Two years later, he published his first volume of poetry. His poems were immediately popular and were soon set to music and sung in the shops — while Rosenfeld continued to eke out a meagre existence as a shop-worker.

Harvard professor of Slavic Cultures Leo Wiener (the first Jewish professor at the university and a native speaker of Yiddish), took an interest in the young poet and translated his work into English where he found a wider audience and became world-renowned as the “Poet of the Sweatshops.” Upon achieving such recognition, Rosenfeld began to be embraced by the Yiddish literary elite that had originally rejected his proletarian poetry.