^B00:00:11 >> Sharon Horowitz: Good afternoon. Welcome to the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. On behalf of the music division and the Hebraic section, let me thank you all for coming to today's program. My name is Sharon Horowitz. I'm a reference librarian in the Hebraic section. The Hebraic section marks its beginning in 1912 with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets, whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist, Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and other Hebraic-script languages. The Hebraic section also includes an important collection of books in Ge'ez, Hark [phonetic], and Tigrinya, the languages of Ethiopia, past and present. Our sections' holdings are particularly strong in the areas of bible and Rabbinics, liturgy, Hebrew language and literature, [inaudible] and Jewish history. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. One way we accomplish this second goal is by holding lectures and having programs such as the one we are hosting here today. And now, a word about our speaker. Vivi Lachs is a social and cultural historian, a performer as well as an academic. She completed her PhD in 2015 from Royal Holloway University of London. She has given many academic presentations focused on ethnomusicology and the acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life. She has written both academic and popular articles and has performed throughout Europe. She has a wide experience performing as a Yiddish vocalist, dance leader, and among her performance-related accomplishments, she has organized a marching band and chorus performing Yiddish songs of protest from the late 19th Century by the late Morris Winchevsky. Vivi has been called the Yiddish London folk song detective. She collects, performs, translates and records Yiddish songs about London. In her book, White Chapel Noise, Jewish immigrant life and Yiddish song and verse, London 1884 to 1914, Ms. Lachs researched points to the similarities between these Yiddish folk songs and English musical songs. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish text are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex, yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish histography in three main areas. Politics, sex, and religion. Two items of business, before we begin. Vivi Lachs' book, White Chapel Noise, will be available for sale after the program, and she will be happy to sign books, and this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture, at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments. Please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting to the library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Vivi Lachs. [applause] >> Vivi Lachs: I've just [inaudible]. Thank you very much, Sharon. It's lovely to be here in this amazing building, which I haven't been in before. I mean, obviously I've been in the British library many, many times, so I know exactly what people do in these sort of buildings. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my book and hopefully entertain you with it and give you some ideas from what it's about. So the book is called White Chapel Noise, and the White Chapel is an area of East London. It's in the East End where the immigrant population came to from the mid-1880s. So Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came over to White Chapel, and they spoke Yiddish, and that Yiddish culture just infused the area in this time from the mid-1880s. And this is a picture from 1897, and it's showing the noise that's going on. And by noise, I don't just mean the hubbub. I don't just mean the sort of like the horses' hooves and the whirring of wheels and the new motor cars. It's people talking and people shouting and people arguing and people crying and laughing and all that. But in particular, the noise is people having arguments with each other because there were huge arguments going on at this time. And one of the big issues for all of these people was how to acculturate to English society. Because they came from Eastern Europe, and the culture was very, very different, and they wanted obviously to become English. Not only did they, the immigrants, come over and want to be English, but also the settled Jewish communities, who had been there for some decades already, they really wanted these immigrants to become English because they were a source of acute embarrassment to the Jewish community for these very poor immigrants to come along when they as a middle class society had got Jewish emancipation, and they wanted to hold onto the gains that they'd made. So, the book is, it's in two parts, essentially, and the first part gives you some contextual history. So the first part gives you two particular histories. Firstly, it lays out the labor history of the time, and it looks at the radicals or the socialists and the anarchists. However, the particular difference in this history is it's looking at the way poetry was used as a strategy by the socialists. The second history is the history of the Cockney Yiddish musical as it was rather affectionately known. And this is the musical in Yiddish in the east end of London. And then, the second part of the book is analysis of what are called Kuplatan [phonetic] couplets. And these couplets come from three genres, socialist poetry, music-hall song, and satirical verse, which I'll tell you about in a minute. There are three overarching perspectives that cut