Sound Portraits Archives - Page 3 of 8 - StoryCorps

Seymour Rexite, The Yiddish Crooner

At the height of his popularity in the 1940s and ’50s, Yiddish crooning sensation Seymour Rexite starred on 18 half-hour radio shows a week. At its outset his career comprised an all-Jewish repertoire that spanned from liturgical song to Yiddish popular music. But when he took to the Yiddish airwaves, the bill of fare diversified. Whatever song happened to be popular on American radio, his wife, Miriam Kressyn, translated into Yiddish and Rexite sang on one of his shows. He feared nothing, sang everything, and stayed on the air for the better part of five decades.

The son of a cantor, Rexite (originally spelled Rechtzeit) started performing professionally while still in knickers — the “Wonder-Boy,” they used to call him. He hadn’t yet reached his teens when he sang before a special congressional committee and then at the White House in a bid to convince the United States government to allow his mother and sisters to emigrate from Poland. The command performance so moved President Calvin Coolidge he relented to the plea on the spot.

Rexite was equally persuasive in the many venues he came to play, from Yiddish theater, radio, recordings, and film to regular gigs in upscale New York nightclubs like Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe and the Casino de Paris. Excelling in each, Rexite was poised to hone the sort of musical crossbreed that formed the foundation for some of his best remembered songs.

The blend had its roots in the 1943 marriage of Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, a popular Yiddish actress and singer in her own right. Kressyn proved an extraordinary talent at turning American standards into Jewish hits. Who could have guessed that show tunes from Oklahoma would sound so good in Yiddish?

The Kressyn-Rexite concoctions struck big with American Jews. Rexite’s smooth-as-scotch tenor won him Sinatra-like adoration from female fans. And Kressyn’s translations, always lyrical and often lampoons, pleased and surprised careful listeners. Example: “love and marriage,” in her rendition of the well-known 1955 hit of the same name, “geyt tzuzamen vi zup un knaydlakh” (go together like soup and dumplings) instead of “like a horse and carriage.”

The team’s work also translated into highly successful advertising for Rexite’s radio sponsors, which included national clients like Ajax and Campbell’s Soup. While Rexite often guest-starred on lavishly produced shows like WHN’s “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” the programs he created, like “The Barbasol Troubadour,” were all variations on a theme: Rexite, a microphone, and a pianist/organist. His accompanists included Sam Medoff, moonlighting from his gig as bandleader of “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” and Abe Ellstein, who composed many of his hits.

Seymour Rexite lived in lower Manhattan until his death, at the age of 91, in October 2002.

Seymour Rexite (né Rechtzeit) began his career as a child star. His solo command performance at the White House so moved President Coolidge that he granted the “Wonder-Boy’s” request to let his mother and sisters emigrate to America.

Seymour Rexite, c 1940.

Seymour Rexite often sported evening dress for his uptown society gigs.

An important Yiddish singer and performer in her own right, Miriam Kressyn translated American standards into Yiddish for her husband, Seymour Rexite.

Seymour Rexite is pictured here in his apartment in lower Manhattan. Next to him is the Wollensak reel-to-reel tape player he used to listen to his old broadcasts.

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 Philosopher

C. Israel Lutsky, the Jewish Philosopher

Before Dr. Laura, before Dr. Ruth, there was C. Israel Lutsky, the Jewish Philosopher. From 1931 to the mid-’60s, Lutsky took to the air daily with letters from listeners seeking advice. He replied with spoonfuls of folk wisdom and dollops of abuse.

Charlatan or sage, Lutsky was one of the most beloved and listened-to figures from the golden age of Yiddish radio. No other radio personality delved so deeply into the personal lives of his listeners. From men lamenting overextended family business to women bemoaning no-good children, Yiddish-speakers of all stripes solicited Lutsky’s counsel on issues too sensitive for the ears of friends and relatives. His pronouncements on their fate veered in tenor from the singsong melody of Torah study to the gravity of an Old Testament patriarch in no way averse to sputtering rage. That the letters he expounded upon were written by his copywriter never diluted the strength of his convictions, or his determination to see his advice followed to a T.

