Pepi Litman Pandemic Project

Leksikon title page

Zylbercweig’s Lexicon of Yiddish Theatre Volume 1, 1931

When the pandemic hit, we all found new tools, new games, new ways to work & play. I found the Yiddish Klal Keyboard and started typing up the entry on Broderzingers in the Leksikon fun Yidishn Teater. In the lower right, it says this volume was published in Nyu-York. That’s where I first saw it, in the YIVO reading room. (You can now read it for free online at the Yiddish Book Center.) Read More »

Pepi Litman Part 2

You can now hear some of Pepi Litman’s recordings on the Internet Archive!

Pepi-Littman-hatThere’s also a Wikipedia article about her.

And I hear that my Yiddisher teater comrade  Miryem-Khaye Segel is writing a scholarly article about the Broderzinger movement that inspired Pepi Litman, & many others, to crisscross Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, trying to educate & uplift the masses through Yiddish song & comedy. They were like the earliest Yiddish sketch comedians!

Here’s an article about Pepi in the Times of Israel; scroll down to see our interpretation of her song “Hot a yid a vaybele!”

Pepi Littman, Pepi Litman (Part 1)

Pepi-1I fell in love with Pepi Littman’s voice in the 1990s, Read More »

This Is A Test

I’d like to enable folks to comment on this site & I am trying to figure out how to do that. Please write a comment if you can.

All About the gonifs CD: S’iz shoyn farfalen

This is another song I learned from Meyshke Alpert. It’s about going away to jail…a favorite theme for the gonifs. When the band formed back in the 1990’s, as the house band for pirate radio station Radio Libre, we regularly pulled capers that could have put us all away for quite a while. But we were white, & privileged, & educated; I especially was old enough that when I put on earrings & my job-hunting coat & scraped my wild hair back into a ponytail I could pass for a middle-class middle-aged lady (the disguise I am so desperate now to escape, twenty years later!).

Meyshke kindly wrote out the words for me. Roughly translated: Read More »

I’m back!

Back from the Bronx, here in Oakland, going into the recording studio Tuesday. So many inspiring people in NY! After 12-hour days with Ruth Rubin’s field recordings, I got to hang out with Sarah & her kids, Beyle & her poems,  Rachelle & her new sweetheart, who kindly sent along this photo of me singing Ruth Rubin songs at Barbés:

Photo by Albie Mitchell

We Interrupt This Blog…

We interrupt this blog for a special announcement brought to you from the Bronx:

Yep, I’m here at the end of the 4 subway line (“Ladies and gentlemen, the next and last stop is Woodlawn Cemetery”). I’m staying in a cabin in the backyard of the 91-year-old Yiddish singer-songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, whose windows look out on a wild garden (my favorite kind) overgrown with roses, flax, lilac & lilies. The cabin shelters under a giant maple tree, which Beyle says she started as a twig from the Bronx Botanic Garden.

I’ve come out here from California to help digitize the Ruth Rubin tapes at  YIVO.

Ruth Rubin

Basically, Ruth Rubin was the Alan Lomax of Yiddish folk culture. She spent her life collecting old Yiddish folksongs from old Yiddish folksingers. Starting in 1947, when she was 41, she recorded thousands of songs, stories, children’s rhymes, curses, prayers, streetsellers’ cries, jokes, riddles, rants & reminiscences. Ruth shlepped her reel-to-reel tape recorder to old folks’ homes, Greenwich Village parties, summer camps, public libraries, the Jewish Guild for the Blind, and her friend’s kitchens – anywhere she thought there might be a chance to save some scrap of Jewish culture.

Rejected by the straight, male-dominated academic world (all she had was a B.A. in folklore), she herself mocked scholars who pontificated about Jewish culture but never listened to a Yiddish folksong. The professors said romantic love didn’t exist in nineteenth-century Jewish culture; Ruth recorded hundreds of love songs that her informants learned from their mothers & grandmothers. The professors had secretaries and research assistants & faculty wives & university funding & salaries; Ruth made her living as a stenographer, typed her own tape logs, & created a meticulous, hand-bound, typewritten catalog to go with her excellent-quality field recordings. The professors published in academic journals which nobody ever read; Ruth Rubin wrote a book called “Voices of a People” (still in print!),  published numerous popular songbooks, & released one of the most important Yiddish records ever made, as an LP on Folkways Records.

Ruth spent twenty years preparing a book manuscript based on the recordings, but could never find an interested publisher. In the end, the book was published after her death. The book includes her music transcriptions, transliterated Yiddish lyrics, and translations, edited by Mark Slobin & Khane Mlotek. The book doesn’t include any additional source recordings, but it does come with a CD of the original LP.

