David Edelstadt

David Edelstadt was born in Kaluga, Russia, to an assimilated Jewish family, and he fled to the United States in the wake of the Kiev pogrom. He was a buttonhole-maker, an anarchist, an editor, and a poet. He contributed to the Yiddish anarchist newspapers Arbeter Fraynd (Workers’ Friend) and Varhayt (Truth), and was editor-in-chief of Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Worker’s Voice), where he published poems in tribute to the Haymarket “martyrs” and to the dignity of workers. His poems were popular among the Jewish working class, and were sung at rallies, sweatshop floors, and on picket lines. Likely due to poor working conditions, he contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 26 in Denver, Colorado. His collected poems were published posthumously in London and Moscow.