At the Crossroads: The Early Modern Yiddish Folk Ballad

Abstract

The present study seeks to address the main obstacle in the research of the folk song in eastern Yiddish—the lack of documentation of texts, melodies, and contexts from before the end of the nineteenth century, and the almost complete lack of reliable informants. Based on extant documentation as well as research in neighboring traditions, and conducting a dialogue with a monumental unpublished dissertation by the Soviet musicologist Sofia Magid on the folk ballad in Yiddish (1938), the article outlines three different styles in the eastern Ashkenazi balladic repertoire: the old Yiddish ballad, the German "medieval" ballad that had been absorbed into Yiddish-speaking society since the end of the eighteenth century, and the new sentimental urban ballad. The discussion focuses on the style of the songs from the first group and traces their historical development, poetics, music, social functions, performance by men/women, and interrelations with the printed songs in old Yiddish. The focus on the old ballad as a distinct phenomenon of the early modern East Ashkenazi culture is achieved through examining narrative motifs, rhythmic patterns, and melodic contours. This scrutiny reveals how the aesthetic foundations of the international ballad genre—such as impersonal contemplation of emotional responses to pivotal events in daily communal life, and openness to absorbing diverse poetic and musical elements—contributed to the formation of its premodern eastern Ashkenazi oicotype in the small towns, at the crossroads between the western European heritage, the Slavic environment, Jewish narrative and musical traditions, and the Ashkenazi way of life.