David Herman
Isaac Rosenberg: Jewish Poet of WWI
David Herman - Isaac Rosenberg: Jewish Poet of WWI
- Hello, my name is David Herman. On Sunday evening I spoke about the Jewish American writer Abraham Cahan, and this evening I’m going to be talking about his British contemporary Anglo Jewish writer and very gifted and underrated artist called Isaac Rosenberg. Isaac Rosenberg isn’t as well known as he should be, and I’m really going to try and make a case for why he should be better known. Rosenberg’s political, poetic legacy, excuse me, his poetic legacy is still being debated. Was he primarily a Jewish poet or was he primarily an English poet? Was he primarily a war poet from the First World War or was he more a painter poet? Was he a great poet or was he a minor poet? And these questions have really dominated the years since he died during the First World War when he was killed in 1918. Siegfried Sassoon, himself one of the great war poets, praised Rosenberg’s genius. T.S. Elliot called him perhaps the greatest English poet to be killed in the war. And F.R. Leavis, the great critic of the 30s, 40s, and 50s compared Rosenberg with Wilfred Owen, but found him even more interesting technically in his own words. Rosenberg stands out perhaps for three main reasons. First, class Rosenberg’s working class origins and deprived upbringing in Bristol, and then in the East End of London, mark him out among the many middle class public school boys who make up the war poets. Crucially, and this is where the difference most clearly affects his work, his background did mean that he was automatically enlisted as a private rather than an officer, unlike the majority of the war poets during the First World War.
So that when he wrote the lines quoted “Of a man’s brains splattering on a stretcher bearer’s face”, he was the stretcher bearer. And when in the same poem, “Dead Man’s Dump”, he recorded quote, “The wheels lurched over sprawled dead.” He was the driver of the limber carriage, referred to not the officer ordering or witnessing the incident. In other words, his position as a private gives an even greater immediacy and authenticity to his account of the war. Certainly it’s more literally realistic. Secondly, there’s Rosenberg’s Jewishness. His Jewishness gives him a unique position among the war poets. Siegfried Sassoon, it is true was half Jewish, but on his father’s side, and he was brought up as a Christian, and though many of Rosenberg’s friends from the East End, the artist David Bomberg, John Rodker, Joseph Lefkowitz, Stephen Winston and Abraham Abrahams wrote verse during the First World War, they will not be remembered among its greatest poets. While Sassoon, like the majority of his fellow war poets, drew largely on the Christian and classical mythology he’d absorbed through his traditional public school education. Rosenberg’s different cultural heritage distinguishes his work in a number of ways. Lending to it as Sassoon himself claimed “A racial quality”, an interesting phrase, a racial quality, biblical and prophetic, scriptural and sculptural. The fact that Rosenberg had been exposed to an English education and would eventually read widely among the English poets only adds to his interest. His work displaying a Sassoon again argued “A fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture”, that word Hebrew.
For his part, Rosenberg claimed that Jewishness gave him and his fellow Jewish artists that which nothing else could have given. “The travail and sorrow of centuries”, he wrote in a review of two Jewish painters, have given him a more poignant and have given life, sorry, a more poignant and intense interpretation. While the strength of the desire of ages has fashioned an ideal, which colours all out expression of existence. One leading Jewish American critic, the great Harold Bloom from Yale, wrote about, addressed really Rosenberg’s Jewishness in a piece in New York Times in 1979. I would locate that his major achievement is his biblical poems and dramatic fragments. These include prophetic lyrics such as the “Burning of the Temple”, “The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes” and Rosenberg’s death poem written for the Jewish battalion, which ends with the poignant Zionist lines in Bloom’s words “They see with living eyes. How long they have been dead”. Finer even than these lyrics are the dramatic fragments goes on Bloom “Moses, the amulet and the unicorn. The latter two centering upon the cabalistic figure of Lilith, Adam’s demonic first wife.” Thirdly, and related of course to the second point about Rosenberg’s Jewishness, Rosenberg was crucially an outsider among the generation of outsiders. Let me tell you a story which will give some sort of sense of how this applied to that whole generation of Rosenberg’s. On the night of the 4th of August in 1914, David Bomberg, perhaps the greatest of the Anglo Jewish artists of this period was sitting in the Cafe Royal, very posh, very smart, very gentile with Augustus John. When the waiters broke the news that Britain was at war, Bomberg immediately volunteered to serve in the army only to be turned away ‘cause of his foreign sounding name and beard.
A year later in November, 1915, he enlisted. In 1916, he was at the front, only a few rudimentary sketches survived. Bomberg quickly found life in the trenches, so unendurable that in 1916 he shot himself in the foot in order to be invalided out of the army. What does this story tell us? It seems to be a story about 1914 and the great war and the awfulness of the trenches, but it tells us something else that the great Anglo Jewish artists of the early 20th century, all immigrants or sons of immigrants, David Bomberg, but also Jacob Kramer, Mark Gertler, Bernard Meninsky, Isaac Rosenberg, they all had one foot inside British culture in the Cafe Royal with Augustus John, you can’t get more inside British culture than that, but were fundamentally outsiders, foreign sounding names and beards and above all Jewish. Remember that in 1914, Rosenberg had just completed a series of studies called “Reading the Torah”. Not many Torahs you may have noticed in the Cafe Royal. If you are wondering what this means, let me read you another quotation, this time from the great British art critic, Herbert Reed, perhaps the greatest, most influential British art critic between the 1930s and the 1950s. It’s in a book called “The Philosophy of Modern Art”, and he writes, “It is a quality which we find in the delicate stone tracery of an English cathedral. In the linear lightness and fantasy of English illuminated manuscripts, in the silver radiance of stained glass. It returns after an eclipse in our interpretation of classicism, in our domestic architecture, in our furniture and silver, in Chippendale and Wedgewood, the same qualities expressed distinctly in our poetry and music. It is a conscious tradition as inevitable and as everlastingly vernal as an English meadow.”
