Yiddish Songs Research Articles

"Yiddishists for Palestine": Diasporism and Solidarity through Twenty-First Century Yiddish Song

ABSTRACT: As many young Jews grow increasingly alienated from Zionist narratives, some have found a space for expressions of diasporism and solidarity with Palestinians in the international Yiddishist music scene. This article examines four twenty-first century Yiddish songs that refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and express solidarity with Palestinians: "Ver Tantzt" by Black Ox Orkestar, "Dumai" by Daniel Kahn, "A shtik fun harts" by Josh Waletzky and Michael Winograd, and "Qibya" by Koyt far dayn fardakht. These songs were compiled by the authors as part of the group "Yiddishist with Palestine," an online gathering of Yiddishist activists that started during the 2021 Gaza war, discussing strategies for expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Yiddishist communal spaces. Through textual, contextual, and musical analysis, and drawing on theories of diaspora and diasporism, the article explores the various ways these songs express Jewish solidarity with Palestinians.

ПАМЯТЬ О ХОЛОКОСТЕ: КОНТАКТ КУЛЬТУР В МУЗЫКЕ МИХАИЛА БРОННЕРА

The research focuses on the musical works of the contemporary Moscow composer Mikhail Bronner (b. 1952), which reflect the theme of the Holocaust: Jewish Requiem and Long Return (Book of Songs) for choral theatre. The article analyses the problem of the contact between European, Russian and Jewish cultures, which is manifested in these works on different levels: artistic content, genre definition (Jewish Requiem), thematism that defines the sound aura. It outlines the composer’s position in the choice of text language for his vocal and instrumental works, analyses the correlation between music and words: the lyrics of Yiddish songs (Long Return), Yiddish and Hebrew (Jewish Requiem — Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem In the City of Slaughter, translated into Yiddish with words from The Diary of Anne Frank; Psalms in Hebrew). The analysis of the musical compositions reveals that in the Jewish Requiem the dominant culture is Slavic, and in the book of songs Long Return — Jewish. The forms of manifestation of the cultural contact in the Jewish Requiem were carried out by diffusion (“smoothing out” the sound formants), while in the choral opera Long Return — by transculturation.

From Thieves to Martyrs: The Story of Two Jews from Early Modern Moravia

This paper focuses on the story of two Jewish men who were convicted of theft and executed in Prostějov, Moravia, in the spring of 1684. Although the two were offered a pardon in exchange for converting to Christianity, they resolutely refused. Their story was recorded in a contemporaneous Yiddish song that serves as the basis for the current case-study. The informative layer of the text portrays an event that can be contextualized within the campaign to proselytize Jews in the Bohemian lands at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Likewise, it indicates the great significance that Jews and Christians alike attributed to public conversions—or the lack thereof. From the formative perspective, the text crowns the two Jews as martyrs who died sanctifying God’s Name, disregarding their undenied legal culpability. Accordingly, this paper traces developments in the Ashkenazic ethos of martyrdom from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. It also highlights the shared cultural legacy that bound the larger early modern Ashkenazic communities, such as those in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Prague, to smaller Jewish settlements, like those of Moravia. Besides its hagiographical function, this historic song also imparts didactic and moralizing messages. It censures those who are too lenient vis-à-vis their children’s education as well as criticizing the habit of gambling, practices that may lead to criminal activities and push those involved to the margins of Jewish society.

Four Yiddish songs – one melody

This article discusses four early modern Yiddish booklets containing songs that were to be sung to the same melody: one concerns the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1670 (n.p., n.d.); the second describes two Jews who were executed for theft in Prostějov in 1684 and refused the offer to convert in return for a pardon (Wilmhersdorf 1684); the third depicts the effects of a plague epidemic on the Jewish community of Prague in 1713 (1st edition n.p., n.d., 2nd edition Amsterdam 1714); and the fourth (two editions, both n.p., n.d.) is a rhymed prayer, asking God to eliminate all misfortunes and evil decrees, including an ongoing plague epidemic, apparently composed in Prague in 1680. According to all four, the melody to be used when singing them was niggun akeda, a melody strongly associated with the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). It was originally used in the synagogue to accompany liturgical poems relating the biblical narrative and other cases of Jewish martyrdom. In addition to contextualizing the four texts within Yiddish literature, this article explores the relationship between text and melody in general, and the particular significance of niggun akeda.

