Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire poet who joined the Resistance
Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), born Samy Rosenstock in Romania, became French avant-garde poetry’s Dada spark at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Waag hall during World War I. Paris after 1919 pulled him toward Surrealism’s edge via Littérature, then splits. Later he fought fascism in Spain and the French Resistance.
Nihilist side of early Dada lived in his manifestos and shows with Janco. He served in France’s National Assembly after Liberation-era politics and kept combining humanist, anti-fascist, and communist commitments.
He was born in Moinești, in Romanian Moldavia, to Jewish parents who reportedly spoke Yiddish at home; his father and grandfather worked in the timber trade. At eleven he moved to Bucharest, and in October 1912, aged sixteen, he co-founded the magazine Simbolul, which drew established Symbolist writers and which the historian Paul Cernat sees as a first step from Symbolism toward the radical avant-garde. He signed early work S. Samyro, a partial anagram of his name, then Tristan Ruia, and in autumn 1915 two poems in Ion Vinea's journal Chemarea became the first to carry the name Tristan Tzara.
Where the pseudonym came from is disputed. Vinea claimed in the 1960s to have coined Tzara himself, and noted the unkind French pun Triste Âne Tzara, sad donkey; another account, passed on by the wife of the poet Ilarie Voronca, says Tzara explained it as a Romanian play on trist în țară, sad in the country. After starting mathematics and philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1914 without graduating, he left for neutral Zürich in autumn 1915 to join Marcel Janco and his brothers.
There the Romanians met the anarchist poet Hugo Ball and the music-hall performer Emmy Hennings, who in February 1916 rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, for performances and exhibitions. Dada was born there sometime before May 1916, when a publication bearing that name appeared, though who founded it became a lasting quarrel. The historian Bernard Gendron argues that while it lasted, the Cabaret Voltaire simply was Dada. Later critics see Tzara as a link running from Cubism and Futurism forward to the Beats, the Situationists and parts of rock music.
Source: Tristan Tzara
