"The past ninety years have seen the spectacular rise and development of Yiddish poetry which, until the beginning of the twentieth century, had remained virtually arcane for six hundred years. Its development as an art form between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries was very slender, but it was eclectic, various, and above all, persistent. It reached its full flowering in the twentieth century because the horizon of the European Jew, having broken through the cultural as well as the physical ghetto, became one with the rest of the world. Immigration, especially to the United States, brought new literary experience to the Yiddish writer; the loosening of restrictive laws and customs released him to the contemporary world...Certainly the moment of ripening of Yiddish poetry possesses a terrible historical irony. For just when Yiddish poetry had entered the mainstream of modern European and American literature, overcoming the handicaps of history through its sheer will and dynamism, the Nazi genocide and Soviet purges destroyed many of the writers and readers of Yiddish. But there are poets and novelists writing in Yiddish today in the United States, in Israel, Canada, South America, Mexico, France and the USSR. Yiddish poetry in the twentieth century may well be the most enduring artistic expression of its people's creative vitality."