>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> My name is Betsy Peterson and I'm the director
of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress
and I'm pleased to welcome you
for what I think will be another wonderful, wonderful day.
This symposium marks the center's recent acquisition
of the Henry Sapoznik Collection of more
than 1,000 historic Yiddish radio broadcast
from the 1920s through the 1950s.
And the Sapoznik Collection I should say joins other--
many other important research collections here
at the American Folklife Center.
The American Folklife Center was created by Congress in 1976
and placed at the Library of Congress to preserve
and present American Folklife through programs of research,
documentation, archival preservation, reference service,
live performance, exhibition, public programs and training.
You name it, we do it.
And so I think it's really appropriate
that the Sapoznik Collection join all
of our other important research collections and fill
out the offerings that the American Folklife Center has
and so we're really honored to have it as part of our collection.
We are also honored to present this program in collaboration
with the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress's African
and Middle Eastern Division and in--
and with the assistance of the Division of Motion Pictures,
Broadcast and Recorded Sounds and with the additional support
of many other colleagues around our Augustus [phonetic] Institution.
And also I want to thank the Yiddish of Greater Washington
for their support of our wonderful reception last evening.
Now, last evening's performance gave us a little bit of a taste
of the treasures and the nuggets of the collection through Henry
and Pete's wonderful performance and introduction to Yiddish radio.
And the first panel and a really engaged discussion
that followed I think provided a great foundation for beginning
to understand the historical and cultural context of Yiddish radio
and its relationship to mainstream American culture
and mainstream American media.
And I know we're going to hear much more about that today and I hope
that the discussion will be equally engaged.
One or two little announcements before we sort of jump right
in here, as I mentioned yesterday, these symposium or public programs
that we present is an opportunity not only to share our collections
with the broader public, but it's also an important strategy for us
to add to our collections.
It's an acquisition strategy as we like to call it.
And as part of that strategy, we record all of these sessions so just
so you know we will be videotaping all of this.
And once we videotape, we take everything back, we edit
and the proceedings of this symposium will be posted
on a streaming online video.
It will take probably a couple of months for that to be up and running
and available to you all, but we think it's important to be able
to share the discussion and the information that's shared today
with a broader audience and for a longer period of time.
So, I think I heard a cellphone just a minute or so ago,
if you have your cellphones turned on, please turn them off,
unless you want it to be part of our, you know, part of posterity.
So, without further ado then, I am going to turn this
over to Laura Apelbaum who is the moderator for our first session.
And again, welcome you all for another wonderful day.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]   >> Well good morning.
I'm not usually an early riser.   So, thank you all for coming.
I'm here as a result of shidduch [phonetic] that was made
between Sam Brilowski who used to work in Recorded Sound
at the Library of Congress and Nancy Groce from the Folklife Center.
So, I want to thank Nancy and Sam for inviting me
to moderate the first panel on day 2 of this wonderful symposium.
Ours is a collecting institution as well.
And so, I think it's so fabulous to celebrate the collection
of this wonderful, the accession
of this wonderful collection donated by Henry Sapoznik.
You know, a lot of times, as a collecting institution,
you work with years with donors trying to tease
out things from their collection.
So, what a wonderful gift this is to the nation
and a fabulous repository for it.
I'm sure a lot of people here agree with me.
I'm, you know, just in my 50s
and I really miss hearing Yiddish on a daily basis.
Of course, my bubbie and zaidie spoke
and so my mother sometimes pulls her Yiddish out on occasion.
And my husband and I would sometimes pass the bedroom door
where my in-laws would be staying
and we would hear Yiddish pillow talk.
We're always wondering, "Is it good or is it bad?"
[laughter] you know?
We're kind of trying to catch the words that we know.
There's a few things in our collection that relate to Yiddish
and because of my personal interest, I wish there were more,
and so those of you who are from the Washington community,
if you think about the institutions you've been involved with
and the programs and the educational sessions, if you have things
that you think that we might be able to be a repository
for the Jewish Historical Society, we'd love to talk to you about that.
Panelist Miriam Isaacs
in fact recently donated a fabulous Hebrew letter, typewriter.
I don't know whether it's a Hebrew lettered or Yiddish typewriter
or how you do that, you might be able to tell me.
That belonged to Harry Lerner, who was the founder
of Yiddish of Greater Washington.
We were just talking before that we really need to do more
about the history of that fabulous organization.
Peggy Pearlstein is going to tell you a little bit about a copy
of a book that we also have in our collections written in 1940
that was a little bit of a mystery to us until it was translated
by Jim Feldman who's also active with Yiddish
of Washington entitled Forty Years in Washington and written in 1940.
So this is an invaluable resource about the first decades
of the 20th century that was just a total mystery
to us until it was translated.
We have other things awaiting translation,
a book that's in Yiddish from the Combined Congregations
of Washington.
We think it's the Laws of Kashrut for Washington from 1908 to 1916.
On a more modern basis, we hold the Yiddish Cultural Festival's records
from the late 1990s and we have some great photographs
of Yiddish theater being performed on the National Mall in 1976,
maybe associated with the bicentennial
by the Hebrews Actors Union.
But most pertinent to today, we don't have any holdings
in this regard, but most Washingtonians remember Max
Reznick's long running Yiddish radio show on Sunday mornings.
It ran for 41 years and its last call was WNTR in Silver Spring.
The program combined news and music.
Reznick featured Hasidic and cantorial songs, Yiddish renditions
of songs from folks like The Beatles,
Harry Belafonte, and Al Jolson.
I'm sure many of the stations were carrying these Yiddish songs
such as She'll Be Coming 'Round the Catskills When She comes and lox
and bagels played to the tune of Hava Nagila.
He also had a weekly calling competition
where he challenged listeners to give the correct Yiddish word
for his word of the week and the reward was a choice
of a barbequed chicken, three pints of ice cream or a dozen bagels.
So today's panelists are going to talk about Yiddish collections
in their care and also how the materials are informing research.
And I'll introduce them all at the start of the panel
and then each is going to speak seriatim,
if we can remember the order, and then we'll take Q&A at the end
of all of the presentations.
So, I'll first give a brief bio and I know
that in the program there's a more lengthy bio because each
of these folks deserves more lengthy bio.
Our first panelist will be Dr. Peggy Pearlstein who will tell us
about Yiddish collections and materials here
at the Library of Congress.
She's worked at the Library for close to 30 years
and she is currently the Head of the Hebraic Section of the African
and Middle Eastern Division, the division chief is here.
She is also active with the Association
of Jewish Libraries for many years.
Peggy is also an esteemed past president
of our own Jewish Historical Society
and she remains very active on our board.
Dr. Miriam Isaacs to my left recently retired from teaching
at the University of Maryland.
She will speak-- it's a really interesting topic,
Missing the Punch Line: Mixing the Languages on Yiddish Radio.
She specializes in and has taught Yiddish language and culture
as well as socio-linguistics.   I had to practice that a little bit.
David Rein is an independent scholar.
I think many of you might have met David last night.
He will teach us about cantorial music and Yiddish radio.
He is a collector of cantorial recordings
and a researcher of their history.   Ann Hoog who is at the far--
at my far left will speak to us about Yiddish collections here
at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
She works here at the center as a serious editor for Geographical
and Topical Finding Aids and she also works closely
with the archival staff to improve and maintain access
to the collection materials.
So, we'll start with Peggy Pearlstein.
[ Applause ]
>> Laura, thank you for your introduction.
It's always good to see you, especially here at the Library.
The Hebraic Section of the African
and Middle Eastern Division is pleased to collaborate
with the American Folklife Center in this landmark symposium
on Yiddish American Radio thanks to the Folklife acquisition
of the Henry Sapoznik Collection.
The large attendance yesterday and so early this morning is testimony
to the interest in the subject.
My pleasant task is to tell you about some
of the Yiddish language holdings in the Library of Congress.
To begin, the Hebraic Section is the custodial division for materials
in Hebrew languages such as Hebrew, Yiddish, and Latino,
all of which can be requested in our reading room.
As keepers of these materials, we also serve as the research center
and public face of the library for Hebraica and Judaica.
Several items from the Hebraic Section Collections are
on display today.   They are over there.
So, go take a look when you have a chance.
We just ask that you don't bring any coffee
or noshes close to the materials.
I have some Yiddish plays, some sheet music, some postcards,
a Yiddish language megillah and a copy of our newest publication,
Perspectives on the Hebraic Book,
the Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress.
The book was published in June and we've got it open
to Zachary Baker's lecture on American Yiddish Theater.
The book is available on the library sales shop and at Amazon.com,
just a little commercial.   [ Pause ]
Okay, the library has 20 reading rooms open
to the public for research.
I'll describe resources in just a few of them in the hopes
that you can come away with an understanding of the richness
and variety of the library's holdings and find avenues
for research in unexpected places and collections.
So, a good way to figure how to access materials
in the library is simply
to understand how the library is arranged.
Here you can see we have General Collections,
Area Studies, and Special Materials.
So, in the General Collections, you will find books, newspapers,
other materials like that in English, French, Spanish,
German, Italian, et cetera.
In the Area Studies reading rooms, we are divided geographically,
the Hispanic Division, the European Division,
the African-Middle Eastern Division, and the Asian Division.
And so if you want materials in what we call squiggly languages,
Japanese, we call them the [inaudible] languages,
besides being squiggly, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Persian,
Hebrew, and Yiddish, also Armenian, Amharic, Turkish, et cetera.
You will either come to the African-Middle Eastern reading room,
geographically, or go the Asian division geographically.
And if you want something like special materials,
if you want a film in Yiddish, you've got to go
to the motion picture division.   If you want some cantorial music,
you've got to go the recorded sound division, or if you want
to delve more into the Henry Sapoznik Collection then you go
So, here in the Hebraic section, I'm just going to tell you a little bit
about our books, our journals, our newspapers,
our microform, and our ephemera.
And here you see an example of a manuscript in Yiddish.
According to our finding aid for the more
than 230 Hebrew script/manuscripts in our collection,
just four of them are in Yiddish.
The collection is almost completely microfilmed and the expectation is
that the film will soon be digitized
and made freely available online together
with this very detailed finding aid.
While we have a number of finding aids that I'll describe
in greater detail, please note that we've got lots of books, journals
and other materials still un-catalogued in the Hebraic section
and in other sections of the library.
While this varies in each custodial area, in the Hebraic section,
we still have a manual card catalogue which we use everyday
because we have several thousand Hebrew
and Yiddish books not available online catalogued and so we've got
to go our manual catalog where they are arranged by title.
So, if you don't see something online, it doesn't mean
that we don't have it, just ask one of us.
"Seder Kinot" is one of two Yiddish books that came to the library
as part of the Ephraim Deinard Collections.
The first two collections of more than 14,000 Hebraica books
and pamphlets were given to the library
by the New York Philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff in 1912 and 1914.
Daniel in the Lion's Den, this drama in Yiddish, was also purchased
and given to the library from the Ephraim Deinard Collection either
in 1916 or 1920.
So by 1920, the Hebraic section had a collection
of 20,000 rare Hebrew Yiddish
and Latino language books and other materials.
On October 25th, we'll celebrate the first gift in 1912
with an exhibit called Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica
at the Library of Congress, 1912-2012.
The exhibit will be up through the middle of March 2013
and will contain several items in Yiddish.
I invite all of you to return to the library over the next several months
to see the exhibit and to attend our many programs.
Now, here's an item that directly relates to radio,
or at least how a radio is built and works.
Well, it's not an American radio,
but perhaps all radio enthusiasts could have benefitted
from the guide book at the time it was published in Kovno in 1934.
I don't see any other holdings for this guide book
in WorldCat, the online catalogue.
And it came to the library from the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction
Organization which distributed heirless material
after the holocaust.
Here's an example of our most recent Yiddish language dictionary.
It's hand delivered a few weeks ago by a Russian physician
who had immigrated to Israel two decades ago.
He was visiting the United States for the first time and insisted
that his cousin drive him from Philadelphia to Washington
to give me the dictionary in person.
He didn't know it wasn't around the corner.
The work is a labor of love he told me
that began in Russia 30 years ago.   Here's another recent dictionary
and this is the online cataloging record for it.
It's a Yiddish-Japanese dictionary.
Anyone in the room know Japanese and Yiddish?
>> My correspondent is a professor of Yiddish in Tokyo.
>> Okay, sounds good to me.
[laughter] But this is a very pricey dictionary.
We paid 700 dollars for it.
So, I hope more people learn Japanese
as well as Yiddish [laughs].
Many of you are familiar with Hinde Amchanitzki's cookbook,
the first Yiddish cookbook published in the United States in 1901.
But according to a New York Times article two years ago,
the gravestone of this lower east side restauranteur was found
on the side walk in the vicinity where she lived.
With help from YIVO, the gravestone I understand has now been placed
on her grave which I think is in Staten Island.
Jenna Joselit wrote about this cookbook several years ago
in one her columns for the Forward, but I have been wondering,
and Henry, maybe you know, if Yiddish radio picked
up on the phenomenon of vegetarianism among some Jews,
either in ads or in station programming.
>> It was a Yiddish vegetarian journal published
in New Jersey for many years.   >> Okay, thank you.
This book of stories for children was published in Mexico City,
but it's just one of many examples of the variety of imprints
of Yiddish books and journals in our collections from around the world,
Europe, the United States, South America,
South Africa, and Australia.
Here is the cover of a contemporary Yiddish magazine or journal
and if you look up the top you'll see that it's the mountain edition.
Family is spending the summer in a [inaudible],
a bungalow colony in Upstate New York.
Supposedly, you can get their copy right away.
The [inaudible] is a special section of one of a number
of ultra orthodox contemporary family magazines
that often have special sections for women too.
But not all of our contemporary Yiddish materials emanate
from the religious community
and this Parisian journal is one example.
And on an even more contemporary note, Aaron Taub,
newly appointed head of the Israel Judaica cataloging team
at the library and the symposium chair yesterday,
has read from his published poetry
in programs sponsored by the Hebraic section.
You can watch his webcast talks from the libraries home page
or the Hebraic section home page.
We have a large collection of Yiddish newspapers
in hard copy as well as microfilm.   The holdings of all the titles
in microform are described in the online catalog.
More than 300 large boxes of these catalog newspapers are now stored
in the library's offsite facility in Fort Meade, Maryland,
but they are available for researchers to request.
Here you see a Canadian newspaper
and an Argentinian Yiddish newspaper.
The [foreign language] is one example of a Yiddish newspaper
that was published here in Washington.
Here you can see the Hebrew side.
