He depicts his tragic fate; having lost his parents, his younger sister has died on the bench,[2] and eventually he loses his own hope.

[3] The song's author Herman Yablokoff was a member of the Yiddish theater that was active in Lithuania and Poland in the years following World War I.

[2] The sight of the children reminded him of his childhood in World War I in Grodno, where he tried selling cigarettes to passers-by.

[2] Yablokoff went to the United States in 1924; the song was published in an American radio program in Yiddish in 1932 and became a hit as part of a musical of the same name that premiered in 1935, which interpolated a silent movie in which Sidney Lumet played the Jewish boy.

[9] It has been discovered by Gila Flam that two songs with different lyrics but the same melody were published by Nachum Shternheim in Prague during and after World War I, titled "Dos Redl" (The wheel) and "Di Parodye Zum Redl" (Parody on the wheel).