Max "Bunny" Sparber

EVERY SO OFTEN I get a hankering for some Yiddish. I'll go into detail about this later, but suffice it to say that the Yiddish language, and the secular culture that grew out of it, is my only ongoing connection to Judaism. I'm not a religious fellow, and can't recall the last time I went to a synagogue. I've never been to Israel, and am one of the current generation of Jews that isn't rabidly Zionistic. I was adopted by a family whose background was Eastern European Jewry: Belarus, Poland, and Moldova.

Many American Jews have a similar history. And I was probably more immersed in the experience of American Jewry than most: I went to a Jewish high school, and I spent several years working on a degree in Jewish Studies. And yet, when we learned about the Jews of Europe, it was almost exclusively in the context of the Holocaust. An important topic, certainly, but Jews were in Europe from about the 10th century on, and it seems a shame to only study the Jews of Europe at the moment of their destruction. Otherwise, especially at classes offered by synagogues, we tended to learn about Judaism in relation to Israel, both in ancient history and in the modern State. It was as though Jewish history had stopped at the siege of Masada and only really picked up again when Hitler rose to power. Further, a lot of what we learned about the Holocaust was framed as a pretext to the founding of the State of Israel.

Admittedly, there were some glimpses, here and there. We sometimes heard about the Golem, a fantastical creature made out of clay, who was supposedly brought to life by Rabbi Judah Loew, a 16th century rabbi who lived in Prague. But we often learned about it while studying antisemitism, and, again, this was tied into a long, unspoken narrative that cast the entirety of the Jewish experience in Europe into a series of antisemitic uprisings that eventually led up to the Holocaust. The day-to-day experience of European Jews was rarely explored, except if you wanted to watched Fiddler on the Roof, which, you might recall, ends with a pogrom and an entire village packing up and leaving for America.

I'm interested in the Jews of Europe when they weren't getting beaten by their non-Jewish neighbors. I'm interested in the culture they developed around Yiddish, and brought to America with them. I've studied up, on and off, about Yiddish theater and music. I'm especially interested in the Jews who moved into organized crime in Europe and America, or worked in carnivals, or as boxers, or other low-rent professions. And there were a lot of them, and their story has been left behind.

It's a pretty big subject, but I thought I'd start simply, with Yiddish songs. I've decided to teach myself about a song a week, for as long as it interests me, and then I'll move on to some other Yiddish related project.

Here's my first song, in video form. The title is "Di Mama iz Gagangen," and the lyrics are as follows:

Di mame iz gegangen in mark arayn noch koyln,
Hot zi mir gebracht a yingele fun Poyln.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mit di shvatse eygalach, ketsale du mayns.

Di mame iz gegangen in mark arayn noch kroyt,
Hot zi mir gebracht a yingele fun boyt.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mitdi vayse tseyndelach, ketsale du mayns.

Ich hob gegesn mandlen, ich hob getrunken vayn,
Ich hob gelibt a yingele, un kon on ir nit zayn.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mit di shvartse heralach, ketsale du mayns.

Roughly translated, the song tells of a girl's conversation with her cat, in which she fantasizes about getting a gift of an attractive boy from her mother, who has gone to market.