across this, and I've just looked at the idea of anglicization of people wanting to become English. The second large perspective is that of transnationalism. So although I chose material that is very much about London and about England, in fact, it's also about a much wider Yiddish-speaking world. And the third one is the culture controversy, is the noise of the argument of the [foreign language spoken] and the shouting and the crying and those, it's what were they arguing about, what was going on there. And then the themes, politics, sex, and religion. You might think have been written about quite a lot but not from these sources because from taking things from Yiddish is, first of all, there's been a lot of Anglo-Jewish history written, very, very few Yiddish sources have been used. So using those sources, you get a very different view. But secondly, the source I've chosen are from popular culture. And if you're taking sources from popular culture, you're getting a view from below, and you're really getting into those arguments. So you're not getting the official line. You're not getting minutes of synagogue meetings or various, not they weren't arguments in synagogue meetings, but you are getting the things that people are making fun of. And if you look at what people are making fun of, you can see actually what's really touching people, especially the satirists. So, I'll start up with the three genres. The first one is socialist poetry, and I found this in all sorts of publications. So we have the newspapers, the Polish Yid or The Polish Jew, [foreign language spoken], The Worker's Friend. We have pamphlets. For example, the one in the top middle, I don't know if anyone can read that, Mary [inaudible] you read it. >> This Vetting System. >> Vivi Lachs: This Vetting System. So, we've got, so pamphlets about politics going on, and then we've got song sheets as well, like Yiddish [foreign language spoken], which is a serious of Yiddish freedom, which is a series of different songs. So this is, and I've found lots and lots and lots of this material. I'll tell you how many in a minute. The second genre is musical songs. And these were produced in song sheets and song books. So at the top left you'll see a song sheet, so this is a little bit of a tattered one there. That's from the National Library of Israel. In the middle you see a program, a theater program, which has got a cross-dressed actress on the front. On the bottom right, you have a song book which tells us there are 150 pages and 100 songs. Actually they can't count, there are 102 songs in that book. And that was because it was pulling lots of pamphlets together, which is sort of what they did. And there are some pages from that at the bottom. So these are all the songs that were being song, and when we start getting into them, we can have a bit of a laugh and possibly a bit of a cry as well over them. And finally, the third genre is satirical verse, and people were writing satirical verse everywhere. ^M00:10:04 Satire is a fantastic genre to look at for a historian, because although you have to go digging a bit to find out actually what's going on there, you really get to see where people are really like having a punisher, of having a go at each other. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a look at all of these three perspectives and show you where they come in to a couple of texts. So I've mentioned Anglicization, Transnationalism, and the cultural noise, and now I'm going to look at two different texts. The first one is a poem by Morris Winchevsky, who we'll come across a little bit later, again, and this is a poem called London bay nakht. And I'll start off by looking at it. In fact, I'll start off by singing it to you. How about that? And then we'll have a look at what's going on. So it's about street lights. ^M00:11:00 [ Singing ] ^M00:11:46 And it goes on so all the things that the streetlights see and the streetlights don't see. So they don't see, they see the streets, but they don't, and the walls of the buildings, but they don't see the unemployment and the poverty and the homelessness, and the difficulty of being a new immigrant in the city. And the song then compares these streetlights to the London committee and the London committee who were the Jewish board of guardians were people who were supporting the immigrants. However, what you'll see is there's a line that goes, have you seen a greener Jew wandering alone. In verse two, the last line of that verse, too new an immigrant to be helped by the London committee, and that too new an immigrant is because the London Board of Guardians wouldn't support immigrants until they'd been in Britain for six months. So if you came to Britain and you didn't have a job and you didn't have family there and you didn't have a way of keeping yourself, then in fact, you would have fallen into a huge poverty gap because there would be no support for you on an institutional level. So, looking at that content, it's very, very much about England and about Anglicization because it's engaging with English culture and English [inaudible]. However, there's also a very interesting transnational part of this, and that is this poem was written by Winchevsky, who wasn't really a poet when he was writing this. He was just a beginning poet, and he wrote this in the structure of a poem by Mietlev [phonetic], who was a Russian poet, and Mietlev wrote a poem called Fonarichi [phonetic], Street Lights. And Mietlev's poem