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Jewish World Review March 19, 2002/ 6 Nisan 5762
Yiddish's new frequency
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Only the gentlest prodding gets
Dave Isay and Henry Sapoznik to
sputter superlatives about "The
Yiddish Radio Project," the
serendipitous act of cultural
reclamation they co-produced, which
airs on National Public Radio starting
this afternoon.
"It's like opening King Tut's tomb,"
says Sapoznik. "It's like the Rosetta
Stone," says Isay.
Drawn from Sapoznik's haphazardly
assembled collection of 500 hours of
fragile recordings of Yiddish radio
broadcasts from the 1930s and '40s,
"The Yiddish Radio Project," along
with its live concert version and Web
site, rescues lost moments of what
Sapoznik calls "the Yiddish American
renaissance."
"NPR understands it's an important cultural event," says Isay. "People
are flipping out."
The 36-year-old producer, documentarian and regular NPR contributor
should know. His instincts have earned him almost every award in
broadcasting as well as the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. "This is
some of the best radio ever created," the self-described
third-generation secular Jew says of his Yiddish predecessors.
In an unprecedented commitment to an obscure corner of American
culture, "The Yiddish Radio Project" is one of the longest independently
produced series ever to run on NPR's flagship program "All Things
Considered." The eight- to 22-minute segments will be heard by nearly
10 million listeners across the country every Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. for
10 weeks.
"To us, this speaks so much larger than the Yiddish experience," says
Jay Kernis, senior vice president of programming at National Public
Radio. "It's about the immigrant experience. Almost any family in
America can listen to 'The Yiddish Radio Project' and hear their own
experiences of trying to make it in America and retain their old
traditions."
He's optimistic that "The Yiddish Radio Project" will find an enthusiastic
audience. The project's Web site is already the second most visited on
npr.org, he said. And Kernis says he warned Isay that local stations
may ask him to produce additional one- or two-hour specials about
their favorite characters.
That would be welcomed.
"We hope to make Nahum Stutchkoff a household name," Sapoznik
says of the radio dramatist whose "Bei Tate Memes Tish" ran for 20
years. His melodramas were typical for Yiddish radio (and theater and
film). Why? They sprang from ordinary people's lives, unlike most
mainstream radio of the day, which was dominated by generic
announcers and escapist fantasies like "The Lone Ranger."
"I dare you not to become emotionally involved," warns Kernis.
Each episode of "The Yiddish Radio Project" focuses on the highlights
of Sapoznik's collection. However, the series does not purport to be a
historical survey. Jerry Stiller, Tovah Feldshuh, Carl Reiner, Anne Meara
and other actors perform Sapoznik's English translations, which are
interwoven with the original Yiddish.
There are episodes on the madcap antics of the Yiddish dadaist poet
Victor Packer, the tear-jerking weekly drama "Bei Tate Memes Tish
(Around the Family Table)," Sam Medoff's popular "Yiddish Melodies in
Swing," and the forgotten Jewish hero Charles A. Levine, the first
passenger to fly across the Atlantic two weeks after Charles A.
Lindberg made his more celebrated crossing.
Though seven years in the making, "The Yiddish Radio Project" is "just
the tip of the iceberg," says Mark Slobin, a Jewish music scholar at
Wesleyan University. There are plenty of films, books, plays, poems,
records and newspapers from the heyday of Yiddish America, but
Sapoznik's collection - to be deposited in a national research
institution - is unprecedented.
"Ethnic radio is the great undiscovered continent in American studies,"
says Slobin. "Henry is making available a huge body of material that is
a rich source for trying to understand how our grandparents and
great-grandparents lived in America."
Slobin calls ethnic radio a "barometer" of immigrant life because it was
local and attuned to needs of the communities, which in some
instances was just a single square mile in Brooklyn. Yet no book has
ever been published on the subject.
Sapoznik aims to write the first. And a conference and documentary
film may follow.
Since his discovery in 1985 of a few hundred old 16-inch records under
mounds of entertainment memorabilia in Joe Franklin's office, Sapoznik
has singlehandedly invented the field of Yiddish radio. Enamored with
these lost voices, he spent years combing attics, basements and
dumpsters to find the few records that had managed to escape time,
neglect and World War II-era scrap metal drives.
Based in New York, he was only able to gather materials from among
the area's three dozen or so Yiddish stations of the golden age (the
late 1920s to late 1940s), from low frequency mom and pop operations
to the famous WEVD. Today, there are just a handful of Yiddish
programs across the country. WEVD had managed to broadcast a few
hours of Yiddish a week until it became ESPN Radio last year.
Sapoznik, founder of the Yiddish culture group Living Traditions, spent
years researching and expanding his collection, even producing "On
the Air," a 1995 concept album by his klezmer band Kapelye that
recreates Yiddish radio broadcasts. But he found little financial support
to properly conserve and catalogue the fragile disks.
Then Sapoznik met Isay seven years ago when he was composing
music for Isay's radio version of Ben Katchor's comic strip "Julius Knipl,
Real Estate Photographer" for NPR. Sapoznik put on a tape of a
swinging version of "Dayenu" and Isay was hooked.
Initially planned as a 30-minute documentary, the project took on a life
of its own. Isay added five people to work full time for his production
company Sound Portraits. Despite major grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations, Isay says he
has relied on his $500,000 McArthur award to help fund operations.
"The Yiddish Radio Project reveals elements of the cultural gene pool
that are still with us," says Yair Reiner, a co-producer of the series.
Howard Stern and Jerry Springer are just two contemporary echoes of
Yiddish radio's early experiments with man-on-the-street interviews
and advice shows.
"Once the series hit, stuff is going to come out of the woodwork,"
Sapoznik predicts. He anticipates that listeners across the country,
who may have heard original Yiddish broadcasts in Boston and Souix
City, Iowa, will flood his mailbox with more stories, photographs, and
best, tips on more recordings, which seem to keep appearing. Just
recently, Sapoznik discovered legendary Folkways Records founder
Moe Asch's recordings of WEVD broadcasts, catalogued as "German
radio," at the Smithsonian.
And there's more. Sapoznik's discovery of Asch's acetate recording of a
BBC broadcast of the first Shabbat service in Bergen-Belsen, two days
after the liberation, will be aired as a "sidebar" on "Weekend Edition
Saturday" on April 20.
To help preach the gospel of Yiddish radio, Isay and Sapoznik have
also organized a multimedia concert with old-time klezmer musicians.
"Yiddish Radio Project Live" premieres Sunday at the Center for Jewish
History and Monday at the newly renovated Symphony Space. Next
month, it travels to Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and
Los Angeles.
Pete Sokolow, Paul Pincus, Ray Musiker and others will perform
Sokolow's new arrangements of songs discovered on the old records,
from classics like Sholem Secunda's "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" to the
jingle from an ad for the "Joe and Paul" men's clothing store. Guests
include Seymour Rexite, Julie Epstein and Claire Barry.
For the concert's finale, and the final episode of the NPR series, Isay
presents "Reunion," a program that reunited family members torn
apart by the Holocaust. Miraculously, they tracked down a man who
appeared in the premiere episode. Queens resident Siegbert Freiberg
will recount the day he saw his father for the first time since 1932 in
the studios of WOR Radio in 1947.
It's a remarkable moment. Hearing the first time a Holocaust survivor
tells his story on the air, in a country that still had immigration quotas,
contributes to our foggy understanding of the American Jewish
community's immediate response to the Holocaust.
Freiberg's father, newly arrived from Shanghai where he spent the
war, knew only four words of English: "Thank G-d for
By Daniel Belasco
'The Yiddish Radio Project' airs immigrant humor and pathos on NPR.
Daniel Belasco is a staff writer at
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