What is striking about this passage? Firstly, it is so Christian, “The delicate stone tracery of an English cathedral”, English illuminated manuscripts, stained glass. Secondly, that it is so classical, “A domestic architecture and our furniture and silver in Chippendale and Wedgwood.” I’m tempted to ask who’s we, who’s our? You don’t find much Chippendale and Wedgewood in pre-World War I Hackney or Whitechapel where Isaac Rosenberg grew up. And thirdly, it’s so pastoral. “A conscious tradition as inevitable, and as everlastingly vernal an English meadow.” The greatest single question we should always ask about 20th century Jewish literature or art is this, who’s we, who’s inside and who’s outside? Who’s left out? Left out of the army like Bomberg, but also of the canon like Rosenberg. Of the great museums and galleries, who’s in the English cathedral sitting on Chippendale furniture? Picnicking on an English meadow and who isn’t? Think of that phrase, “A conscious tradition”. Remember what an important word tradition was for T.S Elliot. Who’s part of that tradition and who’s not? Perhaps this is why when we look at “The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892 to 1935”, edited by Yates, published in 1936, Rosenberg is not there. Not there at all. He’s completely absent. By 2004, however, when Penguin published a penguin book of First World War poetry, Rosenberg is well represented. What happened? What changed to move Rosenberg and a whole generation of Anglo Jewish artists and poets from the margins in these 70 years?
Let’s start by putting Rosenberg and his contemporaries in some sort of historical context. As with the Jewish American writers of the 1880s, '90s, 1900, 1910s, 1920s, Rosenberg was part of that enormous wave of Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe that followed the pogroms of the early 1880s and the enormous economic depression of that period. Over 2 million Jews left the Russian Empire during the 30 years from 1880 150,000 made Britain their permanent home. Between the 1870s and 1914, as many as half a million spent at least two years in Britain before moving on elsewhere to America, to South Africa, returning to East Europe. But 125 or 150,000 stayed on in Britain as Jewish immigrants, why? Why did they come? There were better opportunities than in the economic stagnation of Eastern Europe, especially Romania and Galicia. There was faster, safer, and cheaper transport to go travel by rail and then by boat from the ports in Germany. Thirdly, there was population growth and large family size, which meant people were desperate to find better opportunities, economic opportunities, and of course there was the persecution of the pogroms. The Jews that left tended to be younger and less traditional, and Britain was a place of tolerance relatively with an established Jewish community. Two thirds of the Jewish immigrants came to London and 90% of those settled in the East End. The generation born around the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, became an, included an extraordinarily talented cohort of writers and particularly perhaps of artists. Jacob Epstein, an immigrant from New York, was born in 1880. Bomberg and Rosenberg were both born in 1890, Gertler and Meninsky in 1891. Jacob Kramer in 1892. Clara Winston, one of the few women in 1892, Camille Pissarro in 1893, Klinghoffer and Levi in 1900.
They were a generation caught between the tradition, both religious tradition and cultural tradition of Eastern Europe and the Russian Pale and a new modernity and modernism that was sweeping literature and art in London and in Paris and in Germany and in Vienna. They were mostly Yiddish speaking immigrants and sons of immigrants from the pale. They were brought up in the East End. They were working class. The artists among them went to the famous Slade School just before the First World War, and crucially, they were outsiders. The Jewish ghetto, as one might call it, of Whitechapel And Stepney in London’s East End really came of age in the 15 years or so before the First World War. According to the Yiddishist, David , he wrote “The Jewish East End of 1915 was a much more self-confident and assertive place than it had been a generation before with new newspapers, bookstores, charitable organisations, and political groups, all catering for the large Yiddish speaking population.” It was a time Joseph Lefkowitz wrote of Yiddish Ferment in the East End, “The self-assertion of the foreign Jews.” He wrote in his memoirs, “We met in the Whitechapel library in the East End at Toynbee Hall, at the People’s Palace in Mile End, at the concerts of the Ethical Society in South Place. My own group was Winston, Rodker and Rosenberg, but we often joined with others, Bomberg and Gertler among them. Our friends who were at the Slade brought back to Whitechapel some of their new friends there, Jacob Epstein came and Augustus John and many others.
It became fashionable in those circles to eat in a Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel and to visit the Pavilion Theatre where Moscovitch played in 'Yiddish Hamlet’ or Tolstoy’s ‘Power of Darkness’ or Gogol’s, ‘Dead Souls’ or Strindberg’s ‘Father’ or Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’.” Selig Brodetsky in his book “From Ghetto to Israel”, wrote, “It was religious in the way of the ghetto with many ghetto customs brought from Russia. There was much talk of Russia, of the troubles there and the pogroms, and there was a great deal of nostalgia for the old home, for the intensely Jewish life of the Russian Pale.” And Richard Cork in his biography of the great artist David Bomberg wrote, “Torn between loyalty to family tradition and the ambition to move outside these limits and participate in the artistic or political life of Britain as a whole. These energetic friends constantly found themselves fighting contradictory impulses between loyalty to tradition and the ambition to move beyond these limits.” And it was a time when a whole new Jewish cultural world simply exploded in the East End of London. In 1901, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, still going strong, was founded. In 1906, the Jewish Arts and Antiquities exhibition took place at the Whitechapel Gallery. The first comprehensive Jewish art exhibition held in Britain was in the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1906. In 1907, the London Jewish Hospital Committee was founded. In 1912, The Feinman Yiddish People’s Theatre opened. In 1913, the newspaper did cite the Jewish Times began. 1914, the second exhibition of contemporary Jewish art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 1915, the Ben Uri Art Society was founded, still Britain’s today over a hundred years on Britain’s leading Jewish art museum.
And then there was this group known as the Whitechapel Boys because some of them were born there, some of them grew up in Whitechapel in the East, in London’s East End. And this included Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, Stephen Winston, John Rodker, and its only female member, Clara Winston. So the great Jewish artists of the early 20th century of the first half of the 20th century or who was from New York, but settled in London. But apart from him, the others were all exclusively the Whitechapel boys until the generation of Jewish refugees from central Eastern Europe who came to Britain in the 1930s and 40s. Rosenberg himself was born in Bristol in 1890, the second of six children. His father Barnett was a peddler, and his mother was an Orthodox Lithuanian Jew from Dvinsk. His father spent most of his life as an itinerant peddler, but he was a pious and cultured man from a family of rabbis and scholars, well-versed in Yiddish and Talmudic studies. The family moved to Stepney in London’s East End in 1897 and in 1899, Isaac went to the Baker Street Board School in Stepney. “You mustn’t forget”, he wrote years later, “the circumstances I’ve been brought up in, the little education had, nobody ever told me what to read or ever put poetry in my way.” He was an autodidactic, autodidact, self-taught. In 1904, he left school at 14. In 1905, he started an apprenticeship with a firm of Fleet Street Engravers. And then three important things happen in the years leading up to World War I.
