In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories collects eight of Schwartz’s finest delineations of New York intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer, he captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-stymied young people at odds with their immigrant parents. This is the unique American dilemma Irving Howe describes in his penetrating, loving foreword as “that interesting point where intellectual children of immigrant Jews are finding their way into the larger world while casting uneasy, rueful glances over their backs.”