Lazarus Aaronson

Lazarus Leonard Aaronson (24 December 1894 – 9 December 1966), often published as L. Aaronson,[1] was a British poet and lecturer in economics at the City of London College.[2]

The Stake

All that I am is staked on words.
Bless their meaning, Lord, or I become
Slave to the heavy, hollow, mindless drum.

Make me the maker of my words.
Let me renew myself in my own speech,
Till I become at last the thing I teach.

And let a taste be in my words,
That men may savour what is man in me,
And know how much I fail, how little see.

Let not my pleasure in my words
Forget the silence whence all speech has sprung,
The cell and meditation of the tongue.

And at the end, the Word of words,
Lord! make my dedication. Let me live
Towards Your patient love that can forgive

The blasphemy and pride of words
Since once You spoke. Your praise is there.
I mean it thus, even in my despair.

—The Homeward Journey and Other Poems, 1946

Aaronson was born in Spitalfields in the East End of London to Orthodox Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland.[3] The East End was then a hub of the Jewish diaspora – at the turn of the century a quarter of its population were Jews from central and eastern Europe. Growing up in the East End, Aaronson was one of a group of friends today generally referred to as the Whitechapel Boys, all of whom were children of Jewish immigrants and shared literary and artistic ambitions. Others in the group who, like Aaronson, later achieved distinction included John Rodker, Isaac Rosenberg, Joseph Leftwich, Samuel Winsten, Clara Birnberg, David Bomberg, and the brothers Bram and Joseph Fineberg.[4] Aaronson was also involved in the Young Socialist League, where he and other Whitechapel Boys helped organise educational meetings on modern art and radical politics.[5]

After the War he took work at the City of London College, where he lectured in economics. In the 1920s Aaronson converted to Christianity. His first collection of poems, Christ in the Synagogue, published by V. Gollancz in 1930, dealt to a large extent with his conversion and spiritual identity as a Jew and an Englishman. This subject would become a recurring theme in his numerous mystical poems. Christ in the Synagogue reached only a small public and received less than a dozen reviews, but The Manchester Guardian, The Nation and Athenaeum, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Age wrote favourably of it.[2][6]

Notwithstanding Aaronson's small readership, his publisher V. Gollancz published a second verse collection in 1933, titled Poems. Despite being little known to the general public, Aaronson gained a cult following of dedicated readers.[2] His third collection, The Homeward Journey and Other Poems, was published by Christophers in 1946.[6]

Aaronson remained a committed socialist in adulthood.[7] He was married to the actress Lydia Sherwood (1906–1989) from 1924 to 1931.[2] Aaronson filed for divorce on grounds of her adultery with the theatre producer Theodore Komisarjevsky, and the suit was undefended.[8] His second marriage, to Dorothy Beatrice Lewer (1915–2005), also ended in divorce.[9]

On his retirement from the City of London College in 1958, Aaronson was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his 40 years of service.[2][10] Aronson died on 9 December 1966 at the age of 71. His poetry was not widely publicised, and he left a great many unpublished poems on his death.

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Sutton, David (January 2015). "The Names of Modern British and Irish Literature" (PDF). Name Authority List of the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters. University of Reading. p. 1. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Rubinstein, William D., ed. (2011). "Aaronson, Lazarus Leonard". The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-4039-3910-4.
  3. ↑ Robson, Jeremy (1966). "A Survey of Anglo-Jewish Poetry". Jewish Quarterly (Routledge) 14 (3): 7. doi:10.1080/0449010X.1966.10706502.
  4. ↑ Patterson, Ian (2013). "John Rodker, Julius Ratner and Wyndham Lewis: The Split-Man Writes Back". In Gasiorek, Andrzej; Reeve-Tucker, Alice; Waddell, Nathan. Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Ashgate. p. 97. ISBN 978-1-4094-7901-7.
  5. ↑ Patterson, Ian (2013). "The Translation of Soviet Literature". In Beasley, Rebecca; Bullock, Philip Ross. Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism. Oxford University Press. p. 189. ISBN 978-0-19-966086-5.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Skolnik, Fred, ed. (2007). "Aaronson, Lazarus Leonard". Encyclopaedia Judaica. Volume 1 (second ed.). Gale Thomson. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-02-865928-2.
  7. ↑ Zilboorg, Caroline (2001). The Masks of Mary Renault: A Literary Biography. University of Missouri Press. pp. 67–70, 87. ISBN 0-8262-1322-7.
  8. ↑ "[In the Divorce Court, London, yesterday...]". The Glasgow Herald. 30 October 1931. p. 11.
  9. ↑ Denham, Michael John (September 2014). "Olbrich, Oscar (1901–1957)" ((SUBSCRIPTION OR UK PUBLIC LIBRARY MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED)). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/101342. Retrieved 27 January 2015.
  10. ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 41589. p. 15. 30 December 1958.

Further reading

  • Baker, William; Roberts Shumaker, Jeanette (2015). The Literature of the Fox: A Reference and Critical Guide to Jewish Writing in the UK. AMS Studies in Modern Literature. AMS Press. ISBN 978-0-404-65531-0.
  • Dickson, Rachel; MacDougall, Sarah (2004). "The Whitechapel Boys". Jewish Quarterly (Routledge) 51 (3): 29–34. doi:10.1080/0449010X.2004.10706848.