And if you take a look at the English side and take a look
at where the arrow is pointing, you can see that there was some kind
of discord in the community in 1921
and that's why they started this newspaper.
So Laura, maybe you know something about that.
If not, maybe you can find out for us.
Jim Feldman, a highly involved member of Yiddish
of Greater Washington recently worked with organization members
and led the translation and publication of this directory
of Yiddish-speaking Washington from the 1940's radio day's era.
And Laura spoke about this before.
Here you see one of the photos from the original Yiddish book
that was compiled by Maurice Alex.
And of course in more recent decades we've collected Yiddish
of Greater Washington's newsletter.
In addition to newspapers, among our many microfilm collections is this
example of documents from the Russian State Jewish Theater.
We have a numbers of special collections in the Hebraic section.
One of them is our collection of 1200 Yiddish play scripts
and we've got one of them-- two of them on display today.
Zachary Baker compiled the bibliography that was put online
and he had helped from Bertha Sone [phonetic].
She was born Bertha Schooler [phonetic] and she was a sister
of Steve Schooler [phonetic].
So, she lived here in Washington and she came into the library
and actually, she was the one who also selected 77
of those Yiddish plays that were digitized and are available
on the library's website.   We have a large collection
of Yiddish sheet music, more than 5,000 pieces.
A wonderful finding aid was published by the late Irene Heskes.
I have some pieces of Yiddish sheet music on the table there.
It was a summer project for three summers for several interns.
I had them create a database based on the Heskes finding aid
and scan all the sheet music.
1500 pieces of sheet music and I think they're all from pre 1923,
before their copyright restrictions, are scheduled to become part
of the Performing Arts Encyclopedia at the library.
And the items will also be featured in Song of America.
The scheduled release date is this month.
We have not scanned our Yizkor books.
But we've taken the list of books scanned that appears
on the New York Public Library website and used it to check
against our own holdings.
We now have more than 900 cataloguing records
in this finding aid that you can just go online to for memorial books
for towns in Europe destroyed in the Holocaust.
So, in addition to the name of the town,
there are often smaller towns or shtetl around.
And so, we've added those to our database.
So, it makes it a much more sophisticated finding aid
for finding these little towns.
The Prints and Photographs Reading Room has more
than 50 million items in its holdings.
More than 2 million are digitized and available online.
Again, if you don't see it, please ask a specialist.
I'll return to the George Grantham Bain News Service Collection later.
Here is an image from the Federal Theater project.
The Federal Theater project, WPA project,
during the depression contains more than 9,000 negatives.
All of them have been digitized here at the library
and metadata is currently being added for each image.
A release date will be announced soon for the images to go online.
So, it's my hope that there will be more images
for Yiddish language performances.
I don't know if you can see this one,
but it was performed in California in 1939.
I was fortunate to see some of these Russian postcards when they arrived
at the library last year.
As noted in this online cataloguing record, there is a finding aid,
which includes the section on Jews and Jewish settlements.
Hopefully, about 50 items will soon be available online digitized
to let researchers know about the new collection of more
than 21,000 Russian postcards.
The Rare Book and Special Collections has items
of Yiddish interest as well.
Paul Avrich who died in 2006 was a professor at Queens College
and Columbia University in New York.
His collection of more than 20,000 items on the anarchist movements
in Russia and the United States include newspapers
and other materials in Yiddish.
But here is just one image of something that's in the Rare Book
and Special Collections Division.
A cataloguing record for a program for the drama Shylock
and His Daughter staged
at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York in 1947.
There are many other additional sources for research
at the Library of Congress.
For example, we have a whole collection
of Lithuanian language newspapers in the European division filmed
by the department, with the Department
of Defense Camera Equipment in Vilnius.
The Yiddish language newspapers
from that collection are available in the Hebraic section.
David Boder was a psychologist interested in the technique
and technology of the oral history interview.
He traveled to Europe in 1946, conducted interviews
in nine languages with DPs
on what was then state-of-the-art wire recorders
and those interviews are here at the Library
of Congress in the Holocaust Museum.
Let me share with you some snapshots of information
on Yiddish American radio from two databases, Variety Archives
and ProQuest Historical Newspapers online.
So, first I did just a quick search under Yiddish radio.
And then I narrowed it to Nahum Stutchkoff.
And here you can see the play which we've got
on display in the other room.
And here you can see under Yiddish plays, in Variety newspaper,
there is something about in a Jewish grocery store.
This is from the Boston Jewish Advocate of 1936.
So, there are lots of different places
to search even in online databases.
Don't forget the copyright collection.
This is a cataloguing record for Yiddish language film.
Copyright deposit records after 1978 available to search
from the libraries website.
Before 1978, you can go downstairs in this building
to the Copyright Division and go through hundreds, if not thousands
of card file drawers looking for material
that you never knew existed.
And finally, this last image is from the collection
of the early 20th century George Grantham Bain News Service Agency
available online from the Prints and Photographs Division home page.
Now, that my own daughter and her family live in Brooklyn,
I ride or even walk over this bridge.
The caption that accompanied the photos snapped
in 1919 described a woman praying on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Since most of the Bain photographs of Jews were taken
around the high holidays and outside of synagogues,
I think it might be safe to say
that this woman is reciting Tashlich prayers in the hope
that all sins will be cast off into the river, the East River
at start of the New Year.
Let me conclude my own presentation this morning by wishing those of you
who will soon be celebrating Rosh Hashanah a gut yor.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
[ Pause ]   >> Moishe Pipik, please.
[laughs] I never said that before.   [ Laughter ]
Okay, yup, let's go.   [ Pause ]
[ Music ]   Listen.
[ Music ]
>> Ladies and gents, [foreign language].
>> Okay. So, ladies and gents, [foreign language],
this playful greeting for the folks who listened to Yiddish radio
or Yiddish records by Benny Bell.
I actually have a physical album of his here, Kosher Comedy.
As he took on the persona of Pincus the Peddler or Moishe Pippick,
the [foreign language] or Matchmaker.
Pippick in Yiddish means bellybutton.
I hear two common complaints.
I hear two common complaints involving Yiddish.
One is that parents used it as a secret language,
the other a frustration
of not getting the Yiddish punch lines of jokes.
Yiddish, for most children and grandchildren of immigrants,
became a secret code associated
with older family members or schlocky jokes.
Many Jews grew embarrassed of being greenhorns,
greener recent immigrants.
But for those who enjoyed Yiddish and for the greenhorns
who needed Yiddish radio programs spoke your language,
told the news that most mattered,
and brought your culture into the home.
I would like to present some of the funniest Yiddish entertainers
and discuss them in the context
of linguistic shift and cultural continuity.
The comic material of Yiddish popular songs shape social awareness
of their audience and help bring
to American culture a different kind of world view.
I look forward to using the radio archives at the Library of Congress
which will provide valuable authentic materials.
I here mention only a few popular entertainers who wrote
and recorded comic songs, artists who cater to an audience
in transition linguistically and culturally.
In terms of language, the shift went from Yiddish to a mix of Yiddish
and English, or English in a fake accent
with a few hackneyed Yiddish words thrown in.
In social terms, the transition meant addressing issues
of self image and adapting to America.
Indeed, the wisdom of Yiddish topical songs
and street philosophers gave their working class audience a kind
of education, a night school as was mentioned yesterday,
about how to manage in America.
And they often did it with a wink and a laugh.
It was an important cultural stance reconciling the schlemiel
with a stereotypical image of a hero in America.
We will see how old world and new collided,
when the schlemiel took on the cowboy.
"The Scotchman of Orchard Street," please.
Menasha Skulnik.
[Background music] Listen, listen for the English and the Yiddish.
[ Music ]   Okay, just a taste.
So, in this mix of Yiddish and English from The Scotchman
of Orchard Street by theater and radio personality Menasha Skulnik,
the Scot cuts a strange figure.
He's a kind of hybrid of laconic warrior hero who has moved
to Orchard Street, a street
on the lower east side popular for bargain seekers.
Skulnik Scot is galitiano [phonetic] and he sings
in a knavishly [phonetic] nasal voice with a thick Yiddish accent.
[ Foreign Language ]
So, he says a watchman only and that he is watching somebody else eating.
He introduces his family adding mac [phonetic] to many Yiddish names
like his aunt [inaudible].
He stereotypes both the Scots and the Jews as sharing stinginess,
[inaudible] follows somebody to lunch unless the other person pay.
The stanzas are in rapid Yiddish, only the refrain
and occasional words like watch and hem are in English.
This kind of humor was a tension breaker for the greenhorns.
They contrasted their own small stature and looks
with the tall, square-jawed other.
It help the greener to feel comfortable in their own skins.
Skulnik was comfortable himself as a yiddle,
a small Jew born in Poland in 1892.
He ran away to join a circus at age 10, came to the US
to join the Yiddish theater company and was cast
in comic roles as a schlemiel.
Instead of being embarrassed of having an accent, at his looks,
and having an old-fashioned name, he embraced his identity
and employed it to comic effect.
He found humor in the idea of Jew is anything but himself.
Take his song "Cordova the Bronx Casanova".
I am famous from Paris to Dover.   When I make love I'm in demand.
Each old maid wants to put her future in my hand.
He says. He is the most improbable lover.
In "I'm Sam The Man Who Made The Pants Too Long",
he's an incompetent tradesman who explains the American workplace.
Sam claims that a foreman is a man who stands around and doesn't work.
Sam tried that and got fired.   No, is it my fault?
He says. Skulnik had to adapt as his audiences dwindle.
He grew up in a world with millions of Yiddish speakers.
But Yiddish culture could not withstand the forces
of assimilation and wars.
Skulnik had said that 40 percent of his Yiddish theater was in English.
After Yiddish theater hit its peak in the '20s,
performers had to scrounge for work.
Still Yiddish in the heyday of radio, there was daily news,
were daily newspaper, theater and commerce.
Yiddish still linked you with Jews from other countries
and from different regions.
Immigrants had tried to recreate elements of the old country
in the US and founded societies of people
from their own town or region.   New York became a new shtetl.
Even City place names were Yiddishized,
pronounced "Nev York" and the "Bronx."
Back then folks in Uptown New York may have looked
down on the hyphenated Americans, but on the lower east side
and other smaller enclaves Jews worked and shopped side by side
with immigrants from many countries.
This ethnic melange itself became fodder for humor.
Leo Fuchs wrote a song called "Coney Ireland Wedding"
and [foreign language] is one of his numbers.
In America you live and work with Italian, Swedes and Greeks,
very different from the relations to the old country Poles,
Ukrainians, Russians and Romanians.   This change needed interpretation.
The Yiddish Fred Astaire, dancer, actor and writer Fuchs was born
in Poland in 1911 and begun acting in Polish at the age of 5.
He performed at the Warsaw cabaret at age 17
and moved to New York in 1935.
He performed in many English and Yiddish plays
and wrote much of his own material.
In his song "Hopalong Knish", a cowboy is the butt of his humor.
[foreign language] he says.
In "Der Millionaire fun Delacy Street" the poor guy gets
to walk behind the rich uptown man and gets to inhale his smoke.
In "Uncle Sam and Reb Isruel", he combines patriotism for America
with a new kind of piety.
Both countries are to be democratic and friends forever.
[foreign language] he says.
Some Jews chose to hold on to their greenness.
New immigrants came in.
Some valued living-- some valued living in both languages
and embracing both cultures.
If everyone could read-- couldn't read Yiddish, records
and radio could connect people with broad range of listeners.
Bilingualism added to fun.
Knowing more than one language made greenhorns able to engage
in linguistic play and punning.
Yiddish performers tailored their novelty songs and routines
to a broad audience, and much of the material came
from vaudeville and theater.
As Yiddish radio entered the scene in the '30s,
the culture in Europe was rapidly changing.
A younger generation was urbanizing.
From Europe, fresh talent continued to enrich Yiddish cultural life,
including the refugees who came before and after World War II.
The greenhorn crowd enjoyed making fun of pump.
"Toreador, don't spit on the floor.   Use the cuspidor.
What do you think it's for," was an example.
[laughter] In America, even Yiddish dialects took on new meaning.
If assimilated Jews look down at you, then as a lead fact [phonetic],
you could make fun of galitianos.
And galitianos could make fun of themselves.
If you don't look like a Scot or a cowboy,
you can laugh at the cultural contrast.
Yiddish is an open language
of low status historically considered a jargon by many.
This openness allowed greenhorns to take ideas but interpret them
in America in unpredictable ways.   Performers and producers played
to mainly working class people who wanted to be amused.
Language gaps could be overcome with lots
of [inaudible] and lists of food.   [laughs] A lot of food.
Skulnik and Fuchs, born and raised in Europe played to audiences
that knew a lot of Yiddish and little about American culture.
Rubin Doctor too had his roots in Europe which--
and shaped greenhorns' perceptions of America.
He was a prolific lyricist born in the Zagavia and came to American
in 18-- into America to play vaudeville.
He published more than 80 Yiddish lyrics,
his best known "Ich Bin a Border by Mayn Vayb."
I'm a boarder at my wife's which explains--
which celebrates capitalism in a strange way.
In this case the freedom to transform marriage
into a commercial arrangement.
You get better care from your wife if you're a client
and you'd still have your freedom.
In Doctor's mira nickel, dira nickel [phonetic], it's also liberating.
It features a tram conductor who takes a nickel
for every one the company gets.
It's only fair because the company has many nickels.
American commercialism ranks high in the mockery of American culture.
For American born Mickey Katz, his audiences were for more comfortable
in English and in pop cult-- American pop culture.
He can still occasionally venture into fluid Yiddish.
Can we hear "Duvid Crockett"?   [ Pause ]
[ Music ]
No, no, Mickey Katz the guy with those sausages.
>> That's it.   >> That's it?
>> You got the wrong track.   >> Oh wrong thing.
Oh, I'm sorry.   All right, never mind.
Forget about the Schlemiel of Fortune.
[laughter] I can do it.
[laughter] Okay, born in the wilds of Delancey Street,
home of gefilte fish and kosher meat.
He flicked him a chicken when he was only three.
So, Mickey Katz penned this and other great things.
So Duvid Crockett, our hero, was born in the wilds
of Delancey Street, home of gefilte fish.
The original hero, Duvid Crockett, the guy with the funny hat,
he was actually according to this song,
he's kind of crude and murderous.   He [inaudible] Indianos.
Kills Indians.
Not such an appealing figure in terms of Yiddish culture.
When he's relocated to Delancey Street, he's crude, he chews tobacco
and he [inaudible] is the sound you make when you chew too much tobacco.
And the [inaudible] rhymes with Crockett which is rather clever.
