The Feast Of Freedom
I REMEMBER in my childhood
From my grandfather I heard
Charming tales of gone-by ages
That my soul so deeply stirred.
Philip M. Raskin
About Philip M. Raskin
Philip Max Raskin (1880-1944) published his book of poems, as Songs of a Jew in 1914 and again as Songs of a Wanderer in 1917. He was born in Shklov, Russia and lived for a time in England before emigrating to the United States in 1915. He wrote poems in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. An excerpt from the 1914 foreword by Israel Zangwill:Mr Raskin has yet the unique distinction of expressing himself in English almost as trippingly as in Yiddish. It is only in 1910 that this "alien immigrant" published in his adopted town of Leeds - where he seems to have become a Member of the Royal Sanitary Institute (!) - a Yiddish collection entitled Ghetto-Lieder, with a preface by "Schalom Aleichem," the Yiddish Mark Twain. And now he has already mastered English sufficiently to write in the language - if not of Shakespeare - of Longfellow."
References
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Chanukah Lights
I KINDLED my eight little candles,
My Chanukah-candles--and lo!
Fair visions and dreams half-forgotten
To me came of years long ago. -
The Eternal Riddle
Israel, my people,
God's greatest riddle,
Will thy solution
Ever be told