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Thursday, November 16, 2017

Poem: A Cry of the Foreign Born - by St. Louis poet, Leah Rachel Yoffie (1883-1956)

The following poem by Leah Rachel Clara Yoffie appears in Contemporary Verse, Volume 9 (1920), p. 144, as well as the St. Louis weekly newspaper, The Modern View, April 2, 1926, p. 27.  While I originally found the poem browsing through the microfilm at the library, the Google Books scan of the 1920 volume is a lot clearer than the microfilm printout, so I will share that below.
I suspect from her references she may have grown up in the same slums that my Polish, Russian and Lithuanian ancestral immigrants to St. Louis did. Her plea rings strong today.

Posted for the Great Genealogy Poetry Challenge

2 comments:

  1. Bill WestNovember 23, 2017 at 11:45 PM

    Yes, John, it does still ring true in our times. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    Thanks for taking part in the Challenge!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Linda StufflebeanNovember 24, 2017 at 8:59 PM

    I have no ancestral ties to Missouri, but my father's grandparents were all from Eastern Europe and settled into a new life working in the New Jersey mills. Leah Yoffie's poem certainly reflects their lives, too. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete

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