Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
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"Shame on you for just taking all the abuse, and why haven't you gone to Israel yet?" is the message here.

I kind of hate this song, it's so patronizing, but audiences seemed to lap it up (and there are lots more like it).

Perlmutter and Wohl wrote the music, Hyman Adler wrote the words, the song appeared in a Boris Tomashefsky production, Di yidishe kroyn aka Di Idishe Kroin, "The Jewish Crown." The sheet music is from 1913: on the front the spelling is Das shaifele (the Yiddish spelling is non-standard too), inside it's Dus shaifele, on the label the Yiddish says Dos shefele but the English says Das Sheifele.

Regina Zuckerberg recording this as Das Shaifele, but her voice is too piercing to be endured, so here is Kalmen Juvelier (called on the FAU site K. Yovelyer).


I had trouble translating this text, it's kind of impressionistic.


There was a pretty little sheep
playing so happily in the yard
It grazed on the grass, the rice shoots,
It felt cheerful.
It got a little bigger and soon it was driven out.
It was so afraid of the shepherd.
It cried and lamented in the field all day
It didn't feel as it had before.
"I want to go back home!"

That's what the little sheep cried:
"I want to go back to the yard."
It had happily woven itself many dreams
Never thinking of the future.
"I want to go back to the grass,
back to the sweetness of the rice shoots,
If I had that now, I'd be so valued."
But, my little sheep, that's not your destiny.

The sheep wandered from the shepherd's flut
It met many unfamiliar sheep
Its lovely fleece was shorn with scissors.
It suffered, poor thing, in silence.
Then a wolf came and nobody helped the sheep.
The wolf threatened its life.
It went quietly away, suffering in terror,
Lost sheep, without a home.
"I want to go back home."

Click for a larger view.

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

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Labels: anti-semitism, history, immigration, nostalgia, religion, zion, zionism