Short, pugnacious, and dapper to the point of risibility, the cigar-chomping Lutsky was an entertainer above all else. The “C” in his name stood for cantor, a role in which he had early success before going on to become an amateur pugilist, a vaudevillian, a socialist organizer, a cub reporter, and ultimately a radio personality. In this long-lived function he demonstrated a hypnotist’s talent in bringing his correspondents to life in listeners’ minds, turning private grief into public catharsis and transforming platitudes into pearls of wisdom.

In short, the Jewish Philosopher was a snake-oil salesman, and as such knew it wasn’t enough to gather a crowd. He needed to sell, sell, sell — and he did it with cantorial fervor. His longtime sponsor, Carnation Milk, was so pleased with his impassioned promotions they awarded him a pension at his retirement.

But shilling for sponsors was only the tip of the iceberg. Lutsky launched the Philosopher’s League, a kind of lonely heart’s club devoted to spreading his teachings. And he went multimedia, publishing a magazine dedicated to himself.

Though famously attached to Carnation Milk, his decades-long sponsor, C. Israel Lutsky plugged for a variety of companies, including Chicken of the Sea Tuna and St. Joseph’s pharmaceuticals. The above promotional poster dates from the 1930s. The Yiddish tag line runs: “The Jewish Philosopher: He knows, he sees, he helps, he consoles.”

In 1937, Lutsky founded a magazine dedicated to himself. An outgrowth of the Philosopher’s League, a lonely hearts club which bore Lutsky’s invaluable imprimatur, the magazine appears to have met with little success. Only one issue was published.

Dick Sugar, the narrator of the Yiddish Radio Project documentary about C. Israel Lutksy, was the Philosopher’s English language announcer from 1946-1957.

Carl Reiner, legendary actor, writer and producer, is the voice of the Jewish Philosopher in the Yiddish Radio Project documentary about C. Israel Lutksy.

Isaiah Sheffer, creator of Selected Shorts and artistic director of Symphony Space, was once the Philosopher’s English-language announcer.


The Philosopher’s Magazine and League

In 1937, in a bid to capitalize on the success of his radio show and his growing stature among listeners, C. Israel Lutsky launched the Jewish Philosopher’s League, Incorporated, “an organization that is truly a Cultural and Spiritual Cult,” and The Jewish Philosopher magazine, its house organ. Promising “a successful challenge to loneliness of the heart … loneliness of the soul … loneliness of the spirit,” the league was in essence a matchmaking service built around the magnetic personality of its leader.

Having paid the $10 initiation fee and $5 annual dues, league members could attend sponsored activities like dances, amateur drama classes, and boat rides. If the balance sheet totted up positive for Lutsky, no tally exists on aching hearts salved by the venture. Evidence does however exist that at least one heart was broken: by the Jewish Philosopher’s League treasurer, Morris Shimshak (see photo). (A little while later, Shimshak found himself on the outs, following a squabble with Lutsky about matters financial.)

Endorsements of the league were dutifully penned into every Jewish Philosopher article, written by members of the league’s executive committee. True to its mission, The Jewish Philosopher ran a biographical sketch of Lutsky, an open letter from Lutsky to his listeners, and a novelette based on the solution of a letter writer’s woes. The first issue, dated November 1937, was also the last.

Jack Luth (né Lutsky) was C. Israel’s brother and the President of the Philosopher’s League, Inc.

Solomon Dickstein was the Philosopher League’s second vice-president and one of Lutsky’s most loyal friends.

Morris Shimshak, the League’s treasurer, and Lutsky were eventually to have a falling out over an unsuccessful investment scheme.

This Philosopher’s League membership card belonged to Morris Shimshak, the League’s treasurer.

A Lutsky letter suggesting controversy in the League.

Rae M.K., who professed her unrequited love for Morris Shimshak by letter.


