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:

Click this image, the first page of the 4-page penny songsheet, for a larger view.

There have been several penny songs citing this lyricist/singer, Max Zavodnick, about whom I found this tribute. He writes, "sing with the melody from Di shlekhte tsayt" -- a song I can't find, so no recording...

If you look at this picture of, basically, a horse pulling a wagon with a giant pot of water on it, it's easy to see why fires raged so freely in the early 20th century. And I read that at least at this tenement house the fire escape landings were made of - wood. !!

This 35 Essex Street fire predated the gruesome Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. It can be found online, many national newspapers ran this wire story:



At the bottom of this post is the article that ran in the New York Times the next day, entitled "Five Lives Lost in an East Side Fire - Thrilling Rescues Amid Scenes of Intense Excitement - Baby Thrown Into a Net From the Fifth Floor - Crowd Wails and Weeps as Bodies are Carried Out."

So here is what Max Zovodnik wrote:


Who hasn't heard of the hellish fire at 35 Essex Street?
A terrible disaster, it won't be forgotten.
Many lives lost, they were burnt up in a 5-story house
The terrible cries of those who had to see it,
The burned people and those suffocated by smoke.

A terrible picture suddenly seen right in middle of the day,
Another such calamity hasn't recently been seen, the lamentation, the noise, the cries,
The fire flared up and barred the way out
Under the ruined house's debris the victims were roasted
And they couldn't be saved.

Many children lost their mother, now they're little orphans.
A mother and her dear child were swallowed up in terrible flames
They begged to be saved from the fire, poor things,
The firemen came and brought them down, but it was too late.

Who suffers this sort of misery if not the poor?
They peddled to make a living, they tried, for their children.
When they heard the cries, they ran quickly to save the children
A mother ran up and she, too, met death,
The fire said to her: "Stay."

In the tenement houses one is always in danger
Lives are at risk
And all the while new victims leave this world before their time
Not a year passes when there aren't these catastrophes, at any minute
Graves are filled by people from these narrow rooms
With young human blood

Now the deaths of seven people are written in the color of blood
Wretched orphans are left behind and have no place to go
Everything burned in the house, not a cent do they have
Their condition is so bitter
Such images as this one can only see right here in the golden land.


Click for a large view of the New York Times article:

---

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

---

Labels: disaster, history, travails, workers