Other cowboy parities are [inaudible]
[laughter] Katz's "Born in the US" in 1909 reveled
in the identity of Jewish Americans.
For his jokes to succeed, he needed his listeners to be familiar
with popular American culture.
He called himself a double ethnic smash.
We can see from Katz's work that as more English crept in,
Yiddish took on different significance transitioning
from a natural language of expression to a vehicle of nostalgia
and humor as components of English.
He uses food jokes as in "Sixteen Tons."
I went to work in a delicatessen
for drisick dullah and plenty to fressen.
He loaded 16 tons of salami.   He's a laborer.
English Yiddish comedy included Schlemiel of Fortune
which you just heard a bit of.
The barber of Schlemiel, it's in Michaye in Hawaii,
and the Poiple Kishke Eater.
We'll have to-- like Katz, Benny Bell was born
to an immigrant family in New York in 1906.
He wrote some 600 songs and recorded in Yiddish,
some Hebrew but mainly in English.
In '46, he took on the persona of "Pincus the Peddler," Brooklyn, USA.
One of his numbers is a parody of Yiddish radio,
especially the commercials mocking the jingle
with Lemke's bedbug powder, use cockroach powder, [inaudible].
Bell's songs could be very bawdy using innuendo and risque lyrics.
He wrote, "My Grandfather Had a Long One."
"There were Ain't No Santa Claus."   "And Everybody Wants My Fanny."
Everybody wants my fanny, [laughs], wants to see my fanny,
wants to hold my fanny, but she loves no one but me.
So, don't touch my fanny.
[laughter] The back of this album, it says,
"Jewish American novelty cues mostly in English
with incidentally Yiddish featuring such gems as "Pincus the Peddler,"
"Mazel Tov," "It's a Boy," "Romania," and many others.
So to my conclusions, while many sneered at this let your hair
down stuff of Yiddish shtick, it was sheer fun and wit,
evidence of resilience and intelligence.
The process this took offers broader insights into points
of cultural intersection and tension.
Nw, you didn't have to pretend to be a gun-toting hero.
You could be a Schlemiel of Fortune.
Indeed, you come to the truth that everybody is a schlemiel,
even the supposed heroes.
A world view later echoed in the work of Mel Brooks.
This cumulative body of material holds broader meaning
for ethnic radio in many languages today.
In media where their performers
and their audiences possess a common repertoire,
the laughter breaks social tension.
Humor can help immigrants push the cultural boundaries
as peoples bump up against one another.
Those who wield the microphone are at once insiders and outsiders,
poking fun at their own folk,
but also at the various faces of America.
A lesson for today is that despite the views of many educators
and language purists, language mixing is natural
and healthy and so is laughter.   [ Applause ]
[Music]   >> [Singing] I just-- [Laughter]
>> Thank you.   [ Pause ]
>> I don't know, but for some reason,
I feel like I have been here before.   [Laughter]
>> Deja vu   >> Yeah. Hi, everybody.
There are many topics that we can discuss today in reference
to Cantorial Music on the Radio.
However, our focus here today will be about the development
and progression of number one, cantorial music and number two,
the cantor himself as I will explain.
For those who might not be familiar, which I'm sure you are,
a cantor is someone who leads the congregation in service and prayer.
I've divided to past 150 years into a few sections based
on the major developments and changes
that happened during the course which changed the cantor
and his music leading up to the ultimate new phenomenon known
as Yiddish radio on the air, which I will save for last.
Stage one, is an era I would like to call, "The cantor at the pulpit."
In or around the years 1860 or so, the cantor, the hazzan,
was someone whose education and knowledge of music was minimum.
The little education he did have was mainly taught to him
by the fellow old cantor in the shtetl.
Some cantors also took limited voice lessons from a local teacher
who he himself knew very little.
He would lead the congregants of the synagogues
on a Sabbath, holidays, High Holidays.
His job was mainly at the pulpit.
Of course, he was obligated to do weddings and funerals.
The music exercised by the cantor was beautiful, warm,
and expressed the Jewish pain and suffering in exile,
but wasn't really a composition, a musical arrangement.
It was [inaudible] style, prayer style,
definitely not a Western style composition.
To demonstrate to you what I mean by this style in prayer,
let's listen now to a rare 78 recording sung
by Cantor Abraham Minkowski.
The recording was made in New York in around 1905
by a company named UHD&C, United Hebrew Disc and Cylinder.
Since, the company was Jewish owned and the entertainment was primarily
for a Jewish audience, perhaps this might be an early version
of Yiddish radio.   So, let's listen then.
[ Pause ]   [ Music ]
I hope this gave you an idea.
One last note before we move on to the next stage.
During this time period, the term a world renowned hazzan was
nonexistent because the cantor leading the service
in one shtetl wasn't really known to the people in the shtetl next door.
It wasn't even a goal that a cantor could have dreamt of.
The cantor didn't have a great income,
just a few dollars the congregation paid them.
Stage two is what I would call "Cantor
at the pulpit and in concert."
In the years around 1890 and beyond, we find hazzan
and cantors took the roads and started traveling with choirs
from town to town to lead the services
in various synagogues and concerts.
The great master, cantor [inaudible] known as [inaudible],
he claimed great fame when he traveled throughout cities of Poland
with a big choir to lead the services and concerts.
The songs [inaudible] sang were of a new style.
His compositions took between a half an hour to an hour.
Evidenced by the records he did for Columbia records here on New York
on September 1917, three records, two sides each
to combine one single song.
Traveling cantors was new era in cantorial horizon
that greatly changed the cantor situation.
It bought great fame and lots of money.
In all the cities that they performed, they were showered
with gifts and money and whatever else you can think of.
The hazzan was the Jew celebrity.
People became like addicts to go listen to traveling cantors.
Then after the Sabbath or a concert, huge debates and arguments arouse
on street corners and cafe house.   Who was the better hazzan?
Being the main source of entertainment,
the cantor was the star, the toast of the town making many fans,
something that wasn't-- was unheard of before that.
Fans became so engrossed into certain cantors.
For instance, fans of the great hazzan [inaudible] became known
as [inaudible].
Going right along with our theme of yesterday, of communism
Stage three, we enter in a stage of 78 recordings, RPM recordings.
I'd like to call this set of era, "Cantor at the pulpit,
concert and recording studio."
In the year 1902, a few of the now well-known cantors like Trinity,
Sirota, Fladofsky, [inaudible] and some others signed contract
by recording labels to record a series of cantorial masterpieces.
So, their prayers would now be sold all over Europe and eventually
in the US and bring them great fame and a promising income.
These recordings would range in length
between three and four minutes.   With this, a new style was created.
It brought a major change to the quality and style
of the cantor's chants and prayers because it had to fit
to certain timeframe, a major contrast
to the long drawn out compositions.
These recordings made the cantors world-renowned cantors
or as they say in Yiddish [foreign language].
Invitations and traveling [inaudible] with promising amounts
of money were guaranteed the cantors if he will
to travel the cities around the world.
The cantors accept it.
They set sail to the US, South America, England, even South Africa.
With time, a lot more cantors got contracts to record on 78 records.
This change was a major change to the way contracts
between the cantors and the congregations were written out.
Up until this point, the contract would bound the cantor to be there
for most Shabbos and Saturdays, holidays
and especially High Holidays.
Now with this new era of traveling and being a world star,
the congregation was more than satisfied
to have the cantor for high holidays only.
[ Pause ]
Overall, I would say 35 percent of the Jewish 78s were cantorial.
All of them, the hazzanut started earning more money and great fame.
Being a cantor was a good profession.
Stage four, Jewish radio on the air.
We now enter into an era of cantorial music on the air waves.
And around 1926, as we heard yesterday,
Jewish Yiddish radio was established.
Radio was the opportunity for many cantors
who for various reasons didn't get to record on 78s to now be heard.
On a side note, Yiddish and Hebrew songs became very much part
of the cantorial repertoire,
although it had started a little before.
The cantor would go down to the radio studio and perform
on air live, for a live audience in the studio and even sometimes
in the theater with as much as 3 to 400 seats.
Of course, people from all over the city would tune in to the station
to hear the cantor on the radio.   The music itself was an upgrade,
being better in quality and better in style.
The length of the piece would be approximately 5,
6 or even 7 minutes.
The cantor was able to express his musical ideas and feelings freely.
He wasn't so time-restricted as the records, being a great equalizer
between the long drawn
out compositions and the very short '78s.
Jewish radio, in my opinion, for those who care,
was a fine combination of all of the
above mentioned stages of cantorial music.
It represented the cantor at the pulpit being
that the live broadcasters--
broadcast of service and prayers were heard live on the air
as I will play in a little bit,
which in essence made the radio an actual pulpit.
You can actually sit at home and be on the synagogue at the same time.
It was also performed for a live audience.
Tickets were sold, just like a concert.
I would also argue that radio being an entertainment
in your own living room was a substitute or replacement
for the 78 records which makes the record-- the records an actual--
the radio an actual recording studio.
How appropriate for a Friday morning at the 10 o'clock hour
to play some [foreign language].
WEVD for years had a [foreign language] program Friday morning
to prepare Jews for the holy day of Sabbath
with some cantorial selections.
Our radio star today is none other than Hazzan Moshe Ganchoff.
I have chosen Cantor Ganchoff due to the fact
that I think he represents all four stages and transformations
of the cantors and cantorial music as we have just discussed.
As a boy in the early 1900s, he sung in the choir
of Cantor Schulman in Odessa.
He himself became a great cantor and composer.
He recorded on 78s as well.   And later on, was a huge radio star.
Our first selection here today, interestingly enough,
is a live performance of a wedding service ceremony
for the Friedman Family, no idea who he is, in 1948, giving you a glimpse
of radio's pulpit performances.
I edited the track a little bit to fit our timeframe.
>> This evening is Cantor Ganchoff, very well-known
to radio audience, Moshe Ganchoff.   [ Music ]
>> [Background music] The beautiful singing of the choir conducted
by Mr. Nadel with the opening solo passage by our cantor this evening,
Cantor Ganchoff, dressed in his traditional black robes, hairy,
riddle looking with a purple line talus.
The choir now marches back to its place
and shortly our processional will begin.
[ Music ]   [ Applause ]
>> Our next selection is of Cantor Ganchoff's as well,
on November 30th 1947 for the Stuhmer's Pumpernickel Company.
On an interesting note,
this selection is a Hebrew-Palestinian song
"Ma Yafim Haleilot," track 3.   [ Music ]
[ Foreign Language & Music ]   [ Music ]
[ Pause ]   >> Since we are in Washington,
I thought it would be a little bit appropriate to have some politics.
So our next selection is of Cantor Ganchoff
in the same program [foreign language]
"How Can We Bless You God?"
This is a song in reference to the UN resolution
to establish the State of Israel.   [ Pause ]
[ Foreign Language ]   [ Music ]
[ Applause ]
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my friend,
Noah Brown [phonetic], who couldn't attend for helping me in many ways.
I like to finish up by saying that with the work of Henry Sapoznik,
the Library of Congress, and their preservation,
these radio broadcasts have now become priceless recordings
from radio recording studios.   Thank you all for listening.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> Hi, I'm Ann Hoog and I'm a Folklife Specialist
and a Reference Staff at the American Folklife Center here
at the Library of Congress.
I'm going to talk about some of the Yiddish materials
in the American Folklife Center's Archive.
I'm just going to talk about a few of these
but there is a more complete finding to all of our Jewish, Yiddish,
and Hebrew collections which are in the archive, which about 45
or 50 collections in that category which is
on the Folklife Center's website.
Just for a little context, the Center's archive was founded
at the Library of Congress in 1928 with the archive
of American folk song, where its aim was to collect and preserve local
and regional folk song and spoken traditions as they were passed
on orally through communities and families.
From very early on, the primary collection format that emerged was
in the form of sound recordings made in people's homes and communities
by ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and ethnographers
from around the US and the world.
As a result of this production of ethnographic sound recordings,
the archive grew quickly and over the next 20 years,
amassed more than 10,000 sound recordings
of spoken and song traditions.
It wasn't until around that time though in 1948
that the archive acquired its first collection
with any significant Jewish content.
That collection came to us via the New York Public Library.
The archive was first contacted by NYPL in January 1947 inquiring
about the possibility of borrowing a disc recording machine
and some blank discs in an effort to "record songs
for minority groups in New York City."
The recordings were to be made by ethnomusicologist Charles Hofmann
who worked at NYPL at that time.   The archive thought this
to be a valuable edition and granted the request.
Because of this equipment loan arrangement,
any recordings made using the Library of Congress machine
and discs would then be copied for addition
to the folk archive's collections.
Hofmann recorded 23 aluminum discs totaling about 3 hours
of audio containing folk songs representing a variety
of ethnic groups residing
in New York City including several examples of Yiddish songs.
I know this is hard to see so I'm going
to read a little bit from this.
But shown here is an example of documentation
that accompany the recordings that came.
The typing was likely done by Hofmann
and the cataloguing numbers written rather boldly were written
in by archive staff each number representing a disc.
The log shows that these discs include recordings
of 19th century Eastern European Yiddish songs sang by Ruth Rubin
and were recorded on May 30th 1947.
Now, Rubin came to be quite a prominent Yiddish folk song
collector beginning around the same time and her name is going to come
up again later in my presentation.
Also included here are number of children's games and songs sung
in Yiddish by Michael Rubin at age 9 and Ora Mendelson age 11,
and recorded on June 4th 1947.
I'm going to play two of these short children's pieces.
The first will be, if you can see the big number 9091 up there,
referred to in the log as the second cut called the [inaudible] song
or [inaudible].
Then there will be a pause and the next song will be from side B
of that same disc called Winter Song.
>> Michael Rubin and Ora Mendelson will now sing a [inaudible] song
called [inaudible] in which a burglar broke
into a poor rabbi's house and found nothing at all.
All the shirts at his drawer were torn and patched and so on.
[ Singing ]   [ Pause ]
The next Yiddish acquisition that came into the archive was in 1951.
It's called the Howard Bloomfield
and Harry Gilpar recordings of Yiddish songs.
These recordings were made in Los Angeles, California in 1949
under the supervision of folklorist Wayland Hand.
Bloomfield and Gilpar were graduate students in the Department
of Germanic Languages at UCLA.
And though there had evidently been plans to expand
to this recording project, it resulted in only
about 15 songs being recorded.
Shown here is a log, recording log from that collection
and includes the song titles, dates, recordings, and names of performers.
Yes. That's what we like to see with that type of documentation.
One thing that makes this collection interesting despite the small size
is beyond the notes of who, what, where,
and when the recordings were made.
It also includes some transcripts typed in Yiddish
with English translations.
