Birthday of Irving Berlin, Lyricist and Composer

Irving Berlin was born Yisroel (Isidore) Baline on May 11, 1888 in a shtetl near Mogilev (today Магілёў, Belarus). He was the youngest of eight children born to Moyshe (a cantor) and Lena Baline. The family settled in New York in 1893 and three years later Moyshe (now Moses) died leaving the family poverty-stricken. In 1902, Israel Baline left home and worked at various singing jobs in the city. In 1906, he wrote his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy” and changed his name to Irving Berlin. He quickly became recognized as a clever lyricist, despite the fact that he had difficulty writing English and had never learned musical notation.

In the early 1910s, ragtime, a musical creation of Southern and Midwestern African-Americans, was becoming extremely popular. Berlin began to write lyrics for ragtime numbers and eventually wrote his own, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which became a worldwide hit as recorded by Emma Carus in 1911. It became one of the most famous of all ragtime songs, with its sheet music selling over one million copies.

Berlin continued his success throughout the decade, writing popular musicals. While enlisted during the First World War, he wrote a hit military-themed show, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which featured the hit “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” and for which he wrote “God Bless America” (whose melody was partially lifted from a Jewish dialect novelty song). “God Bless America” was later revised and famously performed by Kate Smith in 1938.

Berlin had an immensely successful musical theater career, creating hit shows such as Ziegfeld Follies (1919, 1920, 1927), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Call Me Madam (1950). He also wrote the scores for films Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Holiday Inn (1942), which featured one of his best known songs — “White Christmas.”

He died in New York on September 22, 1989.

Here’s an early dialect novelty hit by Berlin, “Yiddisha Nightingale,” recorded by Maurice Burkhardt in 1911:

Birthday of Léon Bakst, Painter & Theater Designer

Léon Bakst was born Lev (or Leyb) Rosenberg on May 10, 1866 to a middle class Jewish family in Grodno (today: Гродно, Belarus). He studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student and worked as a book illustrator. He was expelled from the Academy after depicting figures in the Pietà as impoverished Jews. At the time of his first exhibition in 1889 he took the surname “Bakst” apparently based on his mother’s maiden name, although its origin is unclear.

At the beginning of the 1890s was actively a part of artistic circles in the city and he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. From 1893 to 1896 he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and with Jean-Léon Gérôme. He returned to Russia and was part of a group of artists who founded Mir Iskusstva (World of Art). Along with his friends Serge Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois he founded the journal of the same name. He continued painting and teaching art. During the 1905 Revolution, Bakst was working for a wide range of arts magazines.

Bakst's 1912 set design for Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé

In 1909 Bakst went to Paris where he began designing stage sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s newly formed ballet company which eventually became the Ballets Russes. He produced scenery and costumes for Cléopâtre (1909), Scheherazade (1910), Carnaval (1910), Narcisse (1911), Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), and Daphnis et Chloé (1912). Through these and other works, Bakst achieved international fame. His bold designs and sumptuous colours combined with minutely refined details clearly influenced the fabrics and fashions of the day.

Here is a slideshow of of Bakst’s work, set to the music of “Scheherazade” by Rimsky-Korsakov:

In 1922, Bakst went to Baltimore to visit his friend and patron, art philanthropist Alice Warder Garrett. She became Bakst’s representative in the United States and organized two exhibitions of the artist’s work in New York and traveling exhibitions throughout the U.S. Bakst also transformed the gymnasium of Garrett’s home into a colorfully Modernist private theatre, the only private theatre designed by Bakst.

Bakst died of a pulmonary ailment in 1924 in Paris.

Birthday of Dovid Edelstadt,  Anarchist & Poet

Dovid Edelstadt was born on May 9, 1866 in Kaluga (today: Калуга, Russia).  He was educated in Russian language and literature and he published his first poem in Russian at the age of 12. After the Kiev pogrom of 1881 he emigrated to the United States as part of an agrarian settlement program. Rather than moving to the countryside, however, he settled in Cincinnati to work in the garment industry.

