Judeo-German poetry has developed in two directions in
America,--downwards and upwards. Many of the poets left Russia in the
beginning of the eighties, together with the involuntary emigration of
the Russian Jews, to escape the political oppression at home; but once
in America they came in contact with conditions not less undesirable
than those they had just left; for, instead of the religious persecution
to which they had been subjected there, they now began to experience the
industrial oppression of the sweat-shops into which they were driven in
order to earn a livelihood. At the same time, the greater political
liberty which they enjoy makes it possible for them to give free
utterance to their feelings and thoughts, without veiling them in the
garb of a far-fetched allegory. However, they have not all suffered who
have come here. Many have found on the hospitable shores of the United
States opportunities to earn what to their humble demands appears as a
comfortable income. With the increased well-being, there has come a
stronger desire to be entertained. The wedding day, Purim, and the Feast
of the Rejoicing of the Law no longer suffice as days of amusements, and
Goldfaden's theatre, which had been proscribed in Russia, has found an
asylum in New York. Soon one theatre was not large enough to hold the
crowd that asked for admission; and three companies, playing every
evening, were doing a good business. But qualitatively the theatres
rapidly deteriorated to the level of dime shows. The theatre, as
established by Goldfaden, has never been of an elevated character even
in Europe, except as it treated the Biblical and the historical drama.
Still, it reflected in a certain respect the inner life of the Ghetto.
In the New World, the Jewish life of the Russian Ghetto is rapidly
losing all interest, and that part of New York which in common parlance
is known as the Ghetto, deserves its name only in so far as it is
inhabited by former denizens of other Ghettos. There is taking place a
dulling of Jewish sensibilities which will ultimately result in the
absorption of the Russian Jews by the American people. This lowered
Jewish consciousness finds its expression in poetry in the development
of the theatre couplet in imitation of the American song of the day. As
in Russia, the plays are written by a host of incompetent men, not so
much for the purpose of carrying out a plot as in order to weave into
them songs of which Jews have always been fond. Nearly all the plays are
melodramas, in which the contents go for nothing or are too absurd to
count for anything. But the couplets have survived, and are fast
becoming street ballads or folksongs, according to the quality of the
same. Goldfaden's songs, in which there is always a ring of the true
folksong, are giving place to the worthless jingles of Marks, Hurwitz,
Awramowitsch, Mogulesco, and the like, and the old national poems are
being superseded by weak imitations of 'Daisy Bell,' 'Do, do, my
Huckleberry, Do,' 'The Bowery Girl,' and other American ballads. Now and
then a couplet of a national character may be heard in the theatres, and
more rarely a really good poem occurs in these dramatic performances,
but otherwise the old folksong is rapidly decaying.
I. Reingold, of Chicago, is a fruitful balladist who at times strikes a
good note in his songs; but in these he generally painfully resembles
certain passages in Rosenfeld's poetry, from whom he evidently gets his
wording if not his inspiration. Side by side with this deteriorated
literature there goes on a more encouraging folk-singing. Zunser, who
now owns a printing-office in New York, continues his career as a
popular bard as before, and has written some of his best poems in the
New World. It is interesting to note how America affects his Muse, for
he sings now of the 'Pedlar' and the 'Plough.' The latter, a praise of
the farmer's life, to which he would encourage his co-religionists, has
had the honor of being translated into Russian. Among his later poetry
there is also one on 'Columbus and Washington,' in which, of course,
both are lauded. The Stars and Stripes have been the subject of many a
song by Judeo-German poets, which is significant, since not a single ode
has been produced praising Russia or the Czar.
Goldfaden, too, has written some of his songs in America, and
Selikowitsch has furnished two or three translations and adaptations
that may be classed as folksongs. Still more encouraging is the class of
poetry which has had its rise entirely in America or in England, for
among these poets it has received the highest development yet attained.
The volume entitled 'Jewish Tunes,' by A. M. Sharkansky, contains a
number of real gems in poetry. Sharkansky has a good ear for rhythm and
word jingling, and in this he always succeeds. But he is not equally
fortunate in his ideas, for he either over-loads a picture so as to
bury the meaning of the poem in it, or else he does not finish his
thought, leaving an impression that something ought to follow. Now and
then, however, he produces a fine song. Among his best are 'Jewish
Melodies,' in which he says that they must always be sad, and 'Songs of
Zion,' of similar contents. 'Jossele Journeys to America,' which is a
parody on Schiller's 'Hektor and Andromache,' and 'The Cemetery,' a
translation of Uhland's 'Das Grab,' give evidence of a great mastery of
his dialect. It is hardly possible to suspect the second poem of being a
translation. Sharkansky has for some reason ceased to sing, which is to
be regretted, for with a little more care in the development of his
ideas he might have come to occupy an honorable place among the best
Judeo-German poets.
