Listen To The Entire Yiddish Repertoire — At Once!
Molly Picon in 1955. Image by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
By Jordan Kutzik June 21, 2018
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts.
Most American Jews recognize at most two or three Yiddish songs: “Afn Pripetshik,” “Tumbalalaika” and perhaps “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.”
American Jews who grew up speaking Yiddish, however, can recognize dozens of others such as “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen,” “Afn Veg Shteyt A Boym” and so forth. Fans of Klezmer music and Yiddish folksongs know dozens of songs and Hasidic Jews know many more from their own repertoire. Very few people, however, know more than a few dozen Yiddish songs by heart.
In this charming video, filmed at Klezkamp 2013, musicians Benjy Fox-Rosen and Michael Winograd aim to perform “the entire Yiddish repertoire at once.” While they didn’t quite reach their ambitious goal they did create an interesting new composition, a sort of meta-folksong.
How many of these famous and (not so famous) songs do you recognize?
Here are all of the songs in the video in order of appearance:
1) “Oyfn Pripetshik;” Lyrics: Mark Warshavsky
2) “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen;” Lyrics: Abraham Goldfaden
3) “Di Rebetsin” Traditional
4) “Mayn Libe Beserabye;” Lyrics: Itzik Manger
5) “Milners Trern;” Lyrics: Mark Warshavsky
6) “Afn Vegn Shteyt a Boym;” Lyrics: Itzik Manger
7) “Hob ikh Mir An Altn Daym;” Lyrics: Yosef Grinshpan
8) “Zuntik Bulbes, Montik Bulbes;” Traditional
9) “Frayen Zikh iz Gut;” Lyrics: Arkady Gendler
10) “Bortsht;” Lyrics: Traditional 11) “Hudl mitn shtrudl;” Lyrics: Aaron Lebedeff
12) “Zog Nit Keynmol/Partizaner Hymen;” Lyrics: Hirsh Glick
13) “Tumbalalaika;” Lyrics: Traditional
14) “Urloyb;” Lyrics: Mordechai Gebirtig
15) “Sheyn vi Di Levone;” Lyrics: Chaim Tauber
16) “Yidl Mitn Fidl;” Lyrics: Itzik Manger
17) “Tshiribim, Tshiribom;” Lyrics: Traditonal
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
