21th August 2020 – Shabbat is almost here
And today we travel with our imagination to the USA of one century ago with Henry Sapoznik to answer this question: How does a non-Jewish African-American boy born at the beginning of the 20th century end up making a living singing liturgical music in Yiddish?
Hello, how are you? I hope well. This week I have had two reasons to celebrate:
- my birthday, that is on August 26th
- and to discover the amazing blog by Henry Sapoznik and his series of posts about the black cantors in the 1920s and 1930s at the USA.
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Who is Henry Sapoznik
I have the feeling that at the USA, any person interested in Jewish culture knows Henry. Despite the globalization, there is still a big gap between North America and Europe in the field of not mainstream culture, so let me introduce him.
I took this picture from his Facebook profile. It is meaningful: he is a Jew who plays banjo. But he is much more. According with his website, he is a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, award-winning producer, musicologist and performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture.
He explained to me that he started his blog as an answer to the situation produced by the pandemic. We are experiencing much suffering because of it but at least some little jewels are being born in this dramatic conditions. He also told me that he has the idea of starting a podcast. I will be checking to update you.
Sapoznik was the founding director of the sound archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York from 1982 to 1995, as well as founder and director of KlezKamp, beginning in 1985 for the next 30 years.
Henry’s parents were both from Rovno, between Lvov and Kiev. It is the region of Volhynia, also known as Volinskaya, Wolin, Wolyn, Wolina, Wolinsk, Volinski, Wolinski, Volenskii, Wolenskj, Wolenskja, Volin and Volyn, according to the JewishGen website. It is a land that has changed from the hands of Poland, Ukraine and Soviets. Nowadays it is part of Ukraine. Apart from the extermination of the Jews of Volhynia, that began in the first days after the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, in 1943–44 the region was the scene of ethnic massacres in which some 100,000 Poles died and some 20,000 Ukrainians were killed in revenge. The Polish film of 2016 Wołyń, in which my colaborator Janusz Prusinowski played, shows this situation.
According to JGuideEurope, on 6 November 1941, the 17500 inhabitants of Rovno’s ghetto were executed in a single day and left to rot in a huge, circular mass grave. The Sosonki memorial, on the road to Kiev, around two miles from Rovno, reminds this massacre.
Rovno has a synagogue very near the former (and bigger and newer) synagogue and Google Maps is very nice to show them to us:
You know this Music Before Shabbat uses music for the joy in itself and as the thead to learn more about history and I feel this very close to Henry’s vision. I can’t hide what a big joy it has been for me to meet this man and talk with him at the Facebook.
Toyve Ha’Cohen or the black cantor Thomas La-Rue
This amazing story is widely told by Henry in his blog in this post about Larue, and in this one about the tour he made in 1930. I strongly recommend you to check those links. Here I will just make a brief summary of Henry’s work. This poster is from his website too.
Thomas was born in 1902, son of a single mother. They lived in Newark (New Yersey) and she faced much racism. She could make friends only in the Jewish women. With the time, she started to become into their religious believings. Her son and her daughter received a traditional Jewish primary school education. It is not clear if she converted.
How did he start to become a professional singer in Yiddish?
According to Henry’s blog: «One anecdote about LaRue which was repeated so often it has the burnished patina of a creation myth, concerns a Sabbath service he attended as a young boy. During the service, the cantor was taken ill so LaRue quickly put on a prayer shawl and, before the congregation could orient itself, took to the lectern and in his soprano voice began to intone the prayers. The congregation was ready to storm the podium to take him down but he sang with such great feeling that they remained standing and began praying.» True or false, who knows. Thomas was hired by a manager and his career started in 1921 and soon he became usual at the stage in shows of Yiddish theatre. And the recording below is from June 1923.
In 1930 he made a tour in Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Germany and Poland. He was welcome in Warsaw with big scepticism. It was at the time the landmark for cantorial art, specially by the role of the Great Tłomackie synagogue, that will be our focus in a future edition of MBS. This wonderful picture below is from the website of the Jewish Historical Institute.
For that tour, the productor, Edvin Relkin, invented a totally fake story in which his mother died when he was young and his father was a high official in the local Abyssinian government, they were descendents of the Ten Lost Tribes.
Thomas’ last performance documented is in 1953 in Newark. It is not known his date of death nor where is he buried.
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The song encouraging the Polish Jews to keep the hope
Don’t give up hope yet, Mr. Jew
One day it will all work out for you
Pharaoh, Haman and Amolek taught a bitter lesson
But those days are through
Czar Nikolai, has met his destiny
And from Poland, you’ll be free
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Click the picture to listen to the recording of Thomas La-Rue:
I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
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Shabbat Shalom.
Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música