New York is the place of refuge not only of the laboring men among the
Russian Jews, but also of their cultured and professional people. These
had at home belonged to liberal organizations, which in monarchical
countries are of necessity extreme, either Socialistic or Anarchistic.
Such advanced opinions they shared in Russia with their Gentile
companions, with whom they identified themselves by their education.
Their relations to the Jewish community were rather loose, for the
tendency of the somewhat greater privileges which the Jews enjoyed in
the sixties and the seventies had been to obliterate old lines of
demarkation between Jew and Gentile. They had almost forgotten that
there were any ties that united them with their race, when they were
roused from their peaceful occupations, to which they had been devoting
themselves, to the realization of their racial difference. They then
heard for the first time that they were pariahs alike with the humblest
of their brethren. The same feeling which prompted the Russian poet Frug
to take up his despised Judeo-German, drove many a man into the
Judeo-German literary field, who not only had never before written in
that language, but who had hardly ever spoken it. In England and America
such men could only hope to be understood by a Jewish public, and those
who felt themselves called to write poetry wrote it in Judeo-German. But
with them the language could only be the accidental vehicle of their
thought, without confining them to the narrow circle of their nation's
life. Their interests, like those of young Russia in general, are with
humanity at large, not with the Jew in his Ghetto, and their songs would
not have lost a particle of their significance had they been written in
any other tongue. They suffer with the Jew, not because he is a Jew, but
because, like many other oppressed people, he has a grievance, and they
propose remedies for these according to their political and social
convictions.
David Edelstadt was the poet of the Anarchistic party, as Morris
Winchevsky represents Socialistic tendencies. The influence of both on
their respective adherents has been great, but the latter has been a
power for good among a wider circle of readers, within and without his
party. Both show by the language which they use that it was mere
accident that threw them into the ranks of Judeo-German writers, for
while usually the diction of the older poets abounds in words of Hebrew
origin, theirs is almost entirely free from them, so that one can read
their productions with no other knowledge than that of the literary
German language.
Edelstadt mastered neither his poetical subjects nor the dialect. The
latter is a composition of the literary German with dialectic forms, and
his rhythms are halting, his ideas one-sided. There is not a poem among
the fifty that he has written that is not didactic. Many of these are in
praise of Anarchists and heroes of freedom who have fallen in the
unequal combat with the present conditions of society. There are poems
in memory of Sophia Perovskaya, Louise Michel, John Brown, and even
Albert Parsons and Louis Ling. He sings of the eleventh of November, the
Fall of the Bastile, of strikes, misery, and suffering. Most of these
are a call to war with society. They are neither of the extreme
character that one generally ascribes to the Anarchists, nor do they
sound any sincere notes. They seem to be written not because Edelstadt
is a poet, but because he belongs to the Anarchistic party. In all his
collection there is one only in which he directs himself especially to
the Jews, and one of its stanzas is significant, as it lies at the
foundation of much of Rosenfeld's poetry: it tells that they have
escaped the cruel Muscovite only to be jailed in the dusky sweat-shops
where they slowly bleed at the sewing-machine.
Morris Winchevsky is a poet of a much higher type. He is a man of high
culture, is conversant with the literatures of Russia, France, Germany,
and England, is pervaded by what is best in universal literature,
follows carefully all the rules of prosody and poetic composition, and
above all is master of his dialect. His Socialistic bias is pronounced,
but it does not interfere with the pictures that he portrays. They are
true to life, though somewhat cold in coloring. His mastery of
Judeo-German, nearly all of German origin, is displayed in his fine
translation of Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' and some of Victor
Hugo's poems. His other songs show the same care in execution and are
as perfect in form as can be produced in his dialect. Winchevsky began
his poetical career in England, where he was also active as a
Socialistic agitator. The small collection of his poetical works
(unfortunately unfinished) contains almost entirely songs which were
written there. His American poems appeared in the _Emeth_, which he
published in Boston in 1895 and in other periodicals. Although he has
tried himself in all kinds of verses, he prefers dactyllic measures,
which in 'A Broom and a Sweeping' he uses most elaborately. The poems
all treat on social questions and describe the misery of the lower
strata of society. He speaks of the life of the orphan whose home is in
the street, of the eviction of the wretched widow, of the imprisonment
of the small boy for stealing a few apples, of the blind fiddler, of
night-scenes on the Strand, of London at night. A large number of songs
are devoted more strictly to Socialistic propaganda, while a series of
forty-eight stanzas under the collective title 'How the Rich Live' is a
gloomy kaleidoscope through which pass in succession the usurer, the
commercial traveller, the journalist, the preacher, the cardplayer, the
lawyer, the hypocrite, the old general, the speculator, the lady of the
world, the gambler at races, the man enriched by arson, the dissatisfied
rich man, the doctor, the Rabbi. Winchevsky has also written some
excellent fables, of which 'The Rag and the Papershred' and 'The Noble
Tom-Cat' are probably the best. In all those the language alone is
Jewish, everything else is of a universal nature, and the freeing of
society from the yoke of oppression is the burden of his songs.
