Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive (review)

Ruth Rubin (1906–1999) is one of the most well-known preservationists of Yiddish folksong during the second half of the twentieth century. Her Folkways recording of Yiddish songs, Jewish Life: The Old Country (1964), was preceded by her Treasury of Jewish Folksongs (1950) and followed by her book Voices of a People (1979), but a later anthology of Yiddish song remained unpublished at her death. Now her friends and admirers Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin—both famous in the field of Yiddish research and musicology—have lovingly completed this posthumous work and provided at the same time a biography of Ruth Rubin and an assessment of her accomplishments.

The collection contains 144 songs which Rubin obtained from Yiddishspeaking immigrants who had come to Canada and America from Europe from shortly before World War I to shortly after World War II. A list of her 71 informants is given on pages 283–284. According to the editors, Rubin gathered several immigrants together at a time and had each of them sing songs remembered from their childhood, which the others would respond to. In this way memories would be jogged and variants noted. Each of the songs has a rubric indicating who sang the song, the date, and the location where the song was heard. When musical concordances are known (especially in the most important Yiddish collections by Beregovsky, Cahan, Ginzburg and Marek, Idelsohn, and others), they are referred to.

Rubin’s transcriptions are just as she heard the pieces: monophonic, without accompaniment (one song has a fiddle supplement). Each song has a brief melody, which is then repeated to subsequent strophes. There is minimal attempt to edit: no dynamics, no tempos, no articulation. The songs are syllabic and fall comfortably within the ranges of amateur singers. While the tunes are carefully transcribed, inevitably the little diversions in intonation and tempo of the informer are not indicated. This makes for easy reading, but a modern performer unfamiliar with Yiddish as spoken in Eastern Europe a century ago should also consult the CD to get the special flavor of this incredible language.

The first strophe of the Yiddish text is presented with the music, followed by a complete text (all strophes) with an English translation. The translation is not meant to be sung. Since there are several regional variants of the Yiddish language, Rubin indicates those regions when the singer does not use standard Lithuanian Yiddish.

Rubin was very interested in the sociological positioning of the songs, and thus they are organized according to topic: Love Songs and Ballads, Lullabies, Weddings and Marriage, Children’s Songs, Singing Games, Riddles and Cumulative Songs, Work and Apprentice Songs, Dancing, Drinking and Humor, Soldiers, Sweethearts and Wars, The Hasidic Nigunim: Songs without Words and Songs with Words, Anti-Hasidic Satires, Topical Songs and Songs of Social Significance and Struggle, and finally Songs of the Underworld. At the beginning of each topic Rubin explains in a page or so some special features of Jewish life in Eastern Europe that conditioned the songs. For example, in the first section, she explains how there could be love songs in a society with arranged marriages of youngsters. In the last section, she broaches a topic that yielded both scorn on the part of Jewish moralists and songs which recount the life of petty Jewish criminals in poor neighborhoods in Odessa and Warsaw. She adds commentary to most of the songs at the bottom of the page, which gives further context to the meaning of the song. In a few cases she identifies the author of the text or the writer whose text is paraphrased in the song.

The compact disc accompanying this anthology is a reproduction of Rubin’s Folkways recording. It includes 28 brief songs sung by her informants; a table of contents of the record appears on page 285. Some of these appear in [End Page...