Singing between two worlds: Lin Jaldati and Yiddish music in Cold War Europe and divided Berlin, 1945–1953

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although post World War II Berlin is usually held up as the front line of the Cold War, it was precisely in Berlin where the “Iron Curtain” was porous. Lin Jaldati (pronounced “Yaldati”), a Dutch Jewish Communist Yiddish cabaret singer and dancer … and Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen survivor, had been performing in Berlin since 1947. She gave her first wildly popular concert for displaced persons there in an American DP camp. Her popularity all over Berlin after the 1949 division of Germany, her 1952 move from the Netherlands to Berlin, and the 1953 division of Berlin’s Jewish community shows how her Communist and Jewish identities and communities found a kind of unity in a ruined Berlin landscape. The city’s peculiar political geography after World War II meant that until the Wall was built in 1961, Berlin functioned as one highly idiosyncratic space, in which the Communist Jaldati and her Yiddish music successfully straddled ideologies and communities. A close examination of Jaldati’s early Berlin performances shows how Yiddish music was reintroduced into a German cultural landscape that had tried to exorcize the reminders and remainders of eastern European Jewish culture. Jaldati’s successful reintroduction of Yiddish music to Germany took root specifically in Berlin, where DPs and Berlin residents, Jews and non-Jews, cohabitated in a postwar city full of physical, political, and cultural porousness.