СМЫСЛОВЫЕ КОДЫ «ШОА-СИМФОНИИ» МИХАИЛА БРОННЕРА

In the dialogue between the composer and the listener, a significant role is played by musical images that carry information about the semantic codes of the works. It is easier to get it in music related to the word. To help the listener in choosing an adequate vector of music perception, the author often names instrumental works as well. The article introduces for the first time into the scientific context the programme five-part “Shoah Symphony” by the contemporary Moscow composer M. Bronner (born in 1952), which reflects the theme of the Holocaust. In the creative heritage of the composer, who works in various genres, one third of the compositions is associated with images of sacred texts of the Old Testament, which is due to the national identification of the author and the importance of the Holocaust (Shoah) theme for him. The originality of M. Bronner’s “Shoah Symphony” lies not only in its programme (I Lullaby; II Chorus of Children’s Souls; III Scrolls from Ashes; VI My People; V Psalm), but also in the presence of a companion work of 2014 in the genre of oratorio. The author’s libretto of the oratorio makes it possible to identify semantic accents by attaching verbal text to musical themes, including Yiddish songs and Kaddish fragments. Discovering the semantic codes of Mikhail Bronner’s “Shoah Symphony” will contribute to the expansion of the audience.

The Culture of Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Yiddish Song

This article examines a body of Yiddish songs published between 1860 and 1890 with the intention of tracing the historical cultural milieu of Jewish merchants in eastern Europe and how songs functioned in their world and how these songs—at times, playfully, insightfully, or ironically—captured it. Behind this inquiry is a larger one regarding the relationship between folk material and historical material.

" Raisins and Almonds: A Yiddish Song as a Metaphor of Yiddish Folk Culture in the 21st Century"

" Raisins and Almonds: A Yiddish Song as a Metaphor of Yiddish Folk Culture in the 21st Century"

A Hundred Years of Yiddish Song Mobility

The article surveys continuities in the Yiddish song world from 1920–2020 despite the radical disjunctures of eastern European Ashkenazic Jewish life, profiling singers born nearly 100 years apart. The approach is synchronic, a useful method for music and mobility studies.

Klezmer Music in the Context of East European Musical Culture

The repertoire and social role of the klezmer musician in Eastern Europe can be best appreciated within the context of the broader “traditional” musical life of East European Jews. From the early seventeenth century onward the emphasis on the “Jewishness” and halakhic validity of all aspects of life now became fixed and part of local custom (minhag). This merging of the sacred and the secular came to affect music and dance just as it did costume, through the internal action of the Jewish community, not pressure from external sources. The instrumental klezmer music and the accompanying profession of badkhones (wedding orator) displayed both the fusion of the religious and secular in Jewish life, and a continuing tension between secular and religious allusions, moods, and techniques. The “Jewishness” in musical style – especially in instrumental klezmer music but also in Hasidic niggunim and to some extent in Yiddish song – grew by a process of cultural differentiation.This process involved both the preservation and development of ancient features, and the reinterpretation of borrowed musical material to suit principles alien to the original source.This chapter briefly characterizes the system of repertoires and genres of the East European Jews, beginning with the music of prayer, through the various paraliturgical songs, to the music of Hasidism, and the many sub-genres of religious, secular and professional song in the Yiddish language. The chapter concludes with a presentation of the two established musical professionals in traditional East European Jewish life – the khazn (cantor) and the klezmer.

