The Passing of the Badchen
Eliakum Zunser, Poet of His People.
by Sol Liptzin.
Behrman. 248 pp. $3.00.

 

The poet Eliakum Zunser lived through some of the most exciting decades of modern Jewish history. Born in Vilna in 1945, died in New York in 1913, he grew up during one of the early phases of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment) and he lived long enough to witness and participate in the full flowering of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, the Zionist movement, and socialism. His death, on the eve of the First World War, virtually coincided with the close of this great era in Jewish cultural history. From a biography of Zunser we should expect to derive, primarily, an appreciation of the quality of his times, of the color, drama, and tragedy of Jewish life in the Pale and at the turn of the century in America. It is precisely in this respect that Dr. Liptzin’s study is inadequate, even though he seems to be aware that, but for its historical value and interest, Zunser’s work woould, on the whole, not merit serious consideration or study today.

Zunser was a maskil—an enlightener, a folk-poet, a badchen—a jester, and a champion of social justice. As a man of the Jewish Enlightenment, his voice was not the most stimulating or revolutionary. He clearly shared the aspirations of his contemporaries for a modernization of Jewish intellectual, religious, and social life in the ghetto. But, unlike most of them, his demands were moderate, his methods gradualist, and his terms temperate. As a consequence he was not seduced by the roseate dreams of the Haskalah; and he did not need the pogroms and the evil decrees of the 1880’s to return to his people. He had never left, and he never became disillusioned.

Zunser belonged to his people. That is why his roles as folk-poet and badchen are the most important and colorful aspects of his life. And yet these aspects never quite spring to life at the hands of Dr. Liptzin. Instead, he treats us to rather lengthy summarizations and analyses of Zunser’s poetry and music. Now Zunser was utterly simple as a poet and a rather primitive musician. His poetry, for example, is neither as challenging in thought nor as well-written as that of the pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, Y. L. Gordon—and who today, outside the Hebrew classroom, reads Gordon for inspiration or poetic beauty? What might have been re-created in this book is the atmosphere of intellectual excitement that characterized the Haskalah circles in which Zunser moved, and the life of piety, tragedy, and hope in which ghetto Jews sang his melodies for decades.

But perhaps these lively and living experiences are all but impossible to convey in English, especially to an audience so completely removed from them. How can we recapture the spirit of Eliakum the badchen? A badchen at a Jewish wedding today is about as rare as a Jew who still gets drunk on Simchas Torah. The badchen in the old days was no mere jester, although he had to have a quick and ready wit; he was not just the master of ceremonies, although he had to be the master of the intricately detailed customs and practices of the Jewish wedding. The badchen had to regale the wedding guests with Torah; the success of his performance was evaluated, in great measure, by his apt and extensive use of Biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinic quotations, artfully, and preferably extemporaneously, linked with the specific occasion and with the names and backgrounds of the many guests. (How many rabbis today possess the first-rate badchen’s mastery of the traditional lore?) Zunser’s supreme qualities as folk-singer and master of his craft are betokened by the fact that he was everywhere known and beloved simply as Eliakum Badchen.

Eliakum’s world has vanished, and with it, the badchen. Liptzin does succeed, however, in portraying the man personally—a kind, gentle, wise but simple man who was in every respect a shayner yid, a good Jew.

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