And we have to remember all the time through this talk that he lived for such a short time. He was born in 1890, he was killed in 1918. It was a very, very short life. So these three important things were firstly between 1911 and 1914, he met the other Whitechapel Boys and he started to frequent the Whitechapel Art Gallery in particular with Bomberg and Gertler. Then in 1911, three Jewish ladies gave him money to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. It’s grim to learn from a letter that Rosenberg was dependent on one patroness for money to have his shoes repaired. In 1912, he received a grant from the Jewish Educational Aid Society, which helped many of the young generation of Jewish immigrant and second generation artists. And again, one wants to remember why were there so many of these talented artists who suddenly explode and go to the Slade and really develop these very important careers, largely because there were large Jewish philanthropic organisations that would support them financially or individual patrons and patronesses. “The Slade School where Rosenberg went, was the finest school for drawing in England”, he wrote. Non-Jewish students of the Slade included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, and Dora Carrington. Between 1908 and 1914, the Anglo Jewish artist who studied at Slade included Gertler, Mark Weiner, Clara Birnberg, David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Minsky, Morris Goldstein, and Jacob Kramer, all with the result of recent immigration from the East European Pale. All of them were Yiddish speaking. Three were born in England of recently arrived immigrants and their background was mostly in Orthodox Judaism. They painted scenes crucially of Jewish life.
This was the subject matter of their art. Bomberg, one of Bomberg’s most famous paintings is of the East End Jewish theatre. Gertler, Rosenberg, and Kramer all painted synagogues. “In all cases” writes the art critic John Russell Taylor, “The use of Jewish material coincides with the artist’s most experimental phase.” Then in 1912, the third crucial thing that happens to Rosenberg is that he publishes a pamphlet of 10 poems called “Night and Day” and his first piece of art criticism. In 1914, he also exhibited paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in the now much debated Jewish section of the exhibition. He exhibited five paintings, the largest showing of his work in his lifetime. He went briefly to South Africa for his health because he suffered from chronic bronchitis and however, after feeling better, hoping to find employment as an artist in Britain he returned home in March, 1915. And in 1915 he published a second collection of poems, “Youth”. He asked that half of his pay, which was not considerable, he sent to his mother. Later in 1915, in October, Rosenberg enlists in the army, in the British army. In a personal letter describing his attitude towards the war, he writes, “I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over.” Quite a number of the artists served in the First World War. David Bomberg also, Mark Gertler, Rodker, Winston. Jacob Kramer was an alien, non-competent. Minsky and Rothstein were both official war artists.
Rosenberg and Bomberg were the only frontline soldiers. Kramer was medically unfit, but he was called up right at the very end of the war in October, 1918. And Rosenberg crucially continued to write poetry while serving in the trenches, including some of his best known poems, “Break of Day in the Trenches” “Returning we Hear the Larks” and “Dead Man’s Dump”. And two of these poems were published in “Poetry” magazine in December, 1916. In June, 1917, he was temporarily assigned to the royal engineers. Then in 1916, Mark Gertler painted his famous war painting “Merry-Go-Round”, which was sold to the Tate Gallery in 1984. D.H. Lawrence wrote to Gertler, “It is the best modern picture I have seen. In this combination of blaze and violent mechanised rotation and ghastly, utterly mindless, human intensity of sensational extremity.” Wrote Lawrence, “You have made a real and ultimate revelation.” Also, in 1916, Rosenberg painted his self-portrait in a steel helmet. On the 21st of March, 1918, the German army started its spring offensive on the western front. A week later, Rosenberg sent his last letter with a poem, “Through These Pale Cold Days” to England before going to the front line with reinforcements. He was killed on the night of the 1st of April, 1918. There is a dispute as to whether his death occurred at the hands of a sniper or in close combat. In either case, he died in a town called Fampux, Northeast of Paris.
He was first buried in a mass grave, but in 1926 the unidentified remains of Rosenberg and five other soldiers were individually re-entered. Rosenberg’s gravestone is marked with his name and the words “Buried near this spot, artist and poet”. Between 1914 and 1918, 2,425 British and Commonwealth Jews were killed and six and a half thousand were wounded fighting for Britain. And it is this period, 1915, for when he enlisted in the army, to was death in 1918 when Rosenberg found a truly distinctive voice. In part indebted to the Old Testament, his Jewish identity, and in part forged by his experience of war during the First World War. Many critics see Rosenberg really primarily through his war poems. This is what is he’s most famous for. Others however, insist that the war was only a subject for Rosenberg and that his vision of the human relationship with God was rooted in his Jewish heritage and depends on the metaphors of the Old Testament. Perhaps especially in his dramatic fragments, Moses and the unicorn. “Had Rosenberg lived to develop further along the lines on which he’d already moved”, wrote David Daiches, a Jewish critic in “Commentary” magazine in America, “He might have changed the course of modern English poetry producing side by side with the poetry of Elliot and his school, a richer and more monumental kind of verse opposing a new romantic poetry, the new metaphysical brand.” In the great war and modern memory, Paul Fussell’s landmark study of the literature of the First World War, Fussell identifies Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” as the greatest poem of the war.
His war poems rival those of England’s most famous trench poets, war poets including Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. Take for example, “Break of Day in the Trenches”, “The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid time as ever. Only a live thing leaps my hand, a queer sardonic rat. As I pull the parapets poppy to stick behind my ear, droll rat they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you’ve touched this English hand you’ll do the same to a German. Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure to cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass, strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, less chance than you for life. Bonds to the whims of murder, sprawled in the bowels of the earth, the torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes of the shrieking iron and flame hurled through still heavens. What quaver, what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins drop and are ever dropping. But mine in my ear is safe. Just a little white with the dust.” I’ll just read you a short part of his other famous war poem, “Dead Man’s Dump”. “The plunging limbers over the shattered track, rackety with their rusty freight, stuck out like many crowns of thorns and the rusty stakes like sceptres old stay the flood of brutish men upon our brother’s dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead, but pained them not though their bones crunched. Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled friend and faux-man, man born of man and born of woman and shells go crying over them from night till night and now. Earth has waited for them all the time of their growth fretting for their decay. Now she has them at last in the strength of their strength, suspended, stopped, and hell. What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit.
