Rumskinsky: Di Goldene Kale (critical edition). Michael Ochs, eds. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2017.

Reviewed by Hankus Netsky

kale

I have to admit that the irony of being asked to write a review of Michael Ochs’s wonderful critical edition of Rumshinsky’s Di Goldene Kale for Musica Judaica was not lost on me.  As some of our readers might know, the very first editor of this journal and, in fact, the founder of The American Society for Jewish Music was none other than Jewish music scholar Albert Weisser.  Here’s a quote from one of his best-known books:

“The American Yiddish theatre, as it was known at the beginning of the twentieth century on through to the 30s, is today almost non-existent. Aside from Joseph Achron [1], it never had any contact with first-rate composers. Because it built on ‘debris’ rather than the pearls of the Jewish folk song and because it hardly ever outgrew its almost primitive technique, listening today to the body of music it has produced is an embarrassing and painful experience.” [2]

Weisser was indeed correct about one thing in his assessment of the demise of the American Yiddish theater.  It was virtually non-existent by 1956 when he published the book quoted above.  On the other hand, his blanket negative appraisal of the quality of its productions was based entirely on what, in retrospect, can only be considered a toxic form of intellectual snobbery, quite prevalent in his inner circle at the time.  Indeed, almost from the day of its arrival on American shores, Yiddish popular musical culture, while warmly embraced by millions of Jewish immigrants, was shunned by the mainstream Jewish musical, religious, and academic establishment, doomed to the status of an invasive species of weeds that should quickly be eradicated by any means necessary. The result was a virtual moratorium on historical documentation, academic scholarship, or the publication of any kind of serious English-language volume dealing with Yiddish theater music—a freeze that only ended in 1980 when Irene Heskes started her American Yiddish Theatre Restoration and Revival Project.  The very first full-length scholarly publication on the genre was Mark Slobin’s landmark volume, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1982.

Despite all of this, composer Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1955), the universally acknowledged “dean” of American Yiddish theater composers, turned out a massive body of work that presents an unfiltered, unabridged, musically sophisticated, historically informed, and staunchly proud version of the musical world of the Yiddish speaking East European Jewish immigrant. In Michael Ochs’s meticulously edited two-volume edition of “Di Goldene Kale” (The Golden Bride), a Rumshinsky collaboration with librettists Frieda and Louis Freiman and lyricist Louis Gilrod, we finally get a chance to look behind the curtain and inside the score of a typical American Yiddish Theater musical production of the early twentieth century.

As Mr. Ochs, the former head of Harvard’s Loeb Music Library, tells it, he was actually not actively looking to do anything with “Di Goldene Kale” at all; really, it found him. He first encountered a piano-vocal score of the work while mounting a major exhibit at Harvard in 1984 and, after retiring from a second career as music editor at W.W. Norton in 2002, he felt an urge to take another look at it. “I started translating the words that were underlaid to the music. As a native German speaker who also studied Hebrew from an early age, I could pronounce out the words of the Yiddish text and pretty much get the whole meaning.” [3]

As he became more and more drawn into the work, all of the pieces fell into place. He located a Yiddish manuscript at YIVO (New York’s center for scholarly activities pertaining to Eastern European Jewish heritage) and met with Chana Mlotek, the center’s print-music expert at the time.  She arranged for him to have lunch with her son, Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, a century-old Yiddish theater company. With the impetus and the go-ahead from the younger Mlotek to launch an actual production, he traveled to UCLA’s Rumshinsky archive, where he was able to obtain copies of all of the musical materials used in the original production. The fully-staged version that the Folksbiene mounted in December of 2016 garnered numerous award nominations in multiple categories and drew renewed attention to the output of Yiddish theater composers as a body of work of significant musical merit that has much to tell us about the American immigrant experience.

The plot of “Di Goldene Kale” is not particularly unusual, and its characters would actually be eerily familiar to the 1923 Jewish-American immigrant audience, since it revolves almost entirely around the subject of American immigrant families.  It portrays the story of Goldele, an “orphan” in New York City, whose origins may have been that of a kidnapped teenage bride forced into a show marriage.  We soon find out she was raised by an innkeeper and his wife in a Russian shtetl (small town).  The other principal character is a wealthy American cousin whose demeanor exemplifies both the economic riches and relative cultural poverty of the “Golden Land.”  Nevertheless, “America”—that is, the United States—eventually turns out to be the favored destination of much of the cast.

Along the way, we experience expressions of strong Yankee patriotism, ugly American greed, the collapse of ethical values, the idealism of the Russian Revolution, as well as encounters with virtually every Jewish stereotype of the time. These include: a matchmaker, a millionaire, a suffragette, eligible brides, undeserving (potential) male suitors, and even a well-known character from a previous Rumshinsky musical (Dem rebn’s nign; The Rabbi’s Melody), Shayke, who shows up at a masked ball on the Lower East Side.  His appearance serves the sole purpose of reminding the attendees how much richer and more meaningful Jewish life was in the Old Country.

