Rosenfeld Poem
In the Shop
The sweatshop at midday--I will draw you a picture:
A battlefield bloody; the conflict at rest,
Around and about me the corpses are lying;
The blood cries aloud from the earth's gory breast
A moment... and hark! The loud signal is sounded,
And the dead rise again and renewed is the fight...
They struggle, these corpses; for strangers, for strangers!
They struggle, they fall, and they sink into night.
-Morris Rosenfeld, a Jewish poet
The sweatshop at midday--I will draw you a picture:
A battlefield bloody; the conflict at rest,
Around and about me the corpses are lying;
The blood cries aloud from the earth's gory breast
A moment... and hark! The loud signal is sounded,
And the dead rise again and renewed is the fight...
They struggle, these corpses; for strangers, for strangers!
They struggle, they fall, and they sink into night.
-Morris Rosenfeld, a Jewish poet
Written by Morris Rosenfeld, a former sweatshop laborer before becoming a candy store owner and journalist, this poem, in the first stanza, describes the conditions of a sweatshop, written and published for a readership not acquainted with the sweatshop life. Intriguing, yet familiar to most students in a high school history class, is the constant reference to the sweatshop being an epicenter of death and suffering. The cause of these woes is "the conflict at rest;" indeed, according to many writings on the matter of industrial-age factory labor conditions, the unsanitary environment and overhanging knowledge of unjust pay, retribution on the part of factory managers and industrial "giants" would suffer the soul many pains, and conquer these souls daily with its unmoving prominence and its promises, for the workers, of bread in return. And not one soul but many, millions even, all toiling for the mass production of common goods for the populace and the fruitful gain of the corporates -- Carnegie, Rockefeller, and so on. Perhaps this created a darkness in all laborers' hearts, pooling into the night-like environment saturated with their industrial and domestic woes. "They struggle, these corpses; for strangers, for strangers! / They struggle, they fall, and they sink into night." In connection, another well-known Jewish author, Eleazar "Elie" Wiesel, compiled a lyrical memoir of his near-fatal Holocaust experiences as a young man, and entitled the finished work Night. In stark comparison, the pitch misery of the victims of this mechanized slaughter during the second World War were cast into a night of the misery and death, just as the immigrant, Jewish laborers in America were more than fifty years preceding; one was the victim of politics and power, the other of circumstance, and both the corn husk dolls of intolerance. Yet this diseased night, one that history reveals was felt in some extent by nearly every Jewish community in the world from Brazil to Iraq to Russia to South Africa, drew the helpless victims into an enigmatic bond of brotherly suffering. Rosenfeld subtly brushes against this connection between sufferers in this poem; they do come alive, to fight their enemy again, and not alone but together. The question arises, wraith-like, in the reader's mind: when would the circle be broken, and the corpses remain alive after the fight? When was it drawn over so many times it broke through the paper, or the pencil had no lead left to leave?