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.