And We're All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America

Abigail Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317181262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The dawn of the twenty-first century marked a turning period for American Yiddish culture. The 'Old World' of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe was fading from living memory - yet at the same time, Yiddish song enjoyed a renaissance of creative interest, both among a younger generation seeking reengagement with the Yiddish language, and, most prominently via the transnational revival of klezmer music. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first saw a steady stream of new songbook publications and recordings in Yiddish - newly composed songs, well-known singers performing nostalgic favourites, American popular songs translated into Yiddish, theatre songs, and even a couple of forays into Yiddish hip hop; musicians meanwhile engaged with discourses of musical revival, post-Holocaust cultural politics, the transformation of language use, radical alterity and a new generation of American Jewish identities. This book explores how Yiddish song became such a potent medium for musical and ideological creativity at the twilight of the twentieth century, presenting an episode in the flowing timeline of a musical repertory - New York at the dawn of the twenty-first century - and outlining some of the trajectories that Yiddish song and its singers have taken to, and beyond, this point.

PART I
Contemporary Frameworks for Yiddish Song

Chapter 1
Becoming Yiddishists

As I turn back to an old file of research materials, I happen upon one of the few digital snapshots that have survived a decade of displacement since my first field trip to New York City in 2001. It is a silent, fuzzy stop-frame picture of a warm July evening in Riverside Park in Manhattan. About 20 people are singing, sitting on the grass in a rough circle. One strums a guitar. The remnants of a picnic are scattered around, and some of the group clutch photocopied song sheets. The group encompasses at least five nationalities, some six or seven decades of ages, and religious affiliation from non-Jewish to observant Orthodox. I recognise some of the figures: today several hold doctoral degrees in Yiddish subjects, one is a rabbi and another an actor and singer. The little girl with braided hair kneeling at the side is now a confident stage performer. At the time, however, many were at the beginning of their Yiddish journeys.

The snapshot of musical becoming was taken at an event organised by Yugntruf – Youth for Yiddish. Seeking to expand the contexts in which young people could meet and speak Yiddish in an informal environment, Yugntruf had recently inaugurated a programme of ‘svives’ (lit. ‘surroundings’), small groups of young Yiddish-speakers, who met weekly in different New York City locations in order to create a Yiddish-speaking environment. This particular evening was a special event: the Upper West Side svive invited the students of the YIVO-Columbia University Yiddish summer programme to join them for the evening. Here, beginning students, struggling to speak after only four days of Yiddish lessons, would have a first opportunity to sit alongside native Yiddish speakers and long-time Yiddish language devotees.

Picnic aside, the evening’s activities focused on song. The group sang a cross-section of well-known Yiddish favourites. ‘Ale brider’ (All brothers), based on a poem written by Morris Winchevsky, illustrates the ideals of brotherhood and equality central to turn-of-the-century Jewish socialism. This song, rapidly folklorised in its time and popular ever since, lends itself to the creation of new lyrics: while Winchevsky’s text emphasises traditional themes: ‘Un mir zaynen ale brider, un mir davenen fun eyn sider … Frum un link fareynikt ale, vi der khosn mit a kale, vi der khumash mit di rashe …’ (And we’re all brothers, and we pray from one prayer-book … Religious and leftists are all united, like groom and bride, like the Pentateuch with Rashi’s commentary …), some of those at the picnic added more recent verses written by New York klezmer band the Klezmatics, cited at the opening of this volume: ‘Un mir zaynen ale shvester, azoy vi Rokhl, Rus un Ester … Un mir zaynen ale freylekh, vi Yoynoson un Dovid hameylekh’ (And we’re all sisters, like Rachel, Ruth and Esther … And we’re all gay, like Jonathan and King David).1 On an upbeat note, the singing session ended with two Russian-Yiddish numbers: ‘A glezele lekhayim’ (A little toast), a Soviet Yiddish song whose melody derives from an early twentieth-century Yiddish theatre song, and ‘Geven a tzayt’ (Once there was a time) a 1970 translation by Yiddish singer Teddi Schwartz of Gene Raskin’s lyrics ‘Those were the days’, itself a contrafactum to another popular Russian song.

The purpose of Yugntruf’s svives, however, is not only recreational; rather, the meetings are an expression of rigorous devotion to language study, creating a space where, for an hour or two, Yiddish is no longer post vernacular. This picnic was no exception: those present studied the texts of three further songs in small groups, using the texts as a basis for the discussion of idioms and of Yiddish culture. Some worked on vocabulary – how could words learned from the song texts be used in everyday Yiddish? How did the imported Anglicisms in ‘Di grine kuzine’ (The greenhorn cousin) reflect the immigrant experience? Jokingly testing the group’s knowledge of traditional Jewish observance, a young Orthodox man wondered whether anybody noticed an impossible juxtaposition in the religious practices comically portrayed in the song ‘Der rebe elimelekh’ (Rebbe Elimelekh). At the same time, other students enjoyed playing with three children from a local Yiddish-speaking family. Despite the linguistic aspirations shared by the group, such young native speakers were rare enough to be a novelty: by now fluent Yiddish transmitted in a family context was uncommon enough to be a remarkable exception to the rule.

