To what he feels to be the hopeless tragedy of the worker is added in Rosenfeld’s verse the hopeless tragedy of the Jew—the wanderer who has lost the power to laugh. In Sephira[[9]] as well as in other poems, he brings out the fact that the Jew has set his Passover and the period of mourning following it, in the happiest time of the year. This poem, which has been really adequately translated into verse by Alice Stone Blackwell, is one of his saddest and most beautiful:
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.