also had street lights see some things and don't see other things. The things they saw though, the things they didn't see that were sort of hidden to the street lights were a couple in love, a woman who's just been abandoned. They were things that were socially important, but they weren't politically important, and so Winchevsky came along and threw a punch behind it, putting some political importance to this. So, in a way that was a criticism of Mietlev's poem, but it also like gave him a structure to write a better poem too. The other things that's transnational about this that's very interesting is this poem was published in New York, but you couldn't really publish a poem in New York called London bay nakht. I mean who was going to read it? So they changed the name of it to [foreign language spoken] street lights. And they couldn't really have the London committee. So that was changed to [foreign language spoken] street light. The New York Eighth Street folk, which is on the lower east side. The interesting thing about this is that if you can have a poem or a song that is written and published and performed in Britain and then in a completely different place in New York, you can make some claim to saying that the experience in both these places is very, very similar. So we have a transnational culture of immigrants going to different places and actually absorbing the same popular culture, being given that same popular culture. I also look at one other song that also engages with these different transnationalism cultural controversy and Anglicization. And this one, I'm actually only going to look particularly and Anglicization. And that is that term Cockney Yiddish that's used and just try and describe what Cockney Yiddish is. Now, first of all in the transnational front, this is a song called [foreign language spoken]. It's rather a curious Yiddish name. I'm not going to go into that at the moment, that's in the book, but I will say is that the original [foreign language spoken] was written by a man called Abraham Goldsfaden, and Goldsfaden was a father of the Yiddish theater. Now, he wrote this about a decade before or actually probably more, and this was written around 1900's. It was probably written in about 1880 by Goldsfaden, and Goldsfaden's song, everybody would have known, people loved Goldsfaden. So if you produce a song in London with a title that everyone knows, everyone's already got some expectations, so they sort of know what's going to happen. Now the Goldsfaden's song is about a tired, dispirited Jew who is wandering around looking for a homeland, this archetypal figure of the wandering Jew, and his answer is, [foreign language spoken], go back to the Jewish homelands of Zion. The [foreign language spoken] in London is not saying anything of the sort. But that also has an archetypal Jew that's wandering around homeless and penniless, but what the [foreign language spoken] the world to go back is Eastern Europe. So it's a curious poem that again, a song that really like is part of British culture and talks about Britain. But let's have a look at the Cockney Yiddish. Git a blik in der leyn vet interest rate dort zen file mentshn shteyen aropgelozt demonstrate kop. Tsvishn zey in dermit in der korner goldston strit shteyt a griner yid un kukt oys a dzhob. So we've got a few words here in fact, but particularly, the first line git a blik in der leyn, der leyn was Petticoat Lane, which was the market. Okay. But of course you're going to use a word like leyn. You wouldn't change that, but we've got in der--I'm sorry, what am I knocking--we've got in der korner of goldston strit. Well the words for corner in Yiddish [foreign language spoken]. It's not korner. Korner is an English word. And so they're throwing in an English word for no particular reason really. Have another look at the next verse. A yolk hot bald derkent az a griner dort gayt un hot oysgetsoygn zayne hent un hot im bavelkomt mit a fayt. So here you can see quite clearly there's lots of words for welcome in Yiddish. [Foreign language spoken] is not a Yiddish word. It's an English word being Yiddish-sized by putting a sort of Yiddish inflection on it. The word fight is also not a Yiddish word. It's an English word, and in fact, the word [foreign language spoken], which it rhymes with is changed from gayts to giyts to make it rhyme, which is a different way of pronouncing the Yiddish. So this sort of Englishness creeping into the songs makes them very much as a part of English culture. So, I'm now going to talk about the themes of politics, sex, and religion, and I'm going to give you a couple of example on each of them by looking at a couple of different songs and get a sense of what we can sort of glean from the history in these songs. So we're going to stay with Morris Winchevsky, who wrote a poem called Akhdes, and this poem, Akhdes, became very popular later. It became a very popular poem, and in fact in the 1920's it was made into a song called [foreign language spoken]. Some of you might have heard-- ^M00:19:46 [ Singing ] ^M00:19:49 So, but that was a completely song. The [foreign language spoken] is a nice happy, clappy song that they claim came from the Winchevsky. Winchevsky's poem is a satire. It's very funny, but it's not happy clappy. And we'll have a look at the poem and see what it's telling us. So the poem says, we are all united. Whether we've got a lot or a little. We all pray from the same prayer book. We're all united whether