Putting aside the rather predictable cast of characters and plot, the music is extraordinary throughout the work, not only in its variety but also in its originality. In contrast to the much-touted but weakly-substantiated “Jewishness” of America’s Broadway composers [4], when Rumshinsky wanted to express his Jewish roots he channeled them through a deep understanding of nusakh (Jewish modal expression), khazones (cantorial music), Yiddish folksong, synagogue choral music, Hassidic song, and Jewish wedding music. In a biographical passage outlining the composer’s training in such genres, Rumshinsky mentions that “in later years, I often made use of the beautiful cantillation melodies, a great source for a musician.” [5]

His strong background in traditional Ashkenazic Jewish music enabled him to craft melodies that set the standard for virtually all of his musical compatriots in the Yiddish theatrical world. Given his extensive experience working in the mainstream operatic world, he was also adept at pivoting in whatever stylistic direction suited the plot at any given time:  Hassidic marches morph into music hall waltzes and gallops, Yiddish lullabies and religious melodies give way to sinuous love ballads. Along the way, we hear echoes of such composers as Mikhail Glinka, John Phillip Sousa, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Felix Mendelsohn, and Giuseppe Verdi alongside strains of popular music akin to that of Franz Lehar, Avrom Goldfadn (the first universally recognized Yiddish theatre composer), and even James Reese Europe, one of the primary figures in early ragtime.

One of the highlights of the edition is the inclusion of a fully orchestrated score, pieced together by Ochs from the full set of parts that he found in UCLA’s Rumshinsky archive, something that Rumshinsky never saw in his lifetime since he, like so many opera composers, orchestrated hastily as he wrote, conducting only from rudimentary piano-vocal sketch scores.  Classic scoring for the Yiddish theatre involved a sophisticated blending of klezmer (Jewish wedding band) orchestration with techniques employed in light opera and vaudeville These techniques, vividly on display in the score to “Di Goldene Kale,” are revealed to the public for the very first time in this edition.  Furthermore, Ochs also includes a brief history of the Yiddish theater, a full English translation of the Yiddish text, a plot summary, an insightful analysis of the work in its historical context, comprehensive biographies of the principal actors featured in the original production and the members of the creative team, a production history of the work, and reproductions of relevant historical ephemera, including facsimiles of pages of Rumshinsky’s original manuscript.

I have to admit that I find it sobering to consider that it took the active interest of the American Musicological Society rather than an institution or organization in any way related to Jewish Studies to make this publication into a reality.  Somehow, this essential part of our American Jewish musical and cultural heritage is still somewhat marginalized within a field that privileges Jewish liturgical or concert music or more recent outgrowths of both Israeli and American Jewish culture.  As for the actual process leading to the work’s inclusion in the “MUSA” series, a series that has also published critical editions of works by other lesser-known but no less significant American composers such as Harry Partch, Mary Lou Williams, and the Latin/jazz innovator, Machito, not to mention historic transcriptions and arrangements of American Indian music, Michael Ochs submitted his initial proposal to the former American Musicological Society publication committee chair in 2009. In the years following the acceptance of the proposal, he received help from a virtual Who’s Who of Yiddish and musicology academics in order to bring the work to fruition. An NEH grant in 2015 and a subsequent publication subvention grant from the Gustave Reese Endowment of the AMS (funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the NEH) were sufficient to enable Mr. Ochs and an impressive editorial staff to bring this impressive project to fruition.

Now that Yiddish carries neither the stigma of the immigrant nor the curse of the Jewish academic establishment, and Yiddish theater has finally come to the attention of a larger audience, perhaps the Jewish studies world will take note. Recent Yiddish theatrical successes range from a variety of Folksbiene productions, including a recent hit production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, originating in 2018 that continued to play off-Broadway well into 2019. In addition, Mark Slobin’s work bringing the collaborations of Avrom Goldfadn and Sigmund Mogelescu to life [6] and the airing of a PBS special on the Yiddish theatrical world of the Tomashevsky family have reached audiences that otherwise might have never even heard of Yiddish theater. [7]

I can only hope that Mr. Ochs’s phenomenal accomplishment in producing this two-volume edition of “Di Goldene Kale” will be universally acknowledged as an essential step toward sparking an in-depth re-examination of the vast musical riches of a Jewish immigrant heritage that still awaits being fully uncovered.

[1] Achron (1886-1943) was a well known and highly regarded Jewish classical composer and violinist.  He also wrote incidental music for several dramatic Yiddish plays produced in the New York in the 1920s.

[2] Weisser, Albert, The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music, Bloch Publishing Company, Inc. New York, 1954. p. 156.

[3] Ochs, Michael.  2016.  “How I rediscovered Di goldene kale.”  Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.  https://yiddishstage.org/how-i-rediscovered-di-goldene-kale-the-golden-bride.

[4] While a substantial number of books and articles point out the “Jewishness” of composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, and others (See Jeffrey Magee’s article, “Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies”: Ethnic Affiliations and Musical Transformations The Musical Quarterly, Volume 84, Issue 4, Winter 2000, Pages 537–580, Jack Gottlieb, “Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish; How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood (SUNY Press, Albany), 2004, or Michael Kantor, or “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy (PBS/Athena DVD), 2013), none of these document any actual intentional use of Jewish musical sources by composers before the advent of overtly Jewish-themed musicals (I Can Get It For You Wholesale, Milk and Honey, Fiddler on the Roof, etc.) in the 1960s.

[5] Joseph Rumshinsky, quoted in Ochs, Michael.   2017.  Di Goldene Kale, Part 1.  Middleton, Wisconsin: American Musicological Society, p. xxxviii.

[6] For example, Slobin, Mark.  1994. David’s Violin.  19th-Century American Musical Theater, Volume 11: Yiddish Theater in America. NY: Garland Publications.

[7] 2012. PBS Great Performances: The Thomashefskys:  Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre.  DVD, Public Broadcasting System.

Hankus Netsky, New England Conservatory