Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. In March the fiftieth anniversary of his birth was celebrated in Carnegie Hall by a great gathering of the Jewish East Side, under the auspices of the Jewish _Daily Forwards_, to which he is a contributor. Morris Rosenfeld, as a boy a fisherman on the shores of a Polish lake, early an emigrant from home, and until his health broke down a few years ago a worker in the sweatshops of London and New York, expresses in verse the cry of suffering from persecuted and broken Jew and from exploited and broken worker. He is no pitiful East Sider struggling for expression, “found” by a Harvard scholar. He is a poet offering no halting rhymes for which apologies are necessary. Yiddish literature has many poets of real genius, but the major part of Rosenfeld’s verse alone, in his Songs from the Ghetto, has been presented to us in English prose, in the translation of Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavonic literature in Harvard. Through the medium of a language in which, in the expression of Mr. Wiener, German, Polish, Russian and English—the tongues of all countries through which the Jew has passed—contend with Hebrew for the possession of each word, Rosenfeld expresses his meaning with the note of inevitableness and the adaptation of form to thought that is seen only in the work of a great poet. [Illustration: MORRIS ROSENFELD _From an etching by Herman Struck_ ] His poems are cries of pain out of his own life interpreted in terms of the life of his class. He is always lyric, he is always personal, but he is never egotistical. The story runs that at his machine in the midday hour he would write a lyric of the workshop instead of eating his meager lunch. The song to the working-girl prostitute is one of these workshop poems which like a flash reveal working and living conditions such as in less revealing form have been put before us by investigators. The twelve-hour day may be said to be the subject of My Boy. The tailor’s baby was always asleep when his father got home from work: MY BOY I have a little boy, a fine little fellow is he! When I see him it appears to me the whole world is mine. Only rarely, rarely I see him, my pretty little son, when he is awake; I find him always asleep, I see him only at night. My work drives me out early and brings me home late; oh, my own flesh is a stranger to me; oh, strange to me the glances of my child! I come home in anguish and shrouded in darkness—my pale wife tells how nicely the child plays.