we're cutting coupons or we're cutting trousers. I mean whether you're poor or rich, we're all united. We're all united whether you've got short [inaudible], the sidecurls, the [inaudible] and other groups have or whether we've got long ones, or whether we put them behind our ears or whether we have them hanging straight. Whether we're hungry or whether we're satisfied, we're all united just like all these things that are united. But when you look at it a bit more closely, you say well actually what's going on there because there's something very specific going on here. Winchevsky is writing in London. He was in London for 15 years, and he's writing about politics. So, first of all, anyone recognize this chap? Karl Marx. Karl Marx was the inspiration to many of the socialists, and his famous line about unity was workers of the world unite. It's particular important because what Winchevsky is saying in his poem is that actually it's not workers. No, the aristocracy and the workers are united. It's very antisocialist because what Winchevsky is saying and the socialists say is the unity does not come from ethnicity. Just because you all happen to be Jews, that creates no unity. The unity is across class, and it doesn't matter what religion you are. So, in that sense, we can see that what this is going to do as soon as he has a poem called united, we know it's going to turn everything on its head. We all pray from the same prayer book is a phrase, we all sing from the same hymn sheet, but actually he's using that phrase but being quite clever about it. A month prior to this poem being written was the publication of the Single's Pray Book. And the Single's Prayer book was published for the Anglo-Jewish community who were established in middle class, and they spoke English. The immigrants largely didn't speak English, they spoke Yiddish. So a brand-new translation, beautiful as it was, and a really important new addition to Anglo-Jewish and Anglo-Jewish orthodoxy wasn't particularly a very useful addition to the immigrants so they certainly didn't create unity. So we're also united if you're cutting trousers or you're cutting coupons. Well cutting trousers means that you are what most Jews in the East End were at this time, a large percentage worked in sweatshops as tailors [foreign language spoken]. So, these people, they're cutting trousers, they're being manufacturers, they're using their hands and producing. Cutting coupons refers to the Jewish [inaudible] guardians giving handouts. So they, later on they gave money, but at this stage, in fact two years after this had changed to money, so we can really see how much it was topical that this time they're giving coupons. So the socialists are saying don't take handouts. That is not the way to be a worker. The way to be a worker is to work with your hands and to be a part of the working class. Finally, using the word unity is particularly important because six months before this, there was a, six months before this the chief rabbi, Nathan Adler, died, and there was a lot of talk about who was going to take over and where they would live and what sorts of position they'd do and what they'd be involved in, and under the title that was the letters page, unity not uniformity. And under that title, there were lots and lots and lots of letters about what was going to happen, and it's almost like Winchevsky in his poem, he's adding to that. This is his contribution. Those letters were produced in the Jewish chronicle. Winchevsky's letter was produced in the [foreign language spoken], The Worker's Friend, but essentially it is if you like his contribution to that debate. So when you look at a song like this, you can see all the layers of satire, and then when you sing, when you go back and sing [foreign language spoken], again, you can bear in mind that it comes from a good strong history. Morris Winchevsky, in terms of strategy for the poetry, so we saw earlier on that he wrote a poem called London bay nakht, which was part of what was called London [inaudible]. He wrote another poem called [foreign language spoken], Three Sisters, about three girls in poverty. One's selling shoelaces. One is selling flowers. And the other is selling herself. And he puts a socialist message by the girls not blaming each other but blaming society, by blaming devout and [foreign language spoken]. They blame the society for them having to do this sort of work because of their poverty. So these are poems about terrible properties and getting people to feel something. The poem that we have about London bay nakht as well was also about people in poverty. Then we have the satirical poem, but he had other poetry that he wrote as well. And this is one called Tsum arbayter fraynd. And as you see from the lyrics, this is really socialist polemic. It's about alienation. People who are producing are not the same people who consume. So, I'm going to sing you one verse. ^M00:26:17 [ Singing ] ^M00:26:46 It's particularly interesting in terms of the melody of the song because [foreign language spoken] who was a Yiddish sort of like critic and writer came across girls in a factor singing this song. This is actually a picture of a factory in Leeds, but he came across girls singing this song in a factory in Belarus, and this is what he said. He said the tune was haunting, solemn and haunting. The machines knocked and the song carried, demanded, punished, and welcomes the arbayter fraynd. I heard this song many times in