This snapshot neatly introduces the roles played by song among those seeking to acquire a fluent command of Yiddish in New York today. The majority of those who identify with Yiddish language and culture are not specialist musicians, and most contexts for song are combined with other activities: the theatre, social events, education or commemoration. Song is constitutive of community: an enjoyable, sociable activity, and is a structural element that can be used and re-used in creating contexts for the performance of language. Singing is in itself a reason to get together, and a means of performing common purpose once gathered. In performance, songs become a concretised manifestation of culture and community.

If today’s Yiddish culture is little spatialised within conventional frameworks and borders, it is nonetheless strongly felt as a kind of ‘counter-space’, a Yiddishland that is in part defined by its transformation of mundane, everyday spaces. In his 1967 essay ‘Of other spaces’, Michel Foucault labels such spaces ‘heterotopias’: places that contradict the geographies of everyday life; real spaces that enable a ‘simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’; places which in themselves are enfolded a juxtaposition of incompatible sites. Heterotopias occupy a peculiar position of duality: they are both open and hidden, both isolated and penetrable. They exist in analogy with the outside world but are at the same time distanced from it.

Song functions as a door into heterotopic instantiations of Yiddishland. As a repertory, Yiddish song facilitates the imagining of Yiddish worlds, provides a tangible connection to multiple Yiddish pasts, and serves to help define a community of knowledge – but through song as practice, singers actively (re)locate this community in time and space. Focusing on North American institutions, this chapter explores these twin processes of becoming Yiddishists and constituting Yiddish cultural spaces. First, via group singing during a summer Yiddish language programme, I consider the interplay between linguistic and cultural literacy; as a component of the latter, educators ascribe a dual role to song: a linguistic text and an entrance point into Yiddish ‘citizenship’. Second, I focus on a cross-communal Holocaust memorial event as a manifestation of a past-rooted, community-oriented Yiddish culture. Here, songs serve as a structural device for a shared event, but also enable multiple, participatory depictions of the nature of Yiddish community. Finally, I turn to communal singing at KlezKanada, a specialist Yiddish music camp of rather recent creation, but in which participatory singing, set in contrast to the instrumental music for which most participants arrived at the camp, serves as a marker of community, enabling embodied cultural experience, and pointing to possible Yiddish futures.

Song in Yiddish Education

Of several summer schools providing intensive university-level Yiddish teaching, the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture – offered by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in conjunction with various higher education institutions (in recent years, Bard College, New York University and Columbia University) – is the longest running and most prestigious. The programme took its first class of students in 1968; to date, well over a thousand students have graduated the programme, many of whom play active roles in today’s Yiddish cultural community.

At its inception, the primary motivation of the YIVO summer programme was an academic one: to train researchers to use Yiddish resources, an attempt to counter the decline of the Yiddish language of the mid-twentieth century. However, from the outset the programme’s goals expanded beyond formal language acquisition to encompass a wider cultural agenda. 2001 programme director Yankl (Jeffrey) Salant writes:

Priceless treasures that could immeasurably enrich the field of Jewish social science – and by the same token – the general domain of social science – remain to a large degree unutilised. For these treasures in the form of institutional records, minutes, books, epistolary collections, diaries, newspapers and journals are mostly in Yiddish, an adequate knowledge of which is uncommon among American researchers. To remedy this situation, YIVO has planned and worked out the program now conducted jointly by Columbia University and YIVO’. The above, excerpted from an article in Yedies fun yivo/News of the YIVO issue #106, March 1968, describes the founding motivation for the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language (Literature and Culture were added to the name three years later).

Conceived as a starting point for high school seniors who would continue their Yiddish education in college, the Uriel Weinreich program was first launched under the directorship of Dr. Marvin Herzog and sponsored by the Atran Foundation as an 8 week, non-credit elementary course with an enrolment of 25. With morning classes in Yiddish language taught by Mordkhe Schaechter and James Matisoff and an afternoon program including Yiddish folksongs and excursions to Yiddish places of interest, the first year was a success leading organically to much growth and evolution over the years (2001, 6).

By 2001, when I took part in the Intermediate II class, enrolment in the programme had grown to 68 students and four levels of instruction. The programme still catered for researchers: a large proportion of the participants were university students, many of whom – including myself – were tackling Yiddish-related doctoral theses. Others came for a variety of reasons, from high school students hoping to become involved with the Yiddish theatre to Judaica librarians who worked with Yiddish material; from seniors wishing to refresh childhood knowledge of the language, to those who knew no Yiddish before they set foot in the classroom yet simply felt drawn towards the language and culture. Most students came from North America; however, countries as diverse as Poland, Germany, Korea and Japan were also represented.

