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?
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I'm a bit puzzled by this: Rund says he wrote the words and the "Stalen Brothers" wrote the music, but on Joe Feldman's recording the label says Rubin Doctor is the composer. Here is Joe singing this tragic song (also spelled Die Stief Mutter and Die Shtieff Mama). I myself had two stepmothers and they weren't this bad.



Feldman did not sing the second verse. See translation and songsheet below.


The worst suffering in the world is when the child is suddenly separated from the mother when she dies.
The father quickly remarries and so the child receives a stepmother.

And the orphan suffers terrible troubles.
A stepmother has no mercy.
She plagues the child constantly.
She shouts, she curses, it's dangerous.
The child hears not one friendly word from her.
In frost and snow she shouts: "Get out."
She tortures the child with hunger and deprivation.

No shoes, no shirt, it's like a stranger's house for a child when the mother is dead.

Oy! May the child be protected who receives a stepmother.
She doesn't feel the orphan's tears.
She is not as a mother should be.

She torments the child, she curses and hits.
The orphan lives in terror.
It's woe to the child when the mother dies!

When the mother lies in the earth
Then the child is held worthless.
The father has no empathy.
The stepmother loves him.
The child becomes superfluous in the house.
He's driven away, his blood is drained.
The orphan is soon sent away from the home because things are so bad.
And because the father now loves the stepmother and does as she says.
Now the child is like the wind.
He wanders in the frost and cold.
The heart understands and cries terribly.
The mother is gone from the earth.

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

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Labels: disaster, marriage, morality, mother, nostalgia, travails