‘My Song, You Are My Strength’: Personal Repertoires of Polish and Yiddish Songs of Young Survivors of the Łódź Ghetto

‘My Song, You Are My Strength’: <i>Personal Repertoires of Polish and Yiddish Songs of Young Survivors of the Łódź Ghetto</i>

Or Haganuz: Gems of Ashkenazi Hazzanut and Yiddish Songs Revived

Or Haganuz: Gems of Ashkenazi Hazzanut and Yiddish Songs Revived

SINGING THE JEWISH MOTHER ON AND OFF THE YIDDISH STAGE

ABSTRACT This article challenges the existing understanding of the Jewish mother figure by recontextualizing her within the substantial repertory of commercially published Yiddish songs that were first performed for Jewish immigrant audiences in the early twentieth century. While many mother songs exist across different immigrant cultures, the vast number of Yiddish theater songs specifically about mothers, generally overlooked by scholars, suggests that the Jewish mother, and all that she symbolized, occupied a special place both on and off the Yiddish stage. Though they lagged behind the Jewish mother’s real-life economic and social empowerment, the songs themselves increasingly bore the imprints of assimilation, exchanging heart-rending imagery for more Americanized sentiments, revealing a surprisingly complex response to the ongoing anxiety of assimilation. Ultimately, immortalizing the Jewish mother in song allowed Yiddish-speaking immigrants to embrace a cultural identity from which they were simultaneously trying to distance themselves.

Out of the Depths: Complexity, Subjectivity and Materiality in the Earliest Accounts of Holocaust Song-Making

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on two collections of immediate post-Holocaust Yiddish songs: Mima’amakim: folkslider fun lagers un getos in poyln, compiled by Yehuda Eismann in Bucharest in April/May 1945, a copy of which recently appeared in a private collection in Sydney, Australia and song session recordings made by Dr. David Boder in displaced persons (DP) camps in 1946, archived in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Library of Congress. Mima’amakim is a tiny pamphlet containing twelve compositions that would become part of the continuing repertoire of Holocaust songs, alongside eight compositions that disappeared from all other written accounts. Boder's preserved song sessions with Yiddish speakers occurred at displaced persons homes in France, Switzerland and Italy. Both items accompany some of the earliest recorded testimony of Holocaust survivors. The song-spools and the song book are extraordinarily fragile objects, containing material that opens conversations on the place of music inside and outside testimony. Their place at the margin of our understanding of musical experience in the Holocaust prompts the question: how does the affordance of material objects inform our understanding of the construction of repertories, determining exclusion and inclusion of one song over another?

Singing in Yiddish

It is standard for classical singers in the United States to be trained in the singing diction of the German, Italian, and English languages. This sung diction varies from the spoken diction for those languages and is therefore important for singers to study in classes dedicated to singing language pronunciation. Literature is also available for the instruction in the singing diction of numerous other languages like Latin, Spanish, Czech, Russian, and Hebrew. While there is a vast scope of languages represented by vocal diction guides, there is no available singing diction guide for Yiddish songs, despite the spectrum of classical Yiddish vocal repertoire in genres such as art songs, cantatas, operas, operettas, and stage plays. This article gives a back story for the research that went into the author’s dissertation Yiddish Diction in Singing and excerpts key chapters that explain how to pronounce the language in singing in an attempt to make this repertoire more accessible to performers.

Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945

It would be wrong to reduce the “Music of the Shoah” (Holocaust/churbn) to the Yiddish songs from the ghetto camps of Eastern Europe or to the multiple activities in the realm of classical or Jewish music found in the ghetto camp at Theresienstadt, which of course enjoyed a special status as a model camp. It would be equally wrong to restrict our view of music in concentration camps to the Moorsoldatenlied [The Peat Bog Soldiers], the Buchenwald Song, the Dachau Song, or the so-called “Girls’...

Or Haganuz: Gems of Ashkenazi Hazzanut and Yiddish Songs Revived. 2015. Contemporary Jewish Music 4. Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ron Shulamit Conservatory, Jerusalem CJM1501. Annotated by Eliyahu Schleifer. Produced by Edwin Seroussi and Yuval Shaked. 76-page booklet with notes in English and Hebrew. English translation by Tova Shani. CD, 8 tracks (43:43).

Or Haganuz: Gems of Ashkenazi Hazzanut and Yiddish Songs Revived. 2015. Contemporary Jewish Music 4. Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ron Shulamit Conservatory, Jerusalem CJM1501. Annotated by Eliyahu Schleifer. Produced by Edwin Seroussi and Yuval Shaked. 76-page booklet with notes in English and Hebrew. English translation by Tova Shani. CD, 8 tracks (43:43).

