“My Resting Place”- Morris Rosenfeld and The Compass of Mourning.

• In Event: Modernism and the Migration of Jewishness to the Americas

Abstract

This paper deals with mourning in the context of immigration to NYC. The claim guiding this research is that through a novel and radical practice of mourning, Yiddishist socialists provided a discursive key for political involvement that was instrumental to process of Americanization of Jewish workers, allowing them to develop a sentimental framework that conceptualized NYC as home, where their dead would be not only buried and remembered but also avenged- through the institution of an internationalist, socialist concept of justice. A striking feature of the Jewish immigration to NYC at the end of the 19th c. was the rejection of traditional communal institutions, which codified every aspect of Jewish life from birth to death. These institutions were replaced in the early 20th c. by revolutionary institutions. Among these many institutions were those regulating death and mourning. In the new world a new form of mourning was developed – that took to task both the hierarchies of the Shtetl and the promises of the American dream.
In this paper I wish to study this practice of mourning through a reading of the works of the often neglected and dismissed forerunner to the NYC modernist culture- the sweatshop poet Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923). I will claim that Rosenfeld, a poet, political activist and social organizer, placed the foundations for this practice in his poetry, by adopting the nationalist poetics of Haim Nahman Bialik, which he subverted so that no reterritorialization occurred: instead of finding an authentic connection to a “homeland,” the subject (and reader) remained uprooted and alienated in a capitalist wasteland and experienced inconsolable loss. This experience, the darkness of the lived moment in Ernst Bloch’s terms, was a key for a work of mourning, which resulted in a humanist reaffirmation of the subject, which in turn permitted an attentiveness to the suffering of the other and encouraged class solidarity. This subversive gesture was for Rosenfeld a method promoting the development of political conscience. Through the study of Rosenfeld’s work, as a poet, editor and organizer, I will trace the institution of this discourse as a political practice.

Author

• Elazar Elhanan, city college cuny