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It is the summer of 1917. Isaac Rosenberg has been on the Western Front for over a year, having barely survived a terrible winter on the Somme. Temporarily attached to the Royal Engineers, he helps load barbed wire on limbers, hauls it by mule train up to the front at night, and repairs damage to barricades in no-man’s-land. Although highly dangerous, Rosenberg views his lot as much improved, and he finds more time to write.

From his upbringing in the slums of Whitechapel, through his youth as misfit, to his futile death in the killing fields of Europe, the author explores the evolution of a writer whose war poetry is now widely acknowledged as among the finest ever written.

Paradoxically, while Rosenberg’s physical and mental health were on the wane, his terrible experiences on the Western Front appeared to boost the power and originality of his work. Throughout the novel, the reader is given insight into the troubled psyche of a poet who, despite living in constant fear and subject to the contempt of his peers, still managed to retain a highly original perspective on mankind’s descent into darkness.

Beating for Light blends fact and fiction in a way which moves beyond the biographical, breathing life into the fears and aspirations of a great artist while, simultaneously, providing a fascinating insight into one of history’s greatest watersheds.

Biographical Note

Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 into a working class Jewish family in Bristol. His parents, Barnett and Hacha, had immigrated to England from Kovno in Lithuania three years earlier. Lithuania was part of imperial Russia, and Barnett fled to England to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army.

The Rosenberg family later moved to London so that Isaac could attend a Jewish school. Although often unwell and victimised by a number of his teachers, he was fortunate enough to be befriended by John Usherwood, headmaster of Baker Street School in Stepney, who quickly recognised the boy’s skills in drawing and writing.

Although Isaac very much wanted to attend art school, his family could not afford the tuition fees, and in 1904, at the tender age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to an engraver on Fleet Street. Not discouraged, Isaac attended evening classes at Birbeck College, and his persistence paid off in 1911, when three wealthy Jewish benefactors financed his entry to the Slade School of Art, at the cost of twenty-one pounds per annum!

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 in South Africa to convalesce in the warm climate.

In 1915 Isaac returned to London, but, partly due to the war, was unable to make a living as an artist. Despite strong pacifist leanings, he tried to join the Medical Corps, but failed to meet regulation height requirements and was forced instead, to enlist in the newly formed “Bantam” battalion. He quickly came to hate the vicious, humiliating regime imposed by the army authorities, and often found himself the victim of anti-Semitic prejudice. The fact that he was clumsy, absent-minded and scruffy, merely added to the problems he encountered.

He was eventually transferred to the 11th. Battalion, The Kings Own Royal Lancasters, and shipped out to France in June 1916. Apart from a few months in the Royal Engineers during the summer of 1917, Isaac served with the KORL until his death in April 1918.

Killed during the great German Spring Offensive, his body was initially placed in a mass grave where it remained for eight years until reburied at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, St Laurant-Blangym Pas de Calais, in France. His tombstone was engraved with the badge of the King’s Own Royal Lancashire Regiment, and the star of David, in accordance with the Hebrew faith.

Beneath were carved the words “Artist and Poet”.

ISBN 0-9547428-0-X
Price: £9.95

Jewish Book Week review

The life and achievements of Isaac Rosenberg have steadily come into focus in recent years with new critical editions of the works and substantive biographies.

The closure of the Whitechapel Library last year marked by surviving readers and devotees and deplored in the name of its greatest beneficiaries amongst whom Rosenberg figures prominently, sets a seal on that career.

Flimsy original editions of his poems published by Narodiczky are now offered at several hundreds of pounds. Conferences are planned for later this year.

Geoff Akers, a Scottish academic and writer, well-versed in the poetry of the First World War, has taken Rosenberg’s life (and acknowledging the recent formal biographies amongst his sources) for the subject of a novel. The result is an imaginative and poignant story of the growth of an artist’s mind and the tribulations of a soldier’s career and much is made of the sensitivities of so private a man. It makes vivid reading and when it comes to the poems of the trenches sets them precisely in their context with all the gritty detail of their inspiration having Rosenberg explain his thoughts’ workings to his brothers under fire. The story makes the most of its subject and the book comes with serious endorsements by political heavy weights of today.

