The Jewish Underworld in Song
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Forverts associate editor Itzik Gottesman writes about “Din Toyre,” a song that deals with the question of Justice, in both the mundane and cosmic senses. The performance was “recorded by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman in the Bronx, 1980s. The singer was a neighbor, M. Bauman, from either Lodz or Warsaw.”
Gottesman goes on to describe the song’s provenance:
Urke Nakhalnik (1897-1942?) was a convicted criminal and after his release from prison in 1933, he became a writer in Yiddish and Polish writing a hit book based on his experiences in the Jewish underworld. During the Second World War, living in Otwock, he died a hero’s death. His life was truly amazing…
Bauman does not have a strong voice, and is barely on key, but he nicely captures the theatrical nature of the song — particularly his “Rex Harrison/My Fair Lady” spoken lines in the middle of the performance. The fine line between the underworld and revolutionaries is underscored in the text.
Read the whole post and listen to “Din Toyre” here.
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