Earth have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone and flung on your hard back is their soul sack emptied of God ancestral essences? Who hurled them out? Who hurled? Nuns saw their spirits shadow shake the grass or stood aside for the half used life to pass.” The half used life. “Out of those doom nostrils and the doomed mouth when the swift iron burning bee drained the wild honey of their youth.” And there’s another shorter poem, “Returning we Hear the Larks”. “Sombre the night is, and though we have our lives, we know what sinister threat looks there. Dragging these anguished limbs we only know this poisoned, blasted track opens on our camp on a little safe sleep, but hark joy, joy, strange joy, low heights of night ringing with unseen larks. Music showering on our upturned listening faces. Death could drop from the dark as easily as song. That song only dropped like a blind man’s dreams on the sand by dangerous tides like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there or her kisses were a serpent.” It is interesting to see how Rosenberg’s reputation started to grow and revive, posthumously. He was barely known as a writer or as an artist in his own lifetime. In 1922, “Poems by Isaac Rosenberg” were published. And then in the 1930s the great critic F.R. Leavis refers to Rosenberg in his book, “New Bearings in English Poetry”. Leavis was along with Elliot, the greatest single English literary critic of the mid 20th century. And D.W. Harding writes an essay called “Aspects of the Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg”. in Leavis’s journal “Scrutiny” in March, 1935, along with a selection of previously unpublished poems by Rosenberg. And then the “Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg” come out in 1937. And Leavis writes, reviewing the complete works of Isaac Rosenberg in 1937, “He hails these poems, his book of poems, as a rare document of invincible human strength, courage, and fineness.
Rosenberg’s interest in life, he affirmed, was radical and religious in the same sense as D.H. Lawrence’s.” There is no greater praise for Leavis, “And was braced by an extraordinarily mature kind of detachment that made him the better artist of the two compared to Lawrence.” This was in an essay called “The Recognition Isaac Rosenberg in "Scrutiny” in September ‘37. Leavis later called the discovery of Rosenberg as “One of the few moments of real significance” in the 1930s. Then in 1937, also Rosenberg has his first one man show at the White Chapel Art Gallery almost 20 years after his death. Then relative silence for the next almost 40 years. And then begins a huge revival in Rosenberg’s reputation starting in 1975 with the publication of three books, Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s, “Isaac Rosenberg, Poet and Painter”, Jean Liddiard, “Isaac Rosenberg, The Half Used Life”, Joseph Cohen’s “Journey to The Trenches: The Life of Isaac Rosenberg”. And W.W. Robson writing in the “TLS” wrote, “He was a painter of talent, but he was also a poet of at least potential genius. Rosenberg is so intensely sympathetic that it is difficult to write about his work with detachment. The main impression his poetry leaves us with is a shattering unevenness.” He went on, “Rosenberg is capable of amazing , or he can write in a manner unmistakably 20th century, but unassumable to any other poet.” And then in 1979, as I mentioned earlier, Harold Bloom becomes the first major American critic to write about Rosenberg. And he calls him, he says, “Rosenberg was clearly an English poet with a Jewish difference”, which is a fascinating phrase. “He remains the best Jewish poet writing in English that our century has given whites,” writes Bloom.
And then on the 11th of November, 1985, Armistice Day, Rosenberg was among 16 great war poets who are commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s poet’s corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow great war poet, Wilfred Owen. And it reads, “My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.” And a commemorative blue plaque to Rosenberg hangs outside the Whitechapel Gallery, formerly the Whitechapel Library, which was unveiled by the Anglo Jewish writer Emanuel Litvinoff in December, 1987. And from then on, the recognition grew and grew. More books came out, Deborah Maccabee’s, “God Made Blind, The Life and Work of Isaac Rosenberg”, a book of selected poems and letters, a book of poems and plays, the Ben Uri exhibition in 2009, “Whitechapel at War, Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle”, the “Isaac Rosenberg, the Making of the Great War Poet A New Life” and then Vivian Oak’s book, “Isaac Rosenberg”. And then he finally makes it to the dictionary of national biography published by Oxford University Press in 2004. And his self portraits today hang in the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain. So it is an extraordinary life of apparent failure, brought up an abject poverty, no real education to speak of till he gets to the Slade School of Art. But then he meets this extraordinary group of artists, in particular Anglo Jewish immigrant artists, sons of immigrants, immigrants themselves. And through them, through these friendships, his career as an artist really takes on. And then his career as a poet starts very, there are first trickles of publication. And then comes this tragic experience of the First World War and his premature death. And then the recognition which comes in these two phases. First champion by Leavis of all people.
And then years later, almost 40 years later, from 1975, over the last almost 50 years, there’s been a growing recognition that Rosenberg was one of the great war poets, one of the great Anglo Jewish poets and a significant, truly significant artist. And that recognition continues to grow today. And it’s a fascinating story of why is it that he had to wait so long for this recognition? What changed in the larger culture? 'Cause obviously the poetry and art didn’t change. They didn’t grow after its death. That it’s true that there was more accessibility to posthumously published poems and plays. But really it was the culture that changed, its willingness to be interested in and to recognise Jewish artists and Jewish writers. And this wasn’t really apart from a brief glimpse of recognition by Elliot and considerable interest by F.R Leavis, this wasn’t really driven by major critical figures. It was really driven by biographers and scholars who sort of became interested. Art museums, curators, galleries who became interested in the art, proper catalogues appeared, proper biographies appeared, proper books of his letters appeared, scholarly edited in a scholarly way.
