GREAT SONGS OF THE YIDDISH STAGE, VOL. 3 About American Yiddish Theatrical Songs The selections here derive from the medium of popular Yiddish...
GREAT SONGS OF THE YIDDISH STAGE, VOL. 3
About American Yiddish Theatrical Songs
The selections here derive from the medium of popular Yiddish theatrical song that, beginning in the 1880s, flourished for more than six decades as mass-oriented entertainment among large segments of eastern European Yiddish-speaking immigrant generations and their immediate American-born offspring. Although this aggregate medium came to embrace Yiddish film and radio as well as Jewish recordings, all of which generated on their own a large repertoire of popular Yiddish songs originally independent of live stage productions, nearly all the songs considered here have their genesis in live formats of two principal types, notwithstanding the popularity of subsequent recordings and broadcasts.
One medium considered here is the American Yiddish Musical Theater, now more commonly known generically as Second Avenue, so named after the lower Manhattan district (today geographically identifiable as the East Village) where it made its debut and gained its first audiences, and where its most important and prestigious theaters stood at the zenith of that cultural phenomenon. Satellite theaters and companies—eventually often no less important—radiated and flourished as well during that era in other boroughs of New York City and across North America in cities with significant Yiddish-speaking populations, such as Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Montreal. New York–based troupes toured as well, bringing Yiddish theater to many additional communities.
Songs in this category are from full-length theatrical productions based on plays or dramatic scenarios that were variously called operettas, musical comedies, romantic musicals, melodramas, musical shows, or simply musicals. These are to be distinguished from several other more literary Yiddish theatrical forms with less sustained and less widely appreciated, but nonetheless culturally significant life in America: serious Yiddish drama, Yiddish art theater, and Yiddish political theater (ARTEF).
The other live format was Yiddish Vaudeville, played in music halls and variety houses, whose introduction preceded indigenous full-scale Yiddish theater in America. Vaudeville ranged from individual songs, dance routines, and comic monologues to skits, revues, and even one-act sketches and playlets.
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The American Yiddish musical theater was a powerful product of the immigrant experience, and it became a highly successful import to Europe, England, South Africa, and South America. During its peak years, many of its leading stage personalities were virtual folk heroes among certain segments of American Jewish society.
The musical forms, conventions, and styles of Second Avenue, especially as it advanced toward its mature stage, grew out of and relied heavily on Viennese and other Central European light operetta traditions. But its composite musical parameter was also built on the foundations of modern European Yiddish musical theater as initiated formally in Romania in 1876 by Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), a multitalented, learned Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment in eastern Europe) beneficiary and adherent. Goldfaden's plays—especially his operettas, which drew upon a variety of secular folk, operatic, and Jewish liturgical musical sources as well as his own originality—were performed by his own troupes and others not only in Romania but in cities throughout the Czarist and Hapsburg empires. Sometimes they were staged in cleverly camouflaged defiance of the 1883 ban on Yiddish theater in the Czarist Empire, which continued sporadically thereafter. And an imported production in New York of one of his operettas in 1882 is generally accepted as the first full-length Yiddish musical staging in America, which spawned and set the tone for the future of Second Avenue.
In its early years the music of Second Avenue came on its own to be informed by some of the extrinsic gloss of perceived Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Gypsy, Romanian, and other folk motifs and tune styles that resonated well in popular imagination—as well as by references to traditional cantorial modes and synagogue influences, especially where those elements related to specific characters, plots, or situations. But commercially driven songwriters rarely attempted to mine the bedrock of authentic European Jewish folksong (nor would they have known how), turning at most to bits of its topsoil. They were, however, quick to reflect and incorporate idioms, contemporaneously fashionable dance rhythms, and current melodic styles of the day from uptown American popular and theatrical music. Yet the modal adaptation of those in-vogue features, together with familiar residual strains of the imagined Old World, often combined to yield an emblematic type of fusion whose ultimate product was no less than a worthy legacy of wonderful songs.
About the Orchestrations
Few complete or authoritative orchestrations of songs or the shows from which they were extracted have survived; and in many cases full orchestrations, with an actual partitura, were never made in the first place. Many were created after the fact for live radio broadcasts or makeshift 78-rpm recordings, both with limited orchestral forces and usually, by the second decade of the 20th century, for far smaller ensembles than the actual full pit orchestras in the theaters. By about 1920 at the latest, a minimum of twenty-four musicians was the accepted orchestral standard for properly financed productions. Still, conductors often worked from sketches or charts, a not uncommon practice in the theater world, and those sketches also relied on a significant measure of improvisation. After meticulous research concerning orchestra size, typical instrumentation, and orchestral styles and idioms consistent with the original productions, the Milken Archive turned to leading reconstruction orchestrators, commissioning new, historically considered orchestrations expressly for this project. The polished professional renditions here reflect the known desiderata of the best Second Avenue composers and producers, even if their intentions were not always fulfilled completely. It is a mistaken presumption to link the authenticity of orchestral quality or sound to the more crude accompaniments on contemporaneous but inferior recordings, which were made hastily, with minimal financial investment, and for a different purpose. Most of the major shows, especially after about 1918, were orchestrated not by unskilled scribblers, but by the composers themselves—who often had solid classical training and experience—or by accomplished professional orchestrators. Nor by the 1920s were the orchestra pits populated by unschooled street or folk musicians, but often by some of the best players in the business—including conservatory-trained musicians who played in uptown theaters and concert halls on other nights.
Vaudeville houses could feature not only popular voice types and crooning deliveries, but also salty and, where appropriate, even boisterous timbres. In the early decades of theater, too, productions had frequently to rely on untrained singers. But apart from the specifically comic and other character roles that generated signature vocal personalities of their own, the Yiddish theater, with its pretensions to operetta, eventually came to require and present legitimate and even classically trained voices as singer-actors (much as did Broadway for a long time, until at the least the 1970s). There were no microphones, and the theaters were not tiny. Even as popular entertainment, the vocal models were not the club or pop singers of the day, but the voices that would have been heard on either side of the Atlantic in Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Victor Herbert, or Sigmund Romberg—or, for that matter, in good Gilbert and Sullivan.
