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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.