The Resurrection of Eliakum Zunser, “the Father of Yiddish Poetry”

What if I told you one of the most famous and beloved Russian Jews of the 19th century—”the father of Yiddish poetry” no less—spent his final years living and working on East Broadway on the Lower East Side and that today he lies buried—and largely forgotten—just steps from an elevated subway station in Brooklyn?

I myself was unaware of this until, while doing research at Seward Park Library, I stumbled into a four-deck headline in the New York Sun of Tuesday September 23, 1913:

ZUNSER, NOTED POET OF THE JEWS, IS DEAD – Sung in Melting Strains Woes and Hopes of his Race – KNOWN AS WEDDING BARD – Mourned by Thousands in East Side, Millions in Russia

Who?!

Irving Howe in The World of Our Fathers called him “Unpretentious,” adding, “Zunser’s verses represent the stage of 19th century Yiddish culture that bring together folk and artist.”

Jewish music scholar Seth Rogovoy has posited Bob Dylan a descendent of Zunser, a lineage that includes also Allen Ginsberg, Woody Guthrie and Walt Whitman—whose stature as a both poetic trailblazer and an elder eminence Zunser would approximate in his journey from old world to new.

Eliakum Zunser was born in Vilna, Lithuania on October 13, 1836, the first child of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews, Feive, an impoverished carpenter, and Etta Kayle; two more children followed. At five, Eliakum entered kheder (Hebrew school), and later, the prestigious Ramaila’s Yeshiva.

After his father died in 1847, Eliakum left school. Influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) belief that learning a trade—not just Talmud—was empowering, he entered the braider’s guild, signing a six-year apprentice’s contract to learn embroidery with a local master.

Highly skilled within a year but unhappy with his servitude, Eliakum fled Vilna, eventually settling in Bauska, Latvia. Continuing his self-education, Eliakum was strongly influenced by Hartwig Wesseley, a German Hebraist whose work synthesized Orthodox and Enlightenment ideals. When Eliakum began writing poems, however, it wasn’t in Hebrew but Yiddish, which many intellectuals derided as “jargon.”

In 1854, Eliakum’s brother Akiba was drafted into a Russian “cantonist’’ unit, a form of military conscription in which Jewish boys were sent to Siberia to be raised by Russian families, converted to Christianity and, when they turned eighteen, begin twenty-five years of Army service. Though Eliakum rushed to Vilna to console his grief-stricken mother, nothing could be done. His brother was gone.

Two years later, Eliakum nearly suffered the same fate himself. Having settled in Bobruisk, near Minsk, Eliakum, a gifted singer, was hired as a High Holidays chorister. After the holidays, a local farmer employed him to teach his three children Hebrew in exchange for board and wages.

When those wages weren’t forthcoming and Eliakum protested, the farmer sold the tutor—for a 25 rubel bounty— to local authorities seeking to fill their quota of Jewish draftees. Soon Eliakum was kidnapped and joined about eighty other boys in nearby cantonist barracks.

To console himself, Eliakum formed a small choir, teaching the boys some songs he was writing, including a parable about the period of Babylonian captivity— eventually to reach 108 verses—titled “Child Recruits, or Judged and Found Guilty.” Inspiriting as this was, it was only Czar Alexander II’s Coronation Manifesto of August 1856 abolishing cantonist units that saved them. The boys were released to elation, with Eliakum personally hailed, and rewarded, for his fortitude.

The course of Eliakum’s life was now reset, as he’d seek a career as a badchen, or wedding bard, for the elaborate multi-day marriage rituals of Orthodox Jews. Though it took time to establish himself in this role of Talmudic poet, comic, singer and bandleader of klezmer-like musicians, by the early 1860s, Eliakum was secure enough to publish a book of Yiddish songs and, in a union arranged years earlier by his mother and aunt, to marry his first cousin Rochel.

Prosperous times followed: engagements across the Pale of Settlement, and at home in Vilna, the birth of eight children, five surviving, though one was eaten by a wolf as an infant. Then came the cholera epidemic of 1871, and the Zunsers’ remaining four children died. Despite having fled to Minsk, Rochel gave birth to stillborn twins, and soon she herself succumbed to tuberculosis.

Though nearly broken with grief, Eliakum, somehow, survived.

In 1872, he found love again, marrying Feigle, an 18-year-old Minsk girl with whom he started a new family, eventually to number seven children.

Concurrent with these and later events, Eliakum continued writing topical poems and songs in a variety of modes—from lamentations to satire—addressing the Jewish condition as he, a maskilim (enlightener) in Czarist Russia understood it, with a particular concern for the perils of assimilation.

The 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II and subsequent antisemitic pogroms led Eliakum to embrace Zionism. When that movement’s momentum lagged, he looked to America, to which he and his eldest son Philip departed for a concert tour in autumn 1889.

In New York City in early 1890, Eliakum accidentally found trouble when he affably contributed writing to two newly founded Yiddish newspapers, the socialist Arbeiterzeitung and its anarchist rival, Die Frie Abeiter Stimme. When the latter ran a story headlined ELIAKUM ZUNSER IS OURS—AN ANARCHIST that made it back to Russia, a properly frightened Feigle decided the Zunsers must emigrate. By year’s end, the family was reunited in Manhattan.

While Eliakum had some badchen engagements in New York, and would write some new poems on immigrant life, removed from his native culture and with a family to support, he faded from public life and became a printer.

Eliakum wasn’t wholly forgotten, however.

He remained a Yiddishkeit hero, his songs were published, and even English readers could learn of him in linguist Leo Weiner’s History of Yiddish Literature in the 19th Century (1899) and semitophile journalist Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902).

Eliakum’s greatest American triumph came on March 30, 1905, when a jubilee was held in his honor at Cooper Union. Among those paying tribute were poets Morris Rosenfeld and Morris Winchevsky; Yiddish theater founder, Abraham Goldfaben; and actors Jacob Adler and Maurice Moshkowitz.

A Brooklyn Eagle reporter who was present described Eliakum’s recitation style as including “many rollings of the voice and movements of the body, shaking of the head and indications of the hands.” To accompany the event, Eliakum’s autobiography was published in Yiddish, with an abridged English translation included.

While the jubilee provided him with a $3,000 pension, Eliakum kept working at his 156 East Broadway printshop, and enjoyed the company of visitors and family, including many grandchildren, at his 171 East Broadway home, across the street from Seward Park and, as of 1912, right next door to the ten-story Jewish Daily Forward building of his friend and champion, Abraham Cahan. They had come so far.

The day after Eliakum’s passing, the New York Times headlines read:

YIDDISH BARD DIES; THOUSANDS MOURN – Zunser for More Than Sixty Years Wrote His People’s Songs – HIS FAME WORLD WIDE – Fleeing from Persecution Abroad, He Settled Here—Loved American Institutions

**

Eliakum is buried in Washington Cemetery, Brooklyn. To visit his grave, take the F train to Bay Parkway. Enter the cemetery through the gate on 21st Avenue and turn right on Ash Street. At the first mausoleum on your right, enter row 436.

Here lies Eliakum, his wife Fannie (anglicized from Feigle), “a worthy life companion,” as well as such eminent Lower East Side brethren Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908); rabbi and social worker, David Blaustein (1866-1912); writer and journalist Abner Tannebaum (1848-1913); and Jewish Morning Journal publisher Jacob Saphirstein (1853-1914).