SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS. By Anzio, Yezierska. (T. Fisher Unwin.
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America's literary growth may be noted roughly as moving along two diverse but not diverging lines : on the one hand the development of a native American art untrammelled by English traditions, and on the other an art of expression arising from the absorption of streams of alien races, informed with Latin, Slavonic, Scandinavian and Oriental cultures, pouring into the States from the rest of the globe. Plunging at random, but hopefully, into this latter stream we come upon a novel by a Russian Jewess, Anzia Yezierska, who has a considerable reputation as a writer of short stories. Sonya Vrunsky, her heroine, is a journalist with a deal of " uplift " in her spirit, a passion for the redemption of the Jewish race in her mind, and a craze for expensive clothes in her body. This fearful little harpy determines to marry a mffiionaire —" her heart was pierced by the cultured elegance of his attire "—and the book is an account of this achievement and its subsequent failure, a failure rendered inevitable by the circumstance that she owes 500 dollars to a nasty pawn- broker. Then she falls in love with a man milliner who in earlier days had furthered her nefarious designs upon the millionaire by giving her a magnificent dress. "In gratitude her arms went out to him. '0 Savior of my soul ! God of the beautiful ! Are you real ? Or am I only dreaming a dream ?" It must have been a terrifying piece of clothing : "lie put his hand on her shoulder and smoothed the fabric with the thrill of the creator who has taken formless clay and breathed into it the flame of life, the eternal glamour of beauty." That kind of thing is amusing, but everything else in the book is disappointing ; action and speech are as intolerable as in most English novels, the plot transpontine, the passion as tense and taut as a bath bun. Happily this is not a fair example of current American literature.
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