GREAT SONGS OF THE AMERICAN YIDDISH STAGE

This is part two of a multi-part exhibit on the American Yiddish Theater.

Part 1: Abraham Ellstein | Part 3: Joseph Rumshinsky |  Part 4: Schmaltz and Strudl

Like most of the people who made it what it was, the American Yiddish theater was born in Europe but found its greatest success in America. And though its 1882 American premiere ended in a brawl, Yiddish theater (or "Second Avenue," after the Manhattan street that housed most of the theaters) quickly became a popular entertainment choice for American Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

How popular? Irene Heskes relates that by 1910, New York City boasted thirteen theaters featuring Yiddish musical theater productions—three hundred performers putting on eleven hundred performances a year. One personal account collected in the Milken Archive’s oral history project described up to nine shows per week, with multiple productions playing simultaneously in the theaters of Second Avenue, Brooklyn, and beyond. A 1939 New York Times review of a concert held in honor of Joseph Rumshinsky noted a house that was "crowded to capacity, with many standees half-circling the orchestra."

The two most important figures in the origins of the American Yiddish theater are Abraham Goldfaden and Boris Thomashefsky. Goldfaden established the first known Yiddish theatrical company in Romania in the 1870s. He later emigrated to the United States with hopes of great success, but never achieved it. Thomashefsky put on the first American Yiddish theater production—written by Goldfaden—with an acting troupe imported from London, and went on to become the genre’s most important impresario, as well as a noted writer and actor.

Abraham Goldfaden (left, Source) and Boris Thomashefsky (Source)

Though Goldfaden struggled to find success in America, his contributions to the genre were widely acknowledged. Upon his death, a large funeral procession accompanied his family to the cemetery and his tombstone was inscribed with the sobriquet, Father of the Yiddish Theater. Thomashefsky’s success continued unabated.

Beyond Goldfaden and Thomashefsky, American Yiddish theater would not have been what it was without the “big four” composers of Second Avenue: Abraham Ellstein, Alexander Olshanetsky, Sholom Secunda, and Joseph Rumshinsky, a talented group with broad musical backgrounds and diverse artistic output.

Over several decades, the composers, lyricists, actors, and playwrights of Second Avenue created a body of work that spoke to immigrants' experiences as they struggled to adapt to life in a new world and come to terms with the one they left behind. It was not always viewed positively in terms of artistic merit, but it was crucial to the audience it served. As Nahma Sandrow has noted: “in the confusing shifting scramble for survival in a strange land, [Yiddish theater] substituted in subtle ways for the older communal institutions that had been the basis for centuries of Eastern European [Jewish] life.”

Yiddish theater was a powerful force in the turn-of-the-century American Jewish experience. Its songs captured the aura of an era, embodying—often simultaneously—the joy, sorrow, humor, and tragedy of a generation caught between two worlds.

IKH BIN FARLIBT

Olshanetsky’s Ikh bin farlibt (I’m in Love), with lyrics by Jacob Jacobs, is a love duet from his operetta A ganeydn far tzvey (A Paradise for Two), first produced in 1928 at the National Theater in New York. Leybke and Fanitshke are young lovers, both of whom are poor and live on New York’s Lower East Side, They also knew each other in Europe, where he once saved her life and where the two first became infatuated with each other. Khane Tsipe, her conniving aunt, is portrayed as the quintessential yente—the stereotyped combination shrew, henpecker, and meddler made famous by Bette Jacobs (who played the role of Khana Tsipe in this production) through her hilarious radio and vaudeville character Yente Telebende. Khana Tsipe’s second husband was played by her real-life husband, Jacob Jacobs, who also regularly played her scolded husband, Mendel Telebende, in those sparring skits.

