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Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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- [00:26]
Henry Sapoznik
This episode is.
- [00:26]
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Henry Sapoznik
To the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Rob Snyder
On the streets of Manhattan's Lower east side, you might still see an occasional sign in Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews. Today, when the Jewish population of the neighborhood is a fraction of what it used to be, these markers can feel like traces of a vanished civilization. But you can recover the sights, sounds and flavors of that almost vanished world in a new book by Henry Sapoznik, the Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City, published by the Excelsior Editions imprint of the State University of New York Press. Henry is an award winning author, producer, musicologist and performer. He founded the Sound Archives of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and won a Peabody Award for co producing the 10 part NPR series the Yiddish Radio Project. He's also published two other books, the Complete Klezmer and Jewish Music From Old World to Our World. I'm Rob Snyder and I'm speaking with him for the New Books Network and the Gotham center for New York City History. Welcome Henry.
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Henry Sapoznik
Thanks so much Rob, how did you.
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Rob Snyder
Come to write this book?
- [02:37]
Henry Sapoznik
The actual trigger was during the COVID the first shutdown. And I had to kind of reinvent my music career to kind of slow down with the shutdown. And so to. To redirect my energies I started a website and a blog. And my first blog was just coincidence because it had just happened. I wrote about finding a 78 for which I had been looking for since the early 90s. It was recording of Thomas LaRue Jones, the Black Cantor and his One okay recording from 1923. And I wrote this blog about that and I posted it and it got like 80,000 hits. And I can't explain why. I mean these kinds of. But it got my attention that maybe I'm doing something. So I did months more research and uncovered this lost universe of other black cantors, including a woman. And suddenly I'm writing these essays about these lost jigsaw puzzle pieces of New York history. And I wanted to anthologize it. I wanted to bring it together not just on my website but but to have it in a more corporeal form. And I have a friend at Excelsior and they liked the idea. And so I ended up building on some essays that I'd already written. But this gave me an opportunity to do fresh research, but also to write about things that I had never really published before, like film and crime and food. So it was a self indulgence and I'm really kind of thrilled to have had it.
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Rob Snyder
Yeah. Now you said that you were in Covid time when you were starting out on this project. In some ways how did you do the research?
- [04:53]
Henry Sapoznik
This was a golden opportunity. The amount of primary materials that are now available online is just. Is stunning compared to when I first began the research. The biggest thing that I leaned into for the primary research of this was Yiddish newspapers. And for a lot of this the kind of depth that I was looking for, I ended up with over 5,000 downloads of Yiddish articles. And just the sheer number of them not only answered a lot of the specific research, but I was getting a huge overview to much more of what was going on at the time. So was much better able to assess what it is I was researching. It's a great. Again, this wasn't. I remember when microfilms of newspapers and they were throwing out the right. But this to be able to do word searches. You couldn't do that in a morgue edition. You actually had to. So what was a terrible thing about making microfilm of the morgue editions in the Case of online research. You gave us a tool research tool that just sped up and deepened the content.
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Rob Snyder
Now, you've organized the book around four themes. Eating, architecture, music, and theater. How did you choose these?
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Henry Sapoznik
They chose me. I just let some of the. I mean, that's. You have. I don't have to tell you this has happened to you, I'm sure, more the times than you'd care to admit. Half of the research that we do where we find things while we were looking for something else, and that's what a lot of this research was. I created a whole series of rabbit holes and I just kept going down them as long as the stories were coming, as long as the people, that there was some sort of real visceral story behind the story. It wasn't enough to write about the history of the knish. I wanted to get real life stories of the people, the. The clish, the. If you will. And. And that's. As long as I was finding real people and real narratives behind these, then I just kept going. And so then the. The size of the chapters, you know, if I was writing the encyclopedia of. Of food, then you'd say, okay, keep going, but to stop somewhere. So this was a straight. A combination, like I said, of stuff that I was now interested in pursuing. I had a gossamer thin validation to do this research and to dig out stuff that I had written about 20, 30 years ago and see how it holds up with access to new content.
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Rob Snyder
I mean, your first and longest chapter is on the subject of eating. And this fascinates me not only because I like to eat, but I caught the last days of Dubrow's Cafeteria. I used to eat there in graduate school, and I took cafeterias to be a normal part of city life. But as you point out, they have a specific Jewish history that's really fascinating. Can you say more about cafeterias?
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Henry Sapoznik
Well, what was so interesting? You know, the cafeteria, of course, was invented in Philadelphia. And when they moved to New York, they were not building, they were not putting them up in Jewish neighborhoods. So this had to be the idea of what I call, you know, fast, cheap. And this became a signal of life. And I think the thing interested me most about cafeteria is how each of them reflect a kind of a cultural autonomous region. Some of them were for taxi drivers, and some of them were for actors, and some of them were in ethnic neighborhoods. So I really like to be able to look through the prism of these kinds of, you know, 24, seven. You know, it's for outcasts and for you know, people living in inverse proportion to the regular world. But that there was a Jewish subtext in creating a whole series of especially Jewish food. The issue of kosher having meat and milk. Cafeterias were omnivorous. There was no distinction in that way. So this kind of pushed on the edges of saying, well on the one hand it's not about traditional eating, but on the other hand it serves foods that are reminiscent of it. So the cafeteria was as much a part of the acculturation of the community as going to the movies, introducing them.
