Pj Kavanagh

Fighting his corner

P.J. Kavanagh reviews Jean Moorcroft Wilson's biography of Isaac Rosenberg

issue 03 May 2008

This author said of her biography of the wealthy Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A study of his life is a study of an age’. So is this one, from another aspect, deep down among the poverty of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century, and it is warming to learn how the more successful of these banded together to help the strugglers.

The eldest son of Orthodox Russian Jews, the painter and poet Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890, in the Jewish quarter of Bristol (astonishingly, we are told that the Jewish population of Bristol in 1901 was 328,945).

His father was an itinerant salesman, away from home for half the year. He seems to have been a dreamy, sensitive man; painted and drawn by his son he has a rabbinical air. Isaac’s mother, left to look after the children, took in washing, and lodgers, and sold her careful sewing.

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