Shown here side by side is one of the selections,
a song for Joseph shown in Yiddish on the left
with its English translation on the right.
And here's a close-up to make it a little bit easier to see.
I found these transcriptions interesting.
I didn't really know the story behind them.
So after digging through some correspondents,
I found that neither collectors nor the donor made these transcripts,
but the donor Wayland Hand says in a letter to Duncan Emrich,
who was then the Head of the Folklore Section at the Library
of Congress, that the original transcriptions were done
in Hebrew characters.
No English translations were provided.
So Hand sent them to Mike Weinreich [phonetic]
of the Yiddish Scientific Institute of New York, YIVO,
and asked him if he and his staff could "put the materials
[laughter] Unfortunately, we didn't appear
to have been sent the original transcripts done
in the Hebrew characters which would have been really interesting
to have alongside this.   But at least we have this.
In 1966, we acquired the Ben Stonehill Collection.
This letter which I'm going to read from is from April 1949
when Stonehill first approached the archive
with his recordings he had made on a wire spool.
He wished to undertake quite an ambitious project of recording
and documenting Jewish folk songs which he describes in this letter.
I'll read from the last paragraph.
"With the aid of a wire recorder, I've been engaged in collecting
over a thousand heretofore unknown, never before recorded, notated
or published Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs, ballads, et cetera,
from the lips of hundreds of refuges, ghetto, and DP survivors,
could have gone on taking down a thousand more each year,
but began to transcribe texts, melodic lines,
and realized the sheer clerical work that faced me.
Until a subvention appears from somewhere,
I'm plotting away a piecemeal transcriptions, transliterations,
and translations and looking for assistance and a publisher.
Bibliography, definitive index of all existing songs
and print biographical, historical notes, all these
and more is envisioned in this volume, tentatively titled,
Adventures of a Jewish Ballad Hunter.
Emrich replied that he would in fact, like to add the wire recording
in the archive but, of course, goes on to say that there were no funds
to provide for the rest of his project.
Nothing more was pursued about this wire recording for another 16 years,
when Stonehill contacted the library again in September 1965.
He was then incapacitated by malignant cancer and wanted
to be sure his recordings were preserved
at the Library of Congress.
By this time, the wire recordings have been copied
on to reel-to-reel tapes.
The tapes are shipped to the library along
with recording logs identifying each song title.
And again, the details here don't matter except just to see
that it's a long piece of paper with a very long list of songs.
This page showing songs numbered 623 to 681.
We have the same typed pages for more than a thousand songs.
So not only did he record them, he typed the titles
out of all these material.
Many of these songs are in Yiddish in this collection.
The duration of the collection is approximately 36 hours of material.
Stonehill was driven to preserve the repertoire
of Eastern European songs he feared was being lost among Jewish
immigrants living in New York City after World War II.
And though Stonehill perhaps never fulfilled his dream project in full,
what he did accomplish is invaluable to the preservation of these songs.
Now, back to Ruth Rubin.
In 1969, the archives purchased the Ruth Rubin collection
of Yiddish folk songs and folklore.
This collection consists of field recordings made mostly by Rubin
in the late 1940s through 1960s in Jewish communities
in various locations in the Eastern US, Britain, Israel,
and Canada where she had grown up in Montreal.
She recorded hundreds of songs and interviews during the span of years.
The collection we have here contains 125 reel-to-reel tapes totalling
approximately 70 hours.
Shown here is a letter discussing the shipping of 40 of these tapes.
She shipped them over a number of years in batches.
One of the most wonderful things
about this collection is the documentation that accompanies it.
And this letter helped explained
to me why the logs always looked like this.
Each tape arrived with a detailed index of song titles,
performer names, places and dates of recordings.
You can see here that this piece of paper that's stuck
onto another piece paper, but the original piece of paper is cut
to fit inside a 7-inch tape reel box.
So inside the box, she taped what was on the actual tape.
And then you can see that perhaps they were unstuck from the box
and then restuck to this piece of paper using the same piece
of masking tape [laughs].
Once the tape arrived here, I'm imagining the archivist dealing
with it finding it hard to remove the tape without damaging the paper
and so what was left with the content is there,
but it provides a wonderful context.
Rubin included wonderful detail, not just in the names and places,
but her notes speak to the nature of doing ethnographic field recordings.
The note at the bottom here, I'll read, it says,
"Wherever noises are heard on the tape, they are either from traffic
which intruded into the area where taping was taken place
or the restlessness and fidgeting of certain members of the group itself.
I often taped in groups because one would stimulate the other's memory.
Hearing a song, there would always be someone who would say,
'I heard it another way,' or 'Let me sing it my way.'
In this way, many variants came to light.
Older groups, of course, had a smaller attention span
and that's why they were restless."
This is another log from the Rubin collection.
I found this log to be of particular interest because it's
of an interview she contacted with her mother in Yiddish.
And notice in the notes here what it says about her mother aside
from some biographical information she says, "Her long life
in the new world, however, resulted in her wide use of English terms.
So that although, her imagery remains,
her language has become somewhat contaminated."
Interesting to see here that Rubin has rather boldly underlined these
words on the log, you look at it
and you immediately go to that underlining.
So, I'm going to play an excerpt from that first story.
See if you could try to hear some of the words that, you know,
Rubin is identifying in this.
And if you can't see it there, some of the words are so, law [phonetic],
bunch, front, next door, chickens, yard, and study.
I'll play just a sample of this.   The audio starts with the word so.
[ Pause ]   [ Foreign Language ]
[ Pause ]
One of the final collections I'm going
to mention is the Abraham A. Schwadron "Chad Gadya" collection.
This collection consists of manuscript materials
and sound recordings collected by Schwadron, who's professor of music
at UCLA as part of his 10-year research
on the Passover song, Chad Gadya.
It includes more than 160 versions of the song from around the world
in many languages dating from 1973 to 1985.
Among the manuscripts are transcriptions of some
of these versions that he heard or recorded.
This example is from a recording that we're going to play made
by Zola Tisherman [phonetic]
who preforms a Yiddish version of Chad Gadya.
And I'm just going to play the first two or so minutes of it.
It goes on for 6 or 7 minutes [laughter] and gets faster
and faster and he starts thumping along with it
and it's a lot of fun to listen to.
But for time constraints, we'll just listen to the first couple
of minutes and I'll let Mr. Tisherman
on the recording do the rest of the introduction.
>> I'm Zola Tisherman and I'm about to do a Yiddish version
of Chad Gadya that was taught to me by my dad.
The-- that version was brought here from Romania, Botoshan, Romania.
And I remember this as a small boy we sang--
we couldn't wait to get to sing this song at every Seder.
[ Pause ]   [ Foreign Language ]
[Laughter] The final collection that I'm going to make mention
of at the Folklife Center, though it's actually one of the largest
of all of our Jewish materials is the Aaron Ziegelman collection.
This collection consists of 25 linear feet of manuscripts,
more than 2,000 photographs, 276 videos, 160 sound recordings.
Most of the videos and sound recordings are all histories.
That document the life and traditions in Luboml,
shtetl in Poland, now part of the Ukraine,
whose Jewish community was destroyed in World War II.
In 1994, the Aaron Ziegelman Foundation initiated the Luboml
Exhibition Project to preserve its history and memory-- excuse me.
The foundation collected photographs, letters, maps, posters,
artifacts, and oral histories for more than 100 families
and archives around the world.
The materials then used in a traveling exhibition called
"Remembering Luboml: Images of a Jewish Community" that focused
on the everyday lives of the Luboml Jews.
[ Pause ]
In addition to the many hours of oral histories in this collection,
one of the riches it brings to the Center's archive is its contribution
of historic photo documentation of Jewish community life
and traditions, which historically has also been lacking
in the Jewish collections at the American Folklife Center.
And that brings me to some thoughts I had
when putting this presentation together about the context
in which the Henry Sapoznik collection now fits alongside all
of these materials and what great addition it is
to the Center's archive.
I mentioned our lack of photographic documentation of Jewish life
and Sapoznik collection adds more than 70 historic photos
that document cultural expressions and Jewish life.
Also the his-- among other things, the historic advertisements
and transcriptions for the radio programs provide more context
and visual documentation that we didn't have in our other materials.
And lastly, the archives, Yiddish sound recordings,
don't begin until 1947 currently in the archive.
So being able to add the voices and cultural expression
of Jewish communities from the 1920s, '30s,
and '40s provides a new richness and breadth
to the Center's Jewish materials, in particular the Center's archive
as a whole and the Library of Congress.
That's all I have, thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> We have about 20 minutes for some questions
and I know we have some mics out in the audience,
so we have some right up from here.   Do you want to start in the back?
That's easier.   Go ahead. We'll start in the back.
I'm sorry, gentleman.   >> Is it on?
>> Yeah.
>> Hello, I'm Joel Rubin [phonetic] from the University of Virginia.
I just wanted to mention to Peggy's wonderful presentation
that I've done some research in the Recorded Sound Division
which is now, I believe, in Culpeper.
And there's also wonderful resources
of commercial 78 recordings in that collection.
I'm not sure whether they've been catalogued or not, but the--
there's a number of them from pre-World War I Eastern Europe.
So that's just another addition in the library's collections.
[Inaudible Remark]
>> You're fortunate because you're at the University of Virginia
and the library's Hewlett-Packard campus is offsite 75 miles
from Washington in Culpeper, Virginia.
I've been out there.
They've got all the film recordings, all the sounds recordings,
all the television shows, it's just an amazing facility
and there are actually machines that worked 24 hours a day
to transfer these materials to more modern means of listening
to them or looking at them.
So, it's great that you've used them and, you know,
I hope other people will use them as well.
It's also possible to order these materials into the Library
of Congress, if you're here for a visit, but you need a week
to do that so think ahead.   >> Okay. We have one right here.
>> Hi. My name is Ira Weissman [phonetic] representing no one.
[Laughter] I have a question.
I thought someone here might know the answer to this
because I've never heard this version
of Chad Gadya before the Yiddish Chad Gadya that was just played.
It's obviously not a translation from the Aramaic
because in the Aramaic, the fire does burn the stick
and in this version, it does not.   It refuses to.
It's an exact translation of a Spanish song called "La Chivita."
Does anyone know anything about how this came about,
this Yiddish version 'cause in La Chivita which is exactly
like Chad Gadya except the fire doesn't burn the stick and so on
and so forth, it refuses to?
This sounds like it was taken from a third source.
[Inaudible Remark] It is.   [Laughter] [Inaudible Remarks]
>> I don't have the answer to that but perhaps in the collection itself
where there's a lot of documentation that accompanies these recordings
that Abraham Schwadron did, perhaps the answer is lurking in there.
And so, if you want to-- you know I'll get your contact information
before you leave, I'll help you.   [ Inaudible Remarks & Laughter ]
>> We'll go here and then back again.
>> I'm Michael Beal [phonetic].   I had a chance, my daughter and I,
to go through the Sam Levenson archive at Brooklyn College.
It's difficult because they have absolutely no audio-video equipment.
I had to bring my own turn table, my own tape recorder,
my own movie projector in order to be able to do it.
But what we found was something very, very interesting.
Now, Sam of course he's not a singer, you know, but he did a lot
of course monologues in both-- mixed Yiddish and English.
The records that he made, he made five records,
the fifth one is very rare.
Four sides are basic Yiddish, Yiddish lessons.
Those are the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth of the sides.
When he started his very prolific broadcasting career in 1950,
from that point on, on his broadcast,
he never uttered a word of Yiddish.   And we found [laughs]-- thank you.
[ Laughter ]
We found that very interesting that he--
you know, it started a career both at the Catskill Mountains and going
around Brooklyn and on these five records mixing Yiddish and English.
But somebody and it may have been Irving Mansfield,
he was this producer on all the TV programs in the early,
in his early career, told him-- apparently told him,
you've got to drop the Yiddish and go 100 percent English.
And from that point on, he was phenomenally successful for five,
six, seven years on CBS television.
But there's one record, he rehearsed a lot of the stuff
that he eventually recorded on Apollo.
And there's one record that he did of the routine called Baby
or New Baby on the 5th of '78.
He did it on one side of the practice locker in English,
on the other side in Yiddish and on the label is written by somebody
that the English side is better.
But-- yes and so, you know, he did not--
although he continued doing private lectures at Jewish organizations
for the rest of his life, and a lot of those were done in Yiddish
and they're all on tape, you know his broadcasting career
and his public career was only in English after 1950.
>> He was a Spanish teacher.   >> Yes.
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> I think Miriam is going to comment.
>> Yeah. It's not surprising.
I mean I was told when I was in college, forget about Yiddish.
It wasn't offered as a language.   There was a lot of pressure.
I was told to leave it off my resume.
It would hurt my chances for getting a job, you know.
So, the weight of the social stigma to this day, you know I--
when I was teaching at the university, half of the time
when I'd introduced myself, people would say,
why aren't you teaching Hebrew?   Why are you teaching that language?
Is anybody taking it?   Why are they taking it?
You know, so that's--   >> I'm Josh Rocaque [phonetic].
I have a question for David Rein if I may.
You were talking about the cantorial--
history of cantorial presentations and you said that in 1860,
it was basically an uneducated hazzan teaching another
uneducated hazzan.
In my readings, I noticed that there was influence of the opera
on the cantorial music and vice versa.
In this past century, for instance, Jan Peerce was a hazzan
and he performed in the opera and Richard Tucker as well.
Could you explain how that crept in to the cantorial repertoire,
both as substance and also as recordings?
>> Jan Peerce was an opera star
who I don't think held a cantorial position until later on in his life.
Tucker had a cantorial post.
[Inaudible Remark] Right, and Tucker as a child sang in the choir
of Wise-- Samuel Wise, Fiddle Wise was his name.
So Tucker was little bit more of a chazzan than Peerce.
Peerce-- in the cantorial world,
Peerce is considered a good Yiddish singer, not a serious hazzan.
However, the-- how opera influenced cantorial music
and maybe vice versa, definitely and even cantors
like Rosenblatt were influenced by opera.
I've read many newspaper clippings where on opera occasions and,
you know, shows in Germany and Hamburg and in other places,
Rosenblatt was in attendance.
The Jewish opera singer Herman Jadlowker,
for those who are familiar, was a--
he was very good friends with Rosenblatt
and he was a chazzan later on as well.
But he-- certain compositions, when you listen to Rosenblatt,
you can hear Rossini ideas and other stuff.
So-- yes?   >> When did that start?
Do you know?
>> When the world became a little bit more open.
As we spoke before, it used to be shtetl to shtetl.
