Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
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List of the still-lost songs: do you know any of them?
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As you've noticed by now, Morris Rund's view of the world was bleak. In his songs, wives betray husbands, husbands slave away while their wives gobble oysters, and (here) bad husbands force their wives into prostitution. And all the time, complaints about the "new land" - if things were so great for him in Austria, why did he leave?

I recently posted a song about similar goings on in Argentina: Hert oys gute brider, in which a girl marries in Warsaw, hoping to improve her station in life, and then gets dragged to Buenos Aires to become lebedike skhoyre (lively or living merchandise).

There are SO many Yiddish songs warning girls about becoming too modern or independent. Samet un zayd is a classic - a girl goes with a guy because she'd like nice clothes, and in the second verse the ambulance is bringing her to the hospital in her finery and she expires.

The Rund text here was set to the melody of the Solomon Smulewitz mega-hit A brivele der mamen, a tearjerker about a guy who leaves home and has the good life in America and forgets his mother and then his mother up and dies. In THIS song, though, because it's a girl who leaves instead of a boy, it's she who dies.

Well, enough editorializing, here's the recording I made yesterday:


Transliteration and translation after the jump.




My daughter, you're traveling now to seek bread,
Remember your mother's teaching
Even, God forbid, in times of hunger and want, protect your honor!
Remember, my daughter, whom not to shame - for your mother wishes you happiness.
And soon she's away to a foreign land, there she cries and longs for home.
She suffers terribly, doesn't earn a cent,
she wishes she could go home again,
She cries and laments and wrings her hands.

Going to a foreign land: one who can avoid it
Knows how sweet home is, owes nothing to anyone...
But one who leaves home must suffer terribly.
Woe to she who leaves her home and becomes lost in a foreign land.

Four months pass, the daughter is already happy!
A boy introduced himself to her and they got married.
But suddenly, hear how terrible is her pain, nobody can bear it:
Her husband forced her to live in shame because she is alone in the land.
Nobody watches out for her now,
she suffers even more than before
And her tears pour endlessly!

In a cold room there on a bed you can see her lie.
The daughter's sick. Her husband is gone, he deceived her terribly.
There's nobody there to comfort her in her destitution or give her a little water.
She wishes death upon herself, she doesn't want to live in shame.
And suddenly she is freed!
She dies quietly there,
And this was the last thing she said.

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

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Labels: battle between the sexes, disaster, history, immigration, male chauvinism, marriage, morality, mother, New York, nostalgia, travails