Lutsky on Carnation Milk

Day in, day out, for three decades running, Lutsky began his program with a freshly written tribute to the wonders of Carnation Milk. He lauded the economic efficiency of Carnation’s plants, the mysterious nutritional benefits of its powdered milk crystals, the allergy-preventing properties of its canned milk — all with the same emotion and sense of purpose that went into responding to “listener” letters. The force of Lutsky’s devotion was in full evidence when he summarily fired Isaiah Sheffer, his English-language announcer, for garbling a Carnation ad.

Lutsky was so enamored of his patron that he always sported a white Carnation in his lapel and, for his vacations, toured Carnation plants across the country, prancing about like Napoleon at Austerlitz. It thus seems apt that one-third of the surviving recordings of the program feature Lutsky dispensing Carnation ads rather than the milk of human kindness.

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.

Levine and His Flying Machine

Introduction

Everyone has heard of Charles A. Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic. But does the name Charles A. Levine ring a bell? Likely not. Yet seventy-five summers ago the two men were locked in a battle for aviation history — one as a pilot, the other as a promoter.

Levine, a 30-year-old millionaire who had made his money buying and selling World War One surplus materiel, had entered the competition for a $25,000 prize for the first person to complete a nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh beat him to it on May 20, 1927, but the following day the young entrepreneur announced that his privately owned airplane would presently fly farther faster — and with a “mystery passenger” aboard. The pilot, he stated, would be one Clarence Chamberlin. The mystery passenger remained a mystery.

On June 4, 1927, thousands gathered at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to witness the takeoff. While they waited, Charles A. Levine climbed into the back of his plane and had Chamberlin taxi him around the airfield. No one thought much of it until the plane was halfway down the runway and gaining speed.

Suddenly it was clear: The mystery passenger was none other than Levine himself. The millionaire’s wife fainted. His children wept. The press had a field day.

Forty-two hours later, Levine and Chamberlin ran out of gas and landed safely in a peasant’s wheat field in central Germany. Despite being 40 miles short of the intended destination of Berlin, Chamberlin had smashed Lindbergh’s distance and speed record. And Levine had become the world’s first transatlantic air passenger — as well as an international hero whose face was plastered across newspapers from Europe to America.

The euphoria was greatest among American Jews, for whom Levine was a new symbol of Jewish courage and fortitude. Yiddish radio stations and newspapers covered and re-covered the story and Jewish musicians wrote songs about him.

It seemed Levine had made history.

Ardith Polley is the daughter of Charles A. Levine and the co-narrator of the Yiddish Radio Project documentary about his life.

Charles A. Levine (right) and his pilot Clarence Chamberlin (left) pose for a picture a few days before their historic flight across the Atlantic.

The Columbia prior to its transatlantic flight.

A crowd gathered at Roosevelt Field to witness the historic flight.

Levine’s wife and children tune in to the radio for the latest news on Levine’s flight. The toddler is Ardith.

Upon arriving in Berlin, Levine (left) and Chamberlin (right) receive heroes’ welcomes.

When Mrs. Levine saw this published photo of her husband amidst two young Frauleins, she immediately packed her bags for Europe.

Following their meeting with President Von Hindenberg, Levine and Chamberlin leave the German President’s Palace accompanied by Ambassador Schurman. Later that summer, Levine would also meet Benito Mussolini.

Levine (center), with Chamberlin (left) and Maurice Drouhin (right). Later in the summer of 1927, Levine hired Drouhin to fly him back from Europe to the US. When the flight was cancelled, Levine flew solo from France to London to avoid paying Drouhin his $4,000 forfeit fee.

Levine stands with his mistress Mabel Bolls, aka “The Queen of Diamonds.” Levine’s public affair caused his wife to seek a divorce. “After that,” recalls Levine’s daughter, “he was like Napoleon without his Josephine.”


The Songs

In the weeks following Levine’s triumph, the Jewish-American community was in a state of rapture as across the sea one of its own was received by European dignitaries from Hindenburg to Mussolini. On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Jews spoke of little else.

