Part 9

The riots of the early part of the eighties affected the whole mental attitude of the Jews of Russia by rousing them to a greater consciousness of themselves and by rallying them around distinctly Jewish standards. For hundreds of thousands life had become impossible at home, and they emigrated to various countries, but mostly to America, where, under the influence of entirely new conditions, Judeo-German literature, and with it poetry, developed in new channels.

VIII. POETRY SINCE THE EIGHTIES IN AMERICA

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.

IX. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1817-1863