BOOK REVIEW by Martin Tierney: The Herald

"It would be churlish to criticise the legacy and achievements of the great war writers and poets such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves but Isaac Rosenberg's poetry deserves the same status. Akers' elegiac biography of the young poet includes much of his work. Hopefully, this powerful retelling of the story of a Jewish man who died at twenty eight will elevate his status.

BOOK REVIEW by IAN GARDINER in Scotland on Sunday 15 January 2005

RUPERT Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen: they all sit proudly in the pantheon of War Poets. But what about Isaac Rosenberg? Well - he does too, sort of.

Conventional wisdom has it that Rosenberg's deeply humble background - all the other poets were officers, Rosenberg was a private - and his untimely death have conspired to deny him his superior place in that pantheon. Geoff Akers' Beating for Light sets out to put this right.

The book is a historical novel; a fiction. Akers uses a number of sources and datum points and joins the dots skilfully with his own prose. The dialogue, the characterisation, the action, the sex: these are all fleshed out by the imagination of the author.

The story is almost a cliché. A son of poor Jewish immigrants in Victorian/Edwardian London, Rosenberg receives an artistic education. He paints with some success and moves to the colonies for his health and to escape unrequited love. Lecturing, painting, and seduced by a rich woman, he finds material success, but perversely turns his back on it all for the sake of his art. He returns to Britain and enlists as a private in the army in October 1915.

His refusal of promotion, his eschewing of the chance to be a war artist, the turbulent relationship with his patron, his grindingly basic life at the lowest level in the army, his death on active service in the last few months of the war; all seem inevitable. Even the fact that he has no known grave somehow resonates with the picture of this gloomy, inarticulate, self-absorbed young man.

Akers performs a double service. Historical novels, if they are to be of any greater merit than The Archers, must tell us something of a person or period we don't know already. Akers paints a vivid picture of Rosenberg the person. One is struck with a sense of unrelieved, drab melo-misery, but this is probably not far from the truth. It's a good story well told. He also helps us to interpret Rosenberg's poetry, which is not the easiest to penetrate. Rosenberg was not an easy man, and neither is he an easy poet. Careful study, imagination and perseverance will reward the poetry student with a precious find in Rosenberg. A read of Beating for Light will also help, but Sassoon, and those who are more accessible on first read, always have the advantage.

Akers and Rosenberg in one sense face a similar challenge. They are both trying to describe something which ultimately we cannot share; something indescribable. Rosenberg is trying to express the horror of war to those who haven't experienced it. While some write or paint, many resort to silence; Rosenberg tries with poetry.

Akers is seeking to enlighten us about an introspective, lowly, gloomy, inaccessible, brilliant Jewish poet who was killed in the depths of his misery, yet at the height of his powers.

Some use the lecture hall; others use biography; Akers' medium is historical fiction. Notwithstanding the impossibility of their tasks, all succeed in advancing our understanding and we are the richer for their efforts.

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=66522006

"A great theme and taut story telling: I much enjoyed it.” Andrew Marr

“Isaac Rosenberg was one of the great soldier poets of the First World War. Unlike Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves, he was not an officer but a private soldier. He was also Jewish. He died obscurely in the German offensive of March 1918. I hope that this illuminating book will help restore him to a deserved position of honour and equality with the others.” Martin Bell

"This is a powerful and very moving account of the life and death of a Jewish poet who had already suffered so much and then joined the army only to experience the horror and brutality of the trenches, dying there as millions did.
The novel tells us so much about persecution and despair in the life of one very talented young man, cut down before his full talents could be developed and recognised." Tony Benn

Geoff Akers
Juniper Books.
16 Foulis Crescent,
Edinburgh.
EH14 5BN