The most original poet among the Russian Jews of America is Morris
Rosenfeld. He was born in 1862 in a small town in the Government of
Suwalk in Russian Poland. His ancestors for several generations back had
been fishermen, and he himself passed many days of his childhood on the
beautiful lake near his native home. He had listened eagerly to the
weird folktales that his grandfather used to tell, and as a boy had
himself had the reputation of a good story-teller. At home he received
no other education than that which is generally allotted to Jewish boys
of humble families: he studied Hebrew and the Talmud. But his father was
more ambitious for his son, and when he moved to the city of Warsaw he
provided him with teachers for the study of German and Polish. However,
Rosenfeld did not acquire more than the mere rudiments of these
languages, for very soon his struggle for existence began. He went to
England to avoid military service, and there learned the tailor's trade.
Thence he proceeded to Holland, where he tried himself in diamond
grinding. He very soon after came to America, where for many weary years
he has eked out an existence in the sweat-shops of New York. He learned
in them to sing of misery and oppression. His first attempts were very
weak; he felt himself called to be a poet, but he had no training of any
kind, least of all in poetic diction. For models in his own language he
had only the folk-singers of Russia, for Frug began his activity at the
same time as he, and Perez published his 'Monisch' some years after
Rosenfeld had discovered his own gifts. A regular tonic structure had
not been attempted before in Judeo-German, and a self-styled critic of
Judeo-German literature in New York tried to convince him that his
dialect was not fit for the ordinary versification. One of his first
poems, published in the _Jüdisches Volksblatt_ in St. Petersburg, was
curiously enough a greeting to the poet Frug, who had just published his
first songs in Judeo-German; however warm in sentiment, it is entirely
devoid of that imagery and word-painting which was soon to become the
chief characteristic of Rosenfeld's poetry.
Rosenfeld has read the best German and English authors, and although he
knows these languages only superficially, he has instinctively guessed
the inner meaning contained in their works, and he has transfused the
art of his predecessors into his own spirit without imitating them
directly. One cannot help, in reading his verses, discovering his
obligations to Heine, Schiller, Moore, and Shelley; but it is equally
apparent that he owes nothing to them as regards the subject-matter of
his poems. He is original not only in Jewish letters but in universal
literature as well.
Himself in contact with the lower strata of society and yet in spirit
allied to the highest; at once the subject of religious and race
persecutions and of industrial oppression; tossed about among the
opposition parties or Anarchists, Socialists, Populists, without allying
himself with any; by education and associations a Jew, and yet not
subscribing strictly to the tenets of the Mosaic Law,--he voices the
ominous foreboding of the tidal wave which threatens to submerge our
civilization, he utters the cry of anguish and despair that rises in
different quarters and condemns the present order of things. Rosenfeld
does not scoff, or scorn, or hate. He is one with the oppressor and the
oppressed; if he sings more of the latter, it is only because he sees
more of that side of life. He is a sensitive plate that reproduces the
pictures that arise before his mental vision, and the gloom of his poems
is rather that which he sees than that which he feels; for he has also
written songs of spring and happiness in the few intervals when the sky
has looked down unclouded on the Ghetto in which he has lived so long.
We shall confine ourselves to the small volume of his poetry, 'The Songs
from the Ghetto,' even though it contains but one-tenth of all the
verses that he has written. Who can read his 'Songs of Labor' without
shedding tears? We enter with the poet, who is the tailor himself, the
murky sweat-shop where the monotonous click of the sewing-machine, which
kills thought and feeling, mysteriously whispers in your ear:--
"Ich arbeit', un' arbeit', un' arbeit' ohn' Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un' schafft sich, un' schafft sich ohn' Zāhl,"
and we see the workman changed into just such an unfeeling machine.
During the short midday hour he has but time to weep and dream of the
end of his slavery; when the whistle blows, the boss with his angry look
returns, the machine once more ticks, and the tailor again loses his
semblance of a human being. What wonder, then, that tears should be the
subject of so many of his songs? Even when the laborer returns home he
does not find relief from his sorrows; his own child does not see him
from one end of the week to the other, for it is asleep when he goes out
to work or returns from it ('My Boy'). Not only the workman, but even
the mendicant, who has no home and finds his only consolation in his
children, has reason to curse the present system when he sees the judge
take them away from him to send them to an orphan asylum,--a species of
misdirected philanthropy ('The Beggar Family'). Sad are the simple
words: 'Ich gēh' vardienen!' uttered by a girl before the break of day,
hurrying to the factory, and late at night, following a forced life of
vice ('Whither'). Even death does not come to the unfortunate in the
calm way of Goethe's 'Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh'; not the birds are
silenced, but the worms are waiting for their companion ('Despair').
Nay, after death the laborer arises from his grave to accuse the rich
neighbor of having stolen the flowers from his barren mound ('In the
Garden of the Dead').
Not less sad are his National Songs. In 'Sephirah' he tells us that the
Jew's year is but a succession of periods for weeping. Most of his songs
of that class deal with the tragical conflict between religious duties
and actualities. Such is 'The First Bath of Ablution,' which is one of
the prettiest Jewish ballads. The 'Measuring of the Graves,' which
relates the superstition of the Jews who study by candles with the wicks
of which graves have been measured, is especially interesting, on
account of the excellent use of the language of the Tchines made in it.
The unanswered question of the boy in the 'Moon Prayer' is one of many
that the poet likes to propound. Perhaps the best poem under the same
heading is 'On the Bosom of the Ocean,' which is remarkable not only as
a sad portrayal of the misfortunes of the Jew who is driven out of
Russia and is sent back from America because he has not the requisite
amount of money which would entitle him to stay here, but also on
account of the wonderful description of a storm at sea. The same sad
strain passes through the poems classed as miscellaneous. Now it is the
nightingale that chooses the cemetery in which to sing his sweetest
songs ('The Cemetery Nightingale'). Or the flowers in autumn do not call
forth regrets, for they have not been smiling on the poor laborer in his
suffering ('To the Flowers in Autumn'). Or again, the poet compares
himself with the bird who sings in the wilderness where 'the dead remain
dead, and the silent remain silent' ('In the Wilderness').
The gloom that lies over so many of Rosenfeld's poems is the result of
his own sad experiences in the sweat-shop and during his struggle for
existence; but this gloom is only the accident of his themes. Behind it
lies the inexhaustible field of the poet's genius which adorns and
beautifies every subject on which he chooses to write. The most
remarkable characteristic of his genius is to weld into one the dramatic
action and the lyrical qualities of his verse, as has probably never
been attempted before. Whether he writes of the sweat-shop, or of the
storm on the ocean, or of the Jewish soldier who rises nightly from his
grave, we in every instance get a drama and yet a lyric, not as separate
developments, but inextricably combined into one whole. Thus, for
example, 'In the Sweat-shop' is a lyrical poem, if Hood's 'Song of the
Shirt' is one, but in so far as the poet, or operative, is turned into a
machine and is subjected to the exterior forces which determine his
moods and his destiny, we have the evolution of a tragedy before us.
Similarly, the exact parallel of the storm on the ocean with the storm
in the hearts of the two Jews in the steerage is no less of a dramatic
nature than an utterance of subjective feelings.
Rosenfeld does not confine himself to pointing out the harmony which
subsists between man and the elements that control his moods and
actions; he carries this parallelism into the minutest details of the
more technical structure of his poems: the amphibrachic measure in the
'Sweat-shop' is that of the ticking machine, which in the two lines
given above reaches the highest effect that can be produced by mere
words. In the 'Nightingale to the Laborer,' the intricate versification
with its sonnet rhymes, the repetition of the first line in each stanza
with its returning repetition in the tenth line, the slight variations
of the same burden in each succeeding stanza which saves it from
monotony, are all artifices that the poet has learned from the bird
along his native lake in Poland. These two examples will suffice to
indicate the astonishing versatility of the poet in that direction; add
to this the wealth of epithets, and yet extreme simplicity of diction
which never strives for effect, the musicalness of his rhythm, the
chasteness of expression even where the cynical situations seem to make
it difficult to withstand imprecations and curses, and we can conceive
to what marvellous perfection this untutored poet of the Ghetto has
carried his dialect in which Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and English words
are jostling each other and contending their places with those from the
German language.
It was left for a Russian Jew at the end of the nineteenth century to
see and paint hell in colors not attempted by any one since the days of
Dante; Dante spoke of the hell in the after-life, while Rosenfeld sings
of the hell on earth, the hell that he has not only visited, but that he
has lived through. Another twenty-five years, and the language in which
he has uttered his despair will be understood in America but by few,
used for literary purposes probably by none. But Rosenfeld's poetry will
survive as a witness of that lowermost hell which political
persecutions, religious and racial hatred, industrial oppression have
created for the Jew at the end of this our enlightened nineteenth
century.