Tag Archives: Yiddish music

MBS with the black cantor Thomas La-Rue, through Henry Sapoznik

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.
I invite you to listen to a recording that tells us so many things! It wouldn’t be available without Henry’s work.
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As usual, you have the video at the bottom. And if you like this, as usual, please: share it with your friends! Thank you in advance.
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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

From the available recordings by Thomas La-Rue in Henry’s Youtube channel, I have chossen the one that I prefer the least in terms of melody but that has very meaningful lyrics, specially taking into consideration the story of Henry’s parents. The whole lyrics are in this post by Henry and I will just copy a little part. You’ll understand what I mean:
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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.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

Bringing back to live the Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II

14th August 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And I am so happy for talking about the work of my long-admired producer Daniel Rosenberg and the thrilling project Yiddish Glory!

Hello, how are you? I hope well! In this edition I come back to the todays, with artists that are alive but with a project based on Yiddish songs from the World War II. After many decades considered lost, those songs were found at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. Read more below.

Daniel Rosenberg receives this weekly newsletter and I hope he will have a nice suprise! I didn’t advice him in advance. 🙂

As usual, you have the video at the bottom. And if you like this, as usual, please: share it with your friends! Thank you in advance.

 

The producer, journalist and publicist Daniel Rosenberg

It seems a lie but there was a time when we were able to travel to other continents easily, without masks and without quarantines. This picture was took in Toronto in 2019, where I attended the Canadian Music Week thanks to Music Export Poland. This picture was done the first time we meet, after a big breakfast in a nice cafe and he is Daniel Rosenberg.

Daniel is graduated in molecular biology and in political science. This might have no relationship with the theme of our email, but I want to highlight what an amazing person Dan is. Apart from that, he has been working for more than 20 years in the dissemination of the musics from all over the world, in radio and in compilations.

He has made the selection of many of the albums of the collection Rough Guides, by World Music Network. He has produced and written liner notes for more than 60 CDs, including this Yiddish Glory. He is the producer of this work. He selected the musicians and organiced all the work to make this idea and this documents become a touchable and listenable album.

Before the beginning of the pandemic, he was working in several projects. One of them was the first album by Taraf Syriana, about the music of the Romani people in Syria from before the war, as well as in another amazing project, related also to Jewish culture and history, about which I hope to talk with him in a near future.

You can learn more about Daniel in his official website.

The lost Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II

According to the press release by Rob Jacobs from Six Degrees Records, the label that released this album:

“Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II is the new recording of music created during the darkest chapter of European Jewish history. In the midst of World War II, a group of scholars led by ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky (1892 – 1961) discovered songs written by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos. One song was written by a 10-year-old orphan who lost his family in the ghetto in Tulchin, another by a teenage prisoner of the Pechora concentration camp, and yet another about a Red Army soldier who learns, upon his return to Kiev, that his family had been murdered in Babi Yar. […]

Following the war, the researchers were arrested during Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge. The scholars’ works were confiscated, and they died thinking the collection was lost to history.  The songs were discovered in unmarked boxes stored in the archives of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in the 1990s.

In the early 2000s, a lucky coincidence brought Yiddish Professor Anna Shternshis to Kiev where she learned that these songs had survived all of these decades following the researchers’ arrests. Quickly deteriorating, fragile documents, some typed, but most hand-written, contained some of the most poignant and historically important Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II.”

The booklet includes much more information about the work in general and about each specific piece. You can order it here.

The song about the massacre of Babi Yar

Babi Yar means the grandmother’s ravine. It is a ravine in the outskirts of Kiev where in September of 1941 there were killed more than 33 thousand Jews in two days. It is considered the biggest slaughtering in the less time. Until the 6th of November of 1943 the number of Jewish from Kiev and surroundings killed would increase to around 200 thousand. I won’t explain more details, as this events are widely documented and you can find information easily at the Internet.

The lyrics of the song are by Golda Rovinskaya, 73 years old, Kiev, 22 June, 1947, recorded by Hina Shargorodsky. It talks from the poing of view of someone returning to Kiev from the front line, happy for being still alive, but finding that all his family and beloved ones have been killed. The music is based on “In droysn geyt a regn,” a folk song, with instrumental parts and arrangement by Sergei Erdenko.

This picture of the Memorial of Babi Yar is from the website of the Mizel Museum:

Clic the picture to listen to Babi Yar from Yiddish Glory, in a live recording from Zoomer Hall Classical FM 96.3:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory