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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. As New Yorkers, we've all got lots of reasons to kvetch. We know how to schlep from Brooklyn to the Bronx and the subway. We know the mensch on the block who shovels the sidewalk for his neighbors. And then we've got our other neighbors that make us go, oh, Gewalt, can you see what I'm building here? My Radomis Booka. That's right. We're talking about Yiddish culture in New York City across its history. That's because there's a new book out from Henry Saposnik, historian of Yiddish culture. It's called the Tourists Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City. It covers so much from the Ashkenazi diaspora in the Big Apple, from Yiddish theater on the Lower east side to historic eateries for knishes. He dives into the overlap between Jewish music and the rise of jazz, among many, many other pieces of Yiddish history in our area. Henry, welcome to all of it.
- [01:26]
Henry Saposnik
Alison, thank you for inviting me.
- [01:28]
Alison Stewart
Let's hear about your experience with Yiddish New York, particularly if you or someone in your family grew up in a Yiddish speaking Give us a call. Tell us what's important about Yiddish culture. Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC maybe there's a deli or a butcher you freak with that makes you feel like a man, like Mishpuka. Or maybe you want to weigh in or one of the best places to get knishes. Or maybe you want to shout out a piece of Yiddish theater or music that has meant something to you. Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC so hen you're not just referring to the language, you're focusing more on the culture that existed and exists around Yiddish speaking communities. Can you give us a sense of how Yiddish language served as a nexus for the Jewish Diaspora in New York?
- [02:21]
Henry Saposnik
Well, it was the lingua franca or maybe lingua hebraica of the immigrant Jews coming at the end of the 19th century, the Ashkenazic East European Jews. And that was the connecting the, the Connecting fiber. But, but again they were bringing a Yiddish culture that incubated and grown in Eastern Europe and coming to America at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. They had new cultural languages, not only English, but the, the, the, the underpinning of the society that they were becoming a part of. And this wasn't an era where that encouraged maintenance of ethnic heritage. This was the great assimilation, the great melting pot. So anyone who held on to and attempted to, to grow their Yiddish cultural literacy was, was going against the grain, was a real kind of maverick in terms of American assimilation.
- [03:32]
WNYC Host/Producer
The Yiddish history in the Bronx, it's in Brooklyn, it's on the Lower east side. Can you give us a sense of the geography of Yiddish in New York City and why these communities developed where they did?
- [03:47]
Henry Saposnik
If you look at a New York City map, the concentric circles of where Yiddish culture. The Lower east side was really the center of that concentric circle with the Bronx and Brooklyn bringing up the next tier, Queens and very amazingly little in Staten Island. I think it will take another 200 years for there to be Yiddish culture emerging. But it's really the magnet of the previous generation. And this is not unique to the Jewish community. It was the, the, the, the, the, the really the pull of establishing a foothold in the new world in, in, in your community and then adapting, creating the hyphen between your culture and America.
- [04:48]
WNYC Host/Producer
Let's take a call. This is Tom calling in from Manhattan. Hi Tom, thanks for making the time to call all of it.
- [04:56]
Tom (Caller)
Hi, I want to share a memory from when I was younger than 10. So we're talking about the 50s. My, my friend's mother and father took him and I, she had been an actor in the Yiddish theater maybe a decade before, but took us to the last theater going on Second Avenue. So there used to be two that competed against each other, but this was the last theater that was in existence. The name of the. Mr. Sapasnik might know of him. The name of the lead actor, the star, his last name was Fuchs and the name of the show was Mein Vibe mit Conditions. My Wife with Conditions. And it was everybody, the audience thought it was really funny. Lots of singing and dancing. I did not have any idea what was going on, but I felt like I'd been, I've been part of some historical. I'm not Jewish, so I was part of some historical moment.
- [06:01]
WNYC Host/Producer
Thank you for calling, Tom. Does that sound familiar to you?
- [06:04]
Henry Saposnik
Henry Leo Fuchs, the great rubber faced Yiddish dancer, kind of like Ray Bolger. If People know. Great comedian at the point that you're. That he mentioned just now that there were two theaters. That was the residue at its peak. There were over a dozen Yiddish theaters peppered throughout the Big Apple, most of them in Manhattan and then some in the Bronx and Brooklyn. And Leo Fuchs was one of the great survivors of that once lush theatrical tradition.
