Today we had our event celebrating the new Yiddish translation of Woody Guthrie's classic ode to America, This Land is Your Land. I joined Forward Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren and Forverts writer Jordan Kutzik, along with musician-archivist Lorin Sklamberg, translator and Yiddish expert Michael Wex, and the singer of Dos Land iz Dayn Land, Daniel Kahn. We had a really fun conversation about the why and how of translating from English into Yiddish. If you couldn't make it live, you can watch the video now.
The funniest part, for me at least, came when I noted that in the Yiddish translation, Daniel had inserted a reference to the groyse ozeres, the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are, of course, one of America's natural wonders and a perfect fit for a song like This Land is Your Land. But it also struck me as a very personal reference to Daniel's homeland of Detroit. Though I, a parochial New Yorker, confessed I had never actually seen any of the Great Lakes. At which point, Michael Wex chose to chastise me in front of the crowd, reminding me that I had been to Toronto (in fact, countless times) and had enjoyed walking along one of the Greatest of lakes. Oops. To make up for my unintentional insult to the great nation to the north of us, I'll encourage everyone to listen to the folksinging group The Travellers doing their Canadian version of This Land is Your Land.
Of course, it's well worth your time to watch Daniel perform the song (again).
And finally, for the last couple months I've been OBSESSED with this extremely funky version of This Land is Your Land by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Sharon sings the verse that's often omitted, in which the singer comes across a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign (and walks right past it). If you've never heard this version, PLEASE drop everything and listen right now.
Last night Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird brought their roaring blend of klezmer folk punk to Littlefield, part of a North American tour for the new CD, The Butcher's Share. I'm not ashamed to say I yelled my lungs out singing along with the instant anthem 99% Nayn-Un-Nayntsik. (99% is songwriter Josh Waletzky's celebration of class solidarity as well as the song that coined the essential new word fuck-u-nity. It's extreeeemly catchy. Anyway...)
Painted Bird was supported by Brooklyn radical klez phenomenon Tsibele. I felt a bit of an insider-outsider vibe when part of the crowd got really into yelling 'daloy capitalism' (down with capitalism) then talked loudly over Tsibele's incredible instrumental numbers.
Look, I'm all about a good anti-capitalist chant. We all need some catharsis these days. But I can't help getting salty about the people who are only there for the chants and get bored when it's time for a juicy terkisher. You can't separate the one from the other, or at least, you can't where I come, which is the same place Tsibele and Daniel Kahn come from: the world of Klezkanada and integrated Yiddish folk art. But... not everyone is from that same place. And I want lots of success for my extremely talented friends, but that also means their work is going to be received by people who don't know what a terkisher is and frankly, may not even care.
Which, you know, that's obviously their prerogative. But when it comes to the political stuff I hold on to my saltiness. I have seen for the last couple of years how Dan's work, anthemic and powerful as it is, has been picked up by young Jewish radicals looking for cultural touchstones. Of course as an old fogey, I am conflicted that his work, which is so deeply playful and and nuanced and interconnected... I'm worried about that work being flattened into one crude political reading without any of the nuance that's been pre- baked into his projects. Dan loves anthems. He did a whole album of them with Psoy Korolenko called The Unternationale. The point wasn't an endorsement of Communism. Or socialism or Zionism or Bundism, but the construction of a dialectic by putting all those anthems in the same room.
Anyhoo... I'm the gatekeeping asshole who will call you out for holding a Yiddish sign with spelling mistakes at a demo if you don't actually speak Yiddish. Sorry. You're free to hold whatever sign you want, of course. I'm not the police and I've been given no special power to stop you from doing whatever you want to do. But I will use whatever platform I have to remind Jews that you cannot divorce the politics from the language and the language from the history, and if you like the politics, and you like the slogans, I promise you'll get even more out of it if you learn how to spell them correctly.
This is all a preamble really to tell you to read my latest profile for Tablet, this one of my friend Josh Dolgin. Josh and Dan are the same age and are both fucking geniuses in their own way, as well as having been nurtured by the same cultural scene. In my review of Josh's latest album di Frosh, one of the things that struck me was that he closed the album with the mid-century pro-Israel, Yiddish language anthem Am Yisroel Chai. It took me by surprise because while Josh has a sense of humor in everything he does, his work is most definitely not in the ironic or subversive mode you'll find on a CD like The Unternationale. It felt almost strange to encounter Am Yisroel Chai by itself, unbalanced, as it were, by an anthem of equal and opposite political verve. Are we even allowed to be this earnest in 2018? Earnestly Zionist, even? According to Josh, at least, the answer is why the hell not?
Keep in mind that the origins of di Frosh go back to an invitation Josh got from his hometown synagogue to help celebrate their 50th anniversary with a set of new Yiddish songs. Perhaps Temple Israel in Ottawa isn't quite the place to wheel out a Yiddish IWW workers song (should such a thing even exist, for example) just for balance. But also, Josh's work is subversive in its own way, as I get into in my profile.
I meant to post this a couple days ago, so you'd have time to buy a plane ticket to Berlin to see Daniel Kahn celebrate the release of his new album, but life has a way of getting in the way. But on the bright side, I saved you the price of a ticket to Berlin!
Instead, enjoy the video for the first single (do we even say that anymore?) off his new album THE BUTCHER'S SHARE. I've been listening to it non-stop since I got it (direct from Berlin!) and friends, you will be, too. Daniel and the Painted Bird will be touring North America in May-June 2018, so hopefully you'll have a chance to catch them live, then.
If you're new to Kahn's music, read my profile from 2009 Partisan or Parasiteand then catch up on his music here. How to describe it? The DNA is Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and the baddest midnight Klezkamp jamband you ever heard. It's a Brechtian shove with a Yiddish tam. Don't wait, just click.
My new GOLDEN CITY is up at Tablet and it's part of their 100th Anniversary of the Soviet Revolution week. In my column I talk about how younger artists have started to engage with the hopeful, utopian aspects of the Revolution, taking a playful approach to history.
For almost 10 years [Psoy] Korolenko and [Daniel] Kahn have been bringing all kinds of revolutionary songs into their slightly mad dialectic. As the Unternationale, Korolenko and Kahn set Zionist, Bundist, and Communist anthems against each other. No longer matters of life and death, 20th-century anthems become just another text, to be mixed and remixed with a ruthless 21st-century playfulness.
Keep in mind, that playfulness has only recently become available as an artistic position. Insofar as the Cold War is over (if it is), we're only now starting to see what Yiddish studies, and new Jewish art, might look like without the fierce gatekeepers of anti-Communist hegemony on guard. What if we could talk about Jewish Communists without constantly relitigating the battles of the past? In their superb introduction to the new translation of David Bergelson’s Judgment, Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich tackle a thorny problem, not just for readers of Bergelson, but for students of Yiddish history and literature: how Cold War politics warped the reception of Soviet Yiddish art in the West.
In 1952 Bergelson was murdered on Stalin’s order. A decade later he suffered another execution, this one in the West, as his literary legacy was made and remade according to the politics of the day. Judgment, published in 1929 and untranslated into any language until 2017, became the boundary for the “acceptable” Bergelson. Murav and Senderovich note, for example, that in 1977 the hugely influential anthologists Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg introduced Bergelson to English speaking readers, but as regarded the last two decades of Bergelson’s work, it was “better to leave in the past.” For Howe and Greenberg, there was no point in translating any of it. Having recently read Judgment, a penetrating, darkly funny, and nuanced tale of shtetl Jews caught in the post-Revolution Civil War, the willingness to discard such an important work in deference to politics strikes the contemporary reader as bordering on literary malpractice.... Read more over at Rokhl's Golden City...
Welcome to another installment of my series on out of print Jewish records. I'm working my way through a gorgeous stack of records gifted to me last summer. As I listen I'm going to share my favorite bits and pieces with you.
Today we have the Jewish Students' Bund Production of Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle*, featuring the Yiddish Youth Ensemble (1971). Though you probably can't find this album (or cassette) today, many of the songs appear on In Love and In Struggle: The Musical Legacy of the Labor Bund. That CD was released in 1999 and features the incandescent vocals of Adrienne Cooper (z"l).
I picked one song to share with you today. It's listed as Vinterlid (Winter Song) on Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle. This track features Susan Finesilver, Judy Gottlieb, Dina Schwartzman and Josh Waletsky.
[WARNING I AM ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT MUSIC THEORY AND I AM BOTH UNLICENSED AND UNQUALIFIED] I first heard this in my living room with a friend visiting from England. She happens to be both a master klezmer fiddle teacher as well as an early music professional. It was her observation about this particular recording which really struck me. She noted how the spare setting (just voice, no piano) sounded more like early church music than Eastern European Jewish folk music. The whole album, she noted, used diatonic or church modes, as opposed to what we in 2013 think of as Jewish music (freygish) mode.
I should note, though, that this is a product of late 20th century America. And, of course, Jewish music in Eastern Europe reflected both ancient Jewish liturgical traditions as well as shared Western musical traditions. My visiting friend told me of a project right now exploring the connections between Yiddish and German folksong.
Authenicity, you're soaking in it.
In any case, I am in love with this unusual setting of Vinterlid. I hope you enjoy it, too.
(Apologies for the not great photos. If there's something you'd like to see more clearly let me know and I'll try to take a better picture.)
The liner notes for Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle are great because they include the Yiddish lyrics (in Yiddish oysyes and YIVO standard transliteration) as well as English translation. All Yiddish music should come with such beautifully thought out materials.
Vinterlid - Avrom Reisen
hulyet, hulyet beyze vintn
fray bahersht di velt!
brekht di tsvaygn, varft di beymer
tut vos aykh gefelt
traybt di foygl fun di velder
un faryogt zey fort
di vos kenen vayt nisht flien
toyt zey oyfn ort!
Frolic, frolic, you angry winds;
Freely rule the world.
Break the branches, hurl the trees,
Do whatever you please.
Drive the birds from the woods,
And keep on chasing them away;
And those that cannot fly too far-
Kill them on the spot!
There are many, many recorded versions of Vinterlid. Some have recorded it as Beyze Vintn. One of my absolute favorites is this very different interpretation by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird. It appears on his CD Dos tsebrokhene loshn/The Broken Tongue. (A must-have for any Jewish music collection.)
Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird doing Beyze Vintn.
Memorial for the Murdered Yiddish Poets, Sunday at 3
And then at 3 (on Sunday) is the annual Memorial for the Murdered Yiddish Poets. From the Congress for Jewish Culture:
On August 12th, 1952, Stalin's regime executed, among other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, five Yiddish writers whose achievements represent some of the high points of 20th century literature: Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Moyshe Kulbak.
This Sunday, August 12th, 2012 at 3 PM, the Congress for Jewish Culture together with CYCO Yiddish Books, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Workmen's Circle will be holding a memorial
to remember those and other Yiddish writers who suffered repression in the Soviet Union. The event is free and open to the public, one need only register in advance at the following link: http://yivo.org/events_signups.php
It will take place at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) in Manhattan.
The program is in Yiddish and English. Professor Thomas Bird of Queens College will chair, with the participation of Boris Sandler, editor of the Forverts; Paul Glasser of the YIVO; Hy Wolfe of CYCO Yiddish Books will recite and sing poetry by the writers; Paula Teitelbaum, the folksinger, will sing two songs by Moyshe Kulbak (executed in 1937) and read poems by other writers; and the program will also feature two new short films using poems by Perets Markish as the soundtrack, one by neon animator Jack Feldstein and one by Paul Fischer.
Come, help us remember!
New Staged Reading of the Dybbuk, Wednesday, August 15th, 7 pm
You are hereby cordially invited to attend the wedding of the holy bride and groom. Stand with us under the khupe on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 at 7 PM as Leah Bas Sender is married to Menashe Zoknlialke at the behest of her father, R' Sender Brinitzer.
Potluck orem-moltsayt (seriously, bring a dish fit for a rich man's daughter's wedding).
We present to you a staged reading of selections from The Dybbuk, by Shane Bertram Baker and Benjamin Haim Fox-Rosen with S. Z. Rapoport. Music combobulated by Benjamin Haim Fox-Rosen.
Free and open to the public. RSVP requested. Limited seating. Dress your Sabbath best.
at The St. James Building, 1133 Broadway, Suite 245southwest corner of 26th Street and Broadway
And the Dybbuk's Dybbuk
Finally, a little Hasidic foygel reminded me that you can watch the original Yiddish Dybbuk on-line. Enjoy!