In 1888 he moved to New York City, where he continued working in sweatshops and became involved in the developing anarchist movement. He participated in the first Jewish anarchist group in New York, The Pioniere der Freiheit (Pioneers of Liberty) – a highly Germanized Yiddish was considered elegant in those days). The Pioneers organized meetings, fundraisers, and rallies, and began to spread anarchist propaganda among Jewish immigrants. Their efforts led to the establishment of anarchist circles in other cities – Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Providence and established the newspaper, װארהייט (Truth). Edelstadt often traveled to Philadelphia to deliver talks and he also contributed to the London Yiddish anarchist paper אַרבייטער פֿרײַנד (Workers’ Friend).

At 24 years old, Edelstadt was the third chief editor of the פֿרײַע אַרבעטער שטימע (Free Voice of Labor). He wrote frequently in Yiddish, with works such as “אין קאַמף (In Struggle, or To Battle!),” “װאַכט אויף (Awake!),” and “מײַן צװאה (My Last Will and Testament),” that called upon his working-class audience to revolt against the upper classes and seize the means of production. “How long,” Edesltadt wrote in his poem “Awake!” “Will you create sparkling riches for those who rob you of your bread?” His extremely popular lyrics, sung in sweatshops and on picket lines, depict the world’s imperfections and the wondrous life to come after a social revolution.

Listen to the Klezmatics sing “אין קאַמף,” written by Edelstadt in 1889:

Edelstadt's Grave in Lakewood, Colorado

With the bad conditions in the sweatshops and the tenements, Edelstadt, a buttonhole-maker by trade, contracted tuberculosis and was forced to quit his post in October 1891. He moved to Denver to receive treatment. He continued to send poems to the paper, but he did not live much longer. Edelstadt died there on October 17, 1892 at the age of 26 and was buried near the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society campus off of Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, Colorado.

In the next few years after his death, cultural groups named after Edelstadt sprang up in Chicago, Boston, and other cities. In Argentina, many years later, Jewish anarchists named their cultural circle in Buenos Aires after him. The Free Voice of Labor eulogized him: “David Edelstadt, a fine idealistic nature, a spiritual petrel whose songs of revolt were beloved by every Yiddish-speaking radical.”

Yortsayt of Berek Joselewicz, Jewish-Polish Military Leader

Dov-Ber (Berek) Joselewicz was born on September 17, 1764 in Kretinga in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—a small town near the city of Polągi (Palanga). After receiving a traditional Jewish education, he worked as the financial agent to the local landowner, Bishop Ignacy Jakub Massalski. In this capacity, he traveled frequently to Western Europe, conducting various entrepreneurial activities. With the fortune he amassed, Joselewicz settled in the Warsaw suburb of Praga, where he married his wife Rokhl around 1788 and became a supplier to the army.

Joselewicz was the only Jew in Praga who contributed money in support of the uprising against the third and final division of Poland. Hoping the uprising would usher in equal rights for Polish Jews, he joined the local militia and approached the leadership of the uprising with the suggestion that a Jewish fighting unit be formed. Tadeusz Kościuszko took up this proposal and in September 1794 appointed Joselewicz colonel of a Jewish cavalry squad. In October 1794, Joselewicz made a public appeal in Yiddish denouncing Russia and Prussia and calling upon Polish Jews to join this regiment. At Joselewicz’s request, they were allowed to keep their religious customs, including access to kosher food, abstaining from combat on the Sabbath when possible, and growing their beards. Joselewicz’s unit was popularly known as “the Beardlings.” However, the regiment was decimated in a Russian assault on Praga on November 4, 1794.

"Dov-Ber, Military Hero of the Polish Armed Forces" (Click to Englarge)

Joselewicz moved to Galicia, settling in Lwów in 1795. His suggestion that a Jewish volunteer troop be organized within the framework of the Austrian army was rejected by Vienna in October 1796. However, General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski took Joselewicz on as an officer. After seeing battle in Italy and Germany and achieving the rank of cavalry captain, Joselewicz petitioned to be discharged after the Peace of Lunéville on February 9, 1801. His sense of hopelessness about achieving Polish independence through the Polish legions, as well as the discrimination he had suffered as a Jew, played a decisive role in his decision.

With the founding of the Duchy of Warsaw, he returned to Poland, where, initially as an officer and later as commander of a cavalry squadron, he took part in many battles. On May 8, 1809, he was killed at the Battle of Kock amidst clashes with the Hungarian Hussars. In 1909, a monument was erected there in his honor.

