Yakov Agarunov

A poet of the Mountain Jews who became a captain of Soviet oil.

Yakov Agarunov was born in 1907 in the Red Village near Quba — the storied town that remains one of the last places on earth where Mountain Jews live compactly. At thirteen he wrote what is remembered as the first poem in the Judeo-Tat language; in 1929 he led the group that gave his people a modern alphabet. Yet his other life was iron and oil: he rose through the Party in Baku’s oil districts, and in the darkest year of the war led thousands of Baku oil specialists east to open the “Second Baku,” earning the Order of Lenin. Poet and oilman, he spent his last years writing the history of his small people — and his name lives on through them.