New York City Archives - Page 26 of 28 - StoryCorps

Yiddish Melodies in Swing

The Rise of Yiddish Swing

Yiddish swing. Jazz and klezmer. It may sound like an odd combination, but in late 1937 this mix of Old World and New took the music scene here and abroad by storm. The fad got its start when the Andrews Sisters, a young three-sibling act fresh from Minnesota, recorded an irresistible swing version of a forgotten Yiddish stage tune. “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” (You Are Beautiful to Me) became an instantaneous hit, spawning an unending series of covers and, with them, a musical trend.

Within weeks, executives at New York’s WHN had created Yiddish Melodies in Swing, a weekly program dedicated to the new musical fusion. The talented pianist/composer Sam Medoff was hired to lead the show’s “Swingtet” and to arrange rollicking versions of traditional Jewish folk and klezmer tunes like “Dayenu,” “Eli Meylakh,” and “Yidl Mitn Fidl.”

Front and center on Medoff’s bandstand were the Barry Sisters (née Bagelman), whose close-as-air harmonies, spunky energy, and seamless transitions from Yiddish to English packed New York’s 600-seat Loews State Theater every Sunday at 1 p.m. But Yiddish Melodies didn’t just mainstream Yiddish culture, it reconnected a younger generation of American Jews to an older musical tradition embodied by the Swingtet’s legendary clarinetist, Dave Tarras, a European-born klezmer musician with almost no equal.

Yiddish Melodies in Swing lasted nearly two decades, outliving swing, the golden age of radio, and almost Yiddish culture itself. Small wonder that the 26 surviving episodes of the show are as fresh today as they were on the Sunday afternoons when they aired.

Claire Barry is the narrator of the Yiddish Radio Project episode about Yiddish swing. From almost two decades, Claire and her sister Myrna were the singing stars of the radio program Yiddish Melodies in Swing.

Paul Pincus, the co-narrator of the Yiddish Radio Project episode about Yiddish swing, is one of the only men alive to have shared the bandstand with both Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein, the two greatest klezmer clarinetists of the twentieth century.

The Barry Sisters and Jan Bart promoting the sponsors of Yiddish Melodies in Swing.

The Andrews Sisters pose with Sholom Secunda. The Andrews Sisters’ swing version of Sholom Secunda’s “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” launched the era of Yiddish swing.

Loews State Theater building, where 600 revelers showed up each week to see the broadcasting of Yiddish Melodies in Swing.

The disc label from one of the surviving Yiddish Melodies in Swing recordings.

Dave Tarras, the clarinetist on Yiddish Melodies in Swing.

Naftule Brandwein, the self-styled “King of Jewish Music” and Dave Tarras’s chief rival for the crown of the twentieth century’s greatest klezmer clarinetist, in a photo from the 1950s. Between 1924 and 1927, Brandwein recorded some twenty-four discs. But New World musical tastes gradually eclipsed Brandwein’s Old World playing style.

Peter Sokolow was Dave Tarras’s last keyboard player. The premier pianist and orchestrator of classic Jewish music, he is the musical director of the Yiddish Radio All-Star Band.


“Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen”

The story of this tune’s stratospheric rise is as unlikely as that of Yiddish swing itself. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” was composed by Sholom Secunda for a 1932 Yiddish musical that opened and closed in one season. Fast-forward to 1937. Lyricist Sammy Cahn and pianist Lou Levy were catching a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem when two black performers called Johnnie and George took the stage singing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” — in Yiddish. The crowd went wild. Cahn and Levy couldn’t believe their ears. Sensing a hit, Cahn convinced his employer at Warner Music to purchase the rights to the song from the Kammen Brothers, the twin-team music entrepreneurs who had bought the tune from Secunda a few years back for the munificent sum of $30.

Cahn gave “Bei Mir” a set of fresh English lyrics and presented it to a trio of Lutheran sisters whose orchestra leader, oddly enough named Vic Schoen, had a notion of how to swing it. The Andrews Sisters’ debut 78 rpm for the Decca label hit almost immediately. The era of Yiddish swing had begun.

“Bei Mir” would soon be covered by virtually every pop and jazz artist of the age, and was even retranslated into French, Swedish, Russian — and German. (The song was a hit in Hitler’s Germany until the Nazi Party discovered that its composer was a Jew, and that the song’s title was Yiddish rather than a south German dialect.)

The song’s success also sparked frenzied searches for other Yiddish crossover hits. Some attempts, like “Joseph, Joseph” (“Yosl, Yosl”), by the team of Chaplin and Cahn for the Andrews, and “My Little Cousin” (“Di Grine Kuzine”), by Benny Goodman, found modest success. But no Yiddish song would ever hit it as big again.

Sammy Cahn claimed that he bought his mother a house with money earned from “Bei Mir.” For her part, the mother of Sholom Secunda visited the synagogue every day for a quarter century to ask God for forgiveness, certain that he was punishing her son for a sin she had committed.

Brooklyn Eagle, December 24, 1937

Brooklyn Eagle, August 24, 1952

Sholom Secunda originally composed “Bei Mir Bistu Du Schoen” for the Yiddish musical Men Ken Lebn Nor Men Lost Nisht (I Would If I Could), which opened and closed in one season.

The Barry Sisters were the Yiddish answer to the Andrews. Born Clara and Minnie Bagelman, they changed their names to Claire and Myrna, the Barry Sisters, the night they heard the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Bei Mir” on the radio.

Benny Goodman played “Bei Mir” at his historic Carnegie Hall concert in 1938.

Guy Lombardo’s version of “Bei Mir” was the third to hit number one in 1938, after the Andrews Sisters’ and Benny Goodman’s.

Leo Marjane covered “Bei Mir” in French. The song was soon to get Russian, German, and Swedish lyrics as well.


