In the European countries where Yiddish was the language of daily life, there were traditions of extravagantly emotional songs of love, suffering, courtship and marriage. People sang violent ballads and graphic depictions of hard lives; songs of war, poverty, danger and natural disasters. Folksongs were like broadsides — carrying the news of the day, declaring the troubles in society. These songs were created and sung largely by women. Women working alongside other women in fields, markets, factories and homes shared songs reflecting their lives, their experiences, thoughts, dreams, imaginings.

“A Gutn Ovnt, Brayne / Good Night, Brayne” by Mikveh

The images in the song are stark, vivid, and we can’t turn away. We, like the neighbor, are called to witness the loneliness and to hear the desperate declarations. We see the shame, we witness the loss of control over the simple tasks of daily life, and we see a final image of descent — a battered body sinking to the street and lying still. How many women suffered behind the apartment doors of Warsaw and Krakow? How many women carried bruises in the shtetlekh, the towns of Poland and Lithuania, Russia and the Ukraine?

via “He Beat Me Black and Blue: Yiddish Songs of Family Violence, Part One” By Adrienne Cooper and Sarah Mina Gordon (The Jewish Daily Forward’s Arty Semite Blog)

zoom

fyeah-history:

A demonstration in Russia. The antisemitic slogans cite Henry Ford and Empress Elizabeth
An anti-Semitic protest in Russia. Placards read from left to right: (1) “Revolution in Russia | created by Jews | paid for with Jewish money.” -Henry Ford (The International Jew, 1920); (2) “All Yids: Regardless of gender, age or wealth, must leave Imperial Russia.” (Empress Elizabeth II [of Russia - ed.], 1742); (3) “President Putin! Are you with the Russians or are you with the Jews?”

Annoys me that ‘жид’ (middle placard) is constantly translated as ‘Yid’ or ‘Jew.’ It’s an offensive term and is more like ‘kike’ than anything else.

“Ring Tone” by Opa!

“Антисемит” (Anti-Semite) by Vladimir Vysotsky

На все я готов - на разбой и насилье, -
Бью я жидов - и спасаю Россию!

Но тот же алкаш мне сказал после дельца,
Что пьют они кровь христианских младенцев;
И как то в пивной мне ребята сказали,
Что очень давно они бога распяли!
…

На все я готов - на разбой и насилье, -
Бью я жидов - и спасаю Россию!

from one of my favorite Vladimir Vysotsky songs, “Anti-Semite”

I was going through the Vysotsky tag earlier this morning and it struck me as odd that there were so many Soviet/Russia nostalgia fetish-boner blogs posting him. I wouldn’t say he hated the USSR, but he wrote so many satirical, mocking songs about it that it’s a miracle he was never arrested or otherwise persecuted by the government. This is part of the reason I get really annoyed when people call him the “Russian Bob Dylan”; Bob Dylan knows shit about the risks Vysotsky took to express himself freely.

And in the song above, he spoofs a typical Russian anti-Semite, a character who’s portrayed as idiotic, misinformed, and most importantly, patriotic. He says in the end, “I fight kikes to save Russia.” When he recorded this song back in the day, my father and his friends were young adults and many of them got offended, they thought that since the song is in first-person that Vysotsky was expressing his own views. As ridiculous as that seems reading the lyrics today and knowing that he too was a Jew, I can understand where that fear was coming from; these Soviet Jews expected nothing but abuse from their culture.

And Vysotsky is a strange phenomenon, idealized as the bard of Russia by many of the people he satirized in his songs, I’m sure many anti-Semites as well. He fit well into both the stereotype of a rock star and that of a Russian man; he was a womanizer and a hard drinker. The drinking and drugs were what killed him at the age of 42. But the ~hardcore~ facade and the criminal ballad genre in which he often performed didn’t fit in with the anti-Semitic stereotypes that portrayed Jewish men as weak and effeminate, and so he became the voice of a country that hated Jews. Though he is gone, it warms my heart a little to think of Russian anti-Semites singing the quoted song, not getting that he’s saying “fuck you” right in their faces.

(via svetlana-del-rey)(via lazersilberstein)

(via lazersilberstein)

zoom

thesoviette:

magyarleague:

nprfreshair:

Some Music For Your Tuesday: NPR Music is streaming Regina Spektor’s new album ‘What We Saw From The Cheap Seats’ in its entirety. Enjoy!

(via First Listen: Regina Spektor, ‘What We Saw From The Cheap Seats’ : NPR)

∞  May 22, 2012 at 06:58pm via

386 notes

zoom

“Freedom for Soviet Jews” button from the Baltimore Jewish Council.

Thank you for the submission, sassyfrasscircus!

SUBMIT things! ASK/TELL me things!

zoom

(via zolotoivek)

Poster for Jewish Luck (1925) by Natan Altman

Jewish Luck was among the first Soviet Yiddish films to be released in the US during the 1920s. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s series of stories featuring the character Menakhem Mendl (played by the famous actor Solomon Mikhoels) the film revolves around the daydreaming entrepreneur Menakhem Mendl who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Despite Jewish oppression by Tsarist Russia, Menakhem Mendl continues to pursue his dreams and his continued persistence transforms him from schlemiel to hero as the film uncovers the tragic underpinnings of Sholem Aleichem’s comic tales. Notes Village Voice critic Georgia Brown, “The movie’s best intertitle translated from Isaac Babel’s Russian: ‘What can you do when there is nothing to do?’”

A dramatized version of the Menkhem Mendl stories was first staged by the Moscow Yiddish State Theater, under the direction of Alexander Granovsky, who later made this silent film. Jewish Luck features some of the finest artistic talents of Soviet Jewry during this period. It has been speculated that the cinematography done by Eduard Tissé inspired the filming of certain scenes in one of his later projects, Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (particularly the famous “Odessa steps” scene of that film, the same setting as the Jewish Luck finale). The original Russian intertitles were written by Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who later became a victim of the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s.

(via The National Center for Jewish Film)

zoom

Freedom for Soviet Jewry

(via Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington)