The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

by Leo Wiener

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.