Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the
connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris
Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. In March the fiftieth anniversary of
his birth was celebrated in Carnegie Hall by a great gathering of
the Jewish East Side, under the auspices of the Jewish _Daily
Forwards_, to which he is a contributor.
Morris Rosenfeld, as a boy a fisherman on the shores of a Polish
lake, early an emigrant from home, and until his health broke down
a few years ago a worker in the sweatshops of London and New York,
expresses in verse the cry of suffering from persecuted and broken
Jew and from exploited and broken worker.
He is no pitiful East Sider struggling for expression, “found” by
a Harvard scholar. He is a poet offering no halting rhymes for
which apologies are necessary. Yiddish literature has many poets
of real genius, but the major part of Rosenfeld’s verse alone, in
his Songs from the Ghetto, has been presented to us in English
prose, in the translation of Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavonic
literature in Harvard.
Through the medium of a language in which, in the expression of
Mr. Wiener, German, Polish, Russian and English—the tongues of all
countries through which the Jew has passed—contend with Hebrew for
the possession of each word, Rosenfeld expresses his meaning with
the note of inevitableness and the adaptation of form to thought
that is seen only in the work of a great poet.
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