the factories. It was sung heartily and with feeling. At times, a factory girl would get a tear in her eye, but after they finished singing the atmosphere, it was continuously oppressive, would simply become cleansed. So another strategy that he has was to create songs that were going to help people through the day, that were going to encourage them to keep going. And finally, the sort of songs he wrote were also hymns to go out onto the streets for union action and to march the in di gasn, tsu di masn. Fun badrikte feltker-rasn ruft der frayhaytsgayst. Ikh bring vafn far dem shlafn. Ikh bafray di arbet-shklafn un ikh makh zey drayst. So they're out there chanting and singing the songs, and again, they refer to things that are going on, in particular strike action in London. So Albert [inaudible] asking for systematic work was because they wanted to end out work, which meant that people would take work in and cut union rates. And also [foreign language spoken] because on these strikes they weren't solely strikes from the Jewish tailors or the Jewish shoe and bootmakers, but they were actually strikes where the non-Jewish dockers, the English dockers were also, and the Irish dockers, were also coming in to join them. So, moving on now to the theme of sex. And I found about 80 musical songs, and out of those 80 musical songs that mentioned London, around 47 of them mentioned sex. Now, you might say, that's obvious in the musical because let's have a look at this picture that we've got in front of us. On the stage, we have a very stereotyped Jewish man and woman who looked like they're in a [foreign language spoken] or in a very sort of stereotyped version of the [inaudible]. Up in the gallery, we've got some rather drunken lads who clearly aren't being terribly entertained by what's on the stage. The orchestra seems to me not keeping very good time, and instead of sitting on chairs as one would in the theatre, the front row is full of beds that people are camoodling [phonetic] on. Now this is a satirical cartoon that's on the front cover of a journal called [foreign language spoken], the blofer. It was produced between 1911 and 1913, and all the things, you know, obviously you take satire with a pinch of salt, but there's always an element of truth. But not everyone is writing silly songs for the music call to entertain those lads. Some of the songs are actually very, very moving songs, and this song by Joseph Markevitch tells a story of a woman in Eastern Europe who has been abandoned by her husband. He comes over to London, and he disappears into the 150,000 immigrants that are in the streets of London's east end, and she's writing to him, getting more and more upset, saying, you know, help me, we need help, and the chorus goes-- ^M00:30:44 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:31:03 And what you'll find is that everyone in the audience would have been in tears. They would have been crying because they all knew people like this. They knew people that were abandoned in Russia. They knew people that were abandoned in Britain as their husbands came over here and disappeared into a much larger low east side or anywhere else those immigrants came to in the U.S. However, most of the songs that were being performed in the music hall were pretty much geared towards those lads in the audience, and one of these songs was a song called Vus geyst nisht aheym sore-gitl. Does that sound familiar to anyone? Won't you Come Home. ^M00:31:47 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:31:49 There we go, how does it go? Won't you come home girl, baby? Won't you come home? ^M00:31:57 [ Singing ] ^M00:32:06 So, it's, I mean, you know, this is a known song, and it was a known song in 1905. So, but hang on a second, this is slightly different. [Inaudible] Bill Bailey, Sore is Sara, right. So let's have a look at how the lyrics go on this one, and I'm going to sing you the first versus and chorus. In fact, I'm just going to sing it to you, I think. ^M00:32:32 [ Singing ] ^M00:33:36 Everyone. Oh Sore-gitl. Come home. You're being so embarrassing there. Gallivanting with all the boys. Gallivanting with all the guys. You know, Sore-gitl, they're all looking at you and laughing at you. You know, Sore-gitl, they're looking at us and laughing at us. Oh, you know Sore-gitl they're all looking at me and laughing at me. ^M00:34:03 [ Singing ] ^M00:34:28 Won't you come home, Sore-gitl. Won't you come home. You know, I'm not that kind of lad. Listen to what I tell you. Hear from my tone. It all does along when I get so sad. ^M00:34:46 [ Singing ] ^M00:35:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:35:15 So we have here a performance of a chap looking frightfully silly on the stage, and the question that we have to ask then is why is Norger [phonetic] who wrote this song and performing this song doing something that makes him look so silly on the stage. And the music hall is really about cathartic experience. It's about people laughing and people crying and people being able to get their emotions out when they're living in a situation that's actually very, very difficult, that's struggling to make ends meet. So let's have a look at what might be the cathartic experiences for the men in the audience and for the women in the audience. So a man comes over from Eastern Europe, and he can't keep his family there. They haven't got enough to eat. They come over to London or indeed to New York, but to London, and they still can't