A mol in a tsayt: Legend of Toil

 

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Liner Notes

A mol in a tsayt: Legend of Toil was one of the first Yiddish cantatas Lazar Weiner wrote for the Arbeter Ring Khor (Workmen’s Circle Chorus) in New York, completing it in 1933—about two years after commencing his tenure as its music director. Composed to a poem by Yisroel [Itsik] Goichberg (1893–1970), it addresses what were then resonant themes of class struggle and redress of subjugation through labor movements. Those themes are explored succinctly and summarized against the backdrop of the desperate condition of impoverished and exploited coal miners who suddenly take the offensive and commit themselves to a long, bitter, and costly but ultimately successful fight in which “the miner liberated himself and gained the rightful fruit of his labor.”

For the Yiddish-speaking urban choristers and their principal audiences, the coal miner theme—and the history of miners’ unionization and their battles with management—obviously had symbolic rather than direct application, even though examples and precedents established in that industry could be both meaningful and instructive. To those who subscribed to the notion of a transcending international brotherhood of laborers, the text spoke powerfully to a feeling of solidarity. Yet this work treats the themes of class struggle and the correction of imbalances in universal and humanistic terms—using Yiddish language and literature as a medium, not as an echo of a specifically Jewish cause.

Few Jews were coal miners at any point in the American experience; and the number of Jews who lived in mining towns and were engaged in commerce there at one time was small. It is true that the coalfield enclaves of Appalachia collectively hosted hundreds (but probably not thousands) of resident Jews between the 1880s and the 1930s, and studies have demonstrated that on balance those mining towns were basically receptive to Jews; but generally those Jews were not miners. Nor were they secular Yiddishists or socialists—or even potential socialists. To the contrary, typically they were retail merchants—initially peddlers, who in many cases rose to be bona fide proprietors—who provided miners, their families, and the rest of the townspeople with clothing, other dry goods, and potables obtained from the East Coast. Often they could compete successfully with mine company stores because they were willing to take greater risks at extending credit; and they could be open for business on Sundays (and on Saturdays and even cyclical Jewish holydays as well), when authorities were willing to look the other way in the face of Sunday closing laws. Moreover, far from the orientations of the antireligious secularists of the Yiddishist-socialist milieu in large eastern and Midwestern cities, these Jews tended stubbornly to maintain their communal identities by establishing small synagogues, which usually meant selectively fusing orthodox/traditional and Reform elements and—except for a handful of congregations that supported full-time rabbis—availing themselves of itinerant rabbis and even lay leaders without formal ordination.

Goichberg’s poem thus bypasses specifically Jewish involvements in the struggles for social justice and economic fairness. Yet as a metaphor for the wider cause of unionization and fair labor practices, its particular subject along with its overall tone could resonate easily with Workmen’s Circle choristers and their audiences. They could identify with the cantata’s message not only out of sympathy, but because many of them had been and still were active in unionization campaigns and confrontations supported by bakers, milliners, cigar rollers, and—especially and most visibly—those in the needle trades. (Weiner was also the first conductor of the chorus of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union—the ILGWU.) One of the Workmen’s Circle’s favorite songs in English was R. Chaplin’s general labor movement anthem “Solidarity Forever,” adapted to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

When the union’s inspiration
Through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
Anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
Than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong!

They have taken untold millions
That they never toiled to earn;
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn;
We can break their haughty power,
Gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power
Greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies
Magnified a thousand fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
From the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us strong.

If taken at face value, some of Goichberg’s imagery goes beyond movements for organized labor, suggesting militant and violent revolt if not outright revolution in its evocation of “bloody” years of strife—during which “if one [miner] fell, there were two standing in his place.” Indeed, the early history of labor-management confrontations in America is hardly without its bloody episodes and its barbaric attempts to crush labor disputes, when some companies were not above hiring private armies of goons to attack strikers (the infamous Pullman strike in Chicago in May 1894, for example). The militant images in Goichberg’s text could thus appeal to Yiddish choruses and audiences far to the left of the Workmen’s Circle, which by the 1930s was unmistakably on record as having repudiated Communism and the Communist Party along with any revolutionary aims of dismantling the American political system. Weiner, too, had been an avowed anti-Communist since the late 1920s.

For the Arbeter Ring, A mol in a tsayt (Once Upon a Time) could be interpreted as a nonviolent ode to unionization as an American right fully within the political order. That interpretation is underscored in Weiner’s musical treatment, which gives the cantata a folk character—without quoting any folk music sources. The vocal lines and choral writing are handled with directness, yet with a restrained measure of his usual sophistication in harmonic language and contrapuntal invention. The work is deliberately simple, but it betrays the composer’s uncompromising standards.

Weiner conducted the Arbeter Ring Khor in its world premiere of A mol in a tsayt at Carnegie Hall in 1935. The concert was billed as a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the chorus’s founding (as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Workmen’s Circle’s tuberculosis sanatorium), although considerable confusion continues to surround the actual year of its commencement and the chain of events leading up to the adopted and generally accepted founding date of 1914–15. Accounts vary about the date and circumstances (whether the chorus was or should be considered a continuation of an earlier, less formally founded one dating at least as far back as 1910, or the result of a politically related split) and about who was the first director—Nicholas Zaslavsky, who was succeeded by Meyer Posner ca. 1916/1919(?) (Posner directed the chorus until at least 1929), or J. Pirozhnikov, who also preceded Posner. One source refers to Pirozhnikov as “a” first conductor; another refers to each as the first conductor; and both names appear in other accounts. From what we can piece together without arriving at a firm, definitive chronology, it appears that Pirozhnikov preceded Zaslavsky, probably as the director of a Yiddish workers’ chorus that evolved into the Arbeter Ring Khor. If that was the case, it remains unclear whether, prior to 1914, that or any chorus was recognized as an official arm of the Workmen’s Circle.)

The soloists for the premiere of the cantata were Minna Ysaeva-Tulchin (soprano), Max Spivak (tenor), and Moshe Rudinow (baritone), who was the cantor at Temple Emanu-El in New York. Also on the program was Meyer Posner’s Arbeter-Ring-Himen (The Anthem of the Workmen’s Circle), to a poem by A. Liessin, which was typically included in the chorus’s concerts, and a Yiddish adaptation by David Pinski of a Schubert work, Miriam’s Song of Triumph. The program was presented at Town Hall a month later, with additional offerings that included a choral arrangement by Rukin of “The Song of the Miners”; Posner’s S’loyfn s’yogn; “The Beetle and the Rose” by Fayt; “Corn” by Sheinin; and Vladimir Heifetz’s Meyshe ganvet arbes.

A mol in a tsayt was published with the subtitle Legend of Toil in 1945, in a version with piano accompaniment. It received performances in that form not only by Workmen’s Circle choruses in Chicago; Newark, Trenton, and Paterson, New Jersey; and other cities but also by unrelated Yiddish choruses—most notably New York’s far-left Frayhayts Gezang Farayn/Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus, which Weiner had once directed, and sister choruses of the Ordn (the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, which was affiliated at one time with and under the umbrella of the International Workers Order). An English translation and version by Olga Paul was included.

In a 1946 edition of The Call, the publication of A mol in a tsayt: Legend of Toil was reviewed by Reuven Kosakoff, a respected composer of Jewishly related music and an accomplished pianist. “Weiner is one of the few composers I know of,” he wrote, “who successfully attempts to blend his music into the life of the day, and into the poetry . . . so as to achieve a perfect unit. He feels the poem most deeply first, and then builds his musical concepts, so that combined, they are greater than either medium individually.”

Weiner orchestrated the cantata’s accompaniment for string orchestra, which he employed at the premiere and for subsequent performances under his baton. But he did not publish the orchestration. He had planned to create yet another version for two pianos, which, as he explained to this writer in an interview, he felt would provide a better alternative to the string orchestration than the usual single piano. He even mused that a two-piano version might be preferable to string orchestra for this particular work in terms of the interesting textures and sonorities it could provide. Since, however, no sketches could be located (it is not certain that he ever commenced the task), the Milken Archive commissioned a two-piano accompaniment for its recording in 2001.

 

 

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Lyrics

• English
• Yiddish

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Credits

Composer: Lazar Weiner

Performers: Coro Hebraeico;  Raphael Frieder, Baritone;  Amy Goldstein, Soprano;  Neil Levin, Conductor

Additional Credits:

Publisher: Transcontinental
Translation: Adam J. Levitin