Marilyn Zuckerman

Continues to Blaze Literary and Social Path

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

ARLINGTON - Marilyn Zuckerman heads a writing workshop at the Arlington Senior Center, under the auspices of the Arlington Center for the Arts. But there is a whole lot more to the long and prolific story of this socially-oriented poet and writer who continues to teach and to learn.

Born in March 1925 in Borough Park, New York (“a small, ethnic Jewish small neighborhood, almost like a shtetl,” she recalls), she has published four books of poetry, the first, “Personal Effects” (Alice James Books, Cambridge, 1976), when she was 50, and a self-professed “ardent feminist”. “Monday Morning Movie” (Street Editions, N.Y., 1981), “Poems of the Sixth Decade” (Garden Street Press, 1993), and her latest, “Amerika/America” (Cedar Hill Publications, 2002), followed, as well as a chapbook from “The Greatest Hits” series, Pudding House Publications, 2001. She has also published poems in magazines such as the New York Quarterly, The Little Magazine, Nimrod, Pig Iron, and Mystic River Review. Zuckerman received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.

She recalls her colorful, Old-World influenced youth. “There were pushcarts and Hassids, although most, including my family, were secular conservatives. My grandfather, an immigrant, ran a small Mom and Pop stationery store selling papers and egg creams. He began to buy real estate and became a landlord of a huge Kosher market as well as shoe and other clothing stores, and I was paraded like the proverbial princess to be stuffed with salami slices and charlotte russe,” she laughs.

“My parents never went beyond the eighth grade, but my father yearned to be a lawyer and went into politics instead. He obviously had some identity confusion and sent us to the Victorian-like Female Seminary Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, where only five percent of Jewish applicants were accepted.”

It was truly another era. “My father was a Tammany Hall block captain during the Depression,” she said with clear recollection. “Sunday’s long lines snaked up to the 4th floor of the apartment house where we lived, filled with supplicants needing jobs, housing, release from jail for relatives and pensions. This experience was no doubt the source of my own progressive politics, for my father was patient and helpful and I can still see the desperate expressions on the faces of these poor people.”

During the Vietnam War, Zuckerman worked for Bella Abzug in Women’s Strike for Peace, “when the sight of a woman demonstrating for peace, either in Washington or at the New York office of Senator Javits, became a source of amusement.”

She finished college in her 40s, obtained an M.A. from Goddard College, and raised three children.

“Now in my late 70s,” she says, “I'm still on the road. I belong to a strong supportive poetry group with attachments to the Arlington Center for the Arts where I serve on the literary committee and teach seniors at the Arlington Senior Center.”

It seems young as well as old can, however, marvel at the accomplishments, drive and continuing relevance of this remarkable writer.