make ends meet in London. So they, the wife also brings work in at home, and they still come, and they bring in a lodger, a boarder, to help pay the rent, and they're still not making enough. They're really struggling just to make ends meet. And so the man, who is the wager earner and the bread winner, is feeling like his position as head of the household is in danger, that he is like no longer the patriarch as he can't actually do what the head of the household is meant to do, which is to be able to feed his children. And then he comes to the music hall, and he sees someone on stage who is so much more pathetic than he is. And he laughs. And what about women? So women come to the music hall, and they're working extremely hard, and they're keeping the household, and they're looking after the children. And they come to the music halls and they see a woman gallivanting with other chaps and wandering around London city, and they go [foreign language spoken], if only, I had the time to have an affair with someone. So, we're setting up a situation where people can feel something, and it gives us a sense of this is not just mimicking the English musical, but it's saying something very specific about the immigrants' experience. Okay, so I'm going to move now to the theme of religion. And everybody is writing about religion. The socialists are either haranguing religion or they're using religious structures to make lots of points about socialism. The music hall is making sort of really quite moving points about people becoming more secular and losing their connection to religion and the [inaudible] writers, the satirists, are having field days around it. So, I'm going to have a look at two texts around this. So, the first text is by a guy called Avrom Margolin, Dr. Avrom Margolin, who is the editor of Der blofer, but he was actually a doctor, a medical doctor. And he wrote something called A pekl neviyes. Now the connection with religion is a little bit tangential, but we'll see. A pekl neviyes means a bunch of prophesies or a bundle of prophesies, and it's based on a chapter from Ezekiel, which describes the war to end all wars, and it starts off like this. ^M00:38:51 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:39:10 So he sets up there's something terrible going to happen in White Chapel. There's going to be a war to end all wars. So let's have a look at what that war was going to be. And he continues his 166-line stanza which has 18 people in the community. We have the chief rabbi, Herman Adler. We have a whole range of people. We have [inaudible] my list of them. We have a 66-line stanza with all these people on it, with the chief rabbi, with the Zionist Ahada Ahm [phonetic], with the anarchist leader Rudolf Rocker, and it tells them what will happen to all these people at the end of time when White Chapels turns upside down. So the chief rabbi will stand down and questions and rulings will be taken to the secular Zionist Ahada Ahm. Anarchist leader Rudulf Rocker will become an inspector of kosher meat. The main Yiddish play [inaudible] are expressed in the Yiddish [inaudible] would switch to English, and the new editor would be Winston Churchill and so on. So it's a big satire. Now what connection this has to religion, as I say, it's pretty tangential, but what it's doing is it's using a structure and it's saying really that, first of all, it's saying it's belittling the tone of the Ezekiel [inaudible] but it's also, if you like, saying that if you use a tone like that on these silly little happenings happening in White Chapel, then White Chapel is already such a topsy-turvy place where everything is going wrong, there should really be a war to end all wars to turn it right. But finally, I'm going to finish on one more musical song. And this is a musical song by Nager, and people use religion in lots of different ways, but this is a particularly interesting use of it because in the musical you have a mixture of people who go to the music hall, they're not all atheists like the socialists. Possibly very few of them are, in fact. Some of them have become secular. A lot of them would have had a real feeling of nostalgia for religion and would have had a real feeling of loss, and so what they did in the musical was they did two things. They sort of engaged with that loss at the same time as making fun, but also engaging with the fact that the religion that the immigrants have was very different to the religion that the Anglo-Jews had and that they couldn't connect. So, I'll just have a look at the first verse of this and then sing a couple of verses of it, and hopefully you're going to join in. Because this song called Freg kayn katshanes, in a nice [inaudible] accent, really Freg nit kayn katshanes, as in Anglan, Don't Ask Silly Questions, this is England. So we'll have a look at the chorus. So it goes freg kayn katshanes, and you have to all do in your best football sort of like, football sort of way go, es iz England. Okay, shall we try that. And freg nit kayn katshanes, es iz England. Vos toyg mir di tanes, es iz England. A medinele a shmatinke, oy vey size tatinke. Ales is kapoyer do geshtelt. And you have to put your hand in the air and go England. Right. England. Freg nit kayn katshanes, es iz England [singing] es iz England. A medinele mit minhugimlekh. Un modne menshelekh, bekitser, bekitser s'iz a lebedike velt. So we now get a view of a man with his hat on and his [inaudible] and his beard, and he comes over