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T HJL SOU T H E R N
ISRAELITE
A Portrait Of Myself
A Jewish Poet Tries To Look At Himself Prosaically
By PHILIP M. RASKIN
a as born in Sklove, Russia in 1880.
My lather, a fairly wealthy merchant, gave
traditional Hebrew education, he also
sent me to secular schools. From my ear
liest childhood I was infected with the
Wanderlust. I frequently left my home to
away to a neighboring city to wander
about there for days and sometimes, weeks.
In spite of my natural vivacity and robust
health, 1 have been a very lonely child; I
seldom played with other children prefer-
» play solitaire in the back garden of
our house, or when free from Cheder, in
■>ome far away wood. Having no botanical
knowledge and nobody to ask for any in
formation concerning trees, flowers, I call
ed them names of my own. To me trees
have ever been, since childhood, living
things whom I greeted by name. Later on,
when I learned the real names of the trees
hey sounded to me somewhat strange. I
regretted that I was not at the birth of
he world to name them.
To say that I liked nature would not be
correct. Nature to me was not an object
to be either liked or disliked. It was always
a part of my-self. I could never under
stand the differentiation of nature into
animate and inanimate things. Everything
that I see—even men-made things such as
ises, towers, machines seem to me alive.
>pau\ roads, streets, parks—all are crowd-
"I with living things—Sylvan giants, elves,
animals, babies—nothing is dead! It is
! erhaps because of this feeling that I have
always been a great believer in immor
tality. Mind you, I do not .say immortality
t the soul, for I could never conceive of
,)() dy and soul as two different things, or
! the body being inferior to soul. To me
a finger is a part of the soul.
People make a great mistake when they
alk of life and death. Death is a form of
te. perhaps a more beautiful form. Every
ath gives birth to a multiplicity of life
' ms - And, there is no borderline between
Rood and the beautiful. High up, on
crest of life, the good merge with the
'■ autiful.
introspective moments, I feel that I
r he Jewishest Jew in my conception of
‘R s - I do not conceive of life as a
uggle for existence." This is a purely
an invention. Aryans conceive of life
a series of wars. Even their love for
1 is because sport is war in miniature,
natters little whether the battlefield is
a tenniscourt, or a football ground,
a war, men against men, with strat-
• with skill, with even its dangers and
• ‘ties. If two hundred thousand people
.. see a prize fight in Chicago, and the
ios of the land are kept busy broad-
' nng the result till two o’clock in the
ni ng, it is because the Aryan is by
T Ure a man of war. The Jew is pacific.
• w conceives of life not in the form of
' tru ggle, but as a long road leading to
' ne un known, but great and bright goal
The best known American .Jewish poet,
whose "Songs of a Wanderer,” “Songs of
a Jew and other collection of poems are
familiar to hundreds of thousands of chil
dren and grown-ups, writes in a detached
way about himself and his attitude to
Life, Death, Nature and Jewishness. This
self-portrait was written at the request
of The Seven Arts Feature Syndicate
and The Southern Israelite.
PHILIP M. RASKIN
The noted En^li^h-Jewish poet who
views his career, saying bein^ a Jew
is not the martyrdom it is
alleged to be.
— the “Beacharith Hayamim” of our
prophets.
I am thoroughly a Jew. In my poems on
Jewish and Unjewish themes—probably in
the latter more than in the former—there
is above all Jewish pacifism.
“The same train will carry us, brother,
Him who hurries and him who lays;
Perhaps we might help each other
With our heavy bags.”
This is the spirit of all my lyrics. Why
should men hate each other? Why should
men do evil to men? The greatest riddle of
life seems to me to be why man has some
how never succeeded in arranging his life
on a basis of mutual help instead of mu
tual destruction. Competition too is an un
jewish attribute. The Jew knows only of
“Kinath Sofrim,’’ competition of the mind
How many poems have I written? I can
only guess. I should say that three thou
sand would be approximately the number
of poems I have written during my life.
But, I am rather self-critical. I write and
rewrite my poems and then polish them
endlessly. I have published seven volumes,,
five in English and two in Yiddish. My
English volumes include: “Songs of a Jew”
published in London with an introduction
by Israel Zangwill, “Songs of a Wanderer,”
“Songs and Dreams,” “When a Soul
Sings,” “Poems for Young Israel.” My
Yiddish volumes are: “Ghetto Lieder” pub
lished in London and “Yiddishe Lieder”
published in America. All these books are
out of print. The editions have all been
sold, but I would not permit a new edi
tion of any of them, because many of my
poems I wish to eliminate and most of
them have been entirely rewritten. In fact,
in my forthcoming edition of two volumes
of my “Selected Poems” which are to come
out in September, I have retained only a
small number from my previous volumes.
This edition will consist mainly of the
lyrics that I wrote within the last two or
three years, which I consider the most
fruitful period of my life and in which I
have done my very best work. I am not
boasting, I am merely frank.
My earlier poems were mainly on Jew
ish themes, my later lyrics are on univer
sal subjects. In this work I believe to have
found myself.
In my childhood I was greatly influenced
by the Russo-Jewish poet, Simon Frug, but
my favorite poet has always been and will
always be Heine. This is probably because
of my innate proclivity to the veiled, the
enigmatic and the mystical. I believe that
things as they are seen are merely a shell
for things as they are. Things material
never interested me. My motto has always
been:
“/ will not change one golden dream
For all your dreams of Gold,”
Heine’s lyrics have a peculiar influence
on me. They often bring me into a state
of trance. I can sit for hours and hours
meditating on the Rhine, the old castles,
the fishermen and the Linden woods. When
I traveled through Germany 1 was some
what disappointed. I knew German land
scapes through Heine and they were far
more beautiful than what I saw from my
train window. Laurie Magnus, the famous
English poetry critic, whose works on
poetry are used as text books in English
colleges, wrote in a review on my poems a
few years ago that “Mr. Raskin’s poems
have imagination, rhythm, music, depth
and beauty, but he ought to give us more
than he has given us hitherto.” I hope that
with the publication of my “Selected
Poems” he will find his anticipation ful
filled.
I feel that I am entering a new phase
in my creative work, the phase of the
universal Jew whose Jewishness is so
organic that he need not sing a Jewish
melody.
Copyright 1931 by S. A. F. S.