And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America by Abigail Wood (review)

And We're All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America. By Abigail Wood. (SOAS Musicology Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. [xii, 205 p. ISBN 9781409445333. $89.95.] Music examples, bibliography, discography, film - ography, index.It is a surprising fact that the tradition of Eastern European Jewish songs, written in a dying or at least postvernacular language (as coined by Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture [Berkeley, CA: University of Cali - fornia Press, 2006]), continue to live on in such vibrant ways in the early twenty-first century, more than seven decades after the Holocaust. Indeed, as Abigail Wood's monograph convincingly argues in some detail, Yiddish song and the singing thereof act as a kind of cultural linchpin for a community of contemporary Yiddishists that is centered in New York but stretches across North America and reaches over the Atlantic back to Europe. In this succinct and well-written reworking of her doctoral dissertation, Wood introduces the reader to a wide variety of contexts and functions for contemporary Yiddish singing, and explains how and why Yiddish song occupies this central place.Rather than constructing a linear, overarching argument or narrative, Wood's book offers a tour of diverse but overlapping sites within (the contemporary Yiddish cultural world) to shed light on the multifaceted and critical ways songs and singing function in and for the Yiddishland community. For some readers these seemingly disparate sites may feel jarringly hap hazard. They include: songs used for teaching language, learning about and expressing Jewish culture, and commemorating the Holocaust (chapter 1); the discursive space opened up within printed anthologies of Yiddish song from 1945 onwards (chapter 2); the ideological and aesthetic uses for Yiddish in the klezmer revival as it negotiates past and present (chapter 3); the fraught creative spaces in klezmer music opened up by Jewish-American encounters with modern Europe (chapter 4); the role for Hasidic nigunim among non- Hasidic Yiddishists and this repertoire's unique performance aesthetics (chapter 5); and, finally, the layered cultural dynamics of klezmer-hip-hop fusions embarked upon by younger Yiddishists (chapter 6). Trust Wood as she leads you on this circuitous journey through the music of Yiddishland. These snapshots of scenes in which Yiddish music and singing reside together offer a fascinating portrait of a colorful and complicated community, and thoroughly convince the reader that the community of Yiddishland was built around, through, and in Yiddish song and Yiddish singing.While the book's subtopics may sprawl all over the map of musical Yiddishland, there are key interrelated themes woven throughout Wood's description that tie the book together in the absence of a central thesis. Not surprisingly, one such theme is the shadow of the Holocaust, which hovers heavily over the hermeneutics of Yiddish cultural life in North America. For many North American Jews of European descent, the sense of urgency to keep a language and culture that was almost lost alive is strong enough to prompt them to engage deeply with a post-vernacular language and culture that may be quite foreign to them. As Wood points out, this urgency can be seen more specifically in dynamics of salvage ethnography that accompanied much folk song collection after the war and that still lingers today (chapter 2). A post- Holo caust context is a prominent and complex dynamic of the popular reception of American klezmer in Germany and Poland as well (chapter 3), where the combination of audiences grappling with post-Holocaust German and Polish identities and governments who supported Jewish culture within their borders allowed Jewish-American klezmer to flourish there. The ensuing encounters of Jewish-Americans on klezmer tours within the traumatic historical Holocaust spaces of Europe sometimes prompted complex and overwhelming feelings which were expressed creatively in new klezmer musical material (chapter 4). …

Everyday Music by Alan Govenar (review)