Khane Tsipe schemes to accomplish a match for her niece with David—ostensibly because he would be able to provide expensive medical treatment for Fanitshke’s older sister, a pressure to which she yields. But in fact, such a wealthy and socially prominent “nephew-in-law” would give Khana Tsipe the status she craves as a grande dame of the fashionable Upper West Side. At some unidentified point in that first act, Leybke and Fanitshke sing their love duet, Ikh bin farlibt, in which they recall nostalgically their initial love in Europe.

The show contains exaggerated and coarse but sidesplitting comic routines between Khana Tsipe and her husband (probably written with the Jacobs duo in mind), including one in which he knocks her out with boxing gloves. Meanwhile, when David inadvertently overhears Leybke and Fanitshke’s farewell to each other, he realizes that his marriage to her is ill-advised, and he relinquishes her to Leybke.

Although he excelled in a number of musical genres, Sholom Secunda will always be remembered primarily for his association with the American Yiddish musical theater. He established himself as one of the preeminent composers and songwriters in that arena, and became known outside of it through the song, Bay mir bistu sheyn.

Born in Aleksandriya, in the Kherson region of the Ukraine, Secunda became a coveted boy alto soloist in major synagogue choirs, and he soon gained a reputation as a brilliant wunderkind boy cantor. Following a pogrom in Nikolayev, where his family had relocated, he emigrated to America with them in 1907. Until his voice changed, was known in the New York area as “the prince of the young hazzanim.”

By 1913 he was engaged as a chorister in Yiddish theater productions and he began writing songs. A year later he began studies at the Institute for Musical Art (now The Juilliard School), and shortly afterward, together with Solomon Shmulevitz (1868–1943), a well-established songwriter and lyricist for Yiddish theater and vaudeville, he wrote his first full-length score—Yoysher (Justice). When he became acquainted with the music of Ernest Bloch, he was struck by the high artistic level to which Jewish music could be elevated, and he took lessons with Bloch for about a year.

After working in Yiddish theaters in Philadelphia for three years, Secunda saw his first operetta with his own orchestration produced in in 1926. As his composing for the Yiddish theater increased, he began simultaneously turning his attention to serious Yiddish poetry with a view to writing art songs. But the lure of the theater remained paramount for him in those years, along with opportunities in Yiddish radio programming and broadcasting. Between 1935 and 1937 alone, Secunda wrote scores for at least seven shows, and he also began to experiment with more serious incidental music for Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater.

DOS YIDISHE LID

Dos yidishe lid (The Jewish Song) began its life as a showstopper written expressly for a newly expanded 1924 production of Secunda’s melodrama, In nomen fun got (In the Name of God. But ever since it was recorded by the renowned cantor Mordecai Hershman, it has also been an independent, quasi-cantorial concert number. 

Secunda wrote Dos yidishe lid for Joseph Shayngold, an accomplished singer-actor (and son-in-law of the Yiddish stage idol Jacob P. Adler) who also had the ability to interpret the idioms of virtuoso cantorial art and who had already been engaged to play the part of Yitzḥak. Because Shayngold possessed what Secunda considered one of the “few cultivated voices in the Jewish [Yiddish] Theater,” he decided to compose something that would justly exploit his gifts. At the same time, since the show was scheduled to open just around Rosh Hashana, he aimed at something that would represent Judaic religious culture. What emerged was a song that contains, integrated within its descriptive Yiddish “lied” framework, three of the most familiar Hebrew prayers and cantorial harbingers of the upcoming holy days: hinn’ni he’ani mimma’as, the cantor’s plea on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur for worthiness to intone the liturgy on the congregation’s behalf; kol nidrei, the recitation on the eve of Yom Kippur of an ancient legal formula absolving Jews from vows they are unable to keep; and sisu v’sim’ḥu, a traditionally lively expression in the liturgy for Simhat Torah.