Tarras and Brandwein

Dave Tarras, the Yiddish Melodies in Swing clarinetist, was brought up in the world of klezmer, the traditional instrumental music of Eastern European Jews. But he was no stranger to the New World technology of radio.

Apart from his longstanding gig on Yiddish Melodies in Swing, Tarras was the musical director of the low-power WBBC (Brooklyn Broadcasting Company), where he played old-fashioned bulgars and sweet waltzes between programs, tailoring the name of his ensemble to whoever was footing the bill. His band could start the afternoon as Dave Tarras and the WBBC Ensemble, transform fifteen minutes later into Dave Tarras and the Breakstone Ensemble, and round out the hour as Dave Tarras and the Stanton Street Clothiers Ensemble.

Key to Tarras’s success were his extraordinary music reading ability and his capacity to show up to a gig sober and on time. Neither quality was shared by Tarras’s chief rival, Naftule Brandwein — the other leading contender for the title of the twentieth century’s greatest klezmer clarinetist.

Brandwein was Tarras’s opposite in almost every respect. Unable to read a note of music, he preferred the poker table to the bandstand and the liquor bottle to just about everything else. Onstage he wore an Uncle Sam outfit wrapped in Christmas lights, which blew up one night as his perspiration got out of hand. His playing was as rough and wild as his temperament, laced with elements of Greek, Turkish, and Gypsy music.

Brandwein was a fearless musician, always teetering on the edge of disaster. A favorite of Murder Incorporated, for whom he performed in a famed hideaway behind a Brooklyn candy store, the talented iconoclast left a lasting mark on the development of klezmer music.

Aficionados of the genre argue to this day about which of the two klezmer masters, Tarras or Brandwein, was the greatest. As far as who was better suited to radio, history long ago passed definitive judgment.

Naftule Brandwein, c. 1920.

By 1935, when this portrait was taken, Dave Tarras had been in the United States for 12 years, and was well-established in the New York music scene.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

The Radio Dramas of Nahum Stutchkoff

Introduction

Yiddish playwright, actor, and linguist Nahum Stutchkoff (1893-1965) authored some of the most intensely emotional dramas ever broadcast on radio. Every week, his Yiddish radio plays portrayed a different fictional Jewish family struggling to adapt to life in America.

Only 26 episodes from his long-running series Bei Tate-mames Tish (Round the Family Table) survive. These recordings are as close as we’ll ever get to hearing what life was like in the tenements of New York City in the 1930s and ’40s.

When not writing or acting in one of his eight weekly radio programs, Stutchkoff penned reference books, including a monumental Yiddish thesaurus that breathes with the linguist’s genius. The gift is as evident in Stutchkoff’s exhaustively versatile matzo commercials, which listeners loved almost as much as his dramas.

Misha Stutchkoff (Narrator). Naham Stutchkoff’s son is the narrator of the story. As a teenager, Misha acted in his father’s dramas. He later changed his name to Michael Morris and went on to have a successful television career as a writer and producer for numerous mainstream radio and television programs, including McHale’s Navy, Perry Mason, and Chico and the Man.

Ester and Harold Baron are the daughter and son-in-law of Nahum Stutchkoff, in whose radio dramas they acted as young adults.

Eli Wallach (voice of Nahum Stutchkoff and the elder Mr. Bronstein). The Tony Award-winning veteran of the stage and screen is famous for his raspy voice and countless memorable appearances in such films as The Magnificent Seven, The Misfits, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Tovah Feldshuh (voice of Mrs. Bronstein). In her twenty-five years on and off-Broadway, Ms. Feldshuh has received three Tony nominations for Best Actress, four Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics Circle Awards, and an Obie for her performances in Yentl, Sarava, and Lend Me a Tenor. Ms. Feldshuh currently appears in the feature film Kissing Jessica Stein and on the television show Law and Order, on which she plays attorney Danielle Melnick.

Martin Novemski (voice of Simon Bronstein). Novemski, a performer and theater professor, was born in the U.S. to Eastern European parents and grew up with Yiddish as his first tongue. He is currently translating, for the purpose of performance, a number of previously untranslated works by the renowned Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem.

David Rogow (voice of Hirshl Zaremba). Rogow was a leading light of Vilna’s pre-War Yiddish theater world. He came to the U.S. after the war and resumed his career as one of the great monologists and actors in the Yiddish language.

Lillian Lux (voice of the meddling neighbor). Lillian is an American-born veteran of Yiddish theater and radio. With her late husband Peisachke Burstein, she was one of the leading ambassadors of Yiddish, acting and singing throughout the Americas and Israel.

Isaiah Sheffer (reader of Stutchkoff’s thesaurus) is the host of NPR’s Selected Shorts and the Artistic Director of Symphony Space. The nephew of Yiddish-radio and stage great Zvee Scooler, he began his career acting on various of Stutchkoff’s dramas and later became the English-language announcer on WEVD, where he worked with Yiddish radio luminaries such as Seymour Rexite and C. Israel Lutsky, The Yiddish Philosopher.

Anne Meara (voice of Mrs. Stone, Mrs. Bronstein’s uppity friend). Meara’s prolific film career has included Awakenings, The Boys From Brazil and Fame. She and her husband, Jerry Stiller, wrote and performed original comic sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show, and together developed the pilot for The Stiller and Meara Show.

Spencer Chandler is a veteran of the last three Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre productions. He has also written and directed three short films for HBO, and is the author of the play Hurry Up Please, It’s Time, recently produced at the Directors’ Theatre in San Francisco. His voice can be heard in a number of cartoons and commercials.


Stutchkoff’s Dramas

Sundays at noon in the late ’30s and early ’40s, Bei Tate-mames Tish (Round the Family Table) aired on WEVD in New York City. Each week listeners were brought into the home of a Jewish family coping with the problems of immigrant life.

