He had many siblings but when he was still a child, six of them died, including three sisters deceased before maturing. His family tongue was Yiddish, the jargon of the poor disdained by the rich. Even though he knew Polish and Russian, German and English, he stayed faithful to Yiddish until the end of his life, making it a literary language. As a student of yeshiva in Sejny, famous for its liberal character and attachment to Jewish Enlightenment (haskala), he learned the new ways of social thinking and the revolutionary ideas of changing the world. His sense of social injustice and national prejudice made him join the socialists’ movement, although he has never become its ideologist.
Bibliography:
Morris Rosenfeld: Songs from the Ghetto. Boston 1898
Morris Rosenfeld: Songs of Labor and Other Poems. Boston 1914
Poems of Morris Rosenfeld. New York 1979
Sol Liptzin: The Flowering of Yiddish Literature. New York-London 1963
Moris Rozenfeld: "Wiersze" [w:] Antologia poezji żydowskiej. Warszawa 1983
All these booksare available at the Documentation Center of Borderland Cultures in Borderland Center in Sejny.
Moris Rozenfeld
Oct. 12, 2011, 4:36 p.m.
The story of Moris Rozenfeld's life is a violent and dramatic one, like the tragic times he happened to live in. he was born as Mosze Jakub Ałter in 1862 in a family of Jewish fisherman in the village Boksze, one of the most beautiful corners of Sejny region.