Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
Index of songs on this site
Youtube: all the Penny Songs I've recorded so far (with subtitles)
About this project ♦ ♦ About Jane Peppler
List of the still-lost songs: do you know any of them?
Search the blog:

Later in life Gustav Goldstein (also Gustave Goldstein) was known for his comedy patter, comic dialogues and silly songs often with Clara Gold and Anna Hoffman.

But this song, "War," was written at a very somber time, during the Great War (or World War I as it unhappily became). Its anti-war message is still potent.

The performer is Cantor Abraham Rosenstein, he's appeared on this blog before (singing lighthearted material). Click to hear him:


On the video, I included the text both as given in the American Penny Songs collection and as it was published in the sheet music in 1917. See how much "folk processing" went on? Perhaps it was intentional - replacing "swords" with "bayonets", or changing couplets to rhyme in a different dialect - or perhaps whoever transcribed the song for the songsheet was working from memory and got it wrong. I'm sure it happened often.

The song appears three times in the American Yiddish Penny Songs collection, once with a big picture of Czar Nicholas II on it, once under the name "Di milkhome korbones" - it is not the song William Schwartz recorded under the title Die Milchume Korbunos.

There is a third verse not included on the recording. Here's the transcription and my translation from the Yiddish:


The newspapers write lots of news, it's terrible.
War is now fully underway.
Thousands of young men are sent away,
God only knows for how long.
They fight there like heroes for their fatherland
To defend their flag and their crown
With bombs, with rifles, with swords in hand,
Not yet terrified by the prospect of death,
In every land where there are battles
Always declaring victory
But have a look on the battlefield

Oh woe, the war, the cry, "war,"
Always destroying young lives.
Everybody wins in the war. They fall like flies in the war
Countless victims and widows, countless.

"Goodbye, be well, my dear wife and my dear child,"
A young man takes his leave.
"I ask you not to lose hope now,
We will be together again."
The wife's tears are flowing, it's terrible,
The child only wants to be with his father.
"Why do they steal my child's father away?
The child has just turned two years old."
The husband stands there, poor thing,
He knows they'll be as desolate as a stone
And with a broken heart, he has to go.

To fight in the war. What can he say: war.
A telegram comes from the battlefield,
it says the little boy is now an orphan.
The little guy is without a father, what will happen now?

They bring many dead and wounded men back
From the battlefield to the town
Thousands run to have a look
It's possible one of their own is among them
But suddenly a cry is heard, woe is me,
An old woman is wringing her hands there
Look, people, all my four sons,
They're lying there dead, I recognize them
Everyone, big and small, cries with her
They take her away, crazed,
They take her in an ambulance to the insane asylum

She cries and screams, war, now you've robbed me
Of my solace, what will I do now?
I was devoted to them - people, help me dig a grave
I have married off all my four sons

---

For sheet music and/or performances contact me: jane@mappamundi.com

---

Labels: disaster, history, travails, war, World War I