Dashed Hopes and Thwarted Expectations
Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923) went to New York in 1886
and became a pioneer of Yiddish poetry in America. "Poet Laureate of
Labor," he sang of sweatshop and tenement, exploitation and poverty,
a threnody of dashed hopes and thwarted expectations. His poems became
folk songs, and his own life mirrored the poverty and sadness of his
songs.
Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925), an artist, illustrator,
and printmaker, was the first artist to become an active Zionist. Lieder
des Ghetto was one of his earliest important commissions, but the
fullness of his talent is already evident. His drawings, done mainly
in India ink, were a perfect medium for the somber themes of Rosenfeld's
poetry.
Our two unfortunates had to leave, but as Rosenfeld
saw it and Lilien depicted it, the plight of those permitted to remain
was not much better: endless, unrewarding toil in the sweatshop. Illustrating
"An der Namaschine" (At the Sewing Machine), a pious clothing operator,
bearded and in skullcap, his tsitsith (holy fringes) dangling, sits
at his machine. Man and machine have become one. Behind him, his bejeweled
employer literally sucks his lifeblood. Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena
Frank catch the essence and tone of this poem in their volume of translations, Songs of Labor by Morris Rosenfeld, Boston, 1914:
The Pale Operator
If but with my pen, I could draw him,
with terror you'd look in his face;
For he, since the first day I saw him,
Has sat there and sewed in his place.
Years pass in procession unending,
And ever the pale one is seen,
As over his work he sits bending
And fights with the soul-less machine.
More subtle and powerful is Lilien's drawing for "Die
Thrane auf dem Eisen" (A Tear on the Pressing Iron), where a presser
is bending over his work table, heavy pressing iron in hand. He is completely
enclosed in a spider web, in which flies have been caught, and lurking
in the top corner of it is a malevolent black spider. Wiener's prose
translation reads:
Oh, cold and dark is the shop. I hold the iron, stand and press;-my
heart is weak, I groan and cough. . My eye grows damp, a tear falls,
it seethes and seethes, and will not dry up.
"Are you perhaps the messenger ... that other tears are coming? ...
when will the great woe be ended?"
I should have asked more of ... the turbulent tear; but suddenly
there began to flow more tears, tears without measure.
Long hours and drudgery were not limited to the sweatshop.
The lot of the street peddlers was no better, and in foul weather,
worse. Two original drawings by the illustrator William Allen Rogers,
"The Fruit Vendor" and the "Candle Merchant," accompanying a brief sketch,
"Friday Night in the Jewish Quarter," in Harper's Weekly, April
19, 1890, capture this perfectly. It is spring, but the vendor is dressed
in winter hat, coat, and boots. Standing by his three-wheel pushcart,
holding out two pieces of fruit in his right hand, he holds his left
hand open in supplication, which matches the look on his wizened face.
Original drawing by William Allen Rogers to illustrate, "Friday Night in the Jewish Quarter" in Harper's Weekly, April 19, 1890.
Prints and Photographs Division.
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To call the old woman selling candles a "merchant"
is an act of compassion. The sad mute plea on a face wearied by the
tribulations of life mark her a beggar as much as a vendor. Her clawlike
fingers clutch her means of livelihood, a tray of Sabbath candles still
unsold. One is reminded of one of Rosenfeld's most popular
and lugubrious poems, "The Candle Seller" (translation by Stokes and
Frank):
In Hester Street, hard by a telegraph post,
There sits a poor woman as wan as a ghost.
Her pale face is shrunk, like the face of the dead,
And yet you can tell that her cheeks once were red ...
"Two cents, my good woman, three candles will buy,
As bright as their flame be my star in the sky!" . . .
She's there with her baby in wind and in rain,
In frost and in snow-fall, in weakness and pain....
She asks for no alms, the poor Jewess, but still,
Altho' she is wretched, forsaken and ill,
She cries Sabbath candles, to those that come nigh,
And all that she pleads is, that people will buy.
But no one has listened, and no one has heard:
Her voice is so weak, that it fails at each word ....
I pray you, how long will she sit there and cry ...
How long will it be, do you think, ere her breath
Gives out in the horrible struggle with Death?
In Hester Street stands on the pavement of stone
A small, orphaned basket, forsaken, alone.
Beside it is sitting a corpse, cold and stark:
The seller of candles-will nobody mark?
No, none of the passers have noted her yet ...
Rogers also illustrated Sylvester Baxter's "Boston
at the Century's End," in Harper's Magazine, November 1899,
and among those illustrations is "The Jewish Quarter of Boston," of
which the Library has the original. Mary Antin describes the "Quarter"
in her The Promised Land.
Original drawing by William Allen Rogers, illustrator of Harper's Weekly's "Friday Night in the Jewish Quarter," for the April 19,
1890, issue.
Prints and Photographs Division.
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Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the
wrong ends of the city. They form the tenement district, or, in the
newer phrase, the slums of Boston ... [it] is the quarter where poor
immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt, half-washed,
toiling unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries,
the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward politicians, the
touchstone of American democracy.
William Allen Rogers's original drawing of "The Jewish Quarter of Boston," for Sylvester Baxter's article, "Boston at Century's End,"
which appeared in Harper's Magazine, November 1899.
Prints and Photographs Division.
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On the other side of the coin is the tale of a Jewish
immigrant girl, Yetta, the appealing sprite in Frederic Dorr Steele's
original drawing to illustrate Myra Kelly's, "A Passport to Paradise,"
in McClure's, November 1904. Yetta is the heroine in one of
Miss Kelly's touching tales about Jewish children of the Lower East
Side. Born in Ireland, Myra Kelly lived most of her brief life-she died
at thirty-five--in that section of New York, where she taught public
school. Her stories appeared in leading magazines and were subsequently
published in three collections. Theodore Roosevelt expressed the appreciation
of many:
Mrs. Roosevelt and I and most of the children know your very amusing
and very pathetic accounts of East Side school children almost by
heart, and I ... thank you for them. While I was Police Commissioner
I quite often went to the Houston Street public school and was immensely
... impressed by what I saw there. I thought there were a good many
Miss Bailies [the schoolteacher heroine of Miss Kelly's stories] there,
and the work they were doing among their scholars (who were so largely
of Russian-Jewish parentage, like the children you write of) was very
much like what your Miss Bailey has done.
Original drawing by Frederic Dorr Steele of Yetta, the heroine of Myra Kelly's "A Passport to Paradise," a moving story of children in
the Lower East Side Jewish ghetto, which appeared in McClure's, November 1904.
Prints and Photographs Division.
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"A Passport to Paradise" is a bittersweet story of
a little immigrant girl with a penchant for cleanliness, hard to achieve
when water had to be brought up to the tenement apartment from the yard
below; an ambition to serve in the exalted position of monitor; and
a longing for her country peddler father whom she sets out to find,
arousing fears that she has become lost. Most of all it is a loving
account of Jewish boys and girls and their relationship with their Irish
teacher. Steele's drawing catches the pathos and wonder of the immigrant
community in the Jewish neighborhoods of tum-of-the century American
cities, where there was a natural community bound together by memory,
empathy, and shared aspirations.
In this fine original drawing, Frederic Dorr Steele captures the pathos in the life of the immigrant community described by Myra Kelly
in her stories, which were favorites of the Theodore Roosevelt family.
Prints and Photographs Division.
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Sources: Abraham J. Karp, From
the Ends of the Earth: Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress,
(DC: Library of Congress,
1991).
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