Yiddish Radio Project (Original Radio Broadcast) (review)

When King Tut’s tomb was cracked open by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1921, the world was stunned by the opulence of ancient Egypt, which had vanished for thousands of years. In 1985, musicologist and social historian Henry Sapoznik stumbled upon a cache of decaying acetate disks of Yiddish radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s in a New York storeroom. He realized that, like Carter, he had found a window onto a forgotten culture.

In 2002, a selection from Sapoznik’s Yiddish recording discovery aired as a ten-part series on All Things Considered, a program on the U.S. radio network National Public Radio (NPR). Produced by Sapoznik with Dave Isay and Yael Reiner, the Peabody Award-winning series is now available on a two-CD set that should be in the collection of anyone who cares about American immigrant culture. NPR host Scott Simon introduces each segment, followed by Sapoznik, who provides much-needed background. Along with Sapoznik’s helpful commentary, listeners will hear Yiddish dialogue with running English translations spoken by Hal Linden, Eli Wallach, Carl Reiner, Jerry Stiller, and other well-known actors.

On the first track of the first CD, Sapoznik begins his introduction by interviewing his immigrant mother, who is a Holocaust survivor, about the dizzying experience of arriving in New York, where her husband’s first purchase was a radio: “I heard them speak Yiddish. That was my life,” she exclaims. “I knew that everything was meant to be.” He then recalls his own introduction to Yiddish culture, beginning with his study of Appalachian mountain music with old-time fiddler, Tommy Jarrell. Jarrell had found himself teaching a lot of young Jewish musicians. “Don’t your people got none of your own music?” he pointedly asked Sapoznik. The question led Sapoznik to investigate the rich klezmer tradition; it was he, along with Yale Strom and others, who helped to jumpstart a klezmer revival in the 1970s.

In his wide-ranging introduction to the history of American Yiddish radio, Sapoznik gives the sense that almost half a century before the development of the Internet, it was radio that created the first technologically based virtual community. And the 107 New York-based Yiddish radio stations foreshadowed today’s endless proliferation of media channels. Some, like WBBC, WARD, and WVFW, had such low wattage, Sapoznik points out, that even on a good day they could be heard no more than a few blocks from the studio.

Sapoznik culled his material for rebroadcast from 1,200 disks, representing thousands of hours of programming. The task was staggering, and he had to piece together supporting material from radio listings in Yiddish newspapers, FBI records relating to station WEVD (which was founded by socialists), and the personal papers of colorful radio hosts like Victor Packer and Zvee Scooler. Many of the programs are undeniably compelling. For those familiar with A Bintel Brief (Isaac Metzger, ed., Schocken, 1990)—the collection of letters sent to the Jewish Daily Forward in which Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side poured out their tsurris (sufferings)—the selection from the program of C. Israel Lutsky, The Jewish Philosopher, will seem to spring right from the pages of the newspaper. Rabbi Rubin’s Court of the Air, in which the rabbi arbitrated family, business, and other disputes, was a forerunner of The People’s Court and similar shows that are so popular on television today. Most powerful of all is a segment in which a Holocaust survivor, Siegbert Freiberg, is reunited on air with his father; the two had not seen each other since before the war.

Also fascinating is the saga of a Jewish daredevil named Charles A. Levine, who duplicated Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean and thereby became one of the first Jewish celebrities in modern American culture. Sapoznik points out that, unlike most Jewish entertainers of the day, Levine kept his original name and made no attempt to hide his Jewish...