But it was the larger change in the culture, which drove this. It was the beginning of the recognition in the 70s, but then much more in the 1980s and 90s that began to recognise how important some of these apparently minor Jewish poets and artists were. And that has continued to grow so that there are now scholars who specialise in the work of these artists and the work of these poets and writers. And it has become a sort of small specialism all of its own and driven also in part by figures like Harold Bloom taking such an interest in the “New York Times” of all places in a figure like Rosenberg. So one can only assume that this recognition will continue to grow. And public recognition. the poet’s corner at Westminster Abbey, blue plaques, an entry in the “Oxford Dictionary of National Biography”, but also the recognition which comes in the form of anthologies and critical recognition. So let me stop there and I see that there are already some questions. So let me start to address those if I may.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Paula Trushing says, “Can you please repeat the name of the English literary critic who wrote about a conscious tradition?”
A: Yes, let me just find the name of the, not just the critic, but the name of the publication as well. It was Herbert Reed, the art critic who wrote “The Philosophy of Modern Art” in 1952, Paula, and again, it’s a sort of interesting, the date is significant because it’s before, long before the revival of interest in Rosenberg. And this language soaked in Christian references, in classical references, in pastoral references and language obviously would have no place for a Jewish poet or artist from the Jewish East End, the son of immigrants from Lithuania. It was a sort of a high point, you might say, or perhaps that whole period from the 1930s to the 60s was really the high point of a kind of very gentile kind of criticism, both in literature and in art. And therefore Jewish poets and artists were, you know, very marginalised. One Jewish refugee artist spoke to Kenneth Clark, who was then director of the National Gallery and Britain’s leading art critic of the post Herbert Reed generation and Herbert Reed, this was after the war.
Q: And Herbert Reed says, “Well, why didn’t you go back? Have you thought of going back to Poland?”
A: Where this artist was from. Which is just an astonishing thing to say, you know, firstly, he knew for a fact that this artist had lost his entire family during the Holocaust. His home and the whole world Jewish ghetto was completely destroyed. And it was now a Stalinist regime. What on earth did Clark think a Jewish artist had to go back to in post-war Warsaw or Poland? So it’s partly a sort of ignorance in sensitivity, but it’s also a sort of whole other way of thinking. So that the people, I spoke on Sunday about the Bollingen Prize that was awarded to Ezra Pound, despite the fact that he had made wartime radio broadcast on behalf of Mussolini and Italian fascism and antisemitism, and it was only really Jewish writers like Saul Bellow, who said, “This is completely unacceptable. You cannot give one of America’s leading literary prizes to someone who is an anti-Semite, supported fascism, supported Mussolini. How can you possibly do this?” And there’s a fascinating book called “The Bughouse” by a British literary critic about the poets and writers who visited Pound when he went to a mental hospital in Washington DC. And you know, one of the sort of fascinating things about this is it raises the question, was pound actually ever clinically insane? Or was this a way in which a famous gentile poet could be just kept out of the limelight without having to be sent to prison, without having to be tried as a fascist during the war? And he’d just be put aside into St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Right, end of that little rant.
David Garfield, “My grandfather fled Lithuania in 1891, aged 14 because he heard that the Czars army was looking for him. He went to Birmingham where he worked as a cook. In 1899 he went to Canada and then to Minneapolis. One of his sons graduated from Harvard Law School, a very restricted place for Jews at that time.” A very restricted place for Jews at that time. Dave, you’re absolutely right. That’s a very, very significant point. And you know, so that Rosenberg was very fortunate in that he was of an age just when there were Jewish philanthropic organisations who were prepared to fund young Jewish immigrant artists. And there were individual philanthropists who were prepared to help him, for example, buy a new pair of shoes. So that at that crucial moment, just before the First World War, he was really, he and his contemporaries were extraordinarily fortunate. Had they come to Britain, to London in the 1860s or 70s, there would’ve been no such opportunities to develop as an artist to study art. So timing is all for that generation.
Q: Shelly Shapiro, who I remember well from Sunday evening, “What would you say were the differences between these Anglo Jewish artists and poets and the American Jewish ones of the same time? Could any of the differences because America didn’t enter the First World War until 1917?”
A: Shelly, those are big, big interesting questions. I think one striking difference is that the Anglo Jewish artists and poets were so concentrated in a very tiny area of the East End of London, whereas the American Jewish artists and writers tended to be spread much further. If you think of a later generation, what I called on Sunday, the golden generation of postwar Jewish American writers Saul Bellow was from Chicago, although he was born in Canada, of course. Philip Roth was born in New York, New Jersey. Cynthia Ozick grew up in a very rural area of the Bronx, which was rural in those days. Arthur Miller grew up in just north of Central Park. So people, yes, a lot of them were from New York, but then there were others also from Chicago and elsewhere, other major American cities. So that there wasn’t that kind of concentration. And if you think of much of the history of modernism is about this is hugely rash generalisation, I appreciate Shelly, but you know, it’s about the concentration of constellations of talent in particular areas, not even in cities, in areas of Vienna, of Berlin, of Paris, of London, of New York, of Chicago. So that people got to know each other. They went to the same museums and art galleries, they went to the same poetry readings, they had the same supporters, they had the same publishers, the same agents. So that is, you know, crucially, crucially important.
So if Boston was a little bit gentile for their purposes and needs in terms of getting the early recognition, New York and Chicago were not, Montreal was not, the East End of London was not. So that they could support each other, not financially, but in terms of enthusiasm for each other’s work, in terms of going to exhibitions together and in terms of spreading the news about new developments in art and what crucially modernism, of course. So, you know, I would say that is one very important difference is just closeness and proximity. One similarity is that, of course they were part of the same wave of immigration from Poland, the Baltic, we now call the Baltic Republics, the Russian Pale, Ukraine. And that was sort of significant. They came from the same Yiddish speaking background. They had the same kinds of desperately poor parents who worked as peddlers and shoemakers and so forth. So they had the same lack of formal education, and that feeds into a lot of their early writing and their early art. So for example, Saul Bellow’s breakthrough novel, “The Adventures of Augie March” begins with a young narrator growing up in Chicago who is, you know, a sort of Huck Finn type. He’s sort of poor, he’s young, he’s set setting out to conquer the world.
Could any of the differences be because America didn’t enter the war until 1917? Well, yes, I mean, that is a crucial difference. It is because of course, so many of the British artists and writers joined the war right at the beginning, 1914, 1915, like Rosenberg. So that is significant. Therefore, statistically, the Americans had a better chance of living through the war because they were only involved in the war for a year as opposed to four years. So that is significant. I guess the other thing, which is perhaps might explain why America, why New York specifically became such a major centre for art, for modern art, for the explosion of the new, the what Robert Hughes, the art critic called the shock of the new, was the money, the money that went into supporting modern collections and museums like the Museum of Modern Art, famously later at Guggenheim Museum. So there was money to buy the great modernist artists from Paris and from Europe, central Europe. And I think that really helped New York rather than London become the centre of the new culture of the modern, and in particularly modern art. And I think that that was a crucial advantage for young Americans and Britain was rather, you know, was relatively poorer by comparison with New York. The other advantage they both shared crucially, which doesn’t, well it partly applies to literature, it perhaps applies to art more, is that so many major refugees from Europe came to New York and London in particular, but also to Glasgow, to northern cities, the Midlands, and to other American cities and universities. Princeton famously where Einstein was based. And so many of the physicists were at Harvard and Princeton and at Cambridge and Oxford also.
And that meant that new constellations of talent from Central Europe, from Paris came to London, Oxford, Cambridge, New York, Princeton, Chicago, the west coast. And that energised Anglo-American culture, American culture in particular, so much. You know, if you think of people who were teaching at the New School in New York, like Claude Levi Strauss, the famous French anthropologist who was a Jewish, sorry, a Belgian anthropologist originally, but he settled later in Paris and made his reputation in Paris. But he taught at the New School. There were so many major figures and that really did energise Anglo-American culture and literature and criticism. You know, if you think Ernst Gombrich taught at the Warburg Institute when he wrote “The Story of Art”, I think the single bestselling history of art published in the English language for which he was commissioned to write by Horovitz, who ran Phaldon Press. And Horowitz and Gombrich were both from Vienna, both Jews from Vienna, both Jewish refugees from Vienna. So these kind of connections, I think it’s very important to think of Anglo-American culture as a place of connections almost in terms of spatial imagery. And of course Rosenberg didn’t get to live to see that new world, having been killed in 1918, but then it’s unclear whether that would’ve helped him even if he had, because of the kind of gentile, gentile nature of British publishing between the wars and indeed after the wars. So Shelly, I hope that’s a sort of a step towards a set of answers to your very interesting questions.
Q: Mark Tanenbaum, “Is the poetry of Rosenberg taught in public school today in Britain and the U.S.A?”
A: Well, Mark, I’m afraid, I’m not quite sure whether you mean public school in the American sense, state school or public school in the British sense, which is very private schools.
Q: “Are they on the curriculum?”
A: Well, they certainly weren’t in my day back in the 1970s. That’s a long time ago. Whether they are now, I think they might be particularly because there are more anthologies of First World War poetry, First World War, much more than second World War. And I think that has, you know, really got onto the curriculum now. So you might not have Rosenberg taught as an individual poet, but you might have a handful of war poets taught together as part of school curriculums and as part of university curriculums.
Jean Herwitz, her replies “Not in the U.S.A. I checked with my daughter who teaches high school English.” So I guess also of course for Rosenberg, you know, for all of these British artists, it was very hard for them to make it in America, to make a reputation in America. They had no American reputation, they had no presence, cultural presence in America. And America, after all had its own writers, had its own Jewish writers and its own Jewish artists thinking of people like Ben-Shahar and, sorry, my mind’s temporarily gone blank. But there are many great Jewish American artists from the 1930s onwards and many of whom were helped of course by the New Deal. So yes, but I think in Britain in schools at 16 and 18, you probably would get to study the First World War poets.
Q: Shelly Shapiro again, “Could you repeat how many Anglo Jewish soldiers died in World War I?”
A: Yes, Anglo Jewish and also Jewish Commonwealth soldiers, nearly 3000, which is not a huge number, but you know, bear in mind many of course, you know, found it difficult to enlist like Bomberg because they had German sounding names. Or they had beards or they had, you know, whatever it might be. So it wasn’t always easy for 'em to enlist. And also coming from very poor backgrounds, of course, they didn’t serve as officers. They served generally as infantrymen. One thing I forgot to mention, just going back to the American Jewish issue that Shelley Shapiro raised, is that of course there were far more prominent Jewish American women writers than there were Anglo Jewish writers during the first wave of immigrant writers in the 1900s, 1920s, 1930s and , Emma Lazarus of course to start to start with. And then later writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick And I think that’s an important difference that, you know, I did try and emphasise that it was, there were very, the Whitechapel boys were called the Whitechapel Boys for a very good reason. There were very, very few, only literally one or two or three women in that whole cohort. And so even despite the fact that they wouldn’t have been killed during the war, you know, it was much harder for Jewish women to get recognition as writers or as artists even than Jewish men, even than gentile women. And of course there were people like, women like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Wolf was famously Dora the artist, Dora Carrington, but generally speaking, of course, it was much harder for women and it was a twofold hardship for Jewish immigrant women.
Q: Myrna Ross, “What happened to his drawings and paintings?”
A: Well, some were bought privately by better off Jews at the time before and immediately after the First World War. And a lot were not really discovered, were not publicly shown till much later. It was really after the war that people started to collect his work more and to exhibit his work more in public galleries, admittedly mostly Jewish galleries like the Whitechapel and Ben Uri. But nevertheless, the scholarship began, so the proper catalogues were made when the Ben Uri had its outstanding exhibition of Isaac Rosenberg’s work. The catalogue is absolutely fantastic, beautifully illustrated, full of fascinating scholarly essays. So that really is what changes somebody’s reputation. It’s not so much how much they’re collected privately, it’s how catalogues and major public exhibitions take place like in Berlin.
Q: Monty Golden, who I also recognise from Sunday evening, it’s nice to have you back, Monty. “Did E.H. Gombrich write about Isaac Rosenberg and the Jewish artist he associated with?”
