Speech: The Frank Tragedy, the Jews, and the Negroes

Born Avrom Valt in Minsk to a traditional family, Abraham Liessin (his pen name) studied at the Slobodka and Volozhin yeshivas but moved toward Zionism, Hebraism, and then socialism in the 1890s. In 1897, already a socialist activist, he immigrated to New York and became active in the budding Yiddish-using socialist movement taking shape on the Lower East Side. Publishing his poetry and social and political essays in Abraham Cahan’s influential Yiddish daily Forverts and in other local Yiddish papers, he eventually became editor of the Forward Association’s monthly journal, Di tsukunft (The Future), a position he held until his death. Under his editorship, Di tsukunft combined socialist and radical analysis of the American and modern condition with a steadily expanding place for quality Yiddish-language literature and serious engagement with Jewish affairs. Liessin himself never lost his sense that Jews were a people with national as well as social needs and prerogatives, an ideal that expressed itself in his own aesthetically old-fashioned but intermittently powerful and influential Yiddish poetry.