While most dramas on the American radio dial offered escapist fantasies, Stutchkoff’s creations writhed with actuality. His characters were hewn from the stuff of real life, facing difficulties their listeners knew well: the alienation of the older generation, racism within the Jewish community, miscegenation, the conflicts between secular America and Jewish religiousness.

Though a private man who worked in extreme seclusion, Stutchkoff felt bound to the community that was the source of his artistic inspiration. His wife and children often found him crying at his writing desk over the fate of the radio characters he had just created. If he did not weep over them, he asked, who would?

The 26 Bei Tate-mames Tish episodes salvaged by the Yiddish Radio Project are the only of Stutchkoff’s half-dozen radio series to have survived. Not a single broadcast remains of Tsuris bay Laytn (People’s Troubles), Stutchkoff’s most popular show, which ran on WEVD for two decades and helped raise donations for the Brooklyn Jewish Home for Chronic Diseases. But one child actor on the program — Isaiah Sheffer, host of WNYC’s Selected Shorts and the artistic director of New York City’s Symphony Space — remembers it well.

“It was totally frantic,” Sheffer recalls. “Everything was last-minute and done quickly, with all the actors learning their parts along with Stutchkoff.” The writer-director often passed freshly penned lines of script to actors at the mike, a situation par for the course in the radio universe of Nahum Stutchkoff.

This advertisement for Bei Tate-mames Tish (Round the Family Table) ran in the Forverts, a leading Yiddish paper. Bei Tate-Mames Tish aired Sundays at noon on WEVD. The show’s 26 surviving episodes are the sole remnants of Stutchkoff’s many radio dramas.

When Stutchkoff successfully adapted Bei Tate-mames Tish to the stage, the owner of the Manischewitz Matzo Company, Stutchkoff’s longtime sponsor, was among the first to offer his congratulations.

In a Jewish Grocery was another of Stutchkoff’s dramas that was successfully adapted to the stage. In the radio program, Stutchkoff plays a grocer, whose store stands at the center of neighborhood life. The show’s setting made it possible for Stutchkoff to pitch his sponsor’s products—mostly sour cream—without breaking character.

Planter’s Hi-Hat Peanut Oil sponsored several of Stutchkoff’s radio series, including One Thousand and One Nights and Shiker and Schlimazel. No recording of either show survives.

In 1946, Stutchkoff debuted a radio drama called Tsures ba Leitn (People’s Problems), which was sponsored by the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital. Each week, the show told the heartrending tale of a different fictional character who falls ill and, despite poverty, is admitted into the hospital. The show’s commercial breaks were replaced by pleas, delivered by Stutchkoff, for donations to the hospital. The show featured many of the regulars in Stutchkoff’s repertory company as well as Isaiah “Sonny” Sheffer. As a repayment for Stutchkoff’s two decades of service on its behalf, the hospital opened its doors to him when his health failed, affording him a comfortable resting-place in the last weeks of his life.


A Life Devoted to Language

Born in Brok, Poland, in 1893, Nahum Stutchkoff had an early and unerring ear for language. Speaking Yiddish, Polish, and Russian before he learned Hebrew in Jewish day school, Stutchkoff picked up French and German after breaking with his religious upbringing at 16 to join the Yiddish theater.

In 1923 he boarded a boat to America and disembarked two weeks later speaking English, having read William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the way over. But his greatest love was for the Yiddish language. His Yiddish rhyming dictionary, published in 1931, won him great renown among playwrights, intelligentsia, and the general Yiddish public.

With the ink on the rhyming dictionary barely dry, Stutchkoff began work on a thesaurus of the Yiddish language — a Herculean endeavor to which Stutchkoff devoted increasing time and energy, while still writing, directing, and acting in eight radio programs a week. In creating this repository of twelve centuries of Yiddish culture and experience, Stutchkoff read virtually everything ever published in Yiddish — from religious treatises to literary works to daily newspapers, which he cataloged on 3-1/2 x 5-inch index cards his children can recall jutting from every pocket. This philological passion also served as the inspiration for two radio shows: Mameloshn, literally “mother tongue” — how native speakers refer to Yiddish — and Vie Di Mame Flegt Zugn (As Mother Used to Say).

Published in 1950, the 933-page Der Oytser Fun Der Yiddisher Sprakh (Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language) inventoried the culture’s every expression, from its most ethereal allusions to its juiciest vulgarities. The tome contained 392 synonyms for the word “hit,” more than 100 words and expressions for “chutzpah,” and seven pages of curses — inverted blessings, mostly, since cursing is forbidden in Judaism. (Example: “You should have a hundred houses; in every house a hundred rooms; in every room twenty beds, and a delirious fever should drive you from one bed to the next.”)

Arguably the greatest one-man lexicographical accomplishment of all time, his thesaurus was a final, emphatic statement on the wealth of Yiddish, made at the moment the language heaved its last great secular sigh. After completing the thesaurus, Stutchkoff immediately embarked on his final lexicographic undertaking: a Hebrew thesaurus. Begun shortly after the establishment of the Jewish state, it marked an important moment in the modernization of the Hebrew language. He worked on it through his last days as a patient at the Brooklyn Jewish Home for Chronic Diseases, his one-time sponsor.


Stutchkoff’s Commercials

Nowhere, perhaps, did Stutchkoff flex his linguistic muscle more than in his ad copy, especially for Manischewitz Matzo. For thousands of years matzo has been made from three simple ingredients — water, flour, and salt. Yet each time Nahum Stutchkoff pitched it, the bread of affliction came off as something different. It was “clear,” “burnished,” “pearl-like,” “thousand-flavored,” “crispy,” and “bright as the rising sun.” It was a model of modern factory production and a living link to the scattered tribes of ancient Israel. It was the path to culinary delight and the manna of spiritual sustenance.

But Stutchkoff’s greatest matzo pitch was his starkly direct “Manischewitz Matzo” jingle, featuring the simply beguiling lyrics “Manischewitz Matzo, buy, buy, buy.” The song, so popular it was copyrighted and the sheet music sold in stores, was a regular feature on Stutchkoff’s WLTH children’s talent show, “Uncle Nahum’s Kidkins,” where the Barry Sisters, among others, got their start.