And when more Yiddish newspapers came around,
when Jewish economy picked up and when people went to Sulzer
who was a big influence changer in cantorial music,
I couldn't get everything, you know, I wanted but perhaps next time.
Sulzer was in Vienna and all the big cantors,
although he was a very modern and wasn't a religious cantor,
I mean he was religious, but he wasn't religious
in the musical sense for sure.
And he was definitely influenced by classical music.
So, it changed.
When I listened to a 78 RPM without knowing who it is, I can tell you,
this is [foreign language], a German opera, a German cantor,
it's definitely not the Russian or Polish or even English.
It's-- so Sulzer had his area and even people
who were only minimally influenced by him, the professionalism
and the fact that they need to know the theory of music well
and a certain approach to the cantorial music, definitely,
he was a big game changer.
>> There was just a gentlemen right beyond-- right--
who had his hand up for a while.
>> I just want to add one thing in reference to the Chad Gadya
that if anybody knows the translation of Chad Gadya,
there's no mention of a girl or a tree.
It's [foreign language].   [ Laughter ]
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
However, I would like to say that even in our household,
and in many households, the concept of a bar, peer and a tree and a girl
and that she can't reach it is sung in a Yiddish song.
So it could be that it got together
or maybe there is a tradition to that, I don't know.
>> They're more influenced by the reformed movement.
The Orthodox cantors were influenced by Sulzer and by Levandowski.
In the recording of the marriage service by Ganchoff
which you played, he puts a little bit of Levandowski in there.
And a lot of the melodies that are sang today
in the Orthodox synagogue came
from the reformed movement in the 19th century.
>> Okay. I think that Ganchoff represents pentatonic music
which is all traditional Jewish music.
[humming] That's not [foreign language].
That's a very traditional pentatonic music I think.
But it could be that he was influenced in some way.
[Inaudible Remark] Maybe.   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Maybe.   >> I wanted to ask--
>> Agree to disagree and move on to another question.
>> A bit about the process and maybe it's the politics of digitization.
With Yiddish books, I know-- well, I'm sorry, I presume the Library
of Congress is doing some just as part
of an overall digitization effort to make things available to people
who can't physically be here.
I know that the National Yiddish Book Center has been busy digitizing
their collection of Yiddish books which is somewhere on the order
of 15, 20,000 different titles.
And then, if memory serves, Google is busily trying
in their grand scheme to digitize everything
in the world's seven major libraries.
And the question is, do you folks interact?
Have you, for instance, supported the book center just
because what they have represents presumably a sizable portion
of the titles you have?
Or is everybody at least financing themselves
and how much do you talk to each other anyhow?
>> Well, the library has digitized more than 15 million items
out of 130 million items.   One of the primary, shall I say--
what is necessary is the library is focused on pre-1923 materials
which are out of copyright restriction.
And for foreign materials, I just had some Ladino materials digitized.
The library wanted to make sure that they were pre-1870.
So, that's really going back very far.
We have cooperated in the past.
The first Jewish women's magazine in the United States,
the American Jewish from 1895,
we cooperated with the Jewish Women's Archive and it was digitized
through the University of Michigan.
The library also cooperates with the HathiTrust
which is free and available online.
You can get all kinds of materials there.
We actually tried to claim all the Yiddish materials,
Yiddish books that were done at the National Yiddish Book Center,
and Aaron Lansky said, they're out of copyright.
If you want to purchase them, that's fine.
I mean, we've got all the originals.   We have a wonderful collection.
So, we have not done that.
There's a queue and everyone wants to be at the top of the queue
to get his or her materials digitized, so we're working on it.
Yiddish music is coming up.
>> Okay. This is the last question, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.   >> I'm Sherry Mayer [phonetic].
I just wanted to add a note to the cantor and opera question.
One of the most interesting recordings in my collection
that I recently was able to listen
to is the European hazzan Gershon Sirota singing [inaudible] of Tosca.
And what's really interesting about it is--
I mean, he sings it beautifully but his style is not how he sings
when he's singing Jewish material.
I mean, he sounds like an opera singer.
He does not sound like a hazzan.
And I think the availability of something
like that would be a very valuable resource
for people doing research into that question.
>> Thank you.
I want to thank all of our panelists.
It was really a terrific panel.   I know I learned a lot.
I want to just mention that you might want to take some time to look
at the material on display from the Library
of Congress during the break, and we'll reconvene
at 11:20 for the next panel.   [Applause]
>> [Foreign language] Welcome everybody.
My name is Emanuel Goldsmith.
I'm retired professor of Yiddish Language and Literature
at Queens College of the City University of New York.
I taught there for over 30 years.
I also taught at several other universities
because my wife says I can't handle the job.
[laughter] Now, I came here although I'm retired because I do--
since I retired, I do the same things I did before I was retired,
I'm just not paid.
[laughter] You know what retired means.
Hired yesterday, tired today.
[laughter] I'm really here because I couldn't hear about this program
without participating in it.
I am a product of the Yiddish radio in New York.
I spent my life listening to two stations, WEBD and WLIB,
more about that later 'cause if I start talking now,
the speakers will not have a chance to speak.
Let us begin with Alan Gevinson of the Library of Congress,
Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation,
will speak on Yiddish radio in Yiddish cinema.
[ Applause ]   [ Pause ]
>> Yiddish film makers brought to the screen many entertainers
who had made names for themselves in other venues, especially, the stage
but also in Yiddish radio.
In turn, Yiddish radio welcomed talent created elsewhere,
in the concert halls, on the stage, and also in films.
The link between Yiddish radio and Yiddish cinema that I wish to focus
on is not this kind of cross fertilization and exploitation
that what is important and I'll make note of it were appropriate.
I want instead to examine ways
in which Yiddish radio was depicted in Yiddish films.
Popular culture productions like radio shows
and movies have been mined by scholars
for the clues they might offer about the times
in which they were created, clues that can supplement
and even challenge interpretations based
on evidence from other sources.
You can always take the pulse of a time
by studying its second rate arts, the cartoonist
and playwright Jules Feiffer has written.
It's Western crime movies, radio and TV shows,
its True Love magazines, its comic books.
They were all close approximations of the fantasy life
of the lowest common denominator.
To know the true temper of a nation's people, Feiffer concluded,
turn not to its sociologists, turn to its junk."
[laughter] We will soon turn to clips
from three popular Yiddish films considered at the time
of their release to be junk or [foreign language], a Yiddish word
for trash, a term that scholars have applied critically
but also affectionately to a large genre
in Yiddish theater and Yiddish films.
First, I'll give a brief introduction to Yiddish cinema
in general and to the ongoing effort to preserve it for posterity
in which the Library of Congress has been involved.
Yiddish films were produced primarily in three places, Warsaw,
Moscow and New York, most prolifically in New York.
More than 140 short subjects and feature length films were made,
nearly all of them between 1911 and 1940.
Most had theatrical releases in major cities.
Many had an afterlife playing for years in synagogues,
Jewish community centers and schools.
Some starred great actors of the Yiddish stage.
Some were based on works by renowned Yiddish authors and playwrights.
Most were made on less than shoestring budgets.
J. Hoberman in his acclaimed study of Yiddish cinema "Bridge
of Light" has identified five distinct phases in this history.
From 1911 World War I, Yiddish film production was centered in Warsaw,
but New York's Yiddish theater provided much
of the source material for the films.
From 1917 through the end of the silent film era,
the end of the1920s, there were ambitious though sporadic attempts
to produce Yiddish films in Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union,
drawing on the works of Yiddish and Jewish novelists.
These were progressive, youth oriented
and sometimes controversial films influenced by currents of symbolism,
expressionism, futurism and communism.
Only half a dozen examples from this period have survived,
some only in fragmentary form.
In the early sound period-- sound film period of 1929 to 1934,
some 20-feature length Yiddish films
and as many short subjects were produced,
nearly all of them in the United States.
Hoberman cites two major achievements of this period.
The films "Uncle Moses" made in New York and "The Return
of Nathan Becker," a Soviet film.
The fourth period, 1935 to 1940, has come to be known
as "The Golden Age of Yiddish Cinema."
It began with a rejuvenation of the Polish film industry
that allowed what Hoberman characterizes as an ongoing dialogue
between Warsaw and New York resulting
in co-productions and exchanges of talent.
International hits produced during the golden age include "Yiddle
with his Fiddle," "Green Fields," " Tevye," and "The Dybbuk".
Following World War II, attempts to revive Yiddish cinema were made
in Poland, Israel and the US, efforts that resulted
in the production of only a few films.
A much more successful renaissance began in the mid-1970s
when a concerted effort was undertaken
to locate surviving negatives and prints from the Yiddish films
that had been made previously,
and to preserve them for future generations.
In 1974, the Jewish Media Service, a Boston Area based arm
of the National Center of Jewish Federations,
undertook a worldwide search for these films,
nearly all of which had been made with unstable nitrate film stock
which is highly inflammable and prone to decompose
over time into a powder or goo.   Also in 1974, the most prolific
of Yiddish film makers, Joseph Seiden, died.
Activist and producer and director since 1929,
Seiden also had become the major distributor of Yiddish films.
His collection totaled 31 films,
some of which were sole surviving copies.
In 1976, with funds raised by the Jewish Media Service
from private individuals,
the American Jewish Historical Society acquired the
Seiden collection.
The next year, the society transferred all the nitrate
from the collection and some of the acetate
or safety film-based materials to the Library
of Congress in a gift agreement.
The library since then has made duplicate acetate-based prints
of these materials for preservation purposes.
In 1976, the Jewish Media Service reorganized
as the National Center for Jewish Film.
The center continued its search for surviving material and raised funds
to restore Yiddish films and distribute them
in 35 millimeter prints to theaters and film festivals,
but more commonly on videotape and DVD for institutional and home use.
Today, they have restored 41 Yiddish feature length films,
3 Yiddish feature length documentaries,
and 13 short subjects.
You can find National Center for Jewish Film flyers
on the table at the back of the room.
They include information for those interested in becoming donors.
Soviet Yiddish films often focused on [inaudible] depression.
Yiddish films made in Poland gear on Hassidic folklore.
In the United States, family melodramas predominated.
Many haunted in J. Hoberman's words by a profound uneasiness.
He explains, with fair images of psychic and domestic disintegration
of unhappy upward mobility of Americanized children rejecting,
abandoning, or otherwise being lost to the parents who have suffered
and sacrificed for them, such films dramatized the anxieties
of recent immigrants, the disruptive effect
that the new world had on traditional values.
This theme is common among writers on Yiddish cinema that the road
to modernity took Jewish immigrants and especially their children away
from a hallowed romanticized home whose values
and traditions especially those
of the Jewish religion thus were threatened with extinction.
Juxtaposition of variety of desperate elements was common
to shunned, a genre that theater historian, Nahma Sandrow,
characterizes as an art form.
The first, she states to express the distinctively American
Yiddish community.
Sandra Wrights [phonetic] shunned freely mixes everything,
classical Yiddish songs, topical jokes, pilfered dialogue,
irrelevant nude show tunes.   As a prime example of shunned,
the film "Kol Nidre" intertwine its domestic melodrama
with comic interludes by Yetta Zwerling
and David Lederman whom you just saw.
A song by radio cantor, Leibele Waldman,
a sermon by Rabbi illustrated with clips from old Biblical films,
and a chilling ballad by radio poet, Chaim Tauber about a father
who kills his daughter to protect her from a Cossack-like soldier,
a scene that includes clips from another old film.
Although the term shunned originally was meant
as an insult, Sandra observes.
It can have energy, theatricality, flare, flashes of art and wit.
The literary critic, Irving Howe,
has commented whatever else shunned may have been,
it was not an escapist in any obvious sense.
It drove right to the center of the Jewish heart.
"Kol Nidre" is an example also of the dialogue between Warsaw
and New York that Hoberman wrote about.
The madcap Yetta Zwerling as the New York Times referred
to her honed her comic talents
in numerous American Yiddish stage productions before appearing
at eight Yiddish films in the late 1930s.
Her partner in the marital scene was Polish actor, David Lederman,
who came to New York earlier in 1939 with a Yiddish cabaret troupe
from Warsaw that toward the Eastern US and Chicago.
Lili Liliana, who played the daughter in the first clip,
also was a member of the troupe while the actors portraying her
parents were from the American Yiddish Stage.
Fortunately, most of the troupe were still in the US
when Germany invaded Poland just six days before the premier
of "Kol Nidre."
In the film "The Cantor's Son" made in 1937, radio also was symbolic
of the conflict between the traditional and the modern.
J. Hoberman has called the film "An Anti-Jazz Singer."
The Al Jolson film he references played a key role in the history
of cinema as a catalyst for the transition from silent
to sound films, but the film also best key for its detection
of conflicts within Jewish immigrant families
and within individuals faced with assimilation
into the American mainstream culture.
The protagonist of The Cantor's Son, unlike the Jolson character,
ultimately rejects celebrity life and returns to his ancestral roots.
The film transposes the beginning of The Jazz-Singer
from the Lowery side ghetto to an Eastern-European shtetl
where a Cantor's son leaves home as the Jolson character did
to joint a traveling company of performers.
They eventually arrived in America, but there the son struggles
to find work ending up as a janitor in a nightclub
until his talent is discovered by a female entertainer,
also as in The Jazz-Singer.
The review in variety characterized the film
as shunned without using the term.
This is one of the trashiest stories put to the emulsion at the end.
It is a confusion of exaggerated drama, Yiddish jazz,
frantic comedy, and cantoric chant.
The reviewer, however, demonstrated an understanding
in popular taste similar to that of Rosovitch as he continued.
But it's the stuff which peculiarly enough makes
for sure fire box office in the Yiddish theater.
On that premise, the picture should attract excellent Yiddish patronage.
This is "The Great Advisor" released in December 1940,
one of the last Yiddish films made before the US entered the war.
Because the Library of Congress does not own a soundtrack for the film,
this clip digitized from the picture element will be silent,
but we have added an English language subtitles
that were found on a separate reel.
The clip shows divergent perspectives on ways
that audience members might have reacted to Yiddish radio.
[ Pause ]   This is David, the Trouble Fixer.
[laughter] He may have been a caricature of radio personality,
C. Israel Lutsky, known as the Jewish philosopher, he read letters
on the air and gave advice to listeners daily
from 1931 to the mid1960s.   Lutsky's appearance as described
in Henry Sapoznik's Yiddish Radio Project website matches David's
short, pugnacious, and dapper to the point of risibility
and entertainer above all else.
Charlatan or sage as the Yiddish Radio Project describes him,
"Lutsky was one of the most beloved and listened to figures
from the golden age of radio-- of Yiddish radio."