here and he says, I thought it was going to be religious in England but what happens is it's just too difficult. The religion sort of like doesn't fit in with English life because if you have to work, you have to be in the sweat shops. There's no where to pray. You're praying there, and you have to often be there on the Sabbath. And the second character that we have is we have his neighbor who is already an Anglicized Jew, and his neighbor is saying, no, you know, you can't even expect that es iz England. So we'll have a look at the second and third verses. ^M00:43:39 [ Singing ] ^M00:44:43 And, freg nit kayn katshanes, es iz England. Vos toyg mir di tanes, es iz England. A medinele a shmatinke, oy vey size tatinke. Ales is kapoyer do geshtelt. England. Freg nit kayn katshanes, es iz England. Es iz England. A medinele mit minhugimlekh. Un modne menshelekh, bekitser, bekitser s'iz a lebedike velt. ^M00:45:14 [ Singing ] ^M00:45:39 And then we have the neighbor again repeating it, come on, this is England. So you see, the nature of what's happening to religion is brought up, and I guess the way it brings it up both by making fun of it and treating it in a more serious way is sort of shows the double things that are going on for people. Maybe they move their religion because they're having to work all the time and [inaudible] and maybe they feel a little bit guilty about it. You've got a lot of varying degrees of what people are feeling about it. So, this has been a tiny little glimpse of what you got. There are a hundred texts analyzed or looked at in the book that engage with British culture. During that time, I found 300 texts, and all these texts are in rhyming couplets, and it's an archive that has barely been touched, and as any Yiddish [inaudible] will tell you here in the states as well, that there's a huge archive here in America as well, and again, the sort of research that has been done on it is only like touching the surface of it, and that, you know, there's lots and lots more to do. So a lot of encouragement for people, please, to become Yiddish and do some of this research because the social histories they give us are very real or very interesting, and there are lots and lots of connections, both with Jewish immigrants in just different places and with immigrant culture in London between the different, or but in other places, between the different immigrant communities in those places. So I feel that this sort of work actually does lay the ground work for a lot of other things to come. And thank you for being a lovely audience. ^M00:47:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:47:32 Yeah, so are there any questions? Yeah? ^M00:47:37 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:48:00 Oh, well that's very, very interesting, because I haven't heard what you just told me now. So, first of all der blofer. The word blofer in Yiddish has got a stronger meaning than in English. So the word blofer is like to hoodwink someone. It doesn't have the same clout. Now, sometimes it's used gently, but actually blofer means cheating and lying. So, yeah, it's a bad thing. And I mean a pretty bad thing in English, but it's got a gentler side to it. But in Yiddish it's not a nice thing. And der blofer the magazine had a byline which read [foreign language spoken], everyone lies, [foreign language spoken]. The blofer comes to tell the truth. And so it's very curious, you saying, because obviously a blofer can't really tell the truth, they're bluffing people, so it's sort of saying like, okay, so we're now going to have double bluffs and triple bluffs going on here. But the nature of that magazine was to expose hypocrisy, and in fact, there's a very interesting column that happens on a number of issues called [foreign language spoken], the blofer laughed. And what it does is it picks out all these instances of hypocrisy, and then the blofer goes ah ha ha ha ha. And throws his head back and laughs. So, the instances of hypocrisy might be someone is getting married and the people in the family go to Eastern Europe, bring their wife over and bring her to the [foreign language spoken]. Or the blofer is saying, what you get a sense of in this, so that's [inaudible] that's generic yeah, but then you get the blofer talking about a certain lord who will pay his coachman, his non-Jewish coachman, substantial bonuses but will not support a Jewish hospital. And this was a particular story. Maybe not that he was paying his non-Jewish coachman service, but was saying that he won't support Jewish things even thought he is a Jew, Lord Rothchild, but he will support non-Jewish things because he was so terrified of anti-Semitism that he was, or the situation of Jews in England, that he would sort of fall over backwards not to support Jews was what this statement said. And the blofer is laughing. So, they're making fun of things that are real in the community, and they're making fun of generic things. So, yes, the concept of blofer, being a blofer, I think is really, really important, and I get the sense that there's a huge amount of satire being written in Yiddish, and in a way, satire is trying to do that, is trying to show where the hypocrisy lies, is trying to show where people are being too [inaudible] and double minded and saying one thing and doing another. And so it's coming up over and over again. So I think it's very interesting that you say that England is being seen as the land of hypocrisy, and certainly the Yiddish