Dramatic Aspects
The Milken Archive sails in uncharted seas in its effort to reconstruct the dramatic contexts of these songs. Undated scripts—some of them obviously early drafts—have been located for only some of the shows. Like discovered ancient shipwrecks, they seem frozen in time, echoing an entirely lost world of nearly a century ago. Typed in Hebrew characters or even handwritten, they contain undecipherable margin notes and cryptic instructions that allude to unexplained changes; and some are missing whole sections. Rarely are specific locations within the action indicated for particular songs. And it is impossible to know how much was changed—songs, characters, and plot elements—by the time the curtain rose on opening night or even thereafter. Songs were frequently moved from one spot to another during the staging process, and others were added after a show was composed. Fortunately, press reviews, advance notices, information contained on published song-sheet covers, and a few located souvenir programs are helpful in detangling some of the muddle. To further confuse things for the historian, the actors were also permitted considerable freedom to improvise and ad-lib from one performance to another of the same production.
Many of these dated ephemeral plays are crudely constructed, primitive in their predictability, and saturated with deliberately exaggerated but "required" stereotyped characters whose development onstage is generally absent. Yet, patterned on the "song and dance" mold, they furnished their audiences the simple diversionary entertainment they demanded—especially as backdrops to the music, which was always paramount. The plays overflow with warmed-over trite situations, stock plot twists, convoluted subplots, and shopworn coincidences. Looping throughout these plots are recycled clichéd recipes of family objections to marriages; schemes for alternative matches with ulterior motives; zero-hour revelations of concealed identities such as highborn birth or Jewish parentage; convenient discoveries of "long-lost" relatives just in time to save the day; and orphaned or lost Jewish children who grow up to become army officers, famous personalities, or even Christian aristocrats or clergymen. There is nearly always a luckless shlimazl, a comic victim of circumstances, as well as a villain—perhaps a stingy uncle, some meddler intent on thwarting a marriage, or an ill-intentioned rival—who always received resounding boos from the audience during his curtain calls. Favorite predigested routines and formulas concern eleventh-hour revelations at, or just before, weddings, when a pair is unknowingly about to enter into a forbidden—sometimes even incestuous—union, unaware of some concealed adoption, improper conversion, divorce, or other previously hidden information that would nullify the marriage. The new crisis is usually resolved by yet another revelation or some last remaining piece of the puzzle, a dramatic device not confined to the Yiddish theatrical realm, and one finds its non-Jewish counterparts recurrent in Western literature—from Shakespeare to Victorian novels and plays, as well as Gilbert and Sullivan. But the Second Avenue repertoire, where those versions seem less plausible, can appear disproportionately riddled with this cliché.
Among the many stock song patterns was the "couplet song," to which newly invented or improvised couplets dealing with topical situations or personalities would be appended to the original song at any particular performance—often on the spot, since the conductor had only to be signaled.
Pronunciation and Diction
Pronunciation in these recordings expressly avoids consistency with standard literary (YIVO) Yiddish and follows the mixture of Volhynian, Galician, and southern Polish dialects prevalent on Second Avenue stages. The variety of performers' backgrounds and geographical origins in the heyday of Second Avenue, however, also yielded occasional words sung in northern Polish and Ukrainian dialects—without consistency even in the same song. This too is deliberately reflected here.
Neil W. Levin
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About the Composers
Among the significant composers and conductors associated with Second Avenue Yiddish musical theater at its zenith—a list that includes a great many once-prominent names that are now no longer so widely remembered—JOSEPH RUMSHINSKY (1881 [1879?]–1956), along with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky, and Abraham Ellstein, is always considered one of the "big four" in aggregate achievement as well as undiminished fame. The beginning of his Second Avenue career, however, preceded the entrance of the other three in that group. He arrived in America as a young adult and an experienced musician before Ellstein was born, more than a decade before Olshanetsky immigrated from Europe, and only a few years before Secunda's bar mitzvah. (By the time Secunda first attempted to break into the Second Avenue arena, for example, Rumshinsky was already a major force within the entrenched establishment, whose hegemony posed an obstacle to the young newcomer that he could overcome only gradually and patiently—a situation Rumshinsky himself had faced upon his own arrival on the scene years earlier.) In terms of his formative role in the progress of the Yiddish musical, Rumshinsky's generic impact as a would-be reformer—independent of qualitative artistic or literary judgments of his ultimate products—was probably greater than that of the others who followed him. For it was he who first tried to edge Yiddish musical entertainments away from their earlier theatrical crudeness and lift them toward his theoretical ideal of a new American genre of Yiddish light operetta (or, as one critic later characterized Rumshinsky's admittedly unfulfilled aim, operetta in Yiddish). He succeeded, to a degree, in terms of form and structure, as well as with certain lasting innovations both in the pit and on the stage. But content remained little affected in the wake of his commercially driven recidivism. In many respects it may be said of Rumshinsky that his American career mirrored the chronological course of Second Avenue's development from the first decade of the 20th century until the 1950s.
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He was born in a town near Vilna (Vilnius; now, and historically, Lithuania, but then part of Russian Poland), where his father was a hatter by trade and his mother was an amateur voice teacher to local avocational singers and badkhonim (wedding entertainers). He later recalled that his father's shop reverberated with labor-oriented and other Yiddish songs, which were also brought home to the family.
The young Joseph exhibited musical talent at an early age, taking piano lessons at a local private school, and he soon became known affectionately by the sobriquet Yoshke der notn-freser (little Joseph the devourer of music [notes]). He also had some formal Russian secular schooling, which he claimed to have requested on his own, but his further musical exposure and training came with his immersion in the typical eastern European cantorial-choral apprentice—or m'shorer (cantor's choral "assistant")—system. For a time he sang in the choir of the learned and esteemed cantor Abraham Moshe Bernstein (1866–1932) at the Taharat Hakodesh Synagogue in Vilna.
This was a typical khor shul (lit., choral synagogue)—one of the westernized, culturally progressive, and musically sophisticated synagogues, albeit still within a basically orthodox framework, that had been established in many cosmopolitan eastern European cities as a response to modernity. Between 1890 and 1894 the young Rumshinsky toured as a student chorister with several other cantors to various cities throughout the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, where he was exposed to a wider variety of cantorial styles. It was on one of those tours, in Grodno (Russian Poland), that he first encountered not only Russian theater but, fortuitously for his future career, Yiddish theater as well—through the professional touring productions of the famous Kaminski [Kaminska] theatrical company.
Rumshinsky appears to have been instantly attracted to the Yiddish musical stage when he heard his first Goldfaden operetta, Shulamis. First as a chorister and later as a conductor, he toured with the Kaminskis and other troupes, becoming familiar with many of Goldfaden's operettas and enamored of the entire genre, which he would eventually seek to implant and to emulate in New York as the basis for a new American brand of Yiddish musical theater. He was only seventeen years old when he conducted a full-scale production of Goldfaden's Bar Kokhba.