The sheet music to the “Manischewitz Matzo” song was published in 1933. Nahum Stutchkoff wrote the lyrics; Sholom Secunda, of “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” fame, composed the music.

The lyrics to the “Manischewitz Matzo” song were transliterated so that the American-born kidkins could read them easily.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Reunion

Siegbert Freiberg’s Story

Before the term “Holocaust” was part of our vocabulary, a radio show presented by the Mutual Broadcasting Company featured a survivor of Nazi terror telling his story. The program, Reunion, was sponsored by the United Service for New Americans, a Jewish philanthropic organization aimed at reforming the 1924 anti-immigration laws that continued to keep Jews and other Eastern Europeans from the safe haven of America. By masking its grave mission in the guise of popular entertainment, the organization struck the only blow it could against the Fourth Estate’s stonewalling of Third Reich abominations.

The format of Reunion, like the popular radio series Queen for a Day, was to bring together, live on the air, people whose reconnections would hit home with listeners. On July 6, 1947, those connections were diverse: a Sgt. Miles Riley was reunited with his wife; one Bill Clemis of Albany, N.Y., came face-to-face with a childhood friend from India; Ezra (“Henry Aldrich”) Stone planned a reunion party for his class from the School of Dramatic Arts in New York; and — in a story unlike anything heard on radio before or since — the Holocaust survivor Siegbert Freiberg was reunited with his beloved father.

In its final episode, the Yiddish Radio Project reexamines that historic broadcast through the other end of the telescope. Our work on this program — and on the Yiddish Radio Project as a whole — was profoundly influenced by our association with Freiberg, who died on April 20, 2002. We are grateful beyond words for having known him.

Max and Siegbert Freiberg embrace during their on-air reunion, July 6, 1947.

Siegbert and Herta Freiberg outside their home in Middle Village, Queens.

Max and Siegbert a few hours after their reunion.

Father and son at their rooming house on W. 98th St. in New York City in 1948.

Max Freiberg (with cap on far left) is pictured in Shanghai, where he found refuge during the war after his wife’s relentless efforts won his release from Buchenwald, circa 1946.

In 1950, Siegbert was drafted into the Army to serve in Korea.

This is the last time Siegbert was photographed with his father. The two were visiting friends near Spring Valley, N.Y., in November 1954.

Siegbert Freiberg at his father’s grave.


Other Radio Broadcasts about the Holocaust

During the Second World War, the American mainstream press did not cover the mass slaughter of Europe’s Jews. As early as 1933 the columnist and commentator Walter Winchell condemned Nazi activities, only to be squelched by the notoriously anti-Semitic William Randolph Hearst. Reports on the roundup of civilians were occasionally published. And it was no secret that Jews were chief among those targeted. But Hitler’s plan to systematically exterminate all Jews under his power was simply never reported.

To be sure, that failure can be attributed to the Third Reich’s success at maintaining a shroud of secrecy around its most abominable acts. And when rumors of mass executions, human slaughterhouses, and depraved scientific experiments did emerge, most people found them impossible to believe.

But it is now clear that by early 1942 the United States government was aware of the ongoing industrial murder of Jews and suppressed that knowledge. The war was not going well for the Allies, and the last thing the U.S. Office of War Information wanted to foster was the perception that World War Two was being fought to save Jews.

The American public at large first learned of the depths of the Holocaust on April 16, 1945, when, in the closing days of the war, Edward R. Murrow described the scene at the just-liberated concentration camp Buchenwald. But several earlier radio broadcasts discovered by Yiddish radio historian Henry Sapoznik provided stark imagery of the fate of Jews living across the Atlantic. One such broadcast is the May 7, 1941, “Cable from Lisbon,” written by and featuring Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. Funded by the Joint Distribution Committee a Jewish refugee relief agency, the dramatization depicted the fate of Jews in a French town under German occupation.

Another is a speech by Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Yiddish Art Theater and co-chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Soviet agency that sponsored his 1943 lecture series in America. Mikhoels’ graphic accounts of German atrocities — including the famed but ultimately unproven allusions to soap made from victims’ bodies — had strong and lasting repercussions.

After the war, Jewish relief agencies like the United Jewish Appeal sponsored English-language radio dramas including “My Town” and “Little Old Man,” which documented the difficulties of Holocaust survivors in America and their new unwary hosts. In them, as in the July 6, 1947, Reunion broadcast, we can witness America’s early attempts to come to terms with one of history’s greatest tragedies.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

The History of Yiddish Radio

The Yiddish Radio Dial

Yiddish was the language of the more than two million Jewish immigrants who came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. As the last great wave of these arrivals landed at Ellis Island in the 1920s, radio was beginning its ascent in American culture. The recent Jewish immigrants embraced the medium, and by the early 1930s, Yiddish radio flourished nationwide. In New York alone, 23 stations broadcast dramas, variety programs, man-on-the street interviews, music, commercials, even editorials in rhyme.

The shows ran the gamut of radio genres, but they all shared one important feature: intimacy. “On Yiddish radio,” explains Yiddish radio historian Henry Sapoznik, “no one was bigger than life. Everyone was life. It was a one-to-one ratio between the listeners and the characters on the radio. Listeners didn’t want a window to look out into another world; they wanted a mirror to see their own.”

Yiddish radio obliged. There were the searing dramas of Nahum Stutchkoff, which grappled with the difficult reality of Jewish immigrant experience; the mediation program of Rabbi Samuel A. Rubin, who resolved disputes among Jews too poor or disempowered to turn to the civil courts; the advice show of C. Israel Lutsky, whom many listeners trusted more than their rabbi; and the talent shows that turned the microphone to anyone in the neighborhood courageous enough to let his or her voice be aired.

