The Yiddish Are Coming:

The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien.

--Richard Wagner

Don't let the schmaltz get in your eyes, don't let the lox get in your socks

--Mickey Katz

In 1965, my great-grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a party at a west Los Angeles hotel, and for the occasion one of their sons, my great-Uncle Norm, was put in charge of securing the evening's entertainment. He chose a performer who he knew was a favorite of his immigrant parents, both of whom grew up in Yiddish-speaking households--the band leader, clarinetist, and Yiddish-English parodist Mickey Katz, himself the son of Latvian and Lithuanian transplants.

Katz had reached his professional peak during the 1950s with a series of full-length albums for Capitol records that were predominately heard by Jewish-American audiences. Though he had released an acclaimed album of traditional Eastern European klezmer recordings, Music for Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and Brisses (and later his own deferential and nostalgic salute to Fiddler on the Roof), in 1965 Katz was still best known for what the sleeve notes to Mickey Katz and His Orchestra describe as his "humorous treatment of the nation's favorite songs," a polite way of characterizing the ninety-plus anarchistic, irreverent, and wildly ethnic klezmer parodies of midcentury popular songs that he recorded from 1947 to 1957. ² Katz's dissonant and aggressively unassimilated interlingual parodies spiked English storylines with Yiddish phrases and punchlines and inserted skilled Eastern European klezmer explosions into a postwar crazy-quilt of swing, calypso, polka, mambo, opera, and rock and roll. ³

When Katz received the call from my uncle Norm, he was in the middle of a Broadway run of Hello, Solly!, an "English-Yiddish Musical Revue" that was part Yiddish theater, part vaudeville, part stand-up shtick, and part chorus-girl-revue-goes-shtetl. Katz was never one to pass up a gig, so he flew west, corralled a few of his usual sidemen, and after a droll fifteen minute sermon from my family's one-time rabbi, took the stage and turned the banquet hall into a Jewish carnival. A few cha-cha-chas, a little "Alexander's Ragtime Band," some requisite jokes about doctors and bobbes, then on to what everyone was waiting to hear: the sound of Mickey Katz making the world Jewish. First, there was "Downtown Strutter's Ball," his send-up of "Darktown Strutter's Ball" which took the song's famous tale of an African-American dance ball and turned it into "a real freilach affair at a Second Avenue palladium...a mishige matzoh ball!" Then it was on to "McNakatz's Band," his kilt-and-yarmulke ode to Scottish Jews done in a home made Scottish-Yiddish accent, and "Max the Messer," which recast Bobby Darin-via-Kurt- Weill's slick and polished mass cult icon "Mack the Knife" as Max, a "big shlub" who works as a kosher butcher on Fairfax Avenue. Towards the night's end, Katz invited my uncle Norm, still wearing his ceremonial tsitsis, on stage for "Yiddish Mule Train" (an uproarious desecration of "Mule Train," Frankie Lane's number one frontier fantasy hit from 1949), dressed him up as a Hollywood cowboy, and asked him to crack a whip in time with the band and yell "Huh, Ho!" between choruses. "There's a package of salami for a Mendel in Miami," Katz sang with voice-cracking glee, "There's a load of lox and bagel for a cowboy in Las Feygl."

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Katz's hybrid brand of antic-Semitic American pop performed Jewish difference too loudly for many Jews of the 50s who preferred a more hushed and...