SEPHIRA
Methinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now.
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all.
Oh, God, you laugh? A wail is in the laugh!
Brothers, what is there of reality
In a Jew’s pleasures? Is his laughter real?
’Tis but the mingling of a sob and sigh.
No savor now has Jewish life, no grace
Has Jewish Joy! Above, in heaven’s deep
The silvery clouds are floating; and the woods
Are full of life, but we sit down and weep.
Spicy the forest is, the garden green;
How fresh and cool spring’s breezes blowing by!
But what concern is that of yours, O Jew?
’Tis now Sephira; you are mute and sigh.
The lovely summer, comfort of men’s lives,
Passes in sobbing and in sighs away.
What hopes into the Hebrew can it give?
To him what comfort summer or the May?
A mendicant who has no place to rest
With whom all men make sport—each day, each week, each hour,
Oh, is it meet for him to think of joys,
Of gardens with their balm, of tree or flower?
And if the Jew at times break forth in song,
Does his song seem to breathe of mirth to you?
I, in his music hear but “Roam and Roam!”
In every note I recognize the Jew.
If one who is well versed in music’s art
Should chance to listen to a Jewish song,
His eyes against his will would gush with tears,
Each note would shake him with emotion strong.
The ram’s-horn call to penitence and grief,
Oh, that is now the Hebrew’s favorite strain—
A strain that makes but feelings for the tomb,
A strain to break a heart of steel with pain.
The song of the Atonement, and the Dirge
For the great temple and the Suppliant’s Psalm;
These are his sweetest music, since his joy
Was shattered in his holy land of balm.
Since his foe broke the sweetest instruments
Of music in his Temple, ever dear,
Only the plaintive ram’s-horn to the Jew
Is left, on which he sobs but once a year.
Of drums and cymbals, organs, harps and lyres,
Flutes and guitars, all with their dulcet strains,
The gloomy ram’s-horn, withered, sad and dry,
Is all that now to the poor Jew remains.
Whate’er he sing, however he may laugh
However gay he seeks to make the strain,
There suddenly awakens in his song
The suppliant’s psalm that rends the heart with pain.
Me thinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now,
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all?
For the Rosenfeld of the Songs from the Ghetto, the present is terrible and the future hopeless; there is always an aching desire for beauty and happiness, but to him beauty and happiness themselves wait upon toil and suffering and death—the nightingale groans “upon the great cemetery of the world.”
But Songs from the Ghetto was written some fifteen years ago. Some of his later poetry is lighter—some hope and the joy of living appear to have crept into it. Of these, a hitherto unpublished poem in English called “If,” has but a gentle melancholy: