By Irv Saposnik
Center for Jewish Studies
The success of Jewish immigration to America may be measured in part by the many contributions that Jews have made to American culture. Foremost among these has been the American popular song, for without all the Jewish song writers how would America have learned to sing? Having arrived as immigrant children, these Jewish song writers transformed themselves into Americans, and as they transformed themselves, they transformed America's musical language.
The old songs was where it all began; the songs heard in childhood were redesigned for the American stage and screen; the song was old, but the words were new. The Yiddish song of Eastern Europe developed into the music of the Yiddish theater, and was then revised as Irving Berlin's "A Russian Lullaby," Harold Arlen's "Stormy Weather," and George Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So."
Before the phonograph became popular, sheet music allowed the Yiddish theater song to become a fixture of the immigrant home. The Yiddish theater songs that were published as sheet music, often with photographs of their composers and/or the stars of the Yiddish stage that made them famous, are the archeological fragments of this lost Yiddish world, artifacts of a once-thriving culture now silent.
Many of these Yiddish theater songs can be explored at the Mills Music Library, thanks to a recently acquired collection of Yiddish sheet music which dates from before the turn of the 20th century until the 1930's. Cradle songs, love songs, songs of longing and regret, all compose, "a uniquely valuable...portal by which sounds of Jewish music entered mainstream American life" (Heskes)*.
The Mills Collection contains selections from the most prolific and popular Yiddish theater composers: Avrom Goldfaden, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Alexander Olshenetsky, while it also preserves the memory of less familiar but nonetheless influential composers such as Louis Fridsell, Perlmutter and Wohl, and Joseph Meyerowitz. Several songs are written as letters, usually from the old country, and often by mothers left behind, while others reflect the longing of a displaced people not yet able to adjust to their new home: "Warsaw," "Zlatopol," "Mein Shetele Belz," "Ich Benk Noch Mein Shetele."
For the Jewish immigrant, "the early years of entry were a time of great transition, full of loneliness, uncertainty, and insecurity" (Heskes). The songs in the Mills Collection open a window into this Yiddish immigrant world, when the theater was often a surrogate synagogue as well as an alternate home. The Yiddish words provided comfort, the continuity of a language that survived the journey across the Atlantic, while the music served as a bridge between old and new, old world rhythms in a new setting.
The sheet music covers offer a look back to a time when Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff and Menasha Skulnick could not only sing but sell songs, when composers were recognizable by their photographs, when the theater was more than an after-dinner event. The face on the sheet music cover, along with the identifiably-Jewish iconography, was a certificate of kashrut, a guarantee that the Yiddish song was able to take its rightful place in the Jewish home alongside the other objects of Jewish survival.
With this collection of Yiddish sheet music, Mills Music Library joins other major libraries in paying tribute to the Yiddish theater song and to the culture that gave it life and meaning. To paraphrase what Jerome Kern once said about Irving Berlin, Yiddish music has no place in American music; it is American music.
*Heskes, Irene. Yiddish American Popular Songs 1895 to 1950. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992.