Berditshever

Reingold, Isaac

Isaac Reingold (1837-1903)

"A poet and song writer who at first combined characteristics of the old folk bards side by side with the tendencies of the social poets and then became a popular song writer and theatrical lyricist was Isaac Reingold (1837-1903) of Chicago. Like Rosenfeld, her performed his songs at workers' club in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago, which popularized them and helped a number to become household songs in the nineties.
Reingold, like Rosenfeld and Eidelshtat, worked in the sweatshops, where the harsh, dulling atmosphere called forth in him a series of poems of deep disillusionment with the New World. ’I can't believe that the Lord intended such inequalities of rich and poor,’ he exclaims in one of his poems [Reingold, Yitskhok. Geklibene lider. Chicago: L. M. Stein Publisher, 1952.] Chicago was then struggling for the eight-hour day, which culminated in the Haymarket riot of 1886. This occurrence deeply stirred Reingold, who wrote this song ’Vos vet zayn der sof?’ (’What Will Be The End?’), in which he called upon the ’slumbering workingmen’ to awake. Contrasting the productiveness of labor and its miserly returns with the wealth of its parasitic exploiters, Reingold's song was subsequently ’folklorized’ and sung in several variants in the large centers of compact Jewish communities both in the United States and Eastern Europe."

See Voices of a People, pp. 355-7.

Broderzon, Moyshe