The best-remembered and most powerful of all the Yiddish radio stations was WEVD. Created in 1927 by the Socialist Party to honor its recently deceased leader, Eugene Victor Debbs, the station was taken over in 1932 by the leading Yiddish newspaper, The Forward.

The Forward created the most famous Yiddish radio program of all time — The Forward Hour, a variety show that aired every Sunday morning at 11:00. Ironically, while hours of relatively obscure programs like Madame Bertha Hart’s Talent Show have survived, only a few random moments of The Forward Hour remain. Among them is the show’s remarkable theme song, with its musical allusions to the Socialist anthem “The Internationale” and “La Marseillaise.”

Further down the dial were micro stations like WBBC, WVFW, and WARD, which fought one another tooth and nail to control frequencies and wattage hardly powerful enough to reach around the corner. Program directors for these stations sometimes had to fill as many as four hours of air-time a day by themselves. Such was the predicament of the inimitable WLTH program director Victor Packer, who probably took more chances and experimented with more genres than anyone in the history of broadcasting.

Yiddish radio reached its apex in the early 1940s and was in near free fall by the mid ’50s. Radio’s loss of prestige to television was only part of the reason. The Holocaust had forever stemmed the flow of Yiddish speakers to America, while many earlier arrivals turned away from Yiddish culture as they assimilated in the New World. Israel’s choice to make Hebrew its official language further marginalized Yiddish as the language of modern Jewish life.

Given the fate of the Yiddish language and the unstable recording materials used in the 1930s to early ’50s, it is a miracle that any remnant of the “golden age” of Yiddish radio has survived to see the present day.

Libby’s Hotel was the site of the first known Yiddish-radio broadcast, The Libby Hotel Hour, in 1926. The hotel stood at the intersection of Chrystie and Delancey streets on the Lower East Side.

The McAlpin Hotel, at the corner of 34th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, was the home of radio station WEVD from 1932-1938. The station subsequently moved to 117 West 46th Street.

Zvee Scooler directing dialogue for a WPA radio production c. 1937. In addition to working for many years on radio station WEVD, where he was known as “Der Grammeister” (The Master of Rhyme), Scooler was a longtime actor on the Yiddish stage and in films like Fiddler on the Roof and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

The cast of a Yiddish drama on WBNX, in the Bronx, c. 1933.

Avant-garde Yiddish sound poet Victor Packer, host of The Hammer’s Beverage Program, featuring the Happy Twins. As Director of Jewish Programming of Brooklyn station WLTH, Packer tried his hand at every conceivable radio genre in an attempt to fill his four-hour slot.

Nahum Stutchkoff, a forgotten genius who created some of the most intense, intimate, and emotional dramas ever broadcast on radio, c. early 1930s.

 

Rediscovering the Remnants of Yiddish Radio

By 1985, when musician/historian Henry Sapoznik showed up at a rummage sale thrown by New York broadcasting legend Joe Franklin, the heyday of Yiddish radio had been all but forgotten. Sapoznik, then the sound archivist at the Yiddish research institute, YIVO, had come to the sale looking for old klezmer 78s. But what Sapoznik wound up tripping over was far rarer: a few dozen aluminum discs, larger and more unusual than any he had ever seen.

On the worn-away labels Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker, could make out some Yiddish writing: WEVD . . . WBNX . . . Yiddish Melodies in Swing . . . Stuhmer’s Pumpernickel Program . . . Life Is Funny with Harry Hirschfield, Sponsored by Edelstein’s Tuxedo Brand Cheese. He gave Franklin the $30 in his pocket, tracked down an old transcription disc turntable, and sat down to listen to his find. He put on the first disc. A clear, strong voice announced:

“From atop the Loews State Theater Building, the B. Manischewitz Company,
world’s largest matzo bakers, happily presents
Yiddish Melodies in Swing . . .”

And the band launched into a raucous, swinging rendition of the Passover song “Dayenu.”

“It was simply unbelievable, unlike anything I’d ever heard,” Sapoznik recalls. “I felt like I was being transported back in time to this real, living moment in history. I was transfixed.” He was also hooked. Sapoznik spent the next 17 years searching for more such surviving discs.

These discs were not your ordinary LPs or 78s. They were transcriptions: single-cut, acetate-coated aluminum discs the stations were required to have on hand in case the Federal Radio Commission showed up with a complaint. The vast majority of these discs were melted down during World War II scrap metal drives or simply disappeared over the decades. The thousand-plus discs Sapoznik succeeded in rescuing were found mostly in attics, storerooms, and dumpsters.

But locating the discs was only half the challenge. Acetate-coated discs were never meant to be an archival medium. The materials were quickly disintegrating, and it was only a matter of time before they would pass the point of no return.

Musician, historian, and Yiddish Radio Project co-producer Henry Sapoznik has spent the last 17 years tracking down the last remnants from the golden age of Yiddish radio.

It was in 1986, at the eviction sale of legendary broadcaster Joe Franklin, that Henry Sapoznik discovered his first Yiddish radio disk.

Pearl Sapoznik is pictured here with her son Henry. Born in Rovne, Poland, Pearl came to the US after surviving the Holocaust. One of her first purchases in America was a white GE radio on which Henry heard his first Yiddish radio broadcasts as a child.

Sholom Rubinstein introduced Henry Sapoznik to veteran Yiddish radio artists such as Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn. Over a fifty year period, Rubinstein produced, directed, and wrote scores of WEVD programs, as well as the Jewish Caravan of Stars on WMGM. From 1927-1932, Rubinstein’s father hosted the Tog Program which ran on the CBS network.

Andy Lanset, Yiddish Radio Project archivist and preservationist, was the first person to suggest that a radio documentary lurked among Henry Sapoznik’s collection of acetates Yiddish discs.