A: No, because Gombrich, being sort of a Viennese Jew would not have been interested in Jewish immigrant artists from Whitechapel rather like Kenneth Clark, even though Gombrich was a Jewish refugee. So he would’ve been much more interested, was much more interested in the great mediaeval renaissance reformation artists and the great modern artists from Paris and so on. So no, he didn’t, is the honest answer. And I dunno whether other people at the Warburg did. I somehow it, because, you know, they were formed by the scholarship of universities in Germany and in Vienna, which was not very interested. I mean, firstly of course there weren’t that many Jewish artists in the canon at that time. And that’s another crucial point. How do people break into the canon, whether it’s poets or as artists? And you know, it is not surprising that someone like Rosenberg, you know, found it very difficult to be published, you know, those two very slim slender books of poems of work during his lifetime. And you know, there was no way he was going to be exhibited at the Tate Gallery or a sort of major national art gallery like that. So it was really the Whitechapel and the Ben Uri, which really waved the flag for Rosenberg and for so many of these other Jewish artists, David Bomberg, who I have to say in my opinion was a greater artist than Rosenberg. He was a truly great artist, but you know, he only really got proper recognition. Recognition he deserved, meaning exhibitions of places like the Tate Gallery, after his death, he lived in poverty for the last years of his life. Many of these people lived in poverty for the last years of his life. You know, I make it sound as if, because they’re now well known as if it was easy for them to gain recognition. It really was not, it was a battle. And for artists, for writers, you know, London publishing, the London Art World, it was just a different world from today. And you know, just as the universities were a different world from today, so it was really hard to break into that.
Q: Mark Taliban, “Was there a parallel experience of Jewish artists and poets with respect to World War II?”
A: Interestingly, not Mark, I think what happened, how best to put this is it is a different experience in America. What happened in America was that a number of major writers really made their names with their books about their experiences in the Second World War. Norman Mailer, famously with “The Naked and the Dead”. Joseph Heller famously with “Catch 22”, Kurt Vonnegut, much later on with “Slaughterhouse-Five”, where their experience as pilots as infantry in different areas, of the different theatres of the war fed in directly into their best known novels. Philip Roth, who was younger, wrote more about young Jewish soldiers conscripted to fighting Korea. So in America there was certainly a significant body of work based on the experience of serving in World War II in Britain, not so much. I mentioned on Sunday, Mark, a writer, a Jewish writer called, who later became known as Alexander Baron, but was born Bernstein. And he wrote straight after the war, and a book, a novel based on his experiences serving in the infantry after the Normandy landings in 1944 and '45. And he served in Sicily as well, and he wrote a novel called “From the City, From the Plough” about a particular regiment. And it sold half a million copies. It’s now barely known even though the Imperial War Museum recently published it in their selection of 20th century war novels. But nevertheless, at the time it was an enormous success.
But I think the reason the World War I poets stand out so much in British culture and became so central in British culture is firstly so many of them were public school educated and officers, which is very, very significant. Secondly, that they were so critical of the war. And by the time of the 1960s when the attitude of the war changed beyond recognition in Britain, the image, the famous phrases of “Lion led by donkeys”, you know, that the war was a disastrous act of folly, which led to the wounding and killing of so many young men. And that has been far more significant in British culture than the Second World War. Although there is, I’m mentioned a book earlier called “The Bughouse” about Ezra Pound’s time at St. Elizabeth’s. But the same critic Daniel Swift wrote a very interesting book called “Bomber County” about how writers wrote about different aspects of the Second World War. You know, those who were on duty looking out for, making sure that blinds were and curtains were drawn and so on, and who served in putting out fires, so on the domestic front, but also those who served in the war and also the new kind of imagery of bombs and fighter planes and so on, and how that began to enter into war poetry during and after the Second World War. So it wasn’t parallel either between Britain and America or between the First World War and the Second World War. And I hope Mark that gives you some, yeah, I hope that’s some kind of answer anyway.
Q: Marilyn Grossman, “What is the title of the poem Containing the phrase, 'Man, born of Woman’?”
A: Right, let’s make sure I get this absolutely right. So bear with me one moment. So yes, there was “Break of Day in the Trenches”, “Break of Day in the Trenches” was the first poem I read. And then “Dead Man’s Dump”, I read an extract, just the opening five verses of that. And I think “Man born of man and born of woman”, is from the second verse of “Dead Man’s Dump”. And the third poem I read, which is a shorter poem “Returning we hear the Larks” and indeed Tricia has already got there first with her message saying, “It was ‘Dead Man Dump’.”
Q: Shelly Shapiro, “How common was it to be both an artist and a poet?
A: Not very is the simple answer, but those who were both artists and poets were very significant figures. Isaac Rosenberg, obviously. Now somebody else who has really come to be discovered in the English speaking world is the Polish Jewish writer and artist, Bruno Schulz, who was both an artist and a poet. And there’s a major new book which has just come out earlier this year about him by Benjamin Balint, who I think is still based in Jerusalem. So those are two examples. A third example that’s just slipped my mind. Oh, Kafka, sorry. Because although Kafka will always be primarily known as a writer, there’s an enormous and beautifully illustrated book of his drawings has just been published, I think I’m pretty sure by Yale University Press. And it is absolutely fascinating because in the various articles, which accompany the drawings, the scholars make very interesting connections between the kinds of figures that Kafka writes about and the kinds of figures he draws. Very thin, very angular, very isolated. So that is fascinating when their art or drawing feeds into their writing or where their connections. Obviously it was harder for Rosenberg to paint or even draw during the First World War when he was serving in the infantry for three years. He didn’t get much leave. So that was hard. He did do some war paintings, pictures, drawings, but really his best known art is from before the war. But his best known poetry is really his poetry about the experience of the trenches. So those are three examples and I’m sure as we talk other examples will come to mind.
And Linda Lyons, thank you by the way very much to Carol Stock, Avon Moss and Julius Aries, Iris, I hope I pronounced that rightly for your very kind messages. Linda Lyons, thank you also. And Linda writes, "My aunt’s brother was Isaac Rosenberg.” My goodness, “She was very proud of him. She had a self portrait of him in her living room.” Well Linda, that is absolutely extraordinary. If you would be so kind as to drop me a line care of the online university, then if you would be interested, perhaps you are already in touch with the people at the Ben Uri Museum, but I’m sure they would love to see the self-portrait, but perhaps you already lent that to them when they had their exhibition a few years ago. That is absolutely fascinating. Linda, thank you so much for letting me know that.