The plot of In nomen fun got unfolds in a small eastern European town, where a wealthy and religious elderly widower and curmudgeon, Reb Nison Kluker, also the town’s cantor, seeks to marry a much younger woman—D’vorale—the daughter of a poor tailor. Though her father welcomes it, she resists, primarily because she is having a secret love affair with Reb Nison’s son, Yitzḥak, who has inherited his father’s musical talent. When D’vorale becomes pregnant and is about to be driven from the town, Yitzḥak swears “in the name of God” that he will always love her. But she disappears, and he loses touch with her completely, going to Italy to study music. The surviving scores indicate that he sings Dos yidishe lid at some point in that first act. 

By the last act, all the characters have immigrated to New York, where Reb Nison has become a well-known cantor and Yitzḥak is engaged to a millionaire’s daughter. While driving himself to his wedding, he accidentally runs over and kills a young boy who has darted in front of his car chasing after a ball. The child turns out to be D’vorale’s and his own son. He and D’vorale reunite in grief, and instead of going through with his wedding, he pulls the ring from his pocket and presents it to her as a marriage pledge—renewing his vow “in the name of God” to remain steadfast forever.

SKRIP, KLEZMERL, SKRIPE

Skrip, klezmerl, skripe (Fiddle, Klezmer, Scrape Away), with lyrics by Chaim Tauber, is a brief reflection on parental devotion, followed by a frenzied exhortation to the band (the klezmorim) to bring accelerated joy to a wedding celebration. It was introduced in Sholom Secunda’s musical show A freylekhe mishpokhe (A Happy Family), with a book by William Siegel. The production, characterized in the press as “a mixture of operetta, comedy, melodrama, farce, and even some burlesque,” was the opening musical attraction of the 1934–35 season at the Public Theater in New York. With a star-studded cast that included Aaron Lebedeff, Lucy Levin, Vera Lubov, Menachem Rubin, Yetta Zwerling, and Itzik [Yitzkhok/Isadore] Feld—who sang this song in the production—A freylekhe mishpokhe enjoyed both considerable public success and, unusual for Yiddish musicals of that era, a measure of respectable critical acceptance for its realistic character portrayals and plausible plot situations. As his first full-length show for an actual Second Avenue area house, it also marked a personal triumph and milestone in Secunda’s career.

The show was conceived and produced primarily as entertainment—with a variety of ethnic music and dance elements (including a Spanish carioca dance tune that Secunda borrowed from the 1933 Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film Flying Down to Rio for a comic Yiddish duet), in addition to an abundance of music with perceived “Jewish flavor” and even some English lyrics. Still, underlying and threaded through its action is the question of whether parenthood is properly defined by biological ancestry on its own merits, or by rearing, nurture, and love—a pervasive theme that also informs the opening lyrics of this song. The show was also saluted in the press for its absence of vulgarity and avoidance of off-color humor, which reminds us of that general reputation among Second Avenue Yiddish comedies.

Lily, who was abandoned in infancy by her father and then adopted and reared by an uncle, Kopel Kieve, becomes engaged to a young lawyer, Sidney, who—clandestinely beguiled by Eva, an unsavory and ambitious woman with no love or fidelity to him—avoids the actual marriage. Meanwhile, Lily’s biological father surfaces in the person of Misha, a past “victim” of Eva’s, who is now an alcoholic derelict. Kopel persuades him, for her sake, never to reveal his identity, and through a clever, stage-worthy trick in which Sidney, with Misha as a silent ally, is made to witness Eva’s perfidious falseness, Sidney realizes Lily’s worth as a bride, and the wedding takes place.

It is likely that Skrip, klezmerl, skripe was sung more or less in its present form by Kopel in connection with the wedding. It appears to be a composite of songs or parts of songs from earlier numbers within the play, but from the content of the lyrics, from the nature of the tune, and from what we know of established theatrical conventions that attended such Yiddish musicals, it is logical to place the song in its entirety at the wedding scene—as a sort of reprise. Indeed, in keeping with the pattern of conventions attached by then to Second Avenue, one can also imagine that the chorus might have enjoyed yet another reprise during the curtain calls. It is also possible, however, that Secunda fashioned the present composite expressly for its subsequent publication.