And yesterday I learn about the radio show Polin, done by the renowed Polish translator settled in Madrid Elżbieta Bortkiewicz Morawska (in the picture) for Radio Sefarad, a project by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain. It is in Spanish. I think it can be interesting even for the not Spanish speakers because you can check the topics and translate automatically the introductions in text for each of the chapters. She dedicated one of her editions to the Great Synagogue at Tłomackie Street too!

The song we’ll listen today is “A Yiddishe Mame”. Elżbieta is not Yiddishe, but she is a mother as well as an enthusiast of Jewish culture. So I think she will feel specially moved by this recording. I hope you too.

How much money would $100,000 from 1927 be now? That is the amount of money that Rosenblatt was offered by Warner Brothers to co-star with Al Jolson in ‘The Jazz Singer’.

They wanted him to have a relevant role as and to sing in the film Kol Nidrei. It is the prayer that is sang on the eve of Yom Kippur. He felt that it was much too sacred to be used as entertainment and refused the offer.

Nevertheless, he participated in the film, with the payment for a star, even when he only appeared to sing one song. And it was in a not religious frame. The protagonist is in the dilemma of continuing his father’s steps as a chazzan or pursuing stardom in jazz. He attends Rosenblatt’s concert in Chicago. He sings a Yiddish song, not religious, Yahrtzeit Licht, acredited to himself in Jyrics.com. Rosenblatt represents the roots.

Curious about that scene of the film?

Watch it here. If you like it, check also this other recording of the same piece.

In the film, the protagonist, who is the son of a cantor, pursues a career as a jazz singer. Rosenblatt encarnates the roots, the traditions. The attendance to that concert produces many emotions in the protagonist. Could he be making a big mistake by abandoning his roots and following the path of modernity? Rosenblatt might had said yes to that question.

Was Rosenblatt’s Kol Nidrei worth of it? 

For sure it was. He was very popular at the time and Warner Brothers were wise business people. And fortunately we can now hear him singing that prayer, here. Decide yourself!

In Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, Gil Toffell explains that “Yet whatever actual Jewish audiences made of the representation of the conflict of assimilation that formed the core of the film, the complexity of the drama was not foregrounded in the discourse or events promoting the title to British Jews. In the advertisements for the screening of the film at the Piccadilly Theatre the performance by Rosenblatt was advanced as a key attraction for Jewish audiences. No mention was made to the challenge to tradition by modernity, rather the promotion was positioned to appeal to identifiably conservative Jewish cultural tastes.” How was that…? Money makes the world go round? Even if not for Rosenblatt!

The multiple layers of The Jazz Singer  

The more I read about this film, the more meaningful it seems to be. Irv Saposnik made an amazing work in Jolson, The Jazz Singer, and the Jewish Mother: or How my Yiddishe Momme Became my Mammy, that I have to recommend with all my heart. Why? Because it uses the film to explain broader issues related to the creation of cultural identities. This analysis is useful for Jews and for anybody.

Saposnik explains the role of music, including the piece sang by Rosenblatt, in the film, with their symbolic use related to the roots and the modernity. He explains very nicely about the song we are listening to today. Below you’ll find more about this.

Briefly about his biography

As the star he was, it is easy to find the biography of Yossele Rosenblatt. For a long one, check this or this. For a shorter one, this. But this part will let us enjoy some wonderful pictures and to travel from our chair!

He was born in 1882 in Biela Tserkov. At that time, it seems there was a shtetl there. Nowadays is a little city, less than 90 kms to the South from Kiev. The presence of Jews is still noticeable. There is the great synagogue, used nowadays as a school, and there seem to be more buildings that have had use as synagogues. They are findable in google maps.

The great synagogue in Biela Tserkov looked like this. This picture is dated from some moment between 1895 and 1910. It is in wikipedia and is of public domain. See below its current look:

I will quote some paragraphs of the outstanding work by Irv Saposnik mentioned above (read it complete, here), as I wouldn’t ever transmit this deepness about the piece. The other piece mentioned, A Brivele der Mamen, “a little letter for mom”, is this. Find the lyrics of “My Yiddishe Mamma” under the video.

“A Brivele der Mamen” (1907) is only one of many Yiddish songs in which the Jewish mother was used as a reminder of the separation that emigration enforced. Its three stanzas, sung to a plaintive tune, foreshadow what was later to become commingled with nostalgia for the old home. The sadness of separation, the son’s lack of responsibility, the mother’s complaint that in eight years he hadn’t written her one letter, much of which later became comic shtick, was in 1907 no matter for laughter. The experience was too fresh, the pain too acute. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but the head forgets too soon. […]

“My Yiddishe Mamma” is as expressive of twenties’ sentiment as “A Brivele der Mamen” had been of turn-of-the-century attitudes. Written by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack in 1925, it became particularly identified with Sophie Tucker, especially after she recorded it in both English and Yiddish versions on two sides of a single record. Two languages for a mixed generation. Side by side, Yiddish and English establish a balance between old and new, between parents and children, between past and future. Parents and children are in transit, and the Yiddishe Momme, while no longer abandoned, is put in her place.

Or perhaps, more accurately places, for the Yiddish and English versions offer different mothers for different audiences. The English Yiddishe Momme is placed in “a humble East Side tenement,” and the singer reaches across “the trails of Time” to recollect the “three flights up in the rear … where my childhood days were spent.” Separation has set in; the singer has grown up, and grown away. The past is remembered with affection, but it remains irretrievable. The Jewish mother, like the old shtetl, lies buried in time.

“My Yiddishe Momme” in Yiddish seems to be a different song. Past and present are intermingled. While the Jewish mother has grown old along with her surroundings, she is still an active presence, still capable of nurturing the world around her. She belongs in her world, and in ours.”