“The anti-Semites in Germany and the anti-Semites around the world will have to take their hats off to Levine the Jew,” pronounced the New York Yiddish daily newspaper Der Tog. “No longer will we be obliged to prove that Jews are as capable and strong on the field of physical bravery as on the field of intellectual achievements.”

Within a month a half-dozen songs had been written in Levine’s honor. The transatlantic flyer was seen as heralding the advent of the modern Jewish hero: independent, courageous, and proud. Two of the songs made musical allusion to “Ha’Tikvah” (The Hope), the then unofficial Jewish national anthem. The implication was unmistakable: here was a defining character for Jewish aspiration.


A Hero Is Forgotten

On February 28, 1937, a short article titled “Headliner Fades Out” ran in the back pages of the Los Angeles Times. A sort of living obituary, the piece chronicled the precipitous fall of an ephemeral modern legend.

Since the summer of 1927, everything Charles A. Levine had touched ended in ruin. In 10 years he had lost everything: fortune, family, and fame — the latter returning momentarily in 1934, when, the LA Times article reports, he was “found unconscious in the kitchen of a friend’s home, with five gas jets on.” In the eyes of the writer summarizing his life, Levine had sunk plenty low. In fact, he had a ways to go.

A few months following the article’s appearance, the erstwhile headliner was back in the news, this time in connection with a Federal charge of tungsten smuggling. After spending 18 months in jail, Levine was eventually busted again, this time for the smuggling of an illegal alien. (The “alien” was a German Jew denied an American visa in his attempt to escape Hitler.)

The former hero’s indignities were for a time thought amusing enough for newspaper back pages, but eventually even the tabloids lost interest. By the 1950s only the FBI cared to investigate further.


Hunted by the FBI

Fifteen years after his tungsten smuggling conviction, Levine still owed the lion’s share of his $5,000 fine. In 1952 the Justice Department sought to ascertain whether the cash was recoupable.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation operative assigned to the case picked up Levine’s scent in the shadowy world of New York rooming houses and dubious businesses. But laying hands on the former flier proved far more difficult. Levine had become a ghost, resurfacing sporadically among acquaintances to make a pitch or borrow a few bucks and then disappearing for days, weeks, or years at a time.

No one, not even Levine’s daughter, knew where he lived or how he survived. Those who saw him remarked on the shabbiness of his suit and his evident lack of money. There was hardly a soul to whom he didn’t owe money. According to his notes, the FBI agent had trouble believing that Levine “was at one time a prominent newsworthy individual.”

After evading the FBI for 26 months Levine was finally discovered in April 1956, thanks to a tip from a former business associate seeking revenge for an unpaid loan. But the task of catching Levine was still easier than getting him to cough up, and in 1958 the FBI closed the case without recovering a penny.

Although the FBI ultimately failed in its mission, the paper trail it left behind illuminates an otherwise obscure chapter in Levine’s drawn out fall.

Having finally hit rock bottom, Charles A. Levine stayed there for the remaining days of his life. He breathed his last on Dec. 6, 1991, cared for by an older woman who had picked him up off the street some 30 years earlier, having vaguely remembered his name from headlines of yore.

In 1953, Levine becomes the focus of an FBI investigation. Levine had avoided paying the fine from his 1937 smuggling conviction, and now the Feds want to collect. Levine’s case is reopened and an agent is assigned to tracking down the evasive former flyer.

In the course of his investigation, the agent discovers Levine’s rap sheet.

The agent questions several of Levine’s former acquaintances. He learns that Levine has hit on hard times but finds few clues to Levine’s whereabouts.

A clerk at a seedy New York City hotel confirms that Levine is living there. The agent is instructed by his superiors not to contact Levine, for fear that Levine may leave town if apprised of the investigation.

Sure enough, when Levine learns that the FBI is pursuing him, he leaves the hotel. He apparently spends the next year moving among several rooming houses. He is occasionally seen at a salesmen’s office in New York City, where he collects his mail.

