MARY BROWN SUMNER
Whither, whither, pretty child? The world is not yet open. Oh, see how quiet is all around! ’Tis before daybreak, the streets are mute, whither, whither, do you hurry? ’Tis now good to sleep, and do you see, the flowers are still dreaming; every bird’s nest is still silent? Whither pray are you driven now? Whither do you hurry, tell me, and what to do?
To earn a living.
Whither, whither, pretty child walking so late at night? Alone through the darkness and cold? And everything is at rest, the world is silent. Whither does the wind carry you? You will yet lose your way. Scarcely has day smiled on you, how can the night help you? For it is mute and deaf and blind. Whither, whither, with easy mind?
To earn a living.[[5]]
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.