The actor playing David is Irving Jacobson, a veteran comic actor
of the Yiddish Stage who also became a producer, director,
and Yiddish theater owner.
In the 1960s, he gained fame in mainstream theater
for originating the role of Sancha Panza on Broadway
in the musical "The Man of La Mancha."
Publicity for The Great Advisor noted.
The producers feel that the world sorely needs more laughter
and we therefore modeled this feature on the type
of film produced by the Marx Brothers.
The farce portrays David as a type of con man
that Groucho Marx made famous and involves him in a zany plot filled
with a host of characters engaged in our host of con games.
Radio in this film does not carry the same symbolic significance
that it has in "Kol Nidre" as a cultural marker of a modernity
that disrupt traditional life.
The Great Advisor is closer in its depiction of radio
to the Cantor's Son which uses Yiddish radio
to centerize the crassness of modern consumer culture,
but also valorizes it as an effective modern way to communicate
to a large immigrant audience the power
and beauty of the cantor's voice.
In The Great Advisor, the Yiddish radio personality is defined
by its listeners.
David, the Trouble Fixer, is mocked as David the Faker
by the young women playing mahjong.
But he also has become a dear friend to this very romantic girl
in earnest search of a match.
In these films, Yiddish radio like Yiddish film functions
as a modern institution that has become for better
or worse an integral part of everyday life
for Jewish community positioned on easily undivided
between the traditional and the modern.
[ Pause ]   [ Inaudible Remark ]
No questions now at the end.   That's it.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Press, theater, literature, music, art,
all of these go to make Yiddish land.
Our next speaker, Itzik Gottesman, is a contributor
and an associate editor of the "Forverts."
Our program says Jewish Daily Forward,
that's an English newspaper.
[Laughter] Firstly [inaudible] are you the editor both?
>> No. But the Yiddish was known also in the Jewish community.
>> I know.   That's the problem.
[laughter] He's also the author of a very important book about Yiddish,
"Defining the Yiddish Nation,"
one of the best books we have about the Yiddish world.
[Applause] Yiddish radio and the Yiddish press.
>> I want to first express my thanks for being invited to this conference
that honors Henry Sapoznik for his pioneering Yiddish radio research.
Thanks to his work.
At least, some of the ephemeral world of Yiddish radio
in America has been saved.
As we have heard, Yiddish radio was an incredibly creative field
with talk shows, talent shows, quiz shows, soap operas, religious,
and music, political programs, and music, music, music.
We are so fortunate that Henry Sapoznik is rescued, preserved
and now donated these recordings and other materials
to the Library of Congress.   Materials that tell so much
about the Jewish immigrant experience specifically
about the rich Yiddish cultural world in America
in a unique and expressive form.
A story in our family tells how one of our relatives in Shtetl
and Armenia heard a radio for the first time at someone's house.
Believing that there was a tiny all-knowing man inside,
he inquired "Would you please ask him the current value
of wheat referring to his invested shares in the stock market."
But there's-- I have no doubt that variance of this anecdote appear
in many languages and cultures so--
and maybe it's no surprise that the Yiddish version relates
to the stock market.
[laughs] Similar jokes are Yiddish stories were created
after new heretical invention appeared among the Jews
in eastern Europe, the telegraph, the railroad,
the luftballon, the Zeppelin.
But broadcast radio was not a 19th century invention like these others,
but was rather a late comer appearing after the First World War.
And as we heard yesterday,
Yiddish radio was truly developed and expanded in America.
The dybbuk radio spirit that the shtetl Jew heard was perhaps an old
world exception.
And more commonly, the intimate voice
of the radio was quickly accepted and made part
of the American Jewish family.
The Yiddish newspaper in America was also part
of the American Jewish family experience and played a major role
in Jewish immigrant life.
The two cultural institutions were intertwined from the beginning
of radio as we've heard yesterday and we hear today.
The Yiddish Forward newspaper, also commonly known
as the Jewish Daily Forward founded in 1897
where I am currently an editor certainly played an important part
in Yiddish radio history particularly
through its powerful radio station, WEVD founded in 1927 and named
after the socialist candidate for president,
Eugene V. Debs, who had died in 1926.
I joined the paper in the year 2000 and soon edit my voice
to the Yiddish Forward radio hour with weekly reviews
of new Yiddish song in klezmer recordings.
Until 2006 or so, The Yiddish Forward Hour programs were still
transmitted over the radio.
But in the six years that I broadcast
on The Yiddish Forward Hour, I saw the amazing outreach possibilities
of Yiddish radio even in the 21st century.
Outreach possibilities that the secular Yiddish press could
not achieve.
Once when I was checking out at a cashier at B&H Photo store,
a large Hasidic run store in Manhattan,
the Hasidic cashier store my name on the credit card and imitated
in just my radio line [foreign language].
[laughter] This was-- he's speaking to you at the Gottesman.
Later, meeting with other Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn,
I realized that I had sort of a following among them.
[laughter] But-- and this is important, they knew me only
from the radio show not from the newspaper.
Since the Forverts that's had originally been a socialist paper,
it has remained taboo, a paper for non-believers,
a precor some among the very orthodox.
So even today, they still think this is a socialist paper.
Now truth be told the "Forverts" has been aligned
with the Socialist Party since the 1930s
when editor Abed Khan supported FDR for president
and broke with the party.
The paper did continue to have strong ties
to the Unions particularly to the garment industry through the 1970s
and have a labor editor into the 1980s.
But it also has and still has a parsha of the week column,
a torah column since the early 50s an idea introduced
by Abed Khan himself, the founding editor.
And the paper included other columns,
material directed at the more religious.
But too late, once the paper was stigmatized
by the orthodox, it remained off limits.
So, today's Hasidic Jews will not be seeing buying or reading the paper
but they do listen to the Yiddish radio of the taboo forward
in the privacy of their own homes.
I get phone calls in the Forward office from Jews in Williamsburg,
"So where can I listen to more Aaron Lebedev, more [inaudible],
two great singers and actors of the Yiddish stage.
The Jewish world often looks to the Hasidim as the authentic Jews.
But it also happen that today's Hasidic Jews look for authenticity
in aspects of secular Yiddish culture learned about on the radio.
Another example of the outreach power of Yiddish radio as supposed
to Yiddish press is the large Jewish population
in New York of the Russian Jews.
The Yiddish radio and to some degree,
the Yiddish theater can reach them in a way the Yiddish press cannot.
In the Soviet Union, Yiddish culture had been suppressed beginning
in the 1930s.
And Jewish who grew up there in the 1930s, 40s,
and 50s were not taught how to read the Yiddish alphabet.
Yiddish culture thereby developed into an oral culture,
parents speaking Yiddish to their children
but not reading them any Yiddish text.
So, many older Russian Jews
in New York can understand Yiddish quite well.
Speak Yiddish less well and read Yiddish hardly at all.
For this audience, Yiddish radio is ideal and is a strong emotional bind
to the culture of their parents and grandparents in the old country.
Henry told you the classic description
of how The Forward Hour would be heard to every window
in the Jewish neighborhood in the 1930s and 40s.
New York Russian Jews have told me that as the time of the broadcast
of The Yiddish Forward Hour approach each week,
every family in an apartment building would return
to their apartments to listen.   This was about 2003.
The golden age of the Yiddish radio, 1930s and 40s, was a little later
than the other golden ages of Yiddish culture unless someday,
we will call this decade the golden age of Yiddish internet.
[laughter] The golden age of Yiddish theater was before the 1920s.
Though as was pointed out, Yiddish theater helped the Yiddish--
the Yiddish radio helped the Yiddish theater very much during the 30s
and 40s.
When Yiddish radio began in the 1920s, the Yiddish press was
at the end of its golden era.
The Forverts had 300,000 readers in the second decade of the century.
By 1953, that was down to 90,000.
The newly imposed limitation of immigrants to the US in 1924
and depression were external factors in this decline.
The rapid assimilation of the Jews particularly linguistically was an
internal one.
No Jews are known for their high literacy rates
and strong tradition of reading.   And I saw a sign.
Today is national literacy day, I think.
These qualities transferred over to the English language
after the first generation of Jewish immigrants.
The Yiddish press in America began really in the 1870.
Thought, it was thought that there was no Yiddish culture before the
east European Jewish immigrants of the 1880s to 1920s.
In fact in 1870, there were enough Yiddish speakers
to publish the newspaper, Die Yiddishe Zeitung [phonetic].
Five Yiddish newspapers are published in New York
and Chicago during the 1870s,
and even more in 1880s, most of them weeklies.
As the Jewish labor movement developed in the 1880s and 1890s,
newspapers were printed for the Jewish workers with the socialist,
anarchist or progressive view point.   Other papers such as Tageblatt were
for the more conservative religious Jews.
During yesterday's questions,
someone marveled how the anti-Nazi now was incorporated
into the concluding song of the socialist Forward Hour.
Some things are we today only associate with communism were shared
by all the Jewish progressive radical movements.
The anti-Nazi now was sung by all of secular progressive Yiddish culture.
The Yiddish poet, David Edelstadt, an anarchist sings
about the red flag in his poems of the 1880s.
Through the 1930, mayday, May first, was celebrated
by all the folk show movements, the socialist Workmen Circle,
designers for [inaudible], the non-political
but liberal [inaudible], and the communist [inaudible].
By the time Yiddish radio came on the scene in the late 1920s,
there were five daily Yiddish papers in New York City.
Two of them were orthodox conservative papers,
those Yiddishes Tageblatt and the Morgn-Zhurnal, which merged in 1928
into the Morgn-Zhurnal so there were really four by 1928.
The Morgn-Zhurnal was founded by Yankev Sapershteyn from Bialystok
in 1901 to compete with the Tagblatt
and the two coexisted for almost 30 years.
Perets Wernick [phonetic] was the first editor,
David Lamont [phonetic] Meckler was the second editor.
These papers were openly against socialism, not against the worker.
Supported traditional Judaism and Sapershteyn even got involved
in New York rabbinic politics as well.
He was close to the Republican Party and presidents have visited him.
It had-- As far as I can see, it had no radio program.
Another daily Yiddish paper at that time was the communist Freiheit.
At the end of 1918, socialist Jewish groups inspired
by the Bolshevik revolution broke off from the socialist federation
and formed an opposition.
The Communist Workers Party was founded in 1921
and the Yiddish paper, the Freiheit, appeared April 2nd 1922.
In every socialist Jewish organization from the Workmen Circle
to the unions divisive splits developed.
In fact, the socialist Jewish world pretty much split in half.
I can tell a family story here about my father-in-law went
to Kinder Ring in Sylvan Lake.
And when the split happens, half the camp founded Kinderland
on the other side of the same lake.
And my father-in-law, Al, was very curious what was going
on in Kinderland.
So he took a canoe and-- by the way [inaudible] was his theater,
he was the theater councilor at RN Circle [inaudible] that summer.
So, Kinderland saw his canoe approaching
and they quickly created this huge greeting for him.
It became a symbolic event that someone from Kinder Ring was going
over to Kinderland even though he was just 12 or 13.
And when he got out of the canoe, they lifted him up
and they carried him around and he was a big hero.
And he was asked to leave that same day from Kinder Ring.
[laughter] So it's a very divisive split.
The Freiheit drew from a loyal readership
and also developed an important literary side,
thanks to its editor Mem [phonetic] Olgin
and the literary editor Zach [phonetic] Epstein.
The communist Yiddish literally group [inaudible] was created thanks
to the Freiheit.
And the Yiddish [inaudible] the camps, the choirs,
the clubs were very much helped by the Freiheit's leadership.
In 1929, the Freiheit became a morning paper
and changed its name to Morgn-Freiheit.
The Freiheit followed the Soviet party line even
when it caused it much of its readership,
as when it shockingly condone the Arab attacks on Jews and Israel
in 1929 and supported the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.
The Tog, the fifth daily in the late '20s began publishing October 1914.
[laughter] With the editor Herman Bernstein.
Bernstein was a columnist at the New York Times at that time
so the announcement of him as editor was a curious one
but turned out to be a good one.   As Henry mentioned yesterday,
the Tog actually had the first regular Yiddish radio show.
The paper called itself "[inaudible] intresante und literarische,"
independent, apolitical, clean, interesting and literary,
which I think could be interpreted as an anti-Forverts description.
The idea--   >> Zionist.
>> And Zionist.
The idea of a politically neutral independent newspaper was a new one
to a Yiddish world used to political party fighting
and strong ideological feelings.
The emphasis of the Tog was on culture,
general culture and Jewish culture.
So the best Yiddish writers were drawn to it.
They were probably also drawn to the Tog as well
because the editor-in-chief of the Forverts, Ab Cahan,
Ab Cahan notoriously dummied down the Yiddish language of the writers
and treated them with little respect.
If you saw the film on "The Forward" made by Marlene Booth,
there is a scene in which I.B. Singer says that whenever he saw
that they sort of simplified his Yiddish language he complained
to Cahan and Cahan would say, "Talk to the--
ask the elevator guy if he knows that word."
Of course the elevator guy knew that if he wanted
to keep his job he'd have to say no, I never heard of the word.
At the Forverts office now in New York we have an exhibit on Ab Cahan
that includes a telegraph correspondence he had
with the Yiddish novelist I.J. Singer, I.B. Singer's brother,
in which Cahan is trying to influence the ending of songs--
of Singer's classical novel "The Family Carnovsky."
Yiddish writers hated Cahan but he hate--
but he paid the highest salary so they have to restrain themselves.
One of the most moving documents I saw at YIVO was a correspondence
between the great modernist writer Dovid Bergelson who was
Really flattering Cahan to a ridiculous degree trying to--
because this was Berlin in the '20s with depression was,
and their money was worth nothing trying
to get some articles printed in the Forverts.
So he was begging Cahan, this is and Bergelson is
like the great fiction writer of the 20th century.
The Tog merged with the Morgn-Zhurnal in the 1950s
and became the Tog-Morgn-Zhurnal.
So by the '50s there were three Yiddish Daily's, the Morgn-Freiheit,
the Forverts, and the Tog-Morgn-Zhurnal.
All three were daily up to the 1960's.
Der Tog closed in 1971
and Algemeiner Zhurnal still printed weekly has tried
to continue its tradition.
But now I think only four pages are in Yiddish.
Today, there are no Yiddish dailies in America,
just the weekly Forverts, the Algemeiner,
and in the Hasidic world the [inaudible], Yid and Blatt,
and other newspapers that come and go.
Thanks to the lack of internet perhaps in much
of the south [inaudible] community and an abundance of ads
for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other simchas in a community
that has many, many children.   >> And schitels [phonetic].
>> And schitels.