 

Restoring the Discs

Before digital audiotapes, before cassettes, before even reel to reel, the standard recording medium was the acetate disc. Acetate–a soft, plastic-like coating onto which sound was engraved–was applied to discs made of aluminum, glass, or paper. The sound quality could be quite good, but the medium was never meant to last.

Even under the best storage conditions, acetate discs are notorious for exuding a greasy white film, the most apparent sign of nitrocellulose acetate decomposition. Under less than optimal conditions, the acetate coating can shrink and crack like the surface of a desert floor. Sometimes, the acetate’s hold on the aluminum disc becomes so fragile that the acetate coating lifts off as it is being played.

Once Henry Sapoznik joined forces with producer Dave Isay and Sound Portraits Productions to begin work on the Yiddish Radio Project, Andy Lanset, one of New York’s premier sound preservationists, was brought on to save the discs.

In his lab, Lanset would start by examining each disc and choosing the cleaning method best suited to its condition. Some just needed to have the grit and schmutz flushed from their grooves; others had to be treated with special agents to replenish elements leached over time.

After cleaning, the right stylus was selected for playback. A stylus that is too narrow can damage a disc, and one that’s too wide won’t get all the sound.

During playback, three transfers were made: a reel-to-reel archival master, a compact disc, and a reference DAT used to produce the radio series. After transfer, each acetate disc was given a fresh acid-free sleeve and reshelved in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment. (Many of the clips later used in the Yiddish Radio Project NPR series also received a subsequent digital cleanup from Gary Covino, the series’ editor and technical wizard.)

After each transfer was completed, the disc information was entered into a database modeled on the extended format used by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute. In 2004 the audio collection, together with reams of related papers and photographs, will be transferred to the Library of Congress.

Many of the transcription discs in the Yiddish Radio Project collection looked like this when first found. The white film on the surface is not dust but a chemical exuded from the disc itself and is the most apparent sign of nitrocellulose acetate decomposition. The shiny patches at the top left of the disc are places where the recording surface has flaked off, revealing the aluminum base beneath.

After a preliminary washing with standard record-cleaning agents, Andy uses a special record-cleaning machine to flush the finer grit from the disc’s grooves. The machine pumps distilled water from a jar stored beneath the turntable (R) and sprays it out through a soft, tone-arm mounted brush. The water is then sucked off the disc by a second arm and drained into a second jar.

After cleaning, the correct stylus has to be selected for playback. An optimal match is depicted in Figure A. A stylus that is too narrow (Figure B) can damage a disc; one that is too wide (Figure C) won’t pick up the full range of recorded sound.

The disc is now ready for transferring. As the disc is played Andy records simultaneously onto reel-to-reel tape (foreground), compact disc, and DAT. CDs and DATs are ideal for production purposes, but tape is still the standard archival medium.

 

Jews in Mainstream Media

Overtly Jewish characters were not confined to Yiddish radio. They were also a staple of mainstream shows.

Mrs. Pansy Nussbaum was a regular on The Fred Allen Show, as were Mr. Schlepperman and Mr. Kitzel on The Jack Benny Show. Unlike the varied, dynamic Jewish personages heard on Yiddish radio, though, these characters tended to be remarkable above all for their overblown accents and love of “exotic” foods like herring.

The model for these Jewish stereotypes was a series of 78 rpm records cut between the late teens and early ’20s that featured the character of Mr. Cohen, an exaggeratedly malapropistic Jew who could barely make himself understood.

Another stereotypical Jewish character was that of the wise elder, like Papa David Solomon in Life Can Be Beautiful, who usually came off sounding like everyone’s idea of an Old Testament sage. Such characterizations were not racist per se, just stereotypical, much like the radio representations of other ethnic groups, like the Italian Luigi in Life with Luigi.

The exception was The Goldbergs, a radio program that evolved into a T.V. show, and which portrayed Jews as regular people with regular problems. Irregular problems, however — miscegenation, intergenerational strife, the grungy day-to-day struggles of immigrant life — were the exclusive domain of Yiddish radio.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Rabbi Rubin’s Court of the Air

Five years ago a stack of acetate radio discs was spotted on the sidewalk outside the House of Sages, a synagogue for retired rabbis on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The discs found their way to the Museum of Radio and Television and, ultimately, to Yiddish radio historian Henry Sapoznik, who gave rapt hearing to the half-century-old proceedings of the Jewish American Board of Peace and Justice, the first court of the air.

From the late-1930s to 1956, Rabbi Shmuel Aaron Rubin, the Director of the House of the Sages, presided over a mediation court that convened in one of the synagogue’s back rooms. Flanked by distinguished members of the mediation court, Rabbi Rubin adjudicated every kind of dispute imaginable, from the complaints of abandoned parents to altercations over ill-fitting sheets.

Rabbi Rubin’s history on the Lower East Side dated to the early 1930s, when he emigrated from Israel (then Palestine). Arriving in New York’s Jewish enclave, he was dismayed at the plight of the city’s retired rabbis, many of whom led impoverished lives. To correct this sad situation, Rabbi Rubin helped to raise money to support the House of Sages, the first institution of its kind in America, to provide retired Rabbis with a weekly stipend and a place to study.

To further the function of the House of Sages, Rabbi Rubin began using it as a site for settling disputes within the community. (There was no charge to the plaintiffs and none of the panel’s members received any compensation.) By the end of the 1930s, the dealings of the Jewish American Board of Peace and Justice, as the mediation court was called, were being recorded and broadcast on Yiddish radio stations like WLTH and WEVD.

Plaintiffs who brought their cases to the Board were often too poor of unfamiliar with the American justice system to take their case to the state courts. In Rabbi Rubin’s court disputants could present their complaints in their own language and appeal for ethical justice — as in the case of parents requiring support — even where no legal issues pertained. The Court’s calendar was always booked, and the surviving recordings envelop us whole in the fabric of Jewish American immigrant life.

