Yiddish Curiosities: a library of wonderful but forgotten Yiddish songs from the late 1920s and after (includes Polish Jewish Cabaret). Have a listen!

Somebody should do an oral history on Ben Chasin! I can't understand him well enough over the phone to spell the names he gives me!

However, he remembered the thief-turned-writer Urke Nakhalnik and said his most famous play was Nakhtmentshn (people of the night) and that the "best actors" played in it, two of them from Vilna. I think he said Rivka Shiler and Chaver Wolfgang but when I google those names nothing comes up.

UPDATE: Three years later, I have found melodies for almost all these songs (and many more collected by Pinkhes Sapir and Itzik Zhelonek. I've recorded many of them, and I've put the whole 126+ songs into a book called Yiddish Songs from Warsaw 1929-1934. Read more at the Yiddish Emporium site I put together for my projects.

The original post read:

This is the "Inhalt" (Table of contents) from one of the little books I got copies of from the National Library in Jerusalem (at great expense!). The title means "The treasure of Yiddish theater and gramophone recordings, couplets and songs, gathered by the artist P. Sapir, sung by the best Jewish artists..." If you have information on these songs or artists, I beg you to leave me a comment!

Der oytser fun yidishe teater un patefon
Kupletn un lider
tsuzamengeshtelt fun artist P. Sapir 1933
gezungen fun di beste yidishe artistn: Feld, Lebedev, Ludvik Zats

Kupletn:
Gey, makh, az es makht zikh nisht (Yitskhok Feld)
In dr'erd dos shnayderay (Yitskhok Feld)
Ikh halt nisht derfun (M. Bozshik)
In Odes, in Odes (Aaron Lebedev)
Lebedik, freylekh
Tsirele, Mirele (Aaron Lebedev)
Oy, mame, shlog mikh nisht
Ludvik zats als badkhn (Ludvik Zats)
A kale-bazingen (Peysakh Burshteyn)
Duet Roza Huki (Regina un Bozsik)
S'iz nisht geven un s'iz nishto (Ludvik Zats)

Lider:
Dos Yidishe Lid (Molly Picon)
Menashe (Moyshe Kosvitski aka MOSHE KUSEVITSKY)
Der vaser-treger
Leybke fort keyn amerike (M. Brodetski)
Dos iz di libe (Yitskhok Feld)
Di eybike mame (Lucy German)
A kidushin-ringele (I. Grinhoyz)
Mir voyle yingelekh (M. Hermalin)
Soni-boy (oyf yidish) (Al Jolson)
Ikh for aheym (Yukhoved Zilberg)

Monologn:
Gest, gest
A khazn a shiker (Morris Schwartz)
Handel, handel (Iberg. I. Feld)
un nokh andere

I'm currently going through the photographs I took of the pages of Itzik Zhelonek's little books of theater songs and cleaning them up so they're readable - between the poor lighting in the Chasidic library where I took the photos, and the brown paper they were printed on (well, it wasn't brown then, but it's brown now, and crumbling - almost all of Yiddish literature was printed on terrible acidic paper), a lot of massaging is required.

The cool thing is, Itsik was trying to be right up-to-the-minute, so his songs and monologues are taken from the shows which were popular in the year he printed the books.

This was a 1934 book called Lider far dir far mir un oykh far ir un monologn on a shir which translates endearingly as "Songs for you for me and also for her, and no end of monologues" from his series called "Tashnbibliotek." This particular song is noted as being "The song from the piece Urke Nachalnik." (The title seems to be A thief is very quick (A ganev iz a teykef) but Itzik Gottesman suggests it might actually be A thief is a powerful man (A ganev iz a takif) "

Thanks to google I was instantly able to discover that Urke Nachalnik was born in 1897 with the name Itzchak Baruch Farbarowicz, into a prosperous Jewish family in a village called Wizna. Wikipedia says cryptically that he "became a criminal and then a self made author and ended his life heroically on November 11 of 1939 as a leader of a small underground unit that fought the German invaders."


There is a wonderful article about Urke in Tablet Magazine. Some excerpts:

He moved to Warsaw, where he ascended in the city’s underworld, working his way up from smalltime pickpocketry to well-planned heists of local businesses, and he formalized his pursuit by taking the name Urke Nachalnik, which means “brazen master criminal,” in the lingo favored by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European thieves.

By his mid-30s, he had spent half his life behind bars ... he went to lectures given by Stanislaw Kowalski ... Urke Nachalnik showed up with two novels and part of an autobiography, which kicks off as follows: “Before I begin the sad story of my life I feel bound to give at least a summary of the circumstances that led me away from the straight and narrow. I ask the reader’s forgiveness for first starting with a picture of my entrance into the world.”

[Kowalski] had it published as Zyciorys wlasy przestpcy, The Autobiography of a Criminal ... an instant bestseller in Poland, becoming the most popular book of the year ... the prison authorities released Nachalnik in 1933, two years before his sentence was up.

Nachalnik’s serialized stories of the Jewish lowlife were a huge hit among the Jews of Poland and in early 1934, actors involved with the smallish La Scala Theatre (not the opera house in Milan) decided to stage a play based on his tales....

The play portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality ... After packed houses for first performances, the actors and stage-hands showed up at the theater for the third evening to find that all the electrical cords had been cut and all the costumes were missing. Even the set had disappeared. It was a mystery—the theater had been hijacked, but by whom? Gossips in town suggested that members of Warsaw’s underworld were furiously unhappy with the play...

The theater managers didn’t know what else to do and sent for Urke Nachalnik. He made things right; he contacted some of his former cronies and every costume and piece of the set was returned, enabling the show to go on as scheduled.

I don't have the tune for this song (yet!) but you can hear another song, Din Toyre, from the Urke Nachalnik show at Itzik Gottesman’s Yiddish song-of-the-week blog.

Labels: gangsters

There is a man in Katowice who has spent four years putting fabulous old recordings of 78s from Poland onto youtube. His online name is jurek46pink - if you clink that link, you can subscribe to his channel. He has an amazing collection, not only of recordings, but of photographs and memorabilia, and for quite some time he shared it all quite liberally with the online community.

When he discovered that people had started copying his materials without permission, he became more cautious, but luckily he hasn't packed up and left town! You can hear the old Polish tangos on his channel and marvel at how much he knows about the period.

He says he will help me with my 'M'ken nisht tsvingen tsu keyn libe' request. I'll let you know when it's posted.