These two [inaudible] newspapers are quite successful while the rest
of the newspapers in the world, not just the Yiddish ones
as I'm sure you have heard, are closing or going online.
Back to history, after the Anarchist Daily, The Wahrheit,
The Truth merged with Der Tog in 1918.
So, it was The Wahrheit and the Tog then they-- and the Morgn--
with the Tog Blatt and then they become--
they keep merging and merging.
So, the Anarchist Yiddish Press was represented
by the fortnightly Fraye Arbeter Shtime, The Free Voice of Labor
which continued in 'til the 1980s.
Again, I don't believe that Yiddish Anarchist Press ever had a Yiddish
radio show, and neither did the Morgn-Zhurnal.
Der Tog did.
I don't believe that the often nasty partisanship that was expressed
in regards to the Yiddish Press, in regard let's say
to what paper you are reading, carried over into the Yiddish radio.
Henry pointed out yesterday that the communist Freiheit developed their
own radio shows rather late in the game in the 1940s.
And even then just one or two shows perhaps.
When you ask the older generation
of former Yiddish Communist what they listen to they say, WEVD,
the Forward Hour, and other stations.
These parallels from the other side
of the spectrum the observation made before about Hasidim listening
to the Forward but not buying the paper.
The communist Yiddish world hated the Forward very much
but they listened to their radio station, WEVD.
I should also mention that in smaller cities, Boston, Philadelphia
and Chicago, Yiddish Press and Yiddish radio did
in fact work together to have shows.
I wanted to conclude by describing the state
of Yiddish radio programming today
which Mark David started doing a comment yesterday.
As a Yiddishist, I don't like to--
we don't like to talk about Yiddish only in the past tense.
And then, so I want to present for a minute what's going on today.
In New York, the Yiddish Forward Hour, the old program produced
by the Yiddish Forward newspapers since the 19--
early '30s is no longer transmitted via radio waves but as a podcast.
Since many of our readers and listeners are in their 80s and 90s
and don't have computers,
the Forward sends them CDs of the show every week.
The Forward Hour is hosted and conducted in Yiddish
and there are some radio shows that are called the Yiddish radio shows
but are half English, half Yiddish but certainly play Yiddish music.
One of them is in Portland with Jack Falk, host for many years starting
in 1979 on WKBOO 90.7 F.M. It's called the Yiddish Hour.
In Boston, the one-hour show Dos Yidishe Kol is broadcast every
Wednesday from 7:30 to 8:30 on WUNR A.M., produced and hosted
in Yiddish by Mark David.
And David has produced many great Yiddish personalities, writers,
and actors who've already passed on.
So the archive of past programs is a treasure.
Elsewhere in North America, Rochelle Zucker produces Winnipeg Jewish
Radio Hour every week, the second half is in Yiddish.
Unfortunately, a long running show started in 1962 in Montreal,
ceased a few years ago when its host [inaudible] died in 2009.
Around the world there are radio shows hosted in Yiddish
in Copenhagen, Warsaw that might have just closed, in Paris,
in Melbourne, in Argentina, in Kishinev Moldova.
In Israel, the Israel Broadcasting Authority has been broadcasting the
Yiddish program Kol Israel more than 60 years.
The only Yiddish program on the radio in New York City, I think,
is from the Yiddish-speaking Hasidic or yeshiva world.
These programs come and go.
The Chabad organization has a one hour program, an interpretation
of the Torah Talmud reading, and Henry mentioned this also.
It's on WMCA, a Christian station that becomes Jewish Saturday night.
[laughter] The Forward Hour was transmitted on that station
at 9 o'clock on Saturday which as you realize is not--
is still Shabbos for a several months of the year.
So we were the space with-- we were the only ones who would take
that slot, so we were-- pretty much the Shabbos glam
of the Yiddish radio.
[laughter] Shabbos Jews, [inaudible].
That's my presentation.
I wanted to-- I wanted to answer a question from yesterday,
'cause I think two people asked about the dial--
the Yiddish dialect on the radio.
And so-- and the film clips that were shown also reinforced.
It's not a [inaudible] world.   There is a Yiddish theatre dialect.
It developed from early on, from the Goldfaden troop.
There was a compromise basically of several dialects,
it's called the [inaudible] dialect.
If you listen, instead of got, they said get, instead of sometimes
and that movie-- the movie clips, instead of liar, they said la,
yadin [phonetic] instead of yadin.
I was in the Yiddish theatre one year,
[inaudible] schooler who's name keeps coming out, who is a Litvak
but he was actually the one making sure other people said get instead
of got, you are sort of the one of the side
of the stage telling us to correct ourselves.
So in fact there is a Yiddish theatre dialect.
It's not a 100 percent.
When a narrator speaks in [inaudible] Yiddish,
that's sort of more acceptable because it's sort
of an authoritarian, then you know, there--
but when you have a Stutchkoff drama which we're going to hear about soon
and it's suppose to depict real life, Yiddish theatre sort
of determine well you can't speak, you cannot speak a dialect
on the stage, it sounds really phony.
And so, an actual theatre dialect was agreed upon.
However, in the Soviet Union, [inaudible] theatre actually went
for the higher road and speaks pretty much general non-dialect
standard Yiddish which works in a play,
let's say like get a king leader in Yiddish which is already
about a king and an aristocrat kind of family but it doesn't work
when you're [foreign language] story doesn't quite work.
Thank you very much.   [ Applause ]
>> And on Yiddish radio everybody calls Judaism Yiddishkeit,
except the singer Semo Retsai [phonetic]
who always said Yiddishkeit.
Our next speaker, Matthew Barton is the curator of Recorded Sound
in the Library of Congress Packard Center
for Audio-Visual Conservation.   Can you remember that?
[Laughter]
>> It's on my card, so that makes it easier.
>> And he's going to speak about Yiddish culture
and mainstream radio's golden age.   [ Pause ]
>> I never talk to two microphones like that but I gather you need
to be careful about your percussive piece when you're doing this.
So my title is "Yiddish Culture and Mainstream Radio's Golden Age"
and it occurred to me this morning that that could be the title
of an extremely thin book.
Because although there are many successful Jewish entertainers
on the radio from Jack Benny on down,
there was very little Yiddish culture, that is literature,
theater, music, very little of that got on to mainstream radio
and by mainstream radio I mean national radio, network radio.
However, over the years once in a while something got on and,
but I'll start with a clip from 1937, if we can get this to work,
yehey, a clip from 19-- actually 1939, sorry,
Sam "Schlepperman" Hearn and this is a character like Schlepperman
who he created for the Jack Benny show, you know, is--
that was the probably the typical representation
of the Yiddish community, Yiddish culture on the radio at that time.
He predates Mrs. Nussbaum of Allen's Alley by many years.
He had a brother named Lew Hearn who was
in the same business of dialect comedy.
They were Jewish from New York and very active
in vaudeville and Broadway.
As you'll hear though, Sam Hearn did more
than just a Yiddish dialect comedy.
So let's hear this from 1939 on George Jessel's Vitalis Show.
>> Benny.   >> Well, hi there, hi there.
I built myself a nice little sattel.   >> You build a-- you build a what?
>> A sattel, a sattel.
You know, like they have in the Switzerland,
in the Alps and the peaks up there.   [Yodeling]
>> I see, yeah, they should have [inaudible] up there too
but no, I don't understand that.   Sattel, how do you spell it?
>> Never mind, it's a bungalow.   >> All right.
[laughter] Now, I bet you have a very cute place.
>> Oh George, you should see it, a rather slinky joint [phonetic].
>> What kind of installation do you use throughout your house,
central unit or diesel?   >> Just plain hot and cold water.
>> Oh I see.   [Laughter]
>> George, you should see it.   It's got some very fancy fittings.
>> Fancy fittings?   >> Yeah, a built-in bathtub.
>> Built-in?   >> Yes, built in 1898.
>> Oh. [Laughter]
>> And also it's got a hidden fireplace.
>> A hidden fireplace?
>> Yes. I'm living there 6 months and I still can't find it.
[Laughter]
>> Anyway, Schlepp, one thing you got
out of working for Benny is a house.
>> That's right and one more season with him
and I could have bought a teapot.
[laughter] But like Shakespeare said all the world is a stage
and so I'm here.
>> Yes, [laughter] and what are you doing in town, Schlepp?
>> I came to see the World Series.   >> The World Series?
[laughter] That was over 2 weeks ago.
>> Oh, no wonder they sold me a ticket for a quarter.
[Laughter]
>> Why don't you wait until the middle of January
and see the world's fair, Schlepp?   >> Hey, I'm glad you reminded me
because there's one thing I'm very anxious to see there.
>> And what's that?
>> The Peoria [phonetic] and the telescope.
>> No, no, no.
[laughter] No, you mean the [inaudible].
That's what you mean?
>> Oh, you took the words right out of my mouth.
>> Well at least you're here in time for the football game.
>> Football games?   That's silly.
They finish last summer.
>> No Schlepp, you have your seasons mixed up.
You could see some great football games here tomorrow.
>> I can. Well, Georgie Boy, when you talk football,
my heart belongs to Teddy.   >> Yeah. Fancy this one, pal.
>> Please, please don't be an echo.
>> Yeah. [laughter] I'm sorry Schlepp, it's so seldom that I hear
such a quaint accent that it fascinates me.
>> Yeah, the feeling is mutual.   >> Oh you think so, yeah.
[laughter] Now, look.
Here's two tickets for tomorrow's game, you come with me,
we'll get a great kick listening to the crowds cheer.
>> Oh you touched me that time, honey boy,
because I was once a cheerleader too.
>> Well, what was your favorite college cheer?
>> Should I call it verbatim?   >> Yeah, verbatim, yeah.
Go ahead, cheer away.
>> Okay. Rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah, Schlepp [inaudible].
Store's open from 8 to 7.   The suit's ready [inaudible].
[laughter] The two pair of pants, you go to town,
satisfaction guaranteed but [inaudible] closed
on Sunday except February which is 28.
Yay team!   [ Laughter & Applause ]
>> Okay, Sam, now seriously,
how long have you've been schlepping this Schlepperman character around?
>> Five years, George.
>> Five years and what sort of a thing did you play before that?
>> Well, I did a New England character called Lem Perkins.
>> Lem Perkins?   What sort of character was he?
>> Well, George, he used to talk like this.
Now he was a kind of a fellow who used to come to the city
and give this liquor two tens for a five.
>> I see. Well, that's what I call a drastic change
from Schlepperman to Perkins.
And certainly demonstrate the most amazing versatility.
>> Oh, versatility, hospitality,
whatever you call it, I got to make a trend.
>> Oh.   >> I think I'll sing something.
[singing] Somewhere over the rainbow, I must fly.
I hope I'll be back on this program by and by.
When the midnight choo-choo leaves for Alabama, I got the blues.
[noisemaking] So long stranger.   >> So long, Sam.
[applause] And I hope to see you again soon.
[ Music & Applause ]
>> Okay. He leaves you breathless, doesn't he?
From a little earlier, in the '30s, 1936, Edwin like George Jessel,
a Jewish comedian, had on his show Joseph Moskowitz,
the great cimbalom virtuoso who at that point had been entertaining
in New York for close to 30 years.
He owned a series of restaurants on the east side
and was quite well-known, got to record for Victor,
that's from the Victor catalog in 1916 and he even pops up in
like Gold's book "Jews Without Money."
The only national radio appearance I know of by him is this from 1936.
And as you'll hear, it sounds as though Edwin had encountered--
had heard them at least once in his restaurant in New York
and brought them on the show on the strength of that.
>> Hey, Mr. Moskowitz.   >> Yeah.
>> This cimbalom is very old and unusual instrument, isn't it?
>> Yes. But it's still used today in Hungary and Romania.
The cimbalom I use dates back to the 17th century.
>> Your cimbalom dates back to the 17th century?
[laughter] My goodness, it should be nearly paid for by now--
[ Laughter & Applause ]
Mr. Moskowitz, have you always been a concert musician?
>> No. After coming to this country, I opened my own restaurant.
Many famous people came to hear me play.
For instance, Mr. Ellmann, Charlie Chaplin, [inaudible].
>> [Inaudible], the musician?
[Inaudible] [laughs] That name always reminds me
of somebody ordering beer.   [Inaudible], you know what I mean.
[laughs] You know, a friend of mine used to play the cymbals.
You know the cymbals in a band.   Not the cimbalom, the cymbals.
He played the cymbals until 1929 [laughs] then came the crash.
[laughter] But I know everybody wants to hear you play this cimbalom
and I'd like you to play your own composition like you did
for me the night I played Thank You, Mr. Moskowitz.
Would you do that?   >> Very well, I will play a tune.
I will play [inaudible] movement from [inaudible].
>> Yeah, well, come over here and play them.
[laughs] Go ahead.   [applause] Let me hear them.
Let me hear them.
[laughs] Player, when you hear this fellow.
He is-- he's the greatest cimbalom player in the world.
Will you hear him?   >> I'm going to let them.
[ Laughter ]   [ Music ]
>> Joseph Moskowitz, who ended his career here in Washington D.C.,
spent the last 10 years of his life here.
Died in 1954 and apparently, he was the regular musical entertainment
at a restaurant in Dupont Circle.   I wish we all could have been there.
I wish we were.
So, moving ahead, the Rudy Vallee Show
which was enormously popular in the '30s and '40s.
Rudy Vallee is not particularly well-remembered nowadays.
He was a very popular crooner of the day
and he had exceptionally broad taste when it came
to the musical guests on his show.   He had Trinidadian calypso singers.
Louis Armstrong served as a guest host one summer.
And at least once, he had Molly Picon on the show and this was
at the end of an international tour she had done,
spent about 18 months overseas getting, you know, going to Africa,
to Ireland as you'll hear and many other places.
You're not going to hear her speak or sing any Yiddish.
I think this is-- what you'll hear is representative of what she did
for mixed audiences or non-Jewish audiences
which did include South African Afrikaners and Zulus on this tour.
So, from 1937, let's hear Molly Picon with Rudy Vallee.
>> Did you have a good time seeing the world, Molly?
>> Oh Rudy, I'm so still full of mileage, I really don't know yet.
I hadn't had much time to stop and think you know.
I just traveled 55,000 miles all on one song.
>> All on one song.   >> Well, mainly on one song.
Of course, I did pick up a few new ones here and there.
In Ireland, for instance, Rudy, last June.
Oh Rudy, June in Ireland.   >> Yes, Molly, June in Ireland.
>> Yes, Rudy, June in Ireland.
June woolen sock, woolen sweater, woolen under--
>> Yes, Molly.
>> Well, you know, I asked one of the stagehands.
