The History Park Poetry Page

Isaac Rosenberg

(1890-1917)

Isaac Rosenberg is one of the lesser known and least privileged of the First World War poets, he is though; considered to be one of the finest.

Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 into a working class Jewish family in Bristol. His parents Barnett and Annie had immigrated to England from Kovno in Lithuania in 1887. At that time Lithuania was a part of Imperial Russia, and Barnett fled to England to avoid conscription into the Czar's army.

Isaac attended a liberal Jewish school in Baker Street in Stepney, and although he was often unwell which affected his schooling, he showed skill in drawing and writing from an early age. Later on during the war he would frequently sketch self-portraits - this is one he sent to a friend from the trenches. Although Isaac wanted very much to attend art school his family could not afford the tuition fees, and in 1904, at the age of just fourteen, Isaac was apprenticed to an engraver on Fleet Street. Not discouraged, Isaac attended evening art classes at Birbeck College on Fleet Street after work, and his persistence paid off in 1911, when three wealthy Jewish benefactors - Mrs. Delissa Joseph, Mrs Herbert Cohen and Mrs Henrietta Lowy financed his entry to the Slade School of Art – £21 a year! By the time Isaac had finished his studies three years later, his poor health had returned and he went to stay with his older Sister Minnie in South Africa to convalesce in the warm climate.

In 1915 Isaac returned to Britain. Due to the war he was unable to make a living. So although he opposed killing, he enlisted in the army to join the medical services. However he was too short for regular regiments and so was sent to a 'Bantam' battalion (for men under five feet three inches tall) called the 12th Suffolk Regiment. It is said that Isaac was unsuited to Army life – being clumsy and absent minded, and he also encountered anti-semitism from both officers and soldiers alike. For example, in a letter written to his friend Schiff in October 1915 Isaac wrote: "I don't mind the hard sleeping the stiff marches etc. but this is unbearable. Besides my being a Jew makes it bad amongst these wretches." Isaac was eventually transferred to the 11th Battalion, The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment (KORL) and by June 1916 he was in the Somme trenches in France.

Apart from a spell of 6 months in the Royal Engineers working to move dead bodies away from the front line Isaac served with the KORL until his death. It was while in the trenches that he wrote many of his poems.