Rita Wilder, Craig Toronto, or perhaps Rita Wilder Craig from Toronto, maybe I’m not sure “You might be interested in Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman’s article in ‘Tablet Magazine’, March the 30th, 1923 ‘Isaac’s War’.” Thank you very much Rita. I didn’t know of that. That is very kind of you. And again, it’s interesting that it was a small handful of Jewish critics in a small handful of Jewish publications who started to spread the word. So immediately after the second World War there was an essay in commentary in the United States, and I think I also mentioned David Daiches’ piece on Rosenberg as well. And you know, those started to lay the foundations. And again, just going back to this question of how people break into the canon. One answer, particularly if you’re talking about Jewish immigrant writers and artists is the Jews begin to enter the universities and they enter the art history of art departments and they enter the literature departments. Famously, Lionel Trilling, the first Jewish professor of English in the Ivy League, and then later his colleague Steven Marcus, also at Columbia University. So when people start to write for these publications and start to teach at universities, word begins to spread. And Britain lagged long behind the United States, and particularly in universities and in terms of magazines and publications. And so the real breakthrough in Britain and new British universities started to happen in the 1980s and ‘90s. I remember when I was, sorry to be to go on like this, but when I was at Cambridge in the 1970s, the Holocaust was not taught as a subject. Jewish history was not taught as a subject, if you studied history. And if you studied literature, English literature, it was very hard to get to study Jewish poets or writers in translation or otherwise. And so at Oxford and Cambridge, that would not have been the case of somewhere like Sussex, for example, which was much more cosmopolitan where they did teach writers like Kafka and .
Anyway, so yes, Kenneth Sherman in “Tablet Magazine” and also various critics in “Commentary Magazine” and that sort of helped spread the word that here were writers to be taken seriously and to be thought about. Rita, thank you very much for your very kind words.
Q: Barbara, sure, “Are there contemporary Jewish groups of poets and artists in England?”
A: Well, there are, but nothing like that constellation, just before the First World War, and I think one of the other reasons for that, it wasn’t just that they were grouped together geographically in the area of Stepney and Whitechapel, just as in a later generation of Jewish playwrights, including Wesker and Pinter and the poet and playwright Bernard Kops and the novelist, Alec Barron all grew up in Hackney and in London again in London’s East End, Stephanie and so on. So that was crucial to them. I don’t think there are really Jewish groups of poets and artists in the same way. And again, I think for artists, they would again find it harder to exhibit because now big art galleries and museums are more interested in other groups of immigrant artists, whether from the Indian subcontinent or whether from Africa, or whether from the Caribbean. So I think it is much harder for them actually. And altogether, I would say, I don’t wish to end on a controversial note, but I think Anglo Jewish literature in particular has really rather been in decline in the last 20 years or so. I think there has been a sort of, there was this kind of hugely energising presence, as I said earlier, Jewish refugee artists and writers and screenwriters who came to Britain in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and their experience is a fascinating one.
Shelly Shapiro, our old friend, “Kenneth Clark, probably thought that Holocaust survivor artist was a communist because he was a Jew.” It’s a very interesting observation, and that may well be the case. I’m not sure it altogether forgives the inhumanity of his advice, if I could call it advice, but it’s a very interesting suggestion and I’m actually not sure that he was wrong about that either.
Q: Joanna, “Was there a comparable poetic expression among German Jewish Rosenberg’s serving in World War I?”
A: I’m not quite sure that I understand what that means, whether, perhaps what you’re saying is, were there German Jewish poets who served in the First World War? Well, I dunno about poets, but of course Remarque famous novel, “All Quite on the Western Front”, recently made a fantastic German film. He would be the first name that would come to mind. And I’m struggling to think of poets or painters who served in the First World War. Of course, one of the huge themes of , the new wave of German art in Weimar Germany, was that of war veterans tragically disabled and crippled by their time at serving in the war. But I can’t think, I don’t really know enough about… Joseph Roth, of course, served in the First World War in the Austrian army, and of course in the Russian army or in the post, in the Soviet army, I should say, in the post First World War, Isaac Babel, of course travelled with the Cossack cavalry and that formed the basis of his wonderful, wonderful book of short stories, “The Red Cavalry”. Right, sorry, I should move on.
Q: Ralph Friedman, thank you for your kind words. “There must be many writings including poetry written from the front lines of two world wars hiding inside family closets. These often reflect last perceptions of their world. Are there any repositories for such writings?”
A: Well, that’s a very interesting question Ralph, and I wonder whether university libraries would be the first place of contact to approach if you or anyone you know has such writings or drawings. And it would definitely be worth approaching university libraries or local university library or others further afield to see if they might be interested in adding to their collections or the Imperial War Museum of course, also. I hope that’s a helpful suggestion.
Q: Hadassah Friedman, I hope I pronounced your first name correctly. “Do you know who the patrons were of Rosenberg, please?”
A: No, sadly I don’t have them, their names in front of me, but if you get hold of the wonderful Ben Uri catalogue of the “Isaac Rosenberg and His Circle” that has a very interesting essay on his time at the Slade, including the names of his patronesses. So that would be the first place, and probably some of the recent biographies, I’m sure will have details about his patronesses.
Wendy Goldblatt, “When I was growing up in London in the late 40s and 50s, I had a boyfriend who was Rosenberg’s nephew. I met his mother, who was Rosenberg’s sister, and they introduced me to his wonderful poetry. But at that time he was relatively unknown, but I managed to get his book of poetry, which I still cherish.” Wendy, thank you, these are fascinating, fascinating connections and I really am grateful to you both for mentioning them how very, very interesting.
And I’m very sorry, there I can see there are more questions and I would love to respond to all of them, but I’m afraid time is short. I was told I must shut up by around now, so I will, I’m afraid. Thank you for your kind words. Thank you for your interest and attention. Thank you for your very, very interesting questions. It has been an absolute pleasure both on Sunday and today, and I hope very much to be back with you very, very soon. Thank you so much.