- [06:46]
WNYC Host/Producer
Yeah. So Henry, tell me a little bit about the Yiddish media landscape. How much diversity was there among these different outlets?
- [06:54]
Henry Saposnik
Well, if you're talking literally about media, and certainly my great interest is broadcast media, just as an Aside, back in 2002 I co produced a series for NPR called the Yiddish Radio Project, which really was the first examination of this incredibly lost moment in, in both Yiddish culture and in American multicultural broadcasting. In fact, my next book is going to be on. On. On Yiddish Radio and an amazing story about how American broadcasting was incredibly diverse and accessible in a way that we kind of don't understand today. But this was a great moment of self invention and, and was the, was the, the.
- [07:53]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
The.
- [07:53]
Henry Saposnik
The kind of the, the. The supernova of Yiddish culture the last that utilized great mass media outreach? It was a great story. It was really a terrific story. And I talk about it a bunch in the book.
- [08:12]
Alison Stewart
We've got a couple of good texts here. Joel Gray's Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof was a treasure. I saw it twice and hope it. The language adds a whole dimension to a beloved and slightly small G show. This says Walk of Fame on Second Avenue in the East Village where Second Avenue Delhi used to be. Can you tell us a little bit about the Walk of Fame?
- [08:35]
Henry Saposnik
It's a great and sad story and I have a chapter about the, the second. About the Second Avenue Delhi and it's enigmatic and I would say romantic. Founder A Label Wall who founded a. A, a kosher. A delicatessen on Second Avenue at a time that kosher delicatessens were in. They, they were never, they never outnumbered kosher style delicatessens. But in the 1950s, labor wall started this restaurant and, and just the same way that he was a romantic about processed meats, he was also a romantic about the. The era of the Yiddish theater which had ended. He had arrived as an immigrant after its glory days. So his attempt to kind of have a version of the Chinese Theater in la, he installed a series of memorials to great Yiddish theater stars. And it was a real draw. Sadly, with Labelwald's murder as unsolved murder and the displacement of the Second Avenue deli, they, they reopened uptown in a couple of locations. But the maintenance of the memorial stones ended and with it, the, the sad degradation. You can't even, you can't even tell what some of them read at this point. They, they required a kind of upkeep that sadly was not happening. So it was really, it should be. If there were any justice, this incredible moment in collective New York history should be preserved.
- [10:34]
WNYC Host/Producer
My guest is Henry Saposnik, historian of Yiddish culture. His latest book is called the Tourist Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City. We're talking about the language, the food, the music and the arts of new Yiddish communities throughout the city's history. And we'd like to hear your experiences. Do a favorite Yiddish work. We Want to hear 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We'll have more after a quick break.
- [11:11]
Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Henry Saposnik and historian of Yiddish culture. His latest book is called the Tourist Guide to Lost Yiddish, New York City. And we're talking about the language, the food, the music and arts of New York's Yiddish communities throughout the city's history. We'd like to hear your experience with Yiddish New York. Do you have a favorite Yiddish word? Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. Edith is calling us from the Upper west side. Hi, Edith, how are you?
- [11:47]
Edith (Caller from Upper West Side)
Oh, I'm great, thanks. This is a fun and interesting conversation. I belong to a Facebook group called One Yiddish Word of the Day. And it's super fun. People post their, their word or their phrase and all the people comment and the language, you know, they're from all over, so they, ah, we say it this way, we say it that way. They tell you what it means. But I love, I think I love languages, but I think Yiddish is my favorite because, for a lot of reasons, but it has a word for everything, like every human emotion under the word, you know, and then it, but best it has a word for everybody.
- [12:27]
Alison Stewart
No, no, wait, wait. What do you mean? It's perfect.
- [12:32]
Edith (Caller from Upper West Side)
Yanta.
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Alison Stewart
Can I ask you what your word for the day, what the word is for today?
- [12:40]
Edith (Caller from Upper West Side)
Oh, I didn't look at it yet. I'm sorry. I think I might put in yenta and see what people say.
- [12:45]
Alison Stewart
Thanks so much for calling.
- [12:46]
Edith (Caller from Upper West Side)
That's kind of an old one.
