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This chapter traces “Yiddish servant romances” back to the eighteenth century. It examines the formal characteristics of melodies and texts typical of servant romances and shows how its emergence can be correlated with verbal folklore, various musical genres, social history, and non-Jewish folk poetry. It also explains the term “Yiddish folk songs,” which is often used to refer to the entire complex of both folk and popular songs performed by the Yiddish-speaking population. The chapter uses the designation “Yiddish folk songs” in line with Bogatyrev and Jakobson's theory of crystallization processes in the development of folklore. It points out how the servant romances revolves around unrequited love and are characterized by the fusion of archaic traits with the markers of day-to-day life in the late modern period.

A hypothetical scheme of musical and related social developments in East European Jewish society between ca. 1600 and 1850, focusing on Weinreich’s definition of these territories as Ashkenaz II. These developments led eventually to the interlocking system of musical repertoires and genres that had become “traditional” by the beginning of the 19th century. The chapter defines the other repertoires of traditional Jewish music of Eastern Europe as: 1) liturgical and paraliturgical song, 2) the music of Hasidism, 3) Yiddish song, with its numerous older and newer genres. It then locates the position of the instrumental klezmer repertoire within this complex, focusing on the social identity of the two professional musicians in traditional Jewish society, the cantor (hazzan) and the klezmer. Both of these professions were exclusively male and represented the religious and secular aspects of the public sphere of the musical culture of Ashkenaz II.

This chapter examines Wolf Krakowski's legendary CD Transmigrations, which was the first example of Yiddish worldbeat. Transmigrations comprises principally secular songs, although these are at times referenced, as is nearly unavoidable in chronicles of Jewish life. Two songs, ‘Shabes, shabes’ and ‘Zol shoyn kumen di geule’ (Let the Redemption Come), are traditionally devotional, if non-liturgical. The songs that address the Holocaust and other Jewish suffering pose basic spiritual questions that Jews must ask, though not in formal prayer. In determining any music's Jewishness, lessons from the sacred repertoire of Judaism may be applied. On utilitarian grounds, all settings of sacred Hebrew texts for use in Jewish worship are Jewish music. This principle extends to all Yiddish song, since Jewish languages are tools of Jewish community. This includes all twelve songs on Transmigrations. Ultimately, Transmigrations—an album of Yiddish folk songs and works by Yiddish theatre and literary artists, its melodies forthrightly Jewish—defies expectations of Yiddish song in broader aspects of style.

This chapter discusses the unique musical career of Lin Jaldati, a Dutch-born Holocaust survivor, and her German husband Eberhard Rebling. When they settled in East Germany in 1952, Jaldati became GDR’s foremost (and only) interpreter of Yiddish music and thus an agent in the state’s complex and shifting antifascist politics. In 1959, after seven years spent building her reputation in the GDR, Jaldati went on her first European concert tour as an official representative of her adopted home. The trip was the beginning of Jaldati’s thirty-year career as the Yiddish diva of the communist world and as an East German cultural ambassador spreading antifascist music. Through Jaldati, Jewish music, specifically Yiddish song, gained a position it never had before in this part of Europe: it became visible and at the same time highly political.

This chapter focuses on Yiddish popular songs that developed strongly in the second half of the nineteenth century. It clarifies that many of the Yiddish songs were produced by the popular itinerant bards known as Broder singers, who took their name from the city of Brody, a frontier town in nineteenth-century Galicia. It also explains the “Broder singer” as a generic term for performers who provided musical entertainment with short skits and limited use of costumes, make-up, and staging. The chapter describes the nature of the Broder singer's performances. It also recounts how the Broder singers disappeared by the 1930s but left behind a corpus of recordings that has been revived in recent years.

Research on the the recent klezmer movement generally obscures the fact that the contemporary klezmer scene in Germany is dynamic and has evolved over a more than twenty-year period. It comprises participants from numerous backgrounds and generations, including Jews from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States as well as both non-Jewish and Jewish Germans, from the former German Democratic Republic as well as West Germany. The chapter shows that the German market also had a strong influence on the development of klezmer internationally—particularly in the United States—as well as interesting inter-European and cross-continental collaborations that have developed in recent years. This chapter situates contemporary German klezmer within a broader framework by interviewing prominent klezmer musicians in the German scene. In so doing, this ethnography shows that, while issues related to the Holocaust and the building of a post-Cold War German identity are central themes, klezmer is inherently transnational—involving multiple nationalities and concerns beyond a simple coming to terms with the German past.

This chapter focuses on how the physical and psychological ordeal of displacement informed and inspired music-related activities among Jewish DPs, from the creation of a sui generis repertoire of topical songs to the drive to collect ghetto and camp songs and the formation of touring performance ensembles. It examines the musical activity in the DP camps in Occupied Germany, particularly the musical repertoire that the DPs created and performed. Recovered from a range of sources–including archival collections, survivor testimonies, memoirs, printed and manuscript songbooks, as well as field and commercial recordings–these works reflect the frustrations and hopes of survivors as they attempt to envision the future and rebuild their lives. Emblematic of this repertoire is the Yiddish song “Vu ahin zol ikh geyn?”, generally regarded as the anthem of the surviving European Jewry. The trauma of dislocation motivated such repertoire, as well as the effort to collect ghetto and camp songs, and the formation of touring ensembles. These music ventures, many unexplored until now, offer insight into the DP experience and culture, and the ways in which DPs coped with the past, particularly the Holocaust and the loss of home through music in the immediate postwar period.

This chapter uses the Yiddish film by Israel Beker Long is the Road (1948; Lang ist der Weg/Lang iz der Weg) to discuss Jewish survivors’ dislocation. As the film reveals, displacement bridges survivors’ past and current identities as they search for a future home. Long is the Roadwas the first feature film—and the first German—Jewish collaboration—to (re)present the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, and the soundtrack by Lothar Brühne particularly sheds light on the various meanings sound and silence can have in the expression of displacement. References to the Kol Nidre prayer convey the trauma of the characters’ separation, and quotation of the popular song “A Yidishe mame” at the reunion of mother and son nostalgically echoes prewar Yiddish entertainment. In the film, Jewish survivors remember home through music and at the same time reimagine that home, which was effectively lost in the postwar period, while looking toward a better future in Israel.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the Jews' search for modern identity through music, in the late Russian Empire. It explains that the first hints of a broader new relationship between Jews and music in eastern Europe appeared in mid-nineteenth-century Odessa, and that the fabled connection between Jews and music in Odessa was solidified through decades of Russian and Yiddish popular songs and the later writings of Isaac Babel, Alexander Kuprin, and others. The chapter also highlights the role of composer Anton Rubinstein in creating the conditions for the rise of Jewish musicians in Russian society.

This chapter describes the story behind Itzig Arenstein's piano piece, “A Mother's Prayer.” Arenstein studied piano and composition at the Scharwenka Conservatory in New York. In 1899, he accepted his first professional engagement, as a pianist for the Charles A. Ellis Opera Company, which gave him the opportunity to tour the country in the company of important visiting artists. Shortly after the tour, Arenstein self-published his first piece for solo piano, “A Mother's Prayer.” In 1900, Arenstein sold his copyright outright for $75 to Theodore Lohr, a piano-seller and publisher who specialized in Yiddish songs. “A Mother's Prayer” went on to have an unusually long and varied commercial life.