An Excerpt From Joseph Freeman’s AN AMERICAN TESTAMENT Essay, Research Paper

from An American Testament by novelist and

apparatchik Joseph Freeman (1936)

Reconciliation to the city is only a prelude to our transformation. The conflict of

cultures grows more acute as we develop new interests and language itself becomes the

symbol and index of the conflict. At home we spoke Yiddish; in the street a form of

American with a marked foreign accent, a singsong rhythm . . . ; in school we read and

recited an English so pure, so lofty, so poetic that it seemed to bear no relation to the

language of the street. Literature was the enemy of the street until years later, when

postwar fiction and poetry gave the language of the street the dignity of art, when Joyce

and Hemingway replaced Longfellow and Whittier.