- [12:47]
Alison Stewart
Yeah.
- [12:48]
Edith (Caller from Upper West Side)
Okay.
- [12:48]
Alison Stewart
Thanks so much for calling, Edith. Yeah, Henry, you know, Yiddish culture has made its way into the mainstream in many ways. Comedy, music, Film and television. As someone who has studied this in depth and from primary sources, how much of is common understanding of Yiddish accurate and then how much of it kind of goes into caricature?
- [13:12]
Henry Saposnik
Well, first of all, let me just address the word yenta, which is one of my favorite words that crossed over from Yiddish to English. There is a chapter in my book about yenta, about the great literary character genta telebenda. And interestingly, the. The, you know, the binary dynamic of Yiddish culture. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was still a work in progress. A freestanding, standalone Yiddish popular culture was only a few decades old. So it was a very malleable, open, binary kind of process that people, on the one hand, were looking to assimilate, but they were also looking to. To find out how to navigate through. Through the popular culture. And the great incubator for how this developed was the variety stage. Vaudeville. It set a bar, a cultural bar, low enough that everyone, native born and immigrant, could really derive an insight into what made the culture and what made the society tick. And I love popular culture because it's an unerring barometer of what is on people's mind, both good and bad. And the, the. The. The. The representation of Jews on the popular stage was like a lot of minorities, blackface, yellow face, the. The. The Irish comics. This was an era of ethnic depiction and again, rising above the mass culture depiction of minorities. And to create a freestanding, unified cultural representation was a real challenge. And in fact, my chapter, I have a chapter in the book on the Jazz Singer, which is a real laboratory for how both internal Jewish identity, Jews who wanted to maintain culture and Jews who wanted to assimilate, and the dynamic between Jews and blacks in the depiction in American mass culture. It's an amazing story which hasn't really been addressed in other forums. So I was thrilled to write about it.
- [15:46]
WNYC Host/Producer
Let's take some more calls. Let's talk to Henry from Croton on Hudson. Hi, Henry. Thank you so much for making the time to call, all of it.
- [15:54]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
Hi, Alison. I make time to listen to you all the time. So that's great. So I want to really introduce another dynamic into what your speaker is talking about. I came to the United States with my parents in 1950. My parents are Holocaust survivors, and their primary language, Polish Jews, was Yiddish. And there was a generational aspect to who wanted to assimilate and who did not. At least in my growing up, the older folks wanted, like my parents wanted their children to assimilate because they wanted them to have a Good life in the United States. But many of them came over when they were, you know, middle age or adults and had a hard time learning English. So there were newspapers like the Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish newspaper, now it's published in English, but at that time it was Yiddish. And I think there was one called Der Tag. And I remember one time looking at my dad and everything about my parents was old fashioned, was old world. I was the new world, so to speak. And my father read the. Was very interested in world affairs and things, and he read the Daily Forwards every day, Every day. And I said to him, dad, why don't you read the New York Times? I mean, it's got more pages, it's got more news and stuff like that. And he looked at me and he said, well, there's a choice. I can try to read the New York Times or the Daily News or the New York Post in those days, New York Herald Tribune, but I won't understand anything. But obviously everyone will think I'm smart or I can read the Yiddish Daily Forwards and I know what's going on in the world and I don't care what people think. And that was, you know, a kind of real tension between the generations, I think, on what was considered old fashioned and new, you know, and new worlds.
- [18:01]
WNYC Host/Producer
Yeah, I wanted to get. Henry, thank you so much for calling in. What do you think about that, Henry, what our guest just mentioned?
- [18:07]
Henry Saposnik
Absolutely. In fact, Henry and I have a very similar background, other than, I think, her first name. My parents also arrived here in 1949. They were survivors. I was born here in 1950. And interestingly, the world that I, and I assume Henry also encountered was a world of contrast because we were children of, and families of survivors who were trying to navigate in an unexpected new world in an America where Jews had been trying to assimilate since the immigration laws had changed barring Jews from the mid-1920s. So this was an era luckily, I guess in my case, my family was pretty religious. My late father was a cantor. So I was kind of inculcated into a, a musical cultural upbringing that was kind of a replication of what had been going on in, in Eastern Europe. So I sang in choirs to accompany my father, who was a can. Sang in synagogues and so forth. And, and there was this, this real contrast between what were called the Greene, the Greenhorns, the, the. And, and. And the American Jews. And we represented our generation. Both the parents who came here and the children represented a kind of a supernova, the Yiddish culture as a real strong dynamic would have petered out earlier as a mass popular culture in the Jewish world had it not been for the post war influx of Jew of survivors who brought their Yiddish fully intact Yiddish cultural literacy with them when they came to America. So it was kind of an amazing moment that you got a chance to encounter old systems that that had created the ongoing Yiddish literacy and it sought adapt in an American environment.
