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

Miriam Isaacs, who's been researching the Stonehill Collection at the Holocaust Museum, told me most of the dirty songs Ben Stonehill recorded at the Hotel Marsellaise were about rebbes. And here is one. It was written by Ludwig Satz, I found the recording at the Harvard Judaica Collection. Zhelonek, however, transcribed a recording of the song by Herman Fenigstein, I've never seen or heard that recording.

So there were three sets of words: the words Satz scrawled on a cocktail napkin or whatever and sent to the U.S. Copyright Office; the words he recorded; and the words Zhelonek transcribed. It seems to have been the rule that when somebody took somebody else's song into their own repertoire, they would re-write the words. So I chose the bits I liked best from those three versions and that's what I recorded yesterday. The song will be going on Nervez!, the last Itzik Zhelonek cd.

Here's our version. Roger Lynn Spears is playing piano, Randy Kloko is singing on the chorus.

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And here is a video from one of our concerts:

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The picture is of Ludwig Satz and Lucy Levine in the show called His Wife's Lover.

Below, my translation of what I sang.

Labels: der rebbe, fun, humor & satire, klezmer, nostalgia, religion, songs for sale