Emphasis continued to be placed upon the acquisition both of language skills and of cultural knowledge. Like in many similar language programmes, song was used both to teach vocabulary and idioms, and as the basis for wider acquisition of Yiddish culture. Morning grammar and literature classes were followed by an afternoon cultural programme; the 1968 syllabus of Yiddish song and outings now supplemented by workshops in dance, theatre and translation, seminars and films. Linguistic and cultural immersion was encouraged, many students taking the opportunity to live together on campus in a Yiddish-speaking environment. It is not surprising, then, that Yiddish songs turned up not only in song classes but also in many other guises during the summer programme.

The formal context for singing during the summer programme, a weekly afternoon song class, was a well-attended and popular activity. During the 2001 session, these classes were taught by Adrienne Cooper, a former director of the summer programme and former assistant director of YIVO, and a prominent Yiddish singer. Like the majority of the summer programme, her classes were taught in Yiddish, though translations of songs were also given. On the first Wednesday afternoon of the course, a large group of students gathered for the opening session. Since at this point beginning students had only two days’ experience in the Yiddish language, Cooper taught the first two songs by ear, choosing texts containing a great deal of repetition.

The first was ‘Shlof, shlof, shlof’ (Sleep, sleep, sleep), a folk lullaby, in which a list of objects are rhymed with parts of the body:

Shlof, shlof, shlof	Sleep, sleep, sleep
Der tate vet kumen fun dorf	Daddy’s coming back from the village
Vet er brengen an epele	If he brings a little apple
Vet zayn gezunt dos kepele	Your little head will be healthy.

In later verses the rhyming pair epele (little apple) / kepele (little head) becomes nisele (little nut) / fisele (little feet), yoykhele (little soup) / boykhele (little tummy) and so on. The low tessitura and narrow pitch span of the song created an easy entry to the singing group for those less confident of their voices; the words were illustrated by Cooper with simple hand gestures, easing the acquisition even of the limited vocabulary required. Further, beginning with a lullaby was a symbolic statement: in the absence of linguistic transmission in the home, the summer programme (or its song class) is the virtual cradle of a new kind of Yiddish fluency, a symbolic restoration to participants of a ‘lost’ childhood. Within a disrupted linguistic society, learning children’s songs at least allows this childhood to be redeemed, enabling an illusion of cultural fullness.

By contrast, the second song Cooper taught, ‘Esn est zikh’ (Eating happens effortlessly) is of Hasidic origin, associated with the Lubavitch movement:2

Esn est zikh,	Eating happens effortlessly,
Trinkn trinkt zikh,	Drinking happens effortlessly,
Vos zol men ton	What should one do
az es lernt zikh nisht?	when it’s hard to study?
Esn est zikh,	Eating happens effortlessly,
Shlofn shloft zikh,	Sleeping happens effortlessly,
Vos zol men ton	What should one do
az es davent zikh nisht?	when it’s hard to pray?

This song taught further simple vocabulary (to eat, to drink, to sleep), and reflexive structures (the construction esn est zikh translates literally as, ‘to eat eats itself’). The song, however, also clearly refers to the traditional religious culture of its origin. Unlike the simple lullaby with which the class began, this song has a more substantial three-section melody with internal modulation; the two parts of the song are followed by an untexted melody, a typical feature of Hasidic music. The rising arched shapes of the melody and delayed return of the tonic reflect the yearning of the text; those hoping for confirmation of stereotypical ‘Yiddish’ melody contours might also have been pleased by the recurrence of the augmented second interval as the melody moves between A minor and E Freygish.3

Helped by the expressive potential of the combined melody and words, Cooper encouraged all present to relate the song to their own experience – frustration when a supposedly simple activity just won’t work. Encouraging everyone to sing with conviction, she urged all to get in touch with their ‘inner Jew’, that part inside – even for the non-Jews present, she emphasised – where this text resonates. This formulation pointed to the complex negotiation between Jewish and inclusive language when translating Yiddish culture for a wider audience. As the language of an ethno-religious minority, the Yiddish language assumes a Jewish frame of reference. While the words of this song and its association with Hasidism did not easily lend themselves to a translation outside a Jewish framework, here Cooper’s deliberate insistence on inclusivity pointed again to a new kind of community: connection to the Jewishness expressed in Yiddish culture is open to all through language, a democratic Yiddish heterotopia through which happenstance entrance by birth might be replaced by a formative shared educational experience.

In later sessions, a popular series of songbooks (Mlotek 1972, Mlotek and Mlotek 1988, 1995) provided source material; covering wide ground these books serve music festivals and language programmes alike as a collected shared repertory.4 Introducing songs in a sing-along format, Cooper taught...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Examples
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I CONTEMPORARY FRAMEWORKS FOR YIDDISH SONG
• PART II YIDDISH SONG AND THE ‘KLEZMER REVIVAL’
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index