The FBI agent is put in touch with Levine’s brother. The brother says that he, too, is owed money by Levine, who has been avoiding him for some time.

A recent employer of Levine agrees to assist in the investigation, having been stiffed by Levine for thousands of dollars worth of company equipment.

Acting on a tip from a former associate, the agent finally locates Levine in 1956 and calls him in for questioning.

When called in by FBI officials for a second round of questioning, Levine refers to the Statute of Limitations on the collection of his fine.

In 1958 Federal officials declare Levine’s debt uncollectible and close his case…

…only to re-open it nine years later, stating that the case had been closed “in error.” The last record of the case is dated June, 1967. Though Levine again pleads protection under the Statute of Limitations, Federal authorities continue to believe that the claim “may be collectible.”

In the meantime, Levine has come to the attention of the FBI in an unrelated matter. Files dating from 1962 allege that Levine has been involved in the illegal sale of electronic equipment to the Government of Venezuela. The investigation is closed the following year due to a heavy caseload in the New York Customs Department.

Read Levine’s complete FBI file here.

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.

Commercials on Yiddish Radio

Introduction

On radio stations that carried Yiddish-language broadcasts in the 1930s and ’40s, an inordinate amount of airtime was devoted to advertising. At the height of its popularity WEVD landed accounts from brand-name sponsors like Manischewitz, Hebrew National, and Campbell’s Soup. But smaller stations like Brooklyn’s WLTH and WBBC were perpetually having to go into the community to rustle up business from mom-and-pop stores on the Lower East Side and along Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

Much to their listeners’ dismay, these stations often filled as much as 50 percent of the broadcast day with pitches. Often inspired, occasionally insipid, commercials from neighborhood stores were the lifeblood of Yiddish radio.

To the ethnographer, these shards provide a vivid snapshot of what ordinary people wore, ate, drank, and cleaned their houses with. For the rest of us, they’re simply some of the most memorable ads ever created — from the Joe and Paul clothiers jingle to the language-murdering ad copy of Mitchell Levitsky, WEVD’s advertising king.

Chunky Chocolate, which was located on Ridge Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was among Yiddish radio’s most loyal sponsors.

Mitchell Levitsky, WEVD’s advertising king, working the phones, c1940. His accounts included Chunky Chocolate, Portnoy’s Trusses, and Mrs. Weinberg’s Kosher Chopped Liver.


Mitchell Levitsky: The Advertising King

Few figures from the golden age of Yiddish radio are more widely if anonymously recalled than Mitchell Levitsky. He began his radio career in 1927, at age 18, as a Yiddish announcer for New York’s WFAB. But by the time he arrived at WEVD in 1943, he had discovered his true calling: selling radio ads.

As the patriarch of advertising sales reps, Levitsky proved an unstoppable force on the streets of the Lower East Side, tossing shop after shop into his game sack. Dick Sugar, the veteran WEVD announcer, recalls that shop owners along Second Avenue would push Levitsky out the front door only to turn around and see him coming through the back. Yet one way or another, Levitsky always got his man. Portnoy’s Trusses, Mrs. Weinberg’s Frozen Kosher Chopped Liver, Meyer Mehadrin Kosher Herring Products — one and all fell before Levitsky’s relentless onslaught.

Shopkeeper’s buying ads from Levitsky hired not just WEVD airtime but the on-air talents of the advertising king, whose delivery was legendary among Jewish New Yorkers. When Levitsky spoke English it sounded like Yiddish was his first language, and when he spoke Yiddish you would swear he was born here. He wended his way through ad copy as though navigating a minefield, stopping to rest on “ums” and “ahs” and regrouping during significant pauses that lapsed into dead air. Yet despite such caution, WEVD listeners heard pitches for bedroom “suits” and hotel rooms with “wall-to-wall telephones in every room.”

Levitsky wooed advertisers by impressing upon them that one little commercial would make them big-time theatrical producers. Each pint-size patron of the arts also got an annual cruise of the East River complete with an open bar and celebrity shipmates like Jewish boxing great Benny Leonard. By the by, Levitsky would corner his guests to discuss a renewal of their contract.

