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  • Welcoming Elijah in 1927 Chicago: Mendelssohn in Yiddish Socialist Clothing
  • Michael Ochs (bio)

Mendelssohn’s Elijah has been a concert staple over the past century and a half in the United States. Hardly a choral group in America has not performed it, usually in the English-language version of the 1846 premiere in Birmingham, England. The work, written in German, has also been translated into many languages, and it seems to speak to people of varying backgrounds, religions, and cultures. An unusual version of the oratorio was heard in Chicago at an Orchestra Hall concert on May 15, 1927. Sung in Yiddish by a leftist amateur chorus, it featured a new, avowedly socialist-labor text. The chief purpose of this article is to acquaint readers with the existence of the work and the circumstances surrounding its genesis. At the same time, the performance can also be seen as the nexus of many strands: Chicago as a city that absorbed waves of immigrants; the socialist-labor movement in action; a triumph of Yiddish cultural activity; and the ready acceptance of Mendelssohn by Jews despite his having lived his life as a Christian.1 None of these elements were new, but here they came together in a single event that suited its time and place, however surprising a performance of Elijah with a recast Yiddish text may strike us today.

Chicago early on became accustomed to assimilating immigrants. Of the multitudes who came to the United States from Germany beginning in the 1820s and later headed west, many settled in the city. In the 1850s they were joined by tens of thousands of refugees from the Irish potato famine. A half-century later Chicago saw an influx of newcomers from Italy, by which time Polish Americans, who had been fleeing their [End Page 85] homeland since the Polish-Russian War of 1830–31, were already well established in the city. Each of these groups developed its own network of organizations and institutions, such as newspapers, restaurants, and performing ensembles. In 1900 Germans had become the city’s largest ethnic group: 470,000 residents, one-fourth of the city’s population, had either been born in Germany or had a parent born there; of these, German Jews numbered perhaps 20,000.2

A handful of this last group had settled in Chicago in the early 1840s. From the 1880s—when the popular Yiddish actors Boris Thomashefsky and Jacob Adler were based there—to the 1920s, the number of Jews in Chicago jumped from 10,000 to 225,000, or from 2 percent to 8 percent of the general population.3 Most of this growth was made up of Yiddish speakers from Russia, Lithuania, and other Slavic lands of eastern Europe. They came for a variety of reasons: to escape pogroms, to avoid being drafted into the czar’s army, to find a way out of poverty, or to join relatives who had emigrated earlier. And while they brought Yiddish theater to the New World, most arrived in this “promised land” with little in the way of money or possessions and thus were forced to do whatever work or take whatever jobs they could find. The men and boys became peddlers, butchers, bakers, tailors, and the like, or they labored in the city’s factories. The women and girls typically fell back on sewing, one of the few skills they had brought with them, and thus entered the needle trades. By 1910 Chicago’s garment industry was enormous, employing many thousands of Jewish women, most of whom slaved away in gruesome sweatshops similar to the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, where 146 workers, nearly all of them girls and women, perished in flames in March 1911.

Just a half year earlier, a series of events in Chicago sheds light on the deep involvement of Jews in the American labor movement. On September 22, 1910, sixteen brave young women and girls, led by eighteen-year-old Hannah Shapiro, struck the firm of Hart, Schaffner, & Marx—a company owned by German Jews—over an arbitrary reduction in the rate they were paid per piece, not to mention the hideously long hours and horrible working...

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