Lynching and Harlem - a Negro Ghetto by Barysh Vaynshteyn

In his poems Lynching and Harlem - A Negro Ghetto Barysh Vaynshteyn explores the world of African Americans in the south and in New York. Being an immigrant to from Eastern Europe, Vaynshteyn found himself suddenly a part of the much larger proverbial "melting pot". He had to learn how to exist in this environment, and also how to relate to his new fellow countrymen. From his poetry, it is clear he felt the strongest ties toward the African American community.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, violent racism was a rampant problem. There were no hate crime statutes, as we have now, to protect the minorities from racist violence. When a racially motivated attack was carried out, the law enforcement all but looked the other way. In Lynching it is clear that in the time of the author this was still the case. In the beginning, Vaynshteyn paints a gruesome picture of a lynching. It draws the reader in, as the crystal clear mental picture is drawn. In the third stanza Vaynshteyn says God won't hear the lynched man's prayers, as He Himself is crucified. On my first reading of this, I thought Vaynshteyn was making a reference to Christianity, and prayers to God from a Christian would fall on deaf ears. As I read it again, I think Vaynshteyn meant to get a different meaning across. I think he was subtly hinting at a kind of solidarity shared between the Jewish community and the African Americans. The Jews had also suffered such cruelty at the hands of oppressors. The last two lines of this poem reinforce this idea. "Like this [reference to the lynching] they now die everywhere - - In Wedding, in Leopoldstadt and in Carolina." Here, Leopoldstadt is certainly a reference to the brutality faced by the Jews in Eastern Europe, and Carolina refers to the plight of the African American. In those lines, Vaynshteyn seals his feelings of shared experience between the two communities.

Harlem
- A Negro Ghetto is much the same way. The term "Ghetto" was reserved solely for the Jewish living conditions in Europe. It had not yet been applied to American black slums. The mere use of this word shows how Vaynshteyn almost wanted to share the Jewish experience in Europe with the American black community. There are many Biblical references in this poem, which I interpret as another sign of Vaynshteyn's solidarity with the black community. For instance, in the second stanza, he says, "Children - black, soft as flax, Spring forth from the Torah, Amazed at the ark from the flood, At Noah's dove on all their windows." The symbolism behind the flood story, and the appearance of Noah's dove is crucial to the author's point. It's as though he's saying that after the tragedy that is your lives now, you too will be God's people, as we are. He's sharing his experience as a European Jew with the experience of the American black person.

It is clear that of all the melting pot, Vaynshteyn felt he could relate most to the African American experience. His comparisons to the lives they lead and the lives lead by the European Jews in the same time period are evidence of this. He felt as though writing about their experience in might bring him closer to understanding his people's experience across the ocean. He felt great solidarity with these suffering peoples, and he may have thought by writing it, he could show his American Jewish community that they were not alone in their suffering.