In 1899, in Łódz, he became the first conductor of the newly formed culturally Zionist and Haskala-oriented Hazomir Choral Society, but in 1902 he emigrated to London to avoid conscription in the czarist army. He soon became persuaded that his future lay in America. He arrived as an immigrant in New York in 1904 only to find no ready welcome from the Yiddish theater establishment or its union for a young newcomer and potential competitor.
In the overall scene he encountered, which continued to prevail for some time, American-born purported Yiddish musical theater, which Rumshinsky often dismissed as "elevated vaudeville," had yet to undergo development into a more cohesive, yet still manifestly popular, form that could be said even to approach a type of operetta in which music, plot, and dialogue were at least interrelated. That was a process in which Rumshinsky was later instrumental.
Pure drama and Goldfaden imports and imitations aside, the pandering level of homegrown Yiddish musical theater during the decade or so of Rumshinsky's immigration can be gleaned partly from a glance at the titles of some of the commercially successful productions of the day. These ranged from such Americana-infused curiosities as Der yidishe Yankee Doodle (1905) and a melodramatic Yiddish version of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a reimagined "Jewish Hamlet" as Der yeshiva bokher (the Talmud student), replete with cantorial renditions and a cemetery service for the "Jewish Ophelia," to the 1907–08 supposedly farbeserd ("improved" or "updated"!) offering of Goldfaden's last work, Ben Ami—a serious drama with music that seems to have drawn loosely on George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda, but which was nonetheless made to appeal to astutely predicted popular tastes by the insertion of comic songs and couplets.
According to his not undisputed memoirs, the soon to become legendary Boris Thomashefsky (1868–1939)—as a young immigrant cigar roller and synagogue chorister on New York's Lower East Side—had persuaded a benefactor to bring an acting troupe from London for a performance of Goldfaden's recently created Di kishefmakhern (The Witch, or The Sorceress). The production, in which the young Thomashefsky also sang and acted, took place in 1882 at Turn Verein Hall and more or less gave birth to popular Yiddish theater in America. Exhilarated and emboldened by the experience, Thomashefsky—by dint of his larger-than-life personality, his natural theatrical proclivities, and his remarkable market instincts about the type of entertainment the growing Yiddish-speaking immigrant community would demand—went on in effect to found Second Avenue as a stage genre, an emotional outlet, a creative vehicle, and a virtual way of life for its insider professional contributors and its patriotn (fans, or groupies) alike. By 1912 he had his own venue, the Downtown National Theater, and he became a force that could not be ignored. Eventually a new breed of more musically sophisticated and schooled composers such as Rumshinsky and his emerging circle managed to build on that standard, but Thomashefsky's initial generic imprint was almost always discernible, especially with regard to the principle of commercial audience appeal.
As the immigrant population swelled, it was less interested in the biblical, historical, literary, or morally and ethically didactic and even homiletical subject matter of much of Goldfaden's work, and it preferred topical themes, artificial nostalgia, romanticized Old World folk motifs, sheer diversion, and, especially, New World immigrant situations and characterizations with which it could identify directly—through tears as well as laughter, including, healthfully, at themselves. Rumshinsky quickly understood that distinction, and in order to overcome the barriers to his participation, he let it be known that he was prepared to reset his sights—at least for a while—and write for the oylem (the "people") and its demonstrated appetites, if only given the opportunity. Still, he continued to imagine the artistic possibilities of an altogether new, higher form of American Yiddish operetta, perhaps even opera.
Rumshinsky had to contend with the fact that from the 1890s through the turn of the century, a number of well-received composers, songwriters, and lyricists had emerged, eager to follow Thomashefsky's proven recipe for popularity. The books and scenarios for many of their productions could be characterized within the extended context of what came to be known, not always with opprobrium, as shund—an almost institutionalized popular industry of "literary trash" that encompassed a world of cheap pulp fiction, common periodicals, and other coarse diversions.
Rumshinsky spent a year at Boston's main Yiddish venue, the Hope Theater. By the 1908–09 season, his career began to fall into place in New York when the "matinee idol" Jacob P. Adler (1856–1926), one of the giants among serious dramatic actors, brought him to conduct and compose at the Windsor Theater, in which Adler was a partner and co-manager. An ardent advocate for a higher artistic and literary plane of theatrical experience even for the popular realm, a sort of "kunst for the people"—though his was ultimately a losing battle—and a voice of opposition to the shund approach, Adler naturally appreciated Rumshinsky's long-range goals as well as his superior musical endowments and dramatic sense.
It was at the Windsor that season that Rumshinsky wrote what he considered to be his first full operetta-type score: A yidish kind, a revision by Bernard Wilensky of an earlier operetta by Shomer [Nohum Meir Shaykevitsch; 1846, 1847, 1849?–1905]. He also wrote the songs that season for another Wilensky operetta, Nosn hakhokhem (Nathan the Wise), based on the German (non-Jewish) dramatist and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous but perplexing play, in which the relative merits of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are argued. That operetta included Rumshinsky's song V'yiten l'kha, with lyrics by Solomon Smulewitz, which, when issued independently in 1909, became his first American publication of an original song. It later acquired the erroneous status of an anonymous folksong.
Rumshinsky teamed up with Anshel Schorr to write the show he later described as the first "modern" Yiddish musical comedy: Dos meydl fun der vest (The Girl from the West). It was followed by his operetta Shir hashirim (Song of Songs), which Rumshinsky—a bit boldly—characterized as nothing less than "the first romantic Yiddish opera." After residencies in several other major Second Avenue venues, Rumshinsky hooked up with Thomashefsky in 1916 in an official affiliation as composer and conductor at the latter's National Theater. During the next three seasons there, he wrote full scores for comedies as well as melodramas with Thomashefsky and other librettists and lyricists. His Tsubrokhene fidl (Broken Fiddle) at the National was a watershed event on two counts. First, Rumshinsky persuaded Thomashefsky to introduce for the first time a full professional dance corps (reports refer to it as "ballet," which is debatable), to expand the elements within a single production along the lines of European opera and operetta, and to avoid reliance upon "chorus line" or vaudeville-level dance movements. But his more far-reaching innovation in that show was his insistence on a full pit orchestra with a minimum of twenty-four professional musicians, upgrading the entire orchestral parameter for the future of Second Avenue beyond the small dance-band or modestly expanded wedding-band formats that had sufficed for most earlier productions and to which audiences were accustomed.