That LP represents just a tiny fraction of the unheard material in the Ruth Rubin collection at YIVO, which has 130 reel-to-reel tapes, along with tape logs, catalogs, papers, & music manuscripts.  I’m so thankful to YIVO, to the An-Ski Institute, to the Center for Traditional Music & Dance, to the commune where I first learned Yiddish, & to all the people who worked together to bring me to NY to to hear these songs, & help turn them into digital files so other folks can hear them too.

YIVO sound archivist Lorin Sklamberg gave me a quick lesson in digitizing sound files before he left to tour Europe with the Klezmatics. Lorin’s colleague Motl Temkin followed up with long-distance tech advice while on vacation at the Arbeter Ring summer camp. Since then I spent 12 hours a day, six days a week, in the YIVO music archives. Every day I threaded the tape onto the reel-to-reel machine; set the sound levels on the computer; created the digital files; entered the song information in a searchable database; & listened to the songs over & over again to be sure I got everything right.  Then I rode the sweltering 4 train from Union Square to 247th St. & fell into bed, to khapn a dreml & do it all over again next day. The only reason I even took time off to post this blog entry is that the YIVO building is closed on Saturday.

Every Yiddish singer & scholar in town will soon be panting down YIVO’s neck, waiting for them to go public with the material. Ethel Raim & Itzik Gottesman, who helped Pete Rushefsky bring me out here through CTMD’s An-Sky Institute for Yiddish Culture, will teach some Ruth Rubin material at Yiddish Summer Weimar.  Lorin Sklamberg will teach some songs at KlezKanada in August.  But until YIVO works out the details of copyright law, I might be the only person, besides Ruth Rubin herself, to hear all 863 Yiddish songs on these tapes.

YIVO is dipping its toes into the waters of free internet sharing, with the online YIVO Encyclopedia, & more websites in the works.  I suspect the wave of interest in Ruth Rubin’s work will keep swelling & swelling until it breaks in a foaming rush of music & song. Let’s hope that YIVO will be there, surfing the crest alongside the Yiddish Book Center, which has already put most of its holdings online.

I must say I myself am dying to share the songs, to sing them out loud, to play them for everybody I know, just to let folks know what a very beautiful gift Ruth Rubin left: not just to me, or you, or YIVO, or CTMD, but to the world.

Maybe someday there will be a Ruth Rubin website like the one where 17,000 Alan Lomax recordings are available online, for free.

Alevay!

All about the gonifs CD: In droysn iz finster

This song comes from a Ruth Rubin recording, which I first heard at the Jewish Community Library.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Ii19xXtIM

The old Jewish Community Library of San Francisco was near Golden Gate Park in a big Victorian house (not big enough for all the books & records that filled it from attic to cellar). It was a good bike ride from the Mission District, through the ardent green of the park, into the foggy Sunset district where the Jewish books lived. Even better was riding back with a pack full of Yiddish songbooks & records.

The library had listening booths, & for a while Read More »

All about the gonifs CD: Tants a freylekhs

Peter Jaques learned this tune by ear from a recording of Shloimke Beckerman, who either composed it,  or learned it & then made it his own by embroidering it with his unique tone, timing & ornamentation.  The guy had a sound like no other:

Shloimke Beckerman Kolomeyke

Beckerman was one of the great klezmer clarinetists Read More »

All about the gonifs CD: Di Moyd fun Gas

the gonifs: Di moyd fun gas

This is a song from Arkady Gendler, a Bessarabian Yiddish singer born in 1921 in what is now Ukraine.  In 1999,  I was lucky enough to accompany Arkady on the accordion when he sang Read More »

All about the gonifs CD: Fishelekh in vaser

I learned this song from Michael (Meyshke) Alpert, who learned it from Isaac (Tsunye) Rymer.

Michael Alpert knows that the best way to learn Yiddish songs & dances is Read More »

All about the gonifs CD: Nokh a glezl

This is one of the first klezmer tunes the gonifs ever played; that means some of us have played it together for fifteen years now. I guess we got kind of Read More »

All about the gonifs CD: Rabeynu Tam

This song came from the collection compiled by Khane & Yosl Mlotek, Mir Trogn a Gezang. This is the first Yiddish songbook I ever saw.  It’s part of a three-book set based on Read More »

All About the gonifs CD: Teahouse Sher

The Teahouse Sher comes from an old songbook at the Jewish Community Library, maybe the first oral collection of Yiddish folksongs ever published. It’s a hundred years old this year.

Yiddish Folksongs, with their original airs, collected by J. L. Cahan: International Library Publishing Co., NY, 1912

Judah Leyb Cahan, who edited & published the collection, was born Read More »

The gonifs CD is here!

12 March 2012

The gonifs CD is done! I just rode my bike to Porto Franco Records on Valencia St. & got a boxful. The band will donate Read More »