Reviewed by: Everyday Music by Alan Govenar Joe W. Specht Everyday Music. By Alan Govenar. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. Pp. 152. Color and black and white photographs, map, appendix, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603445283, $16.95 cloth.) The musical diversity of Texas has long been touted, and rightly so. Few states can match the varied environment, distinct physical terrain, and multi-cultural population, all essential ingredients in creating a rich musical tapestry. With Everyday Music, Alan Govenar, Dallas-based author, folklorist, photographer and filmmaker, continues to document the vernacular melodies of the Lone Star State. Everyday Music is an outgrowth of the radio series, Traditional Music in Texas, which Govenar researched and produced from 1984 to 1988 for National Public Radio station KERA in Dallas. For Govenar, traditional music is "the time-honored songs . . . passed on from one generation to another" (2). In putting the series together, he drove throughout the state searching for "performers whose music was rooted in their cultural background" (1). From Spanish-speaking Jews singing traditional Yiddish songs in McAllen to a Seminole-Kiowa gourd dance in Irving, Govenar taped both professional and amateur musicians with equal enthusiasm. Of the radio series' thirty-nine episodes, which are listed in the appendix [End Page 204] to Everyday Music, more than half were recorded in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (thirteen), Houston (four), San Antonio (three), and Austin (three), a reflection of how Texas's musical mosaic has become increasingly defined in an urban setting. It is worth noting, however, that Govenar's travels missed a vast swath of territory: the Permian Basin and Concho Valley, the South Plains and Panhandle, and, except for stops in El Paso and Redford, the Trans-Pecos. In 2009 Govenar began making return visits to eleven of his subjects. He found that some had died; in other instances, the music was dying too. Everyday Music, richly illustrated with the author's photographs, combines the earlier interviews with more recent conversations and observations. And while the book can be read as a self-contained document, it is also intended as a textbook or supplementary reader for use in the secondary school classroom in conjunction with an interactive website: www.every-daymusiconline.org. One of Govenar's notable strengths is his ability to listen and allow the musicians to riff on their craft. For Dallas barrelhouse pianist Alex Moore, "The music is always here when I get ready. The piano kind of plays itself" (69). For Gustine fiddler Wes Westmoreland, "If everything is right, your fiddling is singing the song" (50). And for Beaumont bones player John Henry Nobles, "White [bones] and black [bones] have a different pitch . . . the black and white get along mighty fine when I put them together" (115). Some of the music that Govenar spotlights, cowboy songs and country fiddling, for example, is alive and well, but other traditions are not as healthy. In the years since Govenar made his initial audio snapshots, the African American community has continued to turn its back on the blues; German oompah music is without mentors to teach a younger generation, and the conjunto accordion is in danger of being relegated to festival and museum status. In lamenting the lack of interest among young people in classical Cambodian instruments, Yani Rose Keo, who started a Cambodian dance company in Houston, is acutely aware of what is at stake: "You need your own music and your own culture . . . you have to know your root" (128). So what is the fate of the musical tapestry of which Texas is so proud? Govenar notes early that "The life of a tradition depends on interaction and communication within the families and communities in which the music is performed . . . In some instances, musical traditions may be dormant among one generation and be revived in a new form by the next" (5). Because vernacular music is ever changing, it has to remain relevant to potential listeners or everyday music becomes yesterday's music. [End Page 205] Joe W. Specht Abilene, Texas Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

Nahum Stutchkoff's Yiddish Play and Radio Scripts in the Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library

The Nahum Stutchkoff collection in the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library contains Yiddish translations, plays, song lyrics, and radio programs created by Yiddish linguist and playwright Nahum Stutchkoff (1893–1965). This article describes the collection in the context of the Jewish Division’s holdings, using bibliographic details about his known works to trace Stutchkoff’s career as a Yiddish actor, translator, director, playwright, and linguist. Stutchkoff’s radio scripts in particular provide rare documentation of the golden era of Yiddish radio explored by Henry Sapoznik and Ari Y. Kelman. A detailed bibliography of Stutchkoff’s published and unpublished works is included.

Songs to Heal Times Past: Miriam Rochlin's Collaborations with Immigrant Jewish Performers in Melbourne after World War Two

Australian-born Miriam Rochlin collaborated with Polish émigrés Reuben Swiatlo in 1947 and Yehuda Grynhaus around 1949 to produce, privately, a number of 78 rpm recordings of Yiddish songs in Melbourne. The recordings are housed in the Australian Archive of Jewish Music at Monash University. During each collaborative process, Rochlin was the piano accompanist, Swiatlo and Grynhaus were both vocalists. The article makes a case for an accompanist being recognized as a true collaborator in performance, and investigates one song from each partnership to demonstrate selected musical interactions between singer and pianist. By all accounts, the two songs chosen are unique to Melbourne and therefore raise the possibility of the performers also collaborating as composers/lyricists. A focal point of the discussion are the lyrics of the two songs, the subtleties of the language used and the cathartic effects of thenarratives on the targeted audience of the day, namely Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors from Europe. The article also considers the altruistic motivation behind the two collaborations.