Indeed, it is in the size, quality, and instrumentation of the pit orchestra for full-scale Yiddish theatrical productions that Rumshinsky made one of his most enduring contributions. When he first added harp, oboe, and bassoon to his orchestrations, word had it that some actors in those productions referred to him as "crazy Wagner!" Yet some of those innovations, such as harp, caught on and became rooted in Second Avenue orchestrations, while others—double reeds in particular—did not. If Rumshinsky was unable fully to achieve his symphonic ideal, he at least advanced toward it on the order of Lehár, Kalman, Romberg, and Herbert—and 1940s–1950s Broadway. Also stemming from his years at the National Theater, Rumshinsky insisted on fully trained singers with legitimate light operatic voices—on the models of Central European operetta. That, too, became the desiderata and the standard thereafter.
By 1919 he felt that his professional association with Thomashefksy had reached its limits, in view of their divergent views concerning dramatic aspects, especially plots and librettos, and he moved over to the Kessler Second Avenue Theater beginning with the 1919–20 season. He and Thomashefsky, however, remained friends and maintained collegial contact for many years.
Dem rebns nign (The Rabbi's Melody) was Rumshinsky's first production at the Second Avenue Theater, and it was a hit that ran for more than six months. In the succeeding thirty-five years, he wrote, produced or coproduced, and conducted an unprecedented—and since unequaled—number of shows, both there and at other principal theaters, which must be acknowledged to vary in quality. But his position as the de facto musical dean of Second Avenue by the mid-1920s is indisputable. Beginning in the 1930s, he was also active in radio programming and broadcasting for various stations, and he became music director of the only Yiddish program broadcast on a nationwide network, The Jewish Hour, sponsored by the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Tog. At the other end of the artistic spectrum, he spent three seasons (1946–49) at Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, where he composed music for such literary plays as Hershele ostropoler, Yehuda Leib Peretz's Dray matones, and Shalom Aleichem's Blondzhende shtern.
No consideration of Rumshinsky's career can bypass his mutually fruitful association for more than thirty years with the adored American-born comedic actress, singer, comedienne, film star, and writer of many of her own songs for the Yiddish stage, Molly Picon [Margaret Pyckoon] (1898–1992), for whom he wrote many scores. Ironically, Rumshinsky first encountered her in 1921 on a trip to Europe, where her "discoverer," manager, and newly wed husband, Yiddish actor and producer Jacob [Yankl] Kalich, had taken her for the ostensible purpose of honing and naturalizing her Yiddish diction and fluency.
Kalich had created a musical play for his new wife, called Yankele, which Rumshinsky happened to see in Łódz and which would become one of Picon's signature vehicles for decades. Rumshinsky claimed, without being perturbed, that the production was partly a patchwork of versions of his own songs, which he had written "over the years" and by that time had transcended their authorship. He was mightily impressed with the young newcomer to the Yiddish stage, but he also discovered the soubrette Mathilda St. Claire, whom he brought back to New York to star in Yiddish operettas. By the time Molly Picon and Kalich returned to the United States in 1923, however, Rumshinsky had determined to make her his protégée and to champion her career as well, since he realized that her refreshing youthfulness, her impish stage presence, her warm immediacy, and her spirited voice would make her ideal for lead roles in the lighter fare he was planning and producing. He introduced her to Second Avenue in a reworked production of Yankele, which inaugurated her long-running career in Yiddish theaters throughout America and abroad, later including Broadway and Hollywood as well. It was not long before the three—Picon, Rumshinsky, and Kalich—were a recognized team, to which a 1931 New York Times article referred as "the Three Musketeers of the East Side."
Like the other three composers of the Second Avenue "big four," Rumshinsky never abandoned entirely his sacred music roots and his youthful cantorial exposure, and he composed a number of enduring liturgical pieces once he was firmly established in the theater. In 1926 he conducted the more than 100-voice chorus of the Jewish Ministers Cantors Association—the Hazzanim Farband Chor—in a premiere of his biblically based cantata, Oz yashir, at their concert at New York's Mecca Temple (now City Center), along with an orchestral fantasy on liturgical melodies. And the Farband's 1931 concert featured three of his major synagogue settings: Al tira, Min hametzar, and his best-known cantorial-choral work, Shma koleinu, which remains in the standard traditional Yom Kippur repertory.
In 1931, the Yiddish theater world celebrated Rumshinsky's fiftieth birthday with a gala concert and banquet and with the publication of a festschrift titled Rumshinsky bukh—an honor accorded to no other composer in that milieu before or since. The Rumshinsky bukh contained numerous testimonial articles and messages by colleagues as well as by critics. Maurice Schwartz, the advocate of art theater, nonetheless congratulated Rumshinsky on not being "ashamed to write for 'the people,'" and conductor Edwin Franko Goldman dubbed him "the second Victor Herbert"—a "sort of Victor Herbert with a yarmulke," as Isaac Goldberg added. And Abe Cahan, editor of the Forverts, the largest circulating Yiddish daily newspaper, placed Rumshinsky squarely in the pantheon of such theatrical pillars as Goldfaden, Adler, Kessler, and Jacob Gordin.
There were also critical assessments that lamented the commercial practicalities of public demand that had prevented Rumshinsky from rising above mass entertainment and further realizing his artistic aims for Yiddish musical theater. For despite his advancements in terms of musical continuity, in the end most of the books, plays, and librettos for his successful scores were not of much higher quality than those of his contemporaries, and they continued to contain some of the same clichés, vaudeville residues, and other weaknesses that he had criticized from the beginning. However, Jacob Shatzky, an intellectual with no predisposition to forgive diluted standards, praised him for his vision, his initial quest for worthy librettos, and his cosmopolitanism "even when depicting [musically] a kleyn shtetl (small town) story" with kleyn shtetl—folk-oriented—sensibilities.
In the 1940s Rumshinsky completed an opera, Ruth, based on the biblical story and written entirely in Hebrew. Some of those closest to him maintained after his death that he had considered it his most important work. That it he had considered it his most important work. That it was never performed (and has not been performed or recorded to this day), despite a planned production in Israel and another in Los Angeles—neither of which materialized—was a source of personal disappointment for him.
Rumshinsky's final show was Wedding March, which was in the midst of its run at the time of his death. He had also been in discussion about an English musical comedy in collaboration with Julie Berns.