The Jewish Board of Peace and Justice adjourned permanently and went off the air in 1956. Since Rabbi Rubin’s death in 1957, the House of Sages has been carried forward by Rubin’s son-in-law, Dr. Kalman Gershon Neumann, Rabbi of Congregation Zichron Moshe, who continued broadcasting a religious program in Yiddish until last year, when WEVD sold its frequency to Disney/ESPN. The House of Sages still exists and functions today on the Lower East Side, giving old rabbi’s a place to Study Torah and to debate eternity.

Rabbi Shmuel Aaron Rubin presided over the Jewish Board for Peace and Justice from the mid-1930s until 1956.

Rabbi Rubin’s stationery included the broadcast schedule of his radio programs. During its nearly two-decade-long run, Rabbi Rubin’s court was heard on WEVD, WLTH, WLIB, WHOM, and WBYN.

Hal Linden (English voice of Rabbi Shmuel Aaron Rubin). The respected actor, singer, and musician has earned three Emmys and a Tony. His recent appearances include the Broadway production of The Sisters Rosensweig and starring roles on the television show Jack’s Place and on the feature Out to Sea, with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau. Linden is well remembered for his role as Barney Miller in the television series of the same name.

Patti Deutsch (English voice of the mother who takes her son to Rabbi Rubin’s court). Ms. Deutsch is a veteran voice actress who has worked in television and film for more than three decades. A former standout on the television shows Match Game and Laugh-In, she recently lent her voice talents to the movies Monsters, Inc., and The Emperor’s New Groove.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Victor Packer

The One-Man Radio Department

In 1992, Yiddish historian and sound archivist Henry Sapoznik got a phone call from a woman who said she was the widow of a former Jewish radio personality. She was moving out of her house in Queens and wondered if Sapoznik might want to haul off some of the materials her husband had left behind. Soon, Sapoznik was making his way down the basement stairs that led to her late husband’s office. When he entered the room, he was astounded.

Sapoznik had descended into a veritable King Tut’s tomb of Yiddish radio, where nothing appeared to have changed in decades. All around were stacks of photos, radio scripts, and dozen and dozens of 16″ acetate discs.

This was the legacy of Victor Packer, an eccentric broadcaster whom the fates had granted a multi-year license to transmit whatever boiled to the surface of his overheated imagination.

From the late-1930s to 1942, Victor Packer served as Jewish Program Director of Brooklyn’s low-budget station WLTH. The title and function don’t sound unusual until you listen to the discs in Packer’s collection and begin to realize that Packer was WLTH’s Jewish division. His charge: to fill — as writer, director, host, and anything else necessary — four hours of radio a day in 15-minute increments, each distinct from the last.

The one-time Yiddish theater actor took to the challenge with a total lack of inhibition. Ideas that sprang into his head one day were on the air the next. In one segment, listeners might hear him recite avant-garde literary masterpieces like his epic sound poems about New York City life, which presaged the beat poetry of 1950s America. The recitation over, Packer would metamorphose from bard to buffoon — say, as host of the “Hammer’s Beverage Program,” an insipid children’s show on which Raisele and Sheyndele, “the Happy Twins,” sang cloying Yiddish and English ditties punctuated by senseless patter, with Packer as the butt of every joke.

As the day proceeded, Packer co-hosted talent and game shows with his English-language announcer, Norman Warembud, conducted man-in-the-street interviews, acted and directed in serial dramas, and created a variety of programs that still defy categorization. Case in point: the 11-minute “To Marry or Not to Marry,” a heated dialogue on the topic of marriage, in which only one side of the conversation is audible. (Fully seven minutes of the broadcast comprise perfect silence.)

Packer sustained his manic production of radio creations until WLTH went off the air in 1942. After that, he hosted the occasional show on several of New York’s other Yiddish stations. But never again would his maverick radio sensibilities be given free rein.

Victor Packer at his desk in the WLTH studio, circa 1930. Behind him is the program schedule he was responsible for filling every day.

Victor Packer quizzes young Mr. Fogelman for the game show Questions in the Air.

Victor Packer pours a glass of pop for Raisele and Shaindele (a.k.a., the Happy Twins), co-stars of his Hammer’s Beverage Program.

The Parkway Public Market at 243 Schenectady Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, was among the dozens of locations at which Packer held his man-in-the-street interview show.

Christopher Lloyd (English voice of Victor Packer). The celebrated actor has appeared in more than 200 plays and nearly 100 films and television productions. He is currently performing in Morning’s at Seven at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater.

Deana Barone (English voice of Rachel in Packer’s melodrama Spies). A multi-talented actress, Deana has performed in numerous off-Broadway productions in both English and Yiddish. Watch for her in the upcoming films Deprivation and Mendy the Drug Seller.

Tovah Feldshuh (English voice of the nun in Packer’s melodrama Spies). In her twenty-five years on and off-Broadway, Ms. Feldshuh has received three Tony nominations for Best Actress, four Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics Circle Awards, and an Obie for her performances in Yentl, Sarava, and Lend Me a Tenor. Ms. Feldshuh currently appears in the feature film Kissing Jessica Stein and on the television show Law and Order, on which she plays attorney Danielle Melnick.


Voices of the Street

If Victor Packer’s sound poems are lasting literary creations, his man-in-the-street interview shows may well be the most irresistible part of his radio legacy. Recorded between 1937 and 1942, they are a passport to New York’s old Jewish neighborhoods, with one of Yiddish broadcasting’s most peculiar figures as the guide.

Shtimes fun di Gas (Voices of the Street) is radio’s premier use of the man — or, more often, woman — in-the-street format. Its conceit was simple. Every Monday and Thursday, Victor Packer traveled to a different Jewish grocery store in Brooklyn or the Bronx with a huge transcription disc-cutting machine and asked ordinary housewives their opinions on various vital issues. After hearing them out, Packer would offer his enthusiastic approval and reward the respondent with a box (if he really liked her, two) of his sponsor’s products, like Foremost Milk or Sterling Kosher Salt.

