Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/191

Yiddish Poetry 603 fellow- Jews. In his nationalistic poems he sings the sorrows of the Jew as Jew, and in these, too, one can feel the throbbing of the aching heart of the eternally persecuted people. Rosen- feld knew how to reconcile his socialist views with his national- ist tendencies. He knew how to sing for the world of the oppressed, and he found in his heart special melodies for his suffering race. Morris Winchevsky (born in Russia in 1856) is of a kind with Rosenfeld in his themes but quite inferior as a poet. His songs are all coloured with propaganda, though some of them, by virtue of correct versification and essential sincerity, are of decided poetic merit. An old man, he is now more or less reposing on his laurels, and these are not few. Successful translator of Hugo's Les Miserables, Ibsen's Doll's House, and Hood's The Song of the Shirt, he was also tireless as a dis- seminator of radical doctrines. He is still revered by the rad- ical masses, who fondly know him as the "grandfather of Yid- dish socialism." Rosenfeld and Winchevsky are the two Ghetto poets of magnitude. David Edelstadt (i 866-1 892), the official poet of the anarchist group, was popular in his days, when radicalism as such was at a premium. His poetry, however, hardly de- serves the name. Of the lesser Ghetto poets, Michael Kaplan is worth noting. His Ghetto Klangen are rich in original, homely plaint. His poetic adaptation of the American- Yiddish vernacular abounding in Anglicisms is decidedly novel. Kaplan in his poetry is the immigrant who is destined to live on a foreign soil without striking root, and his songs fall on sympathetic ears. S. Blumgarten (born in Russia in 1870), known by his pen name of Yehoush, is a poet of high rank, who would be a credit to a literature less obscure and local than Yiddish, perhaps even to a world literature. In this he marks a departure from the older Yiddish tradition. Finding Yiddish inadequate for his new concepts, he introduced a number of foreign words, happy in most cases, but not always adapted to the idiom. He began his literary effort in Russia, but it was in America, after ten years of business pursuits, that his talent found ex- pression. He wrote in many styles and in all of them empha- sized ideas rather than poetic modes ; with the exception, per-