Morris Rosenfeld (1) (1862–1923)

Morris Rosenfeld was born Moshe Jacob (Moyshe-Yankev) Alter to a Jewish family in the village of Stare Boksze, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. In childhood, he moved with his parents to Warsaw, and later to Suwałki in northeastern Poland, where he studied in a religious school. He married Asna Beile, with whom he had three children. In 1882, after the situation for Jews became more dangerous, Rosenfeld went to the USA, but soon returned. At that time, his parents had gone to London, and Rosenfeld traveled there, later bringing his wife and children over. He worked as a tailor and wrote labor poetry. In 1886, he emigrated to the USA and went to work in tailoring sweatshops in New York City. His first published poem was "Dos yohr 1886” (The Year 1886). His poems reflected the lives and working conditions of immigrant Jews and were full of despair, resignation, bitterness, and loneliness. The poems became popular with Jewish working people and were sung in sweatshops and at meetings and concerts of laborers. Rosenfeld also was a popular public speaker, and appeared at socialist and union events. After he became ill, he had to quit working in the sweatshop; he took up peddling his books in New York and across the country. He continued to write, and his third collection, "Dos lieder bukh" (The Volume of Poems), which appeared in 1897, brought him some recognition, thanks to the support of Leo Wiener, a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University. Prof. Wiener wrote about Rosenfeld, translated some of his poems into English, and arranged to publish them with a major American publishing house. Rosenfeld's "Songs from the Ghetto" (Copeland & Day, 1898), made Rosenfeld popular with an international audience. He became a professional journalist and was connected with the editorial staff of several leading Jewish papers. In 1905, he was appointed editor of the New Yorker Morgenblatt. He was also the publisher and editor of a quarterly Yiddish journal of literature, Jewish Annals. Rosenfeld gave lectures at Harvard University in 1898, and at the University of Chicago, Wellesley, and Radcliffe. His work later appeared in a number of anthologies, readers, and songbooks.