In the five years Packer conducted the show, he demonstrated a distinct preference for sententious questions like “What is a good man?” or “What is more important: brains or beauty?” The more banal the response, the happier and more approving Packer seemed to be. Inversely, nothing appeared to throw Packer more than when one of his questions hit home. (Witness the episode of Feb. 24, 1939, when Packer inquired, “What scares you most?”)

To keep things jaunty, Packer often asked his interviewees to share their favorite recipes for beloved dishes like bread pudding and calf’s foot jelly. What most often ensued was a charming if impossible-to-follow torrent of ingredients, measurements, and techniques, concluding with a promise of complete satisfaction.

Packer’s intrepid reporting usually gave more cause for bemusement than culinary delight. But in either case, his novel broadcasting style lets us share a laugh with a few dozen housewives in a neighborhood and world that has long since ceased to exist.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

William Feehan, Fire Chief

To the firefighters he led, William Feehan was legendary. The son of a firefighter and the father of another, it was said that he knew the location of every fire hydrant in New York City. Feehan joined the city’s fire department in 1959 as a member of Ladder Company 3. In his 42 years with the department, Feehan steadily made his way through the ranks. When he was named acting commissioner in 1991, he become the first person in history to have held every possible position in the department.

Feehan died in the line of duty on September 11, 2001, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on his command station. He was 71. This oral history was recorded in 1992 by Feehan’s son Billy and photographer Harvey Wang. It is dedicated to the members of the New York City Fire Department and to all of the men and women who have risked — and lost — their lives to save the lives of others.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered September 15, 2001, on Weekend Edition Saturday.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Weegee

He captured tenement infernos, car crashes, and gangland executions. He found washed-up lounge singers and teenage murder suspects in paddy wagons and photographed them at their most vulnerable — or, as he put it, their most human. He caught couples kissing on their beach blankets on Coney Island and the late-night voyeurs on lifeguard stands watching them. And everywhere he went, he snatched images of people sleeping: drunks on park benches, whole families on Lower East Side fire escapes, men and women snoring in movie theaters. He was the supreme chronicler of the city at night.

Born Usher Fellig in what is now the Ukraine, Weegee moved to New York’s Lower East Side in 1910 at the age of eleven. By fifteen he had left home, supporting himself through odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could find a place: the benches of Penn Station and Bryant Park (to which he would later return, camera in hand), or the Bowery’s flophouses. He became a street photographer’s assistant and later a roaming photographer himself, snapping pictures of children to sell to their poor but proud parents. During the 1920s he worked and often lived in the darkrooms of the New York Times and Acme Newspictures, and soon he was filling in for photographers when they couldn’t make their late shift. By the thirties, his intimate chronicles of disasters both natural and man-made were being featured in PM, Life, Popular Photography, and all of the New York dailies. He went on to become one of the most prolific and famous news photographers of the century. His first book, Naked City, which helped established his fame and is still in print today, was published in 1945.

Today Weegee is credited with ushering in the age of tabloid culture, while at the same time being revered for elevating the sordid side of human life to that of high art. Here is a rare interview with Weegee, recently discovered at the Recorded Sound division at the Library of Congress. It was conducted in July, 1945, by nationally-syndicated talk show host Mary Margaret McBride on WEAF in New York, soon after the publication of Naked City.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered June 11, 2000, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

The Jewish Giant

Photographer Jenny Carchman was eight years old in 1979 when her mother first showed her Diane Arbus’ collection of photos (diane arbus, 1971, Aperture). There were pages of “freaks” — midgets, transvestites, dwarves, hermaphrodites, naked people and the like. She remembers her mother pausing in the middle of the book on a photo of a very large man, towering above an older couple. The caption read, “Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970.” Her mother told her that the giant in the photo was named Eddie Carmel. He was her cousin. Eddie had died two years after the photo was taken, a year after Jenny was born. This was the first she had heard of him.

As a child, Jenny couldn’t get Eddie out of her mind: the freakish son in the dark Bronx living room, his parents looking up at him with wonder and sorrow. She had nightmares for weeks. She felt that if she touched that photo, she too would turn into a giant. Her fears were magnified by the silence surrounding her cousin. For years, whenever she’d try to talk about Eddie, her family refused to discuss him.

The Jewish Giant began with Jenny’s search to uncover a story that has remained a secret for 25 years. Eddie was normal sized until he became a teenager, when he began to grow uncontrollably (he suffered from acromegaly, a then-incurable condition resulting from a tumor that had developed on his pituitary gland). According to The Guiness Book of World Records, Eddie grew to be 8’9″. As an adult, the only work he could find involved exploiting his freakishness. He starred in B-grade monster movies (The Brain that Wouldn’t Die), made two 45 records (“The Happy Giant” and “The Good Monster”) and was billed in the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden as “The Tallest Man on Earth.” Eddie died in 1972 at the age of 36 in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. His coffin was custom made.

The Jewish Giant is a story of suffering, of not fitting in, of the body betraying itself, and of the bizarre life-twists that can subsume a family. It’s a story about what it’s like to be a regular person looking at the world from inside a not-so-regular body.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered October 6, 1999, on All Things Considered.

“Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970,” Diane Arbus

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Charlie’s Story

Charlie Geter had been living in the Palace Hotel, a flophouse on New York City’s Bowery, for over twenty-five years when producers David Isay and Stacy Abramson met him while working on their documentary The Sunshine Hotel. Impressed by his heart and drive, they gave Charlie a tape recorder and asked him to interview other residents of the Palace Hotel and to tell his life story.

Charlie worked on the project for nearly two years, recording late into the night and struggling to get interviews from the other hotel residents. Charlie now lives — in his own apartment — in Manhattan.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 30, 1998, on All Things Considered.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.