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Songwriter, lyricist, bard, actor, badkhn (wedding jester and entertainer), balladeer, and early recording singer SOLOMON SMULEWITZ [a.k.a. Small] (1868–1943) was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1889. He was one of the most prolific and talented of the early Yiddish composers who fashioned a type of Yiddish counterpart to American popular song around the turn of the 19th–20th century and in the immediately ensuing years. He wrote a profusion of songs (words and music) and many lyrics for other songwriters. His subject matter ranged from immigrant families, labor conditions, biblical vignettes, Judaic observances, Jewish historical incidents, nostalgia, immigration obstacles, and current topical subjects to wedding celebration songs. In the last decade of his life—when, to eke out a basic subsistence, he toured the United States and traveled across Canada from Halifax to Calgary and Winnipeg, entertaining local Jewish audiences with his own and similar songs—he mused on man's course through life in his song Man shpilt teater (Mankind Plays in a Theater): "We act as if we were all on the stage, each one acting out his little life to a script written and directed by Almighty God."
Throughout the first two decades of the 20th century Smulewitz recorded his songs in many of the earliest recording studios on a regular basis. Thereafter he continued to turn out melodies and lyrics for others to sing. His legacy comprises about 150 known or traceable songs and song lyrics—of which A brivele der mamen is now unquestionably his most famous—although in a letter to the press he once referred to twice that number with his own tunes, in addition to 200 sets of words to melodies by others.
DAVID MEYEROWITZ (1867–1943) was born in Dinaburg, Latvia (then part of the Czarist Empire). He had no formal education, and his life as a songster and later a songwriter began as he entertained fellow workers in a match factory.
In 1890, he came to America, but he continued at menial shop labor while he composed simple Yiddish parodies and patriotic sentiments. He began singing such songs at various gatherings and then for small remuneration at cafés and music halls, and he soon became known as "the wandering poet." Meyerowitz's one-act operettas, in which he sometimes played and sang while also producing and directing, grew in popularity throughout New York music halls and vaudeville houses, playing at no fewer than all fourteen that once existed simultaneously.
Program Notes
1. Rumshinsky's love duet MAYN GOLDELE, with lyrics by Louis Gilrod, was one of his twenty songs and other musical numbers from his three-act operetta Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride), to a book and libretto by Louis Freiman [Leyzer Genoyk]. First produced in 1923 at the Kessler Second Avenue Theater—staged by Michal Michalesco (who also acted and sang the lead male role), with a cast that included Annie Thomashefsky (sister of Boris), and choreographed by Hyman ("Hymie") Jacobson, who appeared onstage as Jerome—it was the first of Rumshinsky's many fruitful collaborations with Freiman.
The story of Di goldene kale revolves around Goldele, whose mother abandoned her as a child of four at an inn in an unnamed town in the Czarist Pale (her father having left her mother and gone off to America). The child was taken in by the innkeeper and his wife and reared together with their own children, Misha and Khanele. Goldele is a young lady when the Act I curtain rises. Her uncle Benjamin has just made a surprise visit from America with his son Jerome to inform Goldele that she has inherited her father's American fortune. The town is immediately abuzz, and she is suddenly besieged with suitors. Not to miss a chance to earn what he knows would be a handsome commission, Kalman Kliamke, the shames (beadle) of the town synagogue, quickly gets into the act as a shadkhn (matchmaker) and sets about frantically trying to organize potential shidukhim (matches) for Goldele. One can only imagine the comic opportunity this situation provided for the composer, librettist, and director as Goldele is approached by such shtetl (market town) stereotypes as Yankl the shoemaker, Berel the tailor, and Motl the cantor's choir singer, each of whom swears on the spot his undying love.
Uncle Benjamin, however, harbors the hope that Goldele will marry Jerome. As it happens, Goldele has long been in love with Misha, who has been away studying medicine—although the sudden parade of suitors does confuse her temporarily. When Misha returns home for a visit during a school intersession, her confusion evaporates, and she tells him—after he dispels her concerns about a transatlantic separation by offering to come with her—that he is indeed hers ("my Misha"), which leads into the duet Mayn goldele. In the duet he refers to her as his kale (bride), in the sense of a potential bride.
Meanwhile, Goldele tells Misha that she can marry no one until her mother is found, since she is convinced that she is alive somewhere. Mildly suggestive of mythical or fairy-tale prenuptial contests devised by sought-after women, Goldele announces her own variant of those competitions. Rather than any test of physical strength or even mental prowess, as in the non-Jewish versions of this motif, Goldele long ago made a vow that she will marry the one man who can find and bring her mother to her. And now that she is a woman of means, she will spare no expense. The finale of the first act begins with the traditional Sabbath eve meal, at which Misha chants the Kiddush (sanctification) over wine, followed by everyone wishing Goldele well in her new life in America.
Acts II and III are set in New York a year later in Goldele's lavish home. She has brought with her some of her adopted family as well as many of her former townspeople. When she receives a letter from Misha telling her that he is about to board ship for America but has been unsuccessful in finding her mother—and therefore knows that he has lost Goldele forever—she weeps and reiterates her love for him, but adheres to her vow.
In a scene worthy of Italian opera at its grandest, Goldele organizes a masked ball, and each eligible male guest is challenged to bring her mother, if she can be found. In a farcical parade, each of her many suitors (including the various characters from her European shtetl) brings a woman either claiming to be Goldele's mother—assuming that the passage of years would cloud physical recognition—or truly hoping to find a long-lost daughter.
Disguised in a mask, Misha arrives to bring "regards from Misha," and he sings a song of hope couched in a Zionist reference: "Palestine, our land … may the sh'khina (God's feminine manifestation, or presence) rest on her; Land of Israel, one day I will see it again." He and Goldele chat, and she asks if he can tell her anything that might relieve her pain. Telling her that Misha has sent along a song, he begins echoing Mayn goldele, and she soon joins him as in the original duet. In a climactic moment worthy of Verdi, Goldele's mother appears, heavily disguised and masked as an elegant grande dame. She reveals her identity and—you guessed it!—she points at the disguised Misha, acknowledging that it is he who has found and brought her. Before the curtain falls, Misha triumphantly unmasks himself.
In the brief final act, Goldele, in her wedding dress, listens as her mother, Sheyndele, explains her abandonment and disappearance. It turns out that, with no one else to look after her child, she had left her at the inn for a short while so that she could visit her childhood love and first khosn (intended husband) in a sanitarium, where he had been confined with tuberculosis "and a broken heart." Sheyndele had been pressured and all but forced by her parents into a marriage with a man she did not love (who abandoned her for America). But her beloved, taken ill just when she got married, died in that sanitarium; and she fell ill for two years. When she returned to the inn, she found that the innkeepers—with their children and Goldele—had relocated to another town, and as much as she tried, she was never able to find them. Naturally, Goldele forgives her mother, overjoyed at being reunited, and she proceeds to the wedding canopy.
From a musical perspective, Mayn goldele typifies the adoption of Jewish persona and musical identity for a song that is more Viennese than anything else in character, style, and melodic contour. It draws neither on any traditional Jewish material nor on any continuum of melody type associated historically with Jewish experience, sacred or secular. Mayn goldele is indeed a demonstration of the power of language, in terms of its purely aural parameters, and of context to create the perception of a truly—and subsequently nostalgia-laden—"Jewish" song, regardless of actual musical content.
2. Rumshinsky and Louis Gilrod's lighthearted satire on socialist fantasies and big-city corruption, FIFTY-FIFTY, was sung in the 1917 four-act musical comedy Op-to'un un da'un-to'un (Uptown-Downtown). The libretto to Zishe Kornblith's book was adapted by Boris Thomashefsky, in whose downtown National Theater the production was staged, who also starred in the show as Khayim Yosi Plotkin, a frequently unemployed and struggling cabinetmaker who becomes wealthy overnight in New York.
Plotkin invents some sort of "combination bed," for which he gains a patent. His daughters Stella and Tillie believe in his expectation that the patent will make him rich, but his wife, Keyle Bela, dismisses his optimism as daydreaming. Tillie, the older daughter, is being courted by Bernard, a medical student, which pleases Plotkin. Khayim's brother Abie [Avrohom], however, is a fruit peddler with no prospects of betterment.
By the second act, the Plotkin family is exceedingly wealthy, and Khayim Yosi Plotkin is now Gustav Plato, a banker and businessman. Tillie and Bernard are married, and the "Platos" have moved uptown to a mansion, where their pretentious household now includes a full-time maidservant, Mary, and Yukit, a supposedly Japanese male servant who functions as a butler—or "houseboy." "Butlers" were English—so very very English! The "Oriental houseboy" cliché in fact was a borrowed image that continued for decades in both literary plays and Hollywood, as well as on television. Yukit's character portrayal made for some moments of hilarious but, at the time, perfectly acceptable exaggerated ethnic mimicry and affectation. None of the stylized mimicry and manufactured stereotyping seemed to offend anyone in those days. Everybody made fun of everybody—including themselves—in skits, routines, sketches, and revues.
Meanwhile, Stella is engaged to marry a putative Baron Geoffrey West of London, who claims that his grandmother and Queen Victoria once looked through a mahzor (prayerbook) together. When Abie, who is still a peddler, comes to visit, the family is uneasy at being reminded of its former downtown circumstances. He and his brother Khayim Yosi (a.k.a. Gustav) debate the ease with which any poor Jew can, through his wits and work alone, prosper in America. From Khayim Yosi the audience hears the familiar but tired and newly acquired arrogance of the "if I can make it on my own, so can you" mantra. But it turns out that Abie has come to think of himself as a bit of a Socialist, having been seduced by the rhetoric and labor-orientated aspirations in the air of that day, which he only half-seriously expresses in the rollicking couplet song Fifty-Fifty. The song is a spoof on contemporaneous Socialist musings, even on Yiddish songs current among workers' movements—some of which had also surrounded the 1905 revolution in Russia ("There'll be no more bosses … an end to rich and poor"). It mocks some of the attendant naïveté of Socialist propaganda, without dismissing the injustices, conditions, and plights of struggling immigrants, with which many in Second Avenue audiences could still—and did—empathize.
Pleased with the prospect of an aristocratic son-in-law, Khayim Yosi is about to lend the "Baron" a substantial sum when Yukit recognizes him as an imposter—a poor Jewish waiter with whom he once had an encounter. Then comes an equally startling "revelation": Yukit is not Yukit, but a disguised Jew, and a litvak (Lithuanian Jew) at that, which itself represented an internal stereotyping for comic purposes.
That night, in his anguish, Khayim Yosi has a nightmare, dreaming that one of his companies is threatened by labor unrest and an imminent strike. He awakens a transformed and enlightened man, vowing to move back downtown and become a philanthropist for the benefit of Jews in his former milieu. He will establish and fund a landsmen synagogue (for Jews from his hometown in Europe), and Yukit will be the shames (beadle).
In yet a further twist in the plot, Khayim Yosi learns that his dream was not totally fictitious: his brother Abie is in fact the leader of an actual labor strike at his business concern. True to his new attitude, Khayim Yosi gives in to the strikers' demands, on condition that the Jewish workers commit themselves to joining and praying at the new synagogue he intends to found. He even accepts the fraudulent "Baron" as a son-in-law. It develops that Stella knew "Geoffrey's" true identity all along but felt it necessary to impress her "uptown" family. In the end, the entire family realizes that it is more comfortable living "as themselves" without pretensions, in their old neighborhood.
As a comedy, Uptown-Downtown suggests a Jewish version of Horatio Alger in its familiar Second Avenue mold of a poor Lower East Side immigrant becoming rich in the "land of opportunity" and then aspiring to a life in high society. But the boilerplate this time actually bears a social message, consistent with historical Jewish values. For the ultimate happiness of this "happy ending" resides in finding one's purpose in helping others, apart from the usual material jackpots and felicitous outcomes of romantic pursuits. Whether, as a review in the Morgn Journal questioned, that subject was beyond the reach of "all who had a hand in the piece," is another matter.
Fifty-Fifty lived on far past the life of the stage production. It became a frequently performed number by female as well as male entertainers in the context of vaudeville routines, music hall revues, and the like. It is in that guise that the song achieved its greatest popularity, and in which it has therefore been recorded for the Milken Archive.
3. Rumshinsky's love duet IN A KLEYN SHTIBELE (In a Small Cottage), with lyrics by Isidore Lillian, was featured in his extravagant three-act operetta Der rebe hot geheysn freylekh zayn (The Rebbe Has Bidden Us to Be Merry), produced at the Kessler Second Avenue Theater during the 1921–22 season. It was written to a book also by Lillian, whose libretto was reworked by Samuel Rosenstein, the production's director, who also played and sang the role of Benish. The operetta was advertised in the Yiddish press as the "largest and richest operetta [yet]," with "large double chorus, joyous dances, and twenty musical numbers."
As of this writing, the script has not been located. But the story draws on Hassidic lore and folkways and is set in a Hassidic environment in Europe that includes the rebbe's court, which intersects with the Gypsy world. It is likely that the character Reb Elimelekh, head of that court, was based loosely on the historical Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717–87), a popular tzaddik (righteous master) of the third generation of the Hassidic movement in Galicia, who on one plane was known for his asceticism. Unlike some other rabbinical personalities who advocated or were inclined toward asceticism, however, Reb Elimelekh also acknowledged that asceticism was not the exclusive path to the mystical Hassidic goal of tikkun olam—"restitution and repair of the world"—and he is quoted as having said that one tzaddik might reach tikkun through eating and drinking, while another might do so through an ascetic life.
In the operetta, Reb Elimelekh's son Benish is in love with a young Gypsy woman, Diana, and the two sing of their commitment and future togetherness in In a kleyn shtibele. One needs neither the script nor even a synopsis to know that by the end of the story, Diana will turn out not to be a Gypsy, but—by whatever twist of fate or convoluted hidden or switched identities—a bona fide Jewess.
The cast for Der rebe hot geheysn freylekh zayn was unusually large, filled with many of the greatest Second Avenue celebrities of the day and including Kalman Juvelier, Annie Thomashefsky, Regina Prager, Lazar Fried, Sam Kasten, Muni Weisenfreund (who went on to become the famous actor Paul Muni), and Mathilda St. Claire—in her American debut following her arrival in New York at Rumshinsky's invitation.
4. OY IZ DOS A MEYDL, with lyrics by Molly Picon, was written for Rumshinsky's 1927 two-act musical comedy Dzhenke—Oy iz dos a meydl (Oh, Is This a Girl!), subtitled Some Girl!, to a book by Harry Kalmanovitch and a reworked libretto by its producer, Yankl Kalich. All the action takes place in America. Nathan Pomerantz has two daughters living at home. The elder is Beatrice, a recent college graduate—thus the favored one of both parents—whose signature is her pretentious display of pseudosophisticated English vocabulary. The younger daughter is eighteen-year-old streetwise Dzhenke [Jenke], played by Molly Picon, who has no interest in college and prefers a life of gaiety. She stays out night after night until two in the morning with Meni (Manny), a taxi driver who lives next door. It is no passionate love affair for her yet, although she confesses at one point (out of his hearing) that she does love him, for he is keyn ayne hore, a shtik man—"a bit of a man, 'may no evil befall him!'" Nathan's parental reactions to her late-night escapades (which he does not realize involve Manny) are ferocious and violent, and—primarily to free herself from her father—she marries Meni privately and capriciously. Yet so little does she know him that when she introduces him to her parents as her new husband, she does not know his full name. When Nathan discovers that Meni's father is his old friend Simkhe Shrayer—a retired truck driver who was also unaware of the relationship between their two children until they announced their marriage while he was dining as a guest at the Pomerantz home—all the parents give their blessing.
Meanwhile, Beatrice and Meni develop a friendship, which Dzhenke naïvely encourages. Boosted by Beatrice's envy of her sister's happiness, the friendship becomes a secret love affair. By the time Dzhenke learns, through an overheard conversation, that Meni is about to disclose the truth and ask her to accept a divorce—on the pretense that "she doesn't understand him"—she is already the mother of a three-month-old baby. She consults her old friend Nensl (Nancy, who happens, for the audience's benefit, to live on the Lower East Side's main artery, Delancey Street, so they can be treated to the song Nancy from East Delancey, or Ikh bin nensy fun dilensy). Nensl, who claims to know the secrets of how to handle and outwit men, advises Dzhenke to "play dumb" and launch a preemptive strike by approaching Meni first and asking him for a divorce, pretending that she has a secret lover without whom she cannot live. Nensl also urges Dzhenke to appear not to care too much for him, since that is what "today's men want" in a woman. Men's natural jealousy, combined with her feigned aloofness, will reverse Meni's plans, Nensl assures Dzhenke. And of course, the scheme works. Not only does he renounce Beatrice, but he makes a concerted effort to win back Dzhenke's love while she plays "hard to get" for just the right amount of time. He not only succeeds in mending the marriage, but he falls truly back in love with her, which leads to his song Oy iz dos a meydl, sung in the production by Irving Grossman.
Abe Cahan, the editor of the Forverts, allowed that this was one of Molly Picon's best performances and, as usual, that Rumshinsky carried the day, everything "galloping with the music."
5. Rumshinsky's ES TSIT, ES BRIT (It Tugs, It Burns), with lyrics by Isidore Lillian, was hailed by critics as the most memorable number in the 1929 production of Dos radio meydl (The Radio Girl)—a musical comedy in two acts with a prologue, to a book by Louis Freiman. The entire elaborate production was conceived as a vehicle for its star, Molly Picon (who wrote lyrics to some of its songs), and the show was first staged and directed by her husband, Yankl Kalich, at the Kessler Second Avenue Theater.
The story concerns Sadie, a sympathetic young waif of the New York streets who never knew her father. She is the only joy in the life of her suffering mother, and she models for an exclusive Fifth Avenue dress shop. But during her previous employment at a similar establishment owned by a wealthy banker, Oppenheim, she became infatuated with his son, Walter. As a confirmed bachelor, however, Walter never took notice of her.
Meanwhile, Walter, in defiance of the rules of his insular Bachelors Club, has become enamored of a radio entertainer, Viola, to the point of obsession—solely through her voice, without ever having seen her. When he shares this secret with fellow club members, the club's president—despite the others' denunciation of Walter for jeopardizing his bachelor status—offers to help, and he organizes a meeting between Viola and Walter.
It happens that Viola is Sadie's cousin. Completely unaware of Sadie's secret three-year passion for Walter, Viola tells her cousin with great relish of her impending introduction to the wealthy Walter Oppenheim, whom she already imagines as her "Prince Charming." But on her way to meet Walter, Viola is injured in an automobile accident and is taken to hospital without Walter's ever having seen her. That same evening, when Sadie conveniently learns of the derailment of her cousin's rendezvous, she seizes the opportunity and presents herself at the appointed meeting place as Viola. Overcoming a slew of complications, she dupes Walter into believing that she is indeed the "radio girl" with whom he is already in love, and he marries her. Only then does he discover that she is actually the daughter of his friend, the former president of the Bachelors Club, and the reunion of father and daughter makes for a doubly "happy ending."
It is unclear from available documents precisely where the song Es tsit, es brit occurs in the play. In terms of the lyrics, it could have been sung logically at any number of points—and perhaps more than once.
