Eliakum Zunser

Eliakum Zunser (Eliakim Badchen, Elikum Tsunzer) (October 28, 1836 – September 22, 1913) was a Lithuanian Jewish Yiddish-language poet, songwriter, and badchen who lived out the last part of his life in the U.S. A 1905 article in the New York Times lauded him as "the father of Yiddish poetry". About a quarter of his roughly 600 songs survive. He influenced and was influenced by Brody singer Velvel Zbarzher, although it is not believed that they ever met.

Born in Vilna, he grew up poor and first worked braiding lace in Kovno, where he was associated with the devout, moralistic Musar movement of Rabbi Israel Salanter. Later, he was drawn to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and adopted a more modern Orthodox Judaism that renounced superstition.

Forcibly conscripted into the Russian Army just before his twentieth birthday, he was soon released due to Czar Alexander II's revocation of the harsh conscription law. The plight of Jewish draftees, or "cantonists" would be a major subject of his early poetry and songs.

Sol Liptzin describes Zunser's songs as having "simple words and catchy tunes", singing of the "melancholy fate and few joys of the inarticulate masses" and writes that "His songs spread by word of mouth... until all Yiddish-speaking Jews were familiar with them". [Liptzin, 1972, 48]

In 1861 he published a booklet of songs Shirim Khadoshim, the first of about 50 publications in his lifetime. At this time, he was, in Liptzin's words, "primarily a Maskil"—a propagator of the Haskalah—"interested in instructing and aiding his people". However, his life took a tragic turn: not only did his wife die of cholera in the next decade, but all of their nine children as well, and he became, again quoting Liptzin, "a prophet of doom, admonishing his co-religionists not to venture too date along the alluring road of western enlightenment and assimilation..." [Liptzin, 1972, 49] When that doom came, in the form of the anti-Semitic reaction and pogrom after the assassination of Alexander II, he became again a comforter, as well as a Zionist, affiliated with the Hovevei Zion and Bilu pioneers, writing songs such as "Die Sokhe" ("The Plough") and "Shivath Zion" ("Homecoming to Zion").

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