- [20:30]
Alison Stewart
Let's go over to the East Village and talk to Michael. Hi, Michael, thanks for calling, all of it.
- [20:36]
Michael (Caller from East Village)
Thank you for taking my call. Actually, my dad was born just a couple blocks away from where I live now. But then his family moved up to the Bronx. He spoke fluent Yiddish, that was the language at home. And when his parents, my grandpar, wanted to speak without the children understanding, my aunts and uncles and my dad, they would speak Russian. And my dad and I toured England and Scotland and Wales in the summer of 1983. We drove ourselves and somewhere in Scotland, I forget exactly where, we came upon a Jewish cafeteria and I don't know if it was connected to a retirement home, but everyone there was Jewish and they were speaking Yiddish. And my dad was in heaven. He was speaking Yiddish with them. And I asked him when we left, I said, how good was their Yiddish? And he said, actually it was really good, but it had a Scottish accent. So I firmly believe that German is a dialect of Yiddish, not the other way around. And I will not.
- [21:36]
Henry Saposnik
Amen to that. Yeah, I got that. Yeah.
- [21:39]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
Great.
- [21:40]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Richard next. Hey, Richard, thanks for calling, all of it.
- [21:44]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
Oh, thanks for taking my call, Alison. Love your show.
- [21:47]
Alison Stewart
Thanks so much.
- [21:49]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
Yeah, so as a kid in the 60s and 70s, I grew up in Pearl River, New York, and we're a Scottish Italian family. And across the street was a Jewish family. And for a while their grandparents lived with them. And I used to love hanging out and talking with them. And they had one phrase that for.
- [22:08]
Michael (Caller from East Village)
My entire life stuck with me.
- [22:09]
Henry (Caller from Croton on Hudson)
And I hope I'm getting this right. They would say gunish magunish, which means nothing for nothing. It was just a funny little phrase in Yiddish that stuck with me.
- [22:19]
Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling in, Henry.
- [22:22]
WNYC Host/Producer
We're going to run out of time real soon. But I did want to get to.
- [22:24]
Alison Stewart
This important point for folks who want to learn more about Yiddish culture or the Yiddish language.
- [22:32]
WNYC Host/Producer
Can you shout out some organizations or resources that have been helpful?
- [22:37]
Henry Saposnik
Oh, yeah, there's still. This is a really dynamic moment in the new generation taking charge of Yiddish literacy. The Workers Circle in in New York, a venerable organization teaches Yiddish online, runs cultural programming, great resource and and the center for Jewish History also in in Manhattan have great online programs. So the language and the culture that, that it served are within reach. And there's there's resources available.
- [23:16]
WNYC Host/Producer
In our last moments, is there anything you wanted to add?
- [23:21]
Henry Saposnik
Well, I think Yiddish New York City is as much, you know, the, the past is is a foreign country and we're all kind of tourists going into the past. So it's great to bring the past into a dynamic new present. And thank you for giving me that opportunity.
- [23:39]
WNYC Host/Producer
And thank you, Henry Saposnik, the author of the Tourist Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City History. He's also the producer of the Peabody winning NPR series Yiddish Radio Project. Thanks so much for you to you for being with us, Henry, thank you.
- [23:58]
Henry Saposnik
For being my mishpocha.
- [24:00]
WNYC Host/Producer
Excellent. And thanks to all of our listeners who called in. There's more, all of it on the way. We conclude this month's full bio conversation about the life of the Schuyler sisters. I'm not saying we saved the best for last, but coming up, we'll learn about Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. Amanda Vale is the author of Pride and the Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. She joins us to discuss that's happening right after the news.
- [24:34]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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