Here’s Sidor Belarsky singing the song “מלחמה (War),” based on the poem by Avrom Reyzen about the deprivation and misery that follow after a father and husband heads off to war:

Birthday of Y.A. Merison, Yiddish anarchist & translator

Y. A. Merison (Yankev-Avrom Yerukhimovitsh) was born on May 6, 1866 near Vilna, to a rabbinical family. Later, he was also known by his Anglicized penname Dr. Jacob Merison. In 1887 he immigrated to the United States and settled in New York. There he earned a medical degree and joined the Pioneers of Freedom, the first Jewish American anarchist group. Merison is best known for translating important scientific and political works into Yiddish.

Y.A. Merison. מוּטער אוּן קינד (Mother and Child). New York, 1912.

He translated the work of writers like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx,  John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Max Stirner, Errico Malatesta, and Peter Kropotkin, as well as the work of other socialists and anarchists. Beginning in 1906 he argued for the relaxation of anarchist “taboos” against mainstream labor unions. He also argued, more controversially, for parliamentary politics, which most in the movement opposed as agents of the state, bureaucracy, and the capitalist class. Merison’s “revisionist” anarchism was strongly condemned by most other anarchists.

Here’s a link to watch Free Voice of Labor, the great documentary about the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States:

He later became a supporter and close collaborator of the Socialist revolutionary and Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlovsky, who promoted the formation of an autonomous socialist territory for Jews – though not necessarily in Palestine. He was also one of the first anarchists to criticize the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia.

Merison died on January 18, 1941 in New York.

Birthday of Moyshe Nadir, Yiddish writer

Yitskhok Reiss, better known by his pen name Moyshe Nadir, was born on May 5, 1885 in the town of Narayev (today Нараїв, Ukraine) in eastern Galicia. In 1898, at the age of 13, he immigrated to New York and Americanized his name to Isaac Reiss. He spent his teenage years working in a sweatshop. He lived in a mostly gentile neighborhood and in 1902 sent a Yiddish newspaper some of his work. Soon after,his writing was picked up and published widely in the New York Yiddish press, under a variety of pseudonyms, including Rinaldo Rinaldini, Dilensee Mirkarosh, Der Royzenkavalir, Doctor Hotzikl, and, finally, Moyshe Nadir. The name “Nadir” is a Yiddish expression meaning “here you are” or “take that.”

He published short stories, humoresque poems and essays and worked for many years with the satirical גרויסער קונדעס, (The Big Stick) a humor magazine. His first book װילדע רויזען (Wild roses) was published in 1915. It quickly brought notoriety to Nadir due to its erotic and aggressive attitude. Nadir was associated with the Yunge writers, and together with his friend Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, he edited the anthology פֿון מענטש צו מענטש (From Man to Man). Later, he started writing his philosophical lyrical miniatures for “Tog” newspaper and built his reputation as a great satirical Yiddish writer.

Nadir was a witty and humorous writer, and was adored by his reading public. He wrote a few plays and skits that were performed in the Maurice Schwartz Theater and in the marionette theaters of Zuni Maud and Yosl Kotler. He also translated books by great writers such as Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Anatole France, and Rudyard Kipling. Nadir began to write for the communist daily Frayhayt soon after it began publishing. He stayed with the movement until 1939 when Stalin and Hitler signed a joint non-aggression pact. He died in 1943, in Woodstock, New York.

Here are Karsten Troyke and Gennadi Dessiatnik performing Nadir’s most famous song ”Az der rebe elimelekh,” a raucous Yiddish variant on a the Old King Cole theme:

Birthday of Mordecai Gebirtig, Yiddish poet & songwriter

Mordecai Gebirtig (Bertig) was born on May 4, 1877 in Kraków. According to most sources he was trained as a carpenter, (although many details about Gebirtig’s first 20 years have recently been refuted by Natan Gross). Gebirtig began his artistic career in the first years of the twentieth century as an actor with an amateur theatrical company in Kraków. With support from Avrom Reyzen, Gebirtig began to write and published his works in the periodical דער סאָציאַל-דעמאָקראַט (The Social Democrat), the official organ of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia.

During World War I, Gebirtig served in the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1920, the first collection of his songs was published in Kraków. It took the form of a booklet, titled פֿאָלקשטימלעך  (In the Folk Style). Gebirtig’s music was, in some measure, continuing the musical tradition of the popular Galician cabaret entertainers known as the Broder Singers. In the following years, his love songs, children’s songs, and lullabies became increasingly famous because the lyrics were easily comprehensible and his melodies catchy. Adopted by leading Yiddish players such as Molly Picon, Gebirtig’s songs became staples of numerous theatrical productions in Poland and the United States.

Listen to Mendy Cahan sing אַבֿרמל דער מאַרװיכער (Avreml the Pickpocket). In this song Gebirtig addresses issues of crime and the collapse of family life, and argues that both find their roots in poverty and need:

In Kraków, Gebirtig frequently performed his songs, typically with audience participation. In 1936, his second collection of songs was published with sheet music, entitled מײַנע לידער (My Songs). One thousand copies of this collection were printed and distributed. In 1938 Gebirtig wrote his song “אונדזער שטעטל ברענט (Our Shtetl Is Burning),” a stirring response to the Przytyk pogrom of 1936. During the war it became popular within Jewish resistance movements. It was sung in many ghettos and camps, and translated into Polish and several other languages.

Until 1940, Gebirtig lived in Kraków with his wife and family and continued to write songs that reflected the dark mood of the time, although his songs still contained a note of hope for a better future. In October 1940, his family was expelled with other Jews to the outskirts of the city in Łagiewniki. One of the songs he wrote then was called “אַ טאָג פֿון נקמה (A Day for Revenge),” a song of solace and encouragement about the future downfall of the persecutors. In April 1942, the Gebirtig family was transported to the ghetto, where he continued to write. On June 4, 1942, while being marched to the Kraków train station on the way to an extermination camp, Gebirtig was murdered by random Nazi gunfire.

Now that the 2012 campaign is in full swing (az okh un az vey — o and woe), the Vortsman is keeping his eye on the misuse of Yiddish (or Yinglish) in the media.

A recent report on the assumed GOP candidate said: “When told that if he doesn’t switch ties, he’ll be perceived as wearing the same thing two nights in a row, Romney says, it’s fine with him, he’ll ‘look like a schlep.’”

Even if we were to put aside our insistence that Yiddish words not be transliterated as though they were German (fat chance), the writer of the report should know that the noun derived from the verb shlepn—to pull or drag—is shleper—disheveled person, in that state due to low-paid hard (dragging) labor or, sometimes, simply to poverty.

No chance that the assumed standard-bearer would ever fit those descriptions regardless of the ties to which he’s bound.

The matter of spelling—in Yiddish this time—came up in a query to the Vortsman about the rendition of the Hebrew/Yiddish word for “moon” in “Zibetsn Levones (Seventeen Moons),” a poem by Yankev Glatshteyn (aka Jacob Glatstein in some circles). Glatshteyn spells the word in Yiddish transliteration: l-e-v-o-n-e-s (in the equivalent Yiddish letters, of course). The usual practice was and remains to keep the Hebrew spelling of words derived from Hebrew and Aramaic. Thus, the poet should have spelled it l-v-n-u-s (lamed,veyz,nun,vov,sof).

How come? The usual answer is that there’s a “red plot” afoot. Don’t be fooled by that Fox News approach. True, in Yiddish publications under Soviet rule, Hebrew-origin words were transliterated as above. In addition, them Red Rooshins eliminated the five final letters in the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet. So Glatshteyn was a secret commie agent? Not on your life.

Starting early in the 20th century, Yiddishists were concerned that their potential readers among young people, having had a secular education rather than the traditional Hebrew religious training, tried to find more “accessible” forms. The great classic author Y. L. Perets even proposed, in 1908, that Yiddish be “romanized,” that is, written with Latin characters. A compromise developed in the 1920s—the one Glatshteyn followed in the cited poem. Hebrew-origin words would be transliterated, but the horror of the Soviet five-letter execution would not be tolerated. In fact, not a single Yiddish publication around the world—pro- or anti-Soviet— jettisoned those five final letters.

However, the use of transliteration continued through the mid-40s, when post-khurbn (Holocaust) writers and publishers returned to traditional spelling.

Another reader asks about the meaning of mir—me (or we)— in such phrases as zay mir gezunt, hob mir a gutn…Literally translated: “be (for) me well, have (for) me a good…

The reader went on to opine: “mir, I assume is dative case. Could ‘with’ be understood?”

Said the snarky Vortsman: “Since mir  follows the (understood) preposition far—for, I guess that makes it dative—though I much prefer the non-Latinate term, ‘indirect object.’”

