The Worcester spy. [volume] (Worcester, Mass.) 1898-1904, 1898-11-13

purchased and made sure by such q
cost of blood and treasure as was never
poured out upon the altar of a nation S
life before, and one sees a people intel
ligent, resourceful and hugely vital
having much to learn and surely learn
ing much. assimilating foreign elements
with miraculous swiftness and growing
stronger thereby, living laborious
days wherein the rewards are
to thrift and energy and enterprislng
skill, knowing no defeat and unac-
! quainted with the sense of fear, and
awakening year by year to a fuller
consciousness of national life and of the
glorious mission of high destiny"
Songs from the Ghetto" BY Morris
Resented. With prose translation,
glossary and introduction. BY Leo
! Wiener, instructor in the Slavic Ian
guages at Harvard University Cope
land & Day, Boston.
To read this little book of poems is to
find oneself confronted with phase OF
life remote. pathetic and infinitely I'M
American. The poetry Of Mr.. Rosen-
field has been compared to that of Ada
Negri, and rightly, for there is no other
poetry of the century known to the
English-reaoing public comparable to
IL in the intensity of it's misery and
hopelessness. Out of the sweat-shop.
Mr.. Rosenfeld chants his lay of oppres-
sion, want, loneliness, despair. He
sings of the everlasting roar of the
machines; of the angry boss and the
foreman; of the pallid operator who
waters the seams of the garments he
makes with the tears that fall from
his besmutted, sweaty face; of the
rather who is never at home to see his
Il hseNT IL >
sity, the horrible toll, the longing for
summer and the country, for joy and
rest and of the hopelessness of the
| struggle. 1t is the cry Of a sensitive
soul. exiled, poverty stricken, helpless,
amid the sordid conflict Of a New York
slum.
The author was born So years ago in
Poland, Where he received the ordinary
education allotted to Jewish boys. He
went early to England, to avoid mill
tary service, and there learned the
tailor's trade Thence he proceeded to
Holland where he tried diamond-cut-
ting. Very soon after he came to
America, where for many weary years
he has eked out an existence in the
sweat shops of New York. 1t is there
he has learned to sing of misery and
oppression. His health gave out and
he had to abandon the shop for the
precarious occupation of a penny-a-
liner, writing in Yiddish, or Judeo-Ger-
man.
The Judeo-German literature had its
| beginnings in the 18th century but pre-
vious to our own times produced moth
ing noteworthy from a literary point of
view. Mr.. Rosenfeld has developed its
versification to hitherto unknown
proportions, and at his hands it has
received its highest perfection in
America. AS Childish has incorporated
| in itself a large number of Slavic and
Hebrew words, the present collection of
Mr.. Rosenfeld's poems is given in Yid-
dish, printed so far as practicable in
the photography of the literary Ger
man, with a glossary and an English
prose translation, which, without at
tempting to convey the magic of Mr.
Rosenfeld's verse, at least expl esses its
impetuous emotionalism.
These Songs of the Ghetto" are very
un-Anglo- Saxon, un-American. Every
now and again one comes across some
mode of feeling so antipodal to the
American point of view that it seems
to open UP q vista of the complete
ther-worldliness of the emigrant who
seeks a home on the American CONT
nent Thus in one of his poems Mr.
Rosenfeld tells of a beggar family
brought before a judge as vagabonds.
The sick father and the broken-down
mother peg TO keep WIN I0elQ their
four children, for 1.-THE city is large
we will somehow manage to get a
meal and a place where to lie down. "
The judge insists on sending the chill
dren to free orphan asylum. THE
sentence is passed. and can it be more
cruel? Doubly cursed be the system
that makes such pictures possible!" is
Mr. Rosenfeld's comment upon the sit
uation.
Again, in another poem he describes
the voyage of an ocean steamer which
is bearing two Russian Jews who, hay
ing escaped from Russia after terrible
prosecutions, to what they supposed a
refuge, find themselves driven back
again to Russia because they have no
money. This is the reverse side of a
shield with which every Thoughtful
American is familiar but instead of
feeling pity for the miserable victims
we congratulate ourselves that a dan
gerous and undesirable element has
been excluded from citizenship. If, af-
ter years spent in America. Mr.. Rosen-
field is still so little Americanized as
this, it only goes to prove not how
stupid or perverted he is, but how ire
mendous is the weight of inheritance,
prejudice, tradition and temporamental
antagonism which, the United States
must combat wher4 even high mind
ed, travelled and cultivated foreigner,
after years of residence among us, can
so resent our philanthropy and misun-
derstant our motives Of self defense.