I said "For heaven's sake, when do you have summer here?"
He answered "Last year, we had it on a Wednesday."
[laughter] But my God, what audiences
and how this song stirred my [inaudible] Irish blood.
[ Music ]   [ Applause ]
>> That song paved your away in Ireland?
>> Well, that song and the other song.
My next stop was Africa, Rudy, Zululand.
The original [inaudible].
Diamond mines, gold mines, the jungle, cannibals, lions, tigers.
Cities hundreds of miles apart.
You know, the people travel hundred of miles to see a show, Rudy,
but they've all got radios
and you know what the favorite song of the Zulu girls is?
>> No, Molly, what is the favorite song of the Zulu girls?
>> [Singing] My time is your time.   [Laughter]
>> I don't believe you.   [Laughter] No.
[Applause]
>> I mentioned that one thing I don't have to play
for you is an appearance that Molly Picon made on NBC
about three years after this.
The record-- no recording of it appears to survive
but it did air nationally on NBC, and this is when she was appearing
on Broadway in a Jewish-themed English language show
that featured her and a number of other greats of the Yiddish theatre,
and the broadcast was of her with Joseph Buloff doing a scene
from Morningstar, and it's in NBC logs, but not in the NBC collection
that has come down to us unfortunately.
>> She had a TV series of her own for a few years.
>> She did, yeah, yeah.
I mean Molly Picon was-- did lots and lots of radio,
but most of it was not heard nationally, at least on the network.
>> Is any of this on internet?
>> This-- everything that I am playing is from the holdings
of the Library of Congress.
Much of it's from the NBC collection.
>> Accessible online?
>> No, I'm afraid they're not, you know.
[Singing] Yeah.
[laughter] [Singing] If there are any questions
so far, I'll take them.   Yes please.
>> If you say where there's any way to look at this,
the response of some of the "mainstream audience",
the non-Jewish audience to some of these Jewish characters.
I mean it's very close to stereotyped characters.
>> Oh, yeah, certainly, what Schlepperman was doing.
I've found, you know, positive coverage of Sam Hearn
in the Jewish press interviewing him and you know,
talking about how he felt that, you know, yes,
his characterizations were very comic but, you know,
it came from the heart, and this was a, you know, Schlepperman,
we know with all of his malaprops and so on was, you know,
somebody that people could understand, you know.
>> What, was there any review in the secular--
>> Oh, in the secular press.
Well, yeah, I mean he was very popular, the fact that he made--
he had originated a character on the Jack Benny Show in '32 or '33
and he'd been a fixer of the show for four or five years
and then left but, you know, the--
George Jessel wanted him to come back on as Schlepperman in 1939,
and you know, he reprised that character on radio
and elsewhere and, you know,
he and his brother Lew Hearn were often doing a character
like that even if it wasn't called Schlepperman.
So, you know, it's like a lot of the ethnic characters
of radio and film at the time.
Certainly, you know, it's a-- there's a--
I think they've got over on a certain amount of warmth
that they brought to it, the best of them, and in the case
of the Hearn brothers, they were Jewish.
So, you know, to the extent that that, you know, could, you know,
for their defense I suppose you could say.
Yes?
>> [Inaudible] were about the New York Times article
in which we see the first paragraph
on the screen concerning Molly Picon's visit in South Africa.
She, obviously, performed before both Afrikaners and Zulu audiences.
>> Yes.
>> Was that-- where they joint audiences at that time?
>> No, no.
She talks about that at her autobiography.
Yeah. And some of her interactions with Zulus, you know,
were more informal, you know.
She really wanted to see the country and get around.
And so, she, you know, she got out and met people in that way
and I think she described some impromptu performances that she did.
The song that she-- it's not in the clip that I have, but the--
she does an Afrikaner song that she picked up while there,
and she's actually sort of transformed it.
You know, she starts singing the Afrikaans and then,
in the second half, she's freely mixing Afrikaans with English
and making it much more of a dialect piece.
>> Memoir-- In the fall of 1959, I went to the Yiddish theater,
Molly Picon was doing a series of skits.
She jumped into the air, did a midair summersault,
landed on her feet without having touched her hands to the stage,
and then said to the audience,
I know what you're thinking, [foreign language].
[Laughter]
>> And she had been in her 60s at that time.
>> Wow.   >> Yeah, yeah.
>> If I'm correct, Eddie Cantor had a character
on his radio program called the Chinese Philosopher Fan Xi
Khan [phonetic].   [Laughter]
>> One of the great legends of the Yiddish theater, Maurice Schwartz.
He appears here with Mollie Steinberg
of the Stage Relief Fund Program,
this was a depression era organization
that organized benefit performances for actors among other things.
This is a very, it was a short program, a five-minute program sort
of squeezed in between shows on MBC, but we get to hear him talking
about his current production, 1938, The Brothers Ashkenazi by I.
J. Singer, one of his great successes.
As you'll hear, he spoke wonderfully cultivated English in spite
of the fact that he was born in Russia.
In her autobiography though, Molly Picon says that if he got angry
or excited, he spoke pure New Yorkies, as she puts it.
So this sound file, I believe, is just called Stage Relief Fund.
>> And now it is indeed a pleasure and a privilege to introduce
to you a gentleman who has in his own field made theatrical history.
A man who, for years, as a director, manager,
and star of his own distinguished productions,
won the acclaim of critics everywhere.
I refer, of course, to Mr. Maurice Schwartz,
now playing the leading role in his own production,
The Brothers Ashkenazi with Samuel Goldenberg as the twin brother
at the Yiddish Art Theater, 7th Avenue and 58th Street.
Mr. Schwartz.   >> Thank you.
>> How does your present production, The Brothers Ashkenazi,
compare with your previous successes?
>> The reason for that success may be attributed
to the human qualities, universal appeal
and the great message of the story.
It is the same reason that makes Shakespeare, even at these times,
such a great growing power in the theater.
His conception of life was profoundly deep and powerful.
Of course, I.
J. Singer, the author of Brothers Ashkenazi, is not in competition
with the immortal bond, but he does know life
and is a great psychologist.
Critiques have rightly acclaimed him as the modern Tolstoy.
Like the great Russian author, Singer has a deep
and sympathetic insight of life
and a thorough understanding of human nature.
>> And so let's see if this is working.
Oop. [laughs] I'm speechless.
Okay. Well, Maurice Schwartz, again, seven years later.
This time, on Mary Margaret McBride's very popular national
program and the other guest that day was Henry Morton Robinson,
the writer probably best-known for his novel
"The Cardinal" as well as--
>> Maurice Schwartz is sitting here--
>> Well, let them take it away.   >> 'Cause he too has an allegory.
>> I know that he is.   >> Haven't you Maurice?
Tell about your allegory.   >> Well, my allegory is my theater.
So I was thinking and hoping that the theater
in the postwar days will be somewhat different
than it was or than it is even now.
Just as Mr. Robinson explained that he had in mind to bring happiness
to people in writing his book and what you expressed, Ms. McBride,
by coming back from this torturous country that you visited, England
and others that you felt that something must be done
to heal the souls of people.
The theater must do the same thing where we see a good play,
we see a fine picture, and we hear fine music, we leave the theater
with a wonderful thought.
We go home to our families, we talk about the play, we want to return
to the theater again because when I can go back to the times,
the Grecian days when the people in their greatest misery have asked
for circuses and bread, they wanted theater, they wanted entertainment.
And during these crucial days, we know and it is a positive fact,
we know what the USO has done for to help win the war.
We know what Russia has done with sending the finest and best play.
You'll be surprised, Ms. McBride,
that the Russian government found it necessary to send plays
to the front, plays by Chekhov, plays by Shakespeare, the finest
and greatest drama besides musical [inaudible].
That only proves that we need theater.
Theater heals the soul and brings happiness to people.
And we in our own way, the Yiddish Art Theater, which was founded
in 1918, it is an institution
which is now celebrating its 26th year this coming season
with the opening of a play which is also--
I wouldn't say allegorical but symbolic.
It is a musical fantasy which I hope will bring happiness to people.
Although spoken in Yiddish, as Mr. Robinson said when he met me,
he said that he likes the Jewish actors, why?
Because they have a certain warmth, a certain reality.
It isn't the question of just simply a job just coming up on the stage
and play your part and wait for your emerald.
There is a certain ideal of all things.
Well, I can say the same thing on myself.
For 25 years I've done everything possible to organize
and create an institution, a theatrical institution,
which is an American institution, founded in this country,
founded in this New York at the old Irving Place Theatre
if you remember, Ms. McBride.   >> Yes.
>> You remember that?   >> Yes--
>> The time when the Irving Place Theatre was played
by German troupe, very fine actor.
The Germans are very splendor actors.
I wish they do other things as good as they act.
>> The day before Mary Margaret McBride had returned to the air
after being away for several weeks, she had been in Europe,
touring there and what she saw had been the subject
of a very dramatic broadcast the previous day and you know,
that was discussed on this broadcast and I think it was part
of the reason for the tone of this particular broadcast
of Mary Margaret McBride's show.
Okay, I have just one more slide and a clip and this manifestation
of Yiddish culture is a somewhat ironic one
in that it's a radio adaptation of Sholem Asch's version of the life
of Jesus Christ, "The Nazarene."
This aired on NBC Radio on Easter Sunday 1950.
And the adaptations by Ernest Kinoy in order to adapt the novel
which is quite long and complex,
he had to greatly simplify the narrative though he kept one
interesting detail which is that the soldiers
who lash Christ are German mercenaries.
So, this is the last clip we'll hear, just a little bit
from the opening of The Nazarene as it aired
on NBC University Theater in 1950.
>> Today we bring you a fascinating and provocative historical novel.
The Nazarene by Sholem Asch.
Written originally in Yiddish, it has been translated into English
by Maurice Samuel, and today it undergoes a further translation
into the language of radio.   From Sholem Asch's 700-page book,
Ernest Kinoy of NBC has distilled a powerful hour-length drama,
The Nazarene.
Hear it now from the NBC Theater in Hollywood.
[ Music ]
>> [Background Music] This is the story of the Nazarene,
who lived in the Roman province of Judea
in the reign of Tiberius Caesar.
It will be told in three parts in the words of three men.
The first, Cornelius, Roman commander of the Antonia Fortress
in the City of Jerusalem.   [ Music ]
>> [Background Music] My acquaintance with Pontius Pilate,
the procurator of Judea, dates back to the time when we both serve
as centurions in the German wars.
So that when Pilate set out for Judea, I received the post
of military commander of the province.
As our legions approached Jerusalem, Pilate waived me
to his litter and issued orders.
>> Cornelius, how much longer to the city.
>> An hour's march to the Antonia Fortress?
>> Special orders for the cohorts.
The eagles, the images of the gods, and the pictures
of the emperor are to be covered.   >> What?
>> Have them wrapped well.   >> Cover the Roman eagles?
>> Yeah. You have a great deal to learn, Cornelius.
The Jews have special religious privileges,
no image will be shown in the city.
The strategy of Rome is to recognize these barbarian religions.
>> Oh, but to cover the eagles?
>> You may notice Cornelius that there are no delegations to meet me.
No cheering crowds, no flowers
in the streets, and this is no accident.
They are a proud people, these Judeans.
Here, give the order to cover the eagles.
>> So we marched into Jerusalem, through deserted streets
and marketplaces across the bridge that led to the massive stone courts
and pillars of the temple, the temple of Jehovah,
the barbarian god of the Jews.
There in the shops and vaults of the outer court we sounded a halt.
[ Trumpet Sound ]
>> So, thank you very much for your patience, hope you enjoyed it.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you Matthew.
Thank you [inaudible].   Thank you Allen.
We don't have time for questions.   >> Oh no!
>> I'm sorry too.
These were wonderful presentations and I enjoyed them very much.
[applause] Now, I spent the last two weeks watching the political
conventions and I noticed that all of the speakers spoke more
about themselves than they did about the candidates.
I'm going to follow them in their steps.
[ Pause ]
Before I retired I already told you that I retired.
I was a rabbi, a chanter, a professor of Yiddish,
a Zionist and a reconstructionist.
All of those were due to my, the influence of Yiddish radio.
I became a rabbi because rabbis were on the radio.
As a matter of fact, I myself was a Yiddish actor on a series
of programs on WEVD, on Saturday nights for a few years,
presented by the Mizrachi Zionist religious organization.
They were run by the Yiddish actor Chaim Ostrovsky.
So I love the rabbis that appear on the radio.
I also went to the Yiddish theatre and saw Maurice Schwartz.
Rabbis were just wonderful figures.
I didn't know what it would be like when you have a congregation.
That came later.
Now every rabbi is a frustrated chanter.
[laughter] From the Yiddish radio I heard chanters.
I went to a small synagogue that never had--
never hired professional chanters.
I heard the chanters in the synagogue.
Three years ago, my daughter Rachel was sitting here called me
in New York and said, "Daddy, I've decided to become a chanter."
I said, "Rachel, you never showed the slightest interest in it.
Why all of a sudden, do you want--
she already had two master's degrees in other things.
I said, "Why would you want to become a chanter?"
She said, "Daddy, you always play the records."
[laughter] I learned about the records from Yiddish radio.
And by the way, the great star was not only Maurice Ganchoff
as was mentioned but also Liebele Waldman who was famous for--
[ Singing in Foreign Language ]
[Laughter] Then I become professor of Yiddish because I heard all
of these programs, I came home from school every afternoon
and turned on the Yiddish radio.
And when the WEVD ended its broadcasting of Yiddish programs
of the day, I turn to WLIB which also had Yiddish programming.
Now I became a Zionist.
I became a Zionist mostly because of Hebrew songs.
In the late '40s and early '50s there was only one recording
of Zionist Israeli songs produced in America that sold like hotcakes.
And that was a recording by the chanter Mosheh Nathanson,
who set the words that he wrote to the old Hasidic melody
which we now know as Hava Nagila.
His record was played almost every morning at 8:15 on WEVD for years.
So I learned all of those songs, Gamal gemali [phonetic],
[inaudible], Hava Nagila, Yerushalayim, became a Zionist.
Finally, from WEVD and WLIB and the Yiddish theatre, I got involved
with Yiddish literature and I was influenced by the fact
that WEVD catered not only to the socialists and not only
to the Orthodox Jews but to every trend and movement in Jewish life.
And I have to admit that I love them all, even those that were
out to kill each other, I love them all.
That made me a reconstructionist.
Reconstructionism teaches that Judaism is the civilization
and as long as it keeps the Jewish people going
and the Jewish business going, it's great.
Thank you very much for coming.   [ Applause ]
And thank you so much to Nancy Groce.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.