Lest this start a grammarians’ war, let us hastily turn to a word that only seemed to be war-like: kriglekh. It occurs in a song about his childhood by Morris Rosenfeld, recently heard on the net’s “Yiddish Song of the Week,” presented by the An-Sky Jewish Folklore Research Project. One couplet reads: “hit zikh, nit tsebrekht di kriglekh, ruik, makht kayn gvald; Veyst ir vu di yagdes vaksn, in dem tifn vald?”

A Krigl Mit Yagdes

The knowledgeable director of the Project gave this translation:

“Be careful not to break our armaments, quiet, make no noise. Do you know where the berries grow in the deep woods?”

The Vortsman, a devoted listener, commented on-line about the rendering of kriglekh into “armaments,” suggesting that the poet intended “little jars,” the plural diminutive of krug—jar or pitcher. This was disputed by a long-ago friend who noted that the poem described a kids’ “war game,” so “armaments” might be correct. To which the Vortsman replied that the context, “…where the berries grow…” supported his position.

A Krig Mit Yagdes

The dispute sent us to the bookshelf and some fascinating discoveries. Alexander Harkavy’s dictionary of 1898 shows krig only as the plural of krug. His 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew version has six krig entries relating to war and quarrels. Uriel Weinreich’s Modern Yiddish/English dictionary increases the total to ten. Nokhem (Nahum) Stutchkoff’s magisterial Thesaurus—the Supreme Court in these matters—shows krig only in the categories relating to war and quarrels, while krigl appears only under keylim (dishes, receptacles) where krug is also found.

We have often drawn attention to Stutchkoff’s two-plus columns of terminology for weaponry (vofn) to demonstrate how far Yiddish is from being a “kitchen language.” Needless to say, kriglekh doesn’t appear there.

Der Vortsman is Hershl Hartman, long-time Yiddishkayt Board Member and Education Director at the Sholem Community. You can write the Vortsman at info at yiddishkayt.org.

Birthday of Maurycy Trębacz, Artist

Maurycy (Moyshe) Trębacz was born on May 3, 1861 to a Jewish family in Warsaw. From 1877 to 1880, Trębacz received private drawing lessons. He then received a two-year scholarship to attend the School of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he studied under the well-known historical painters Władysław Łuszczkiewicz and Jan Matejko. He continued his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, under Otto Seitz and Alexander Wagner, and graduated with a silver medal for his 1884 painting “Z martyrologii” (Of Martyrology), a study of a nude male.

He earned acclaim and medals at various world exhibitions, including a bronze medal in Paris for his painting “Rekonwalescentka” (Convalescent Girl) and a gold in Chicago for “Miłosierny Samarytanin” (The Good Samaritan). He also won awards at the First Exhibition of Polish Art in Kraków in 1887 and the Modern Art Exhibition in Lwów in 1894. Trębacz’s work shows the impact of both Academic Art and the Munich school. At the beginning of the twentieth century, impressionist trends began to appear in his paintings, especially in his landscapes. He continued throughout his career to favor portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, nudes, biblical scenes, and subjects drawn from Polish romantic poetry.

CLICK HERE to see visit a gallery of Trębacz paintings.

Trębacz was among the first generation of Jewish painters in Poland who followed in the artistic tradition of Maurycy Gottlieb.  Influenced by political issues that affected Jewish life in Poland, he began to paint Jewish historical and contemporary subject matter.  He fell victim to the anti-Jewish press in 1902 when a malicious article about his paintings appeared in Kurier Warszawski (Warsaw Courier), a notoriously conservative daily. This attack inspired Trębacz to join forces with Weinles and sculptor Józef (Mojżesz) Gabowicz to mount the first independent exhibition of Jewish artists in Warsaw in April 1911.

Among Trębacz’s most interesting Jewish works is “Izrael” (1902), an allegorical portrayal of the fate of the Jewish people.  The work demonstrates Trębacz’s growing sympathy for Zionism. In 1909, Trębacz moved his family to Łódź, where until 1939 he directed a painting school in his own studio. There he gained significant acclaim, primarily as a portrait artist, and became known as the “Nestor” of painting. His last solo exhibition took place in 1937.

Trębacz died on January 29, 1941 in the Łódź ghetto.

(click any image for enlarged slideshow)