6. By itself, the term or word hamavdil (lit., [one or He] who distinguishes, or makes a distinction) would normally indicate a particular hymn of which it is the first word. This hymn is recited or sung in most Jewish rites as part of the havdala ceremony—the service that signals and formalizes the conclusion of the Sabbath by proclaiming and emphasizing the distinction between the holy (Sabbath) and the profane (the weekday about to commence)
Rumshinsky's famous quasi-cantorial and partially folklorized song HAMAVDIL, however, is a secular Yiddish theatrical and concert number that only briefly quotes from that Hebrew hymn and is otherwise based liberally on the Yiddish havdala service text Got fun avrohom (God of Abraham)—a devotional and inspirational prayer with numerous text variants. At one time this prayer was customarily recited in traditional Ashkenazi circles primarily by women. Although women are not required under halakha (rabbinic law) to pray, they must nonetheless conclude the Sabbath with the hamavdil passage, which is incorporated in Got fun avrohom. Its message is a poetic extension in the vernacular of the havdala theme with regard to concluding and bidding farewell to the Sabbath and reinforcing its uniqueness.
Rumshinsky's text, which hardly conforms to any of the standard ones found in printed prayerbooks, seems to be a pastiche of fragments of lesser-known variants to which he added his own words. Also incorporated in his song is the greeting customarily exchanged immediately after havdala (and for the rest of Saturday night, or motza'ei shabbat): "a gute vokh" (May you have a good week).
Indeed, it is Rumshinsky's internal tune for that post-Sabbath greeting that gives the song its immortality. For it is to this now-ubiquitous tune that nearly every Ashkenazi congregation, Reform as well as traditional, has sung these words following havdala services for many decades—often to the Hebrew equivalent, shavu'a tov. It is thus assumed to be an anonymous folk tune, but there is no reason to believe that it is not Rumshinsky's own, or that he borrowed it from folk repertoire.
It will no doubt come as a surprise to nearly everyone familiar with this tune that it was born on the Yiddish stage. And to those who have long known Rumshinsky's Hamavdil as a concert number, it may be even a greater revelation to learn that it was introduced to the public as part of a Second Avenue theatrical production—one of twenty musical numbers in Rumshinsky's 1922 operetta Der rebetsn's tokhter (The Rabbi's Wife's Daughter), to a book by Shomer, a popular Hebrew and Yiddish novelist and dramatist who was perceived by his critics and detractors (among them, Shalom Aleichem) as having created a literature and style in Europe tantamount to a Yiddish version of pulp fiction. Der rebetsn's tokhter was Rumshinsky's updated revision and reworking of his 1909 operetta, A yidish kind, which he always considered his "first truly Jewish operetta."
The story takes place in 17th-century Poland, approximately during the time of King John [Sobieski] III (reigned from 1674). Count Zaminsky, an impoverished Polish nobleman whose situation has continued to deteriorate, seeks to restore his fortunes by laying a new tax on the Jews and by organizing a marriage between his son Vladislav and the daughter of the wealthy and secure Count Orlov. It happens, however, that Vladislav is somehow in love with Henele, the only daughter of a rebetsn—which meant that the audience (with the possible exception of anyone who had never been to a Second Avenue production) already knew by the first act that Count Zaminsky's son was not really Count Zaminsky's son! The audience, which has already been given reason to suspect the circumstances, had only to wait for the final act to learn that he had been switched as an infant for an aristocratic Polish baby who died. It turns out of course that Vladislav is a Jew whose name now becomes Avrohom ben Yisro'el. Not only is he a Jew, says the messenger who delivers the good news, but a Jew with a true "Jewish heart of silver and gold."
Hamavdil was sung in the operetta by the rebetsn, portrayed by one of the great Second Avenue prima donnas, Mme. Regina Prager. Since the song is listed as the seventh number, followed by Kum aheym tsurik (Come Back Home!)—also sung by Henele's mother—it probably occurred in the first act, but in any case before the
Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride) (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride): Mayn Goldele (My Goldele) - 3:37
Op-to'un un da'un-to'un (Uptown-Downtown) (arr. Z. Mlotek) (more info)
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Op-to'un un da'un-to'un (Uptown-Downtown): Fifty-Fifty - 2:37
Der rebe hot geheysn freylekh zayn: In A Kleyn Shtibele (In A Small Cottage) (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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Der rebe hot geheysn freylekh zayn: In A Kleyn Shtibele (In A Small Cottage) - 4:11
Dzhenke - Oy iz dos a Meydl (Oh, Is This a Girl!) (arr. I. Hearshen) (more info)
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Dzhenke - Oy iz dos a Meydl (Oh, Is This a Girl!): Oy iz dos a Meydl - 3:11
Dos radio meydl (The Radio Girl) (arr. P. Russ) (more info)
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Dos radio meydl (The Radio Girl): Es Tsit, Es Brit (It Tugs, It Burns) - 3:13
Der rebetsn's tokhter (The Rabbi's Wife's Daughter) (arr. J. Ness) (more info)
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Der rebetsn's tokhter (The Rabbi's Wife's Daughter): Hamavdil - 4:10
A Brivele der Mamen (A Little Letter to Mama) (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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A Brivele der Mamen (A Little Letter to Mama) - 7:38
Berele Tremp (Berele, the Vagabond Street Boy) (arr. P. Russ) (more info)
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Berele Tremp (Berele, the Vagabond Street Boy): Watch Your Step - 2:20
Gebrokhene hertser (Broken Hearts) (arr. P. Russ) (more info)
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Gebrokhene hertser (Broken Hearts): Got Un Zayn Mishpet Iz Gerekht (God and His Judgment Are Just) - 6:35
Hu-Tsa-Tsa (O-tsa-tsa) (arr. Z. Mlotek) (more info)
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Hu-Tsa-Tsa (O-tsa-tsa) - 5:12
Dos mamele, "Kid Mother" (arr. P. Russ) (more info)
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Dos mamele, "Kid Mother": Oyb S'iz Geven Gut Far Mayn Mamen (If It Was Good Enough for My Mother) - 6:15
Yosl un zayne vayber (arr. P. Russ) (more info)
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Yosl un zayne vayber: Du Bist Dos Likht Fun Mayne Oygn (You Are the Light of My Eyes) - 4:37
Di khaznte (The Cantor's Wife) (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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Di khaznte (The Cantor's Wife): Shma Yisro'el - 3:34
Tsipke (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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Tsipke: A Bisl Libe Un A Bisl Glik (A Bit of Love and a Bit of Luck) - 2:57
Fishl der gerotener (arr. I. Hearshen) (more info)
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Fishl der gerotener: Dir A Nikl, Mir A Nikl (A Nickel for You, and a Nickel for Me) - 2:05
Dos galitsiyaner rebele (The Little Galician Rabbi) (arr. P. Henning) (more info)
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Dos galitsiyaner rebele (The Little Galician Rabbi): Shloymele Malkele - 3:15
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