The most original poet among the Russian Jews of America is Morris Rosenfeld. He was born in 1862 in a small town in the Government of Suwalk in Russian Poland. His ancestors for several generations back had been fishermen, and he himself passed many days of his childhood on the beautiful lake near his native home. He had listened eagerly to the weird folktales that his grandfather used to tell, and as a boy had himself had the reputation of a good story-teller. At home he received no other education than that which is generally allotted to Jewish boys of humble families: he studied Hebrew and the Talmud. But his father was more ambitious for his son, and when he moved to the city of Warsaw he provided him with teachers for the study of German and Polish. However, Rosenfeld did not acquire more than the mere rudiments of these languages, for very soon his struggle for existence began. He went to England to avoid military service, and there learned the tailor's trade. Thence he proceeded to Holland, where he tried himself in diamond grinding. He very soon after came to America, where for many weary years he has eked out an existence in the sweat-shops of New York. He learned in them to sing of misery and oppression. His first attempts were very weak; he felt himself called to be a poet, but he had no training of any kind, least of all in poetic diction. For models in his own language he had only the folk-singers of Russia, for Frug began his activity at the same time as he, and Perez published his 'Monisch' some years after Rosenfeld had discovered his own gifts. A regular tonic structure had not been attempted before in Judeo-German, and a self-styled critic of Judeo-German literature in New York tried to convince him that his dialect was not fit for the ordinary versification. One of his first poems, published in the _Jüdisches Volksblatt_ in St. Petersburg, was curiously enough a greeting to the poet Frug, who had just published his first songs in Judeo-German; however warm in sentiment, it is entirely devoid of that imagery and word-painting which was soon to become the chief characteristic of Rosenfeld's poetry. Rosenfeld has read the best German and English authors, and although he knows these languages only superficially, he has instinctively guessed the inner meaning contained in their works, and he has transfused the art of his predecessors into his own spirit without imitating them directly. One cannot help, in reading his verses, discovering his obligations to Heine, Schiller, Moore, and Shelley; but it is equally apparent that he owes nothing to them as regards the subject-matter of his poems. He is original not only in Jewish letters but in universal literature as well.