satirists are pushing, you know, trying to show where that is. In fact, even in very interesting stuff in the '40s and '50s, they're still writing Yiddish satire. Yeah? ^M00:51:13 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:51:25 All right. So there's different publishers for all these different things, yeah. So the socialist publishers, they are producing their own presses, because they really can't get anyone else to publish their material. So they're getting their press, they've got, for example, the [foreign language spoken], which was the main socialist paper, was being published by their own press. Then it would get defaced, and people would break in and smash the printing presses and they'd have to like get new ones. So that's what's happening there. So what that shows and what we write about is there's loads of politics around publishing. Then, the more mainstream papers are also having their own presses. The smaller things, so the socialist pamphlets and stuff are also being published by the [foreign language spoken] press. So all of that is in one place. The Song Book, there are a number of different publishers. So there's a publisher called Mazin [phonetic]. There's a publisher called Josef [phonetic]. There's a publisher called Wooderman [phonetic]. And they're all producing song sheets. And they're selling them sort of for a penny. And then Josef the publisher, in fact, there's another song called [foreign language spoken], which was what we saw earlier, and he uses that to advertise his publishing services for songs, and he says, I've go this great, new invention. I've got a song book, not just a song sheet, and he's connecting all of these and putting them into a book. So, these people are realizing there's a commercial market out there, okay. So there's the song sheets that people get for a penny, but if you do it in a book, you get even more, and they're putting little pictures of people's faces on them. So they're really playing to the market. And I guess that what's happening quite a lot is a lot of these publications will run for quite short lengths of time because financially it's really hard to keep them viable. So you've got lots of competing presses and small ones and slightly larger ones. The thing about like Mazin, so ones, and Josef, the ones who are producing the song sheets, on one side they're producing these song sheets. On the other side they're producing like Zionist songs about sort of the new Zionist movements that produces, for example, Josef produces a series of songs to the tune of [foreign language spoken] in Yiddish. A and then also they're producing religious stuff as well. So, I mean I find it sort of like quite strange that at the same time this publisher is producing these silly sexy musical lyrics and then also producing some quite religious material. But that's what's happening. There are a number of publishers doing that. Yes? ^M00:54:22 ^M00:54:36 Well, I mean it's interesting because [inaudible] has always tried to be quite trendy, and so it's set in the present time, but it is in the east end, so it is in this area or a little bit further east maybe. The trendiness has meant that it has sort of brought in immigrants occasionally because [inaudible] it was like a very much a non-immigrant population as it was engaging with sort of the white east enders who had been born there and had lived there for generations. But it's certainly in this area, and so it's engaging with some of the issues around work. And I think it's interesting you bring that up, because in a way, I think it became very popular because the east end has been home to all sorts of waves of immigrants as they came in and then often they moved out as they became more upwardly mobile. So the here were the Irish before the Jews and then the Jews, and then we've had Banglandeshian, Somolian. And so it's become an area that has been sort of an immigrant area as well as an indigenous population of white British people. So there's a sort of sentimentalism that goes with the east end and that has sort of like been drawn around it. And I think that in a way that's why something like east enders has got such a, just by its title has got quite a powerful resonance for people. ^M00:56:09 ^M00:56:19 >> Sharon Horowitz: My friend, Jane Petzler [phonetic] has done research on the little booklets. >> Vivi Lachs: Yep. >> Sharon Horowitz: I find it ridiculous that people would sing along with the performers. I mean if I was a performer, I don't think I would like it. But anyways, so she's done-- >> Vivi Lachs: Yep. >> Sharon Horowitz: [Inaudible] was a publisher [inaudible] but anyways, she was able to find a lot of these booklets. Many of them she found in the Library [inaudible]. >> Vivi Lachs: Oh really! I didn't know that. >> Sharon Horowitz: Apparently they sent them to the Library. They were unopened, but of course she found them. They allowed her to open them. >> Vivi Lachs: Wow. >> Sharon Horowitz: But anyway, I just was going to mention that's also an American musical things, these little booklets [inaudible]. >> Vivi Lachs: She's fantastic. Jane Petzler has done like wonderful work in collecting a huge number of American musicals, and what people now need to do with her work is to have a look at some of the social histories that come from them, but she's done a fantastic job of bringing them to life. >> Sharon Horowitz: Great, anyway, thank you very much and thank you all for coming. ^M00:57:19 [ Applause ]