In addition to hawking ads, Levitsky hosted knockoff shows like the advice program Jewish Court of Human Relations and a Sunday morning children’s hour. He was the announcer for The Chunky Program, featuring the Joseph Rumshinsky Orchestra. And he was the host of the long-running Oddities in the News, on which he read offbeat items gleaned from the week’s papers. Listeners to these programs recall no dearth of commercial messages.

Mitchell Levitsky, 1933.

Levitsky organized an annual East River cruise for his customers. Celebrities like Jewish boxing great Benny Leonard (center) were featured guests.

Revelers aboard Levitsky’s East River cruise enjoy a semi-private moment.

Levitsky (right) occasionally read ad copy on Rabbi Rubin’s (left) on-air court.

Inspired by Rabbi Rubin’s example, Levitsky created his own mediation program, which he called The Jewish Court of Human Relations.


“Joe and Paul”

Paul Kofsky opened his first clothing store in Brooklyn in 1912. He called it Joe and Paul – inventing an imaginary cohort, Joe, because he thought people would trust him more if they thought he had a partner. By the early ’30s, Kofsky, a dapper man with a penchant for paper neckties, held sway over a successful chain, with new locations in Manhattan and the Bronx. Sartorial success aside, Kofsky had a greater ambition: to rub shoulders with the Yiddish stars of the day.

He made his dream come true in 1936 by walking into WLTH’s studio and hiring the station’s musical director, Yiddish theater composer Sholom Secunda, to write a song advertising his store. As for the singing, Kofsky would handle that himself.

For the next decade, Kofsky spent most of his days shuttling between stations to perform his jingle live on the air and to talk theater shop with his fellow performers. The ad became more than ubiquitous; to many listeners, “Joe and Paul” was Yiddish radio.

So it happened that a young comedian named Aaron Chwatt (who later became Red Buttons) used “Joe and Paul” as the basis for an extended Borscht Belt parody of Yiddish radio. His routine centered on the fictitious station WBVD, whose programming consisted of commercials interrupted by more commercials, each sillier than the last. For listeners of Yiddish radio, the send-up hit home.

Called to service in World War Two, Red Buttons left the hugely successful skit in the Catskills, where the Barton Brothers comedy team picked it up from hotel staff who had learned it by heart. The Bartons recorded the bit in 1947 for the fledgling Apollo label and soon found themselves proud progenitors of the biggest Yiddish party record ever. According to Eddie Barton, three-quarters of a million records were sold in a span of a few months. The song was so popular it spawned a Latin cover arranged by Tito Puente.

Ironically, most people who bought the Barton Brothers’ 78 rpm never heard the original “Joe and Paul” jingle, which had always been confined to the range of New York City radio waves. Kofsky, it can be assumed, did not mind the additional exposure.

Joe and Paul clothiers was famous for its radio jingle, which was composed by Sholom Secunda, of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” fame. The jingle was usually sung on-air by Joe Kofsky, the store’s owner, himself.

Joe and Paul’s Brooklyn store was located at 1586 Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

Joe and Paul’s Manhattan store was located at the corner of Stanton and Delancey.

Red Buttons created a hit Borsht Belt parody of Yiddish radio based on the Joe and Paul jingle.

The Barton Brothers inherited Red Button’s “Joe and Paul” routine and turned into one of the best selling Jewish albums of all time.

“Joe and Paul” was such a hit that Tito Puente orchestrated a Latin style take-off of it for the Pupi Campo orchestra.

This photo of Eddie Barton was taken in Miami Beach, Florida, in April 2000. (The Yiddish Radio Project has since been unable to locate Eddie. If you know of his whereabouts, please e-mail us at [email protected]).


Selected Commercials

Campbell’s Soup

Miriam Kressyn, WEVD, circa 1950.

Hebrew National

WEVD, circa 1950.

Lifschitz Wine

WEVD, circa 1940.

Sterling Salt

WLTH, circa 1942.

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.

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.