Hello, how are you? I hope well. In my country and in many others, today it is the first day of a new year. It won’t be difficult that it will be better than the previous one… I wish you a superb 2021 and for me I wish to keep the strength to continue with you week after week.

A few days ago I received the bulletin of My Jewish Learning, that I signed up for some months ago, and the main topic was “A Brief History of Yiddish”. You can read it here. I will come back to the Yiddish language in the near future.

This article reminded me of a time when I was almost obsessed with hearing any piece of klezmer music that had been recorded. That helped me to get to know the artist who is our protagonist today, the enchanting Theodore Bikel, through this song specifically, which dazzled me from the very first moment: Yossel Der Klezmer.

This handsome man with the charming moustache (yes, I love moustaches), who looks at us from his dressing room of the theatre is Theodore Bikel. I think that if the Jewish and/or Israeli culture is your personal background, you know Theodore Bikel for your whole life.

He was born in 1924 in Vienna. He is a star and you can find his bio in many places. I recommend you this long interview in Youtube, accredited to the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, because Bikel explains many facts of his life, related to the History of XX century.

This other one is shorter and very interesting too. It is quite relevant to learn about the time he and his family spent since the Nazis arrived in Vienna until they left. He explains several events, like the situation in which his grandmother was all day long for two weeks crying in the office of the warehouse where the Nazis kept their personal belongings confiscated, to retrieve them so they could send them to Israel to restart their lives there. In this short bio he explains he wanted to become a pioneer in agriculture in Israel and he started to study it, until he realized his talent was more for culture than for agriculture. How good that he noticed!!!

He was not only a singer but also an actor in cinema and theatre. He is the actor who played the role of Tevye of The Fiddle on the Roof, in more occasions, more than 2 thousand times. Watch him here singing the so popular If I were a rich man.

He has his own website: http://www.theodorebikel.org/  If you want to delve more, check it! And if you want to listen If I were a rich man, in Yiddish, this is the place: http://www.theodorebikel.org/yiddish/ 

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There is a composition with the lyrics of Yosl Klezmer, with music by Lazar Weiner, from 1939. But in the back of the album by Theodore Bikel, this song is accredited to… Feingold??? Who is that? It is Lipa Feingold, a jeweler born in Russia in 1878, who moved to the USA in 1905. In his spare time he was a composer of songs in Yiddish and in English. He was living in Denver for some time and in 1925 he moved to New York to pursue his career in music. He contracted tuberculosis soon after that and died in 1945. I found this information in the website of the University of Denver.

So what about the song by Lazar Weiner? It is very interesting to see how from the same seed or, at least part of the same seed, things so different can arise. I think Feingold got the inspiration from the work by Lazar Wiener and made something quite different. This is an assumption, because I have no proof that Feingold’s song predates Lazar Weiner’s.

In Milken Archive, the page about the song Yosl Klezmer is this, and about the author of the music, this one. As I said, this song is not exactly the same as Theodore Bikel sings, but it is clearly related and the one in Milken was composed in 1939 (according to this edition). At some time, this person, Feingold, appeared and made an alternative composition. But the arrangements of the album by Theodore Bikel are by Dov Seltzer, a very relevant person about whom I talk below, so you will learn more about him, here below.

About Yosl Klezmer, the composition of 1939, the lyrics are by Naftoli Gross (poet in Yiddish, born in 1896 in Kolomaye, eastern Galicia,  currently Ukraine, bio available here) and the music is by Lazar Weiner (composer born in 1987 in Cherkasy, currently Ukraine and part of Imperial Russia at the time, bio available here). This composition is quite less “folk” style than the one sang by Theodore. Let’s check some examples:

Theodore Bikel’s version was arranged by Dov Seltzer and this is very relevant, because Seltzer is a landmark on the creation of folk music from Israel.

Dov Seltzer was born in Iași, Romania, in 1932. He studied music in Bucharest from a very young age. He left Romania to Israel in 1947 as an illegal immigrant and was caught by the British, who were ruling Palestine at the time, and sent to a detention camp in Cyprus. After the establishment of the state of Israel, he was released and settled in Israel and continued studying, first there and later in the USA. He returned and he would gain for himself a prominent place in the history of the music of Israel. He would write hundreds of songs and he was also a musician (accordeonist) in the band Oranim Zabar. Let’s listen to them:

Seltzer also composed musical comedies and light operas, he was commissioned by and performed with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted both orchestras in concerts of his own works. Here you can listen to him conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra playing his own arrangements of popular pieces, in the album Tradition, for the violinist Itzhak Perlman. A recording of those I have special memories and that now get much more meaning, after learning about all this, is this one.

Dov Seltzer is alive nowadays and he has his own website, in which you can learn much more.

These are the lyrics I have found at Milken Archives. It is a very nice poem, a tribute to the musicians. Note that, as I put bellow, the last two strophes sung by Theodore are the same as what is in the website, I believe he made changes in the lyrics but I have not been able to find what Theodore sings.