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Rob Snyder
To ideas of abundance. And at the same time I was fascinated to read this. They were often crime scenes.
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Henry Sapoznik
Be still mine heart. I loved wow people. I. I didn't write about all of the instances of major, major crime, major stick ups and armed robberies while people sat there eating, could not be bothered to look up for their plate and see someone is walking out with a 500 pound safe through the middle of the dining room. I love it more that you'd like to say about eating again, I think because I line it out from a. I start by talking about the issue of kosher, which is the demarcation of self identity. And the thing that I think interested me most was because the whole realm of kosher was a fairly implementing it in New York was an uphill struggle and it didn't really happen until the twentiet century. But it's interesting how early that the concept of kosher was met in restaurant, in social eating contexts with kosher style. That there was a desire for the essence, but not for the literal. And it created this duality of cultural identity on the one hand, but against a kind of orthodoxy. So it reflected you could be eating a sandwich and making a statement and being in that strata of the society that you as an American, as you as someone who's come to this country has chosen for himself.
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Rob Snyder
So kosher style could be very Jewish without being kosher or orthodox.
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Henry Sapoznik
Yeah. And interestingly, the guy who really created it as in, in. In. In. In the meat, in the processed meats or what the New York Times called the. The. The realm of pungent meats, the Zion meats. And the guy was. Had a. He was running a, already a. A kosher meat processing plant and built a kosher style one right next door. And each of them fulfilling. One is fulfilling the biblical admonition and the other is fulfilling the social. There it is without any contradiction from both ends.
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Rob Snyder
Right now in architecture you have two of my favorite buildings on the Lower east side which I've Watched evolve over the years. Yarmolovsky's bank and the Forward building. I mean, what does it tell us about the Jewish community and the Lower east side? You get these two buildings within short walk of each other.
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Henry Sapoznik
Well, it's actually, it was a triptych. Here's the thing, the two the Yarmoluski bank and the for Richard Oath, built in the same year 1912. And Yarmoluski was a private bank that was dedicated to the. To the. To the uplift of the Jewish community. It's a backstory about his two nitwit sons who started a competing bank and who ended up destroying the family goodwill. But S. Yar Miluski, in the last year of his life, built this up until then the bank was, from what I understand was like a six story tenement. It wasn't anything special. And what is so interesting is that because it was a bank, as was the case, that banks had to exude a sense of permanence, a sense of gravitas. And for someone who was from Eastern Europe and was a Yiddish speaker and so forth, the resulting Beaux Arts building. You could not tell what the original intention of this building because it didn't have any signal, any design elements that point to it. And that was very. Again, I think that was an important statement because it meant that everyone has arrived into that society with something as equal as any other building. The Forward, the will of the publisher Abe Kahan. And you would think, here is this building built for the socialist group and here is this building the bank. You think, oh my God, it's the forces of capital versus the force of progressivism. But it's not that simple. Yormolewski was far more involved in the daily integrity of the lives of his depositors. And the Forward showed that, hey, there could be some serious bucks in socialism. So one was less socialist than you think and the other. So they represented two ends of the spectrum for their time. The erection of the Libby's Hotel in 1926 was a really different statement because now you had a generation, you had almost five years since emigration. The Reed Johnson act had cut off new immigration. It was abundantly clear that this was the community. And this building was built as a statement of arrival, but also as a kind of a gift to the community. There of the building, which was as tall, in fact taller than the Yarmoluski bank and from all reports so relentlessly lavish, but not in a garish way even. It was built with an incredible amount of taste and open handedness. And it worked to not only raise a sense of arrival for the Lower east side community, but it poised that community as a springboard to the realization of economic uplift, with this acting as a primary engine. So it was a tragedy when, thanks to the mortgage company running an incredible nationwide scam of selling overpriced mortgages and then having unannounced foreclosures and selling. It was a tragedy because it resulted not only in the hotel failing, but in the destruction of the building in order, as Fiorello laguardia pointed out, that it was a massive Tammany scheme, which it turned out to be. But so its removal from the skyline of the Lower east side was the first modern statement after World War I, the first modern statement in the modern era of acculturation. And it was like a Carthaginian piece. It was removed, and Sarah Delano Roosevelt park was the result. But it's almost as if the ground were salted because the memory of it and the meaning of it was brutally excised.
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Rob Snyder
Thank you. That's a piece of history that I didn't know before I read your book, and I really appreciate that.
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Henry Sapoznik
There's a whole book coming out on it by friends. So, yeah, yeah, that's a story that I had been holding on to. And again, I only learned of the Libby's hotel because I was doing research on Yiddish radio and discovered that they had a radio show. So it was a side door. I had never heard the narrative about Libby's. All I found out is, oh, they were on WFBH in 1925. So once I did the research, I said, oh, my God. It's like one of these dreams where you're in your house and you see a door that you didn't recognize, and you open the door, the room is full of stuff you didn't know you had then. That's what this was.
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Rob Snyder
You've also got a chapter on theater, and you have a lot to say about the Jazz Singer. How does that fit into your story of Yiddish New York?
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Henry Sapoznik
Well, ultimately, I mean, the story is based. It's rooted in New York. But I think the thing that really sells it. Look, when. When you talk about the Jazz Singer to most people, 99, 44, 100% have the film as a frame of reference. One out of a hundred may know about the play, and one out of a thousand would know about the short story that preceded it. But these three elements, all of them combined, tell in microcosm both the welcomed and enforced acculturation of Jews in America. And the reason that I latched onto the play, mostly because there's so much more traction coming out of it having existed, was how dramatically different it was in the meaning of the Jewish community than the subsequent film. Again, Abe Kahan, you know, I was reading a lot of forwards for this stuff. His review, his own review of the play. He referred to it as the greatest Yiddish play in New York, which is not in Yiddish. And he understood because, again, a critical plot difference, both in the short story the Day of Atonement and in the Jazz Singer play, is that he goes back to the synagogue. He does not turn his back on the continuity, and he does not turn his back on his family or in the meaning of. Of what the singing is. He is a far more. Samson Rafkulson crafted a complex character with varying loyalties to the worlds around him. It's almost like when you're standing in the ocean and suddenly there's a wave of warm water washes over you and then it gets cold again. That's kind of how this. He is affected by both by dominant culture and the continuity of his family. And he is humanized. Jake, Robin. Jackie Rabinowitz is humanized in the film, in the short story and in the play by offering these complexities of duel, of these emerging loyalties, but also to use language, actual spoken Yiddish, that humanizes the characters because they are existing in their own soundscape. By the time the film was made, it was conforming to what the market had already defined it wanted in entertainment. And the sad story was that George Jessel, who had been such a star in the play and who was promised the part in the film, did not realize that the ending had been changed. And he made a career choice which I think adversely affected. He was never the big star after he was replaced on the Jazz Singer. It's a complex. And again, it reveals. I got a couple of the chapters in the book, especially like with the Black Cantors and with the Jazz Singer and with an essay that I wrote about the 1900 Uncle Tom. The Yiddish Uncle Tom plays, the interaction, taking in the characterizations. Jewish, you know, the Jewish actors who were coming in after the turn of the 20th century. You know, it was like they were moving it to someone else's apartment. You know, they're just, you know, the usual emigre thing. Well, in this case, they were not only inheriting previously lived in space, but also theatrical conventions and in America, you know, was. You want to move up the socioeconomic scale. You portray someone farther down the socioeconomic scale and I think Jews were the last major franchise owner of the franchise of Burnt Cork. And it kind of really shows the duality of how people chose to use the upward mobility of popular and mass culture. To what end?
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Rob Snyder
It's a fascinating relationship, right, between Jewish culture and mainstream popular culture in these years. Can you say more about mutual influences? What are the Jews for the Yiddish New York bringing to the mainstream as they move into the mainstream?
- [25:05]
Henry Sapoznik
I think, again, you think about how many people who did come out. My next book, which is going to be on Yiddish radio. I have these two kind of polls about American broadcasting. And of course, William Paley was Jewish, who represents the sort of like the. The Calvin Klein of broadcasting. And then there was David Sarnoff, who was much more homey and much more meny. So, but in it, here in American, this, The. The emergence of American popular culture at this time, anyone who left the Jewish world in order to make it in. In. In the dominant culture was not going to improve people's perception of minority culture. They were going because they. Aha. That's how we need to portray it. And I find that everyone, the ones who stay back, and I think this is possibly true, you know, in other communities, the ones who stayed behind to do art for the community there were working with. It was all to the right of the decimal point of, you know, the Hollywood budgets. You know, it was. So there were. There were decisions made and choices made that in order to be. In order to be a spokesman, in order to be a gateway for that community to have relevant and. And referential art, you were sacrificing, you know, I mean, you were making do, but it was not. You weren't in it for the money. That's clear.
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Rob Snyder
The story of the black cantors is incredible and fascinating. Tell us more about them, who they were, how they became cantors and how they were received.
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Henry Sapoznik
Well, there were actually two. I uncovered that there were two parallel black cantor universes. On the one hand, there were black Hebrew congregations. At the Beginning of the 20th century, a number of independent black congregations emerged that were using a combination of the different Abrahamic traditions to mold a new form of devotion and prayer and using the template that existed within reach. Now congregations like in Harlem, like in Newark, like in East New York, where black and Jewish communities were in tandem and were in. When black immigration to Harlem was happening, Harlem was already like the second largest Jewish community in New York. So there were already institutions in place that could act as a model for the construction. So a number of black congregations emerged, storefronts like what the East European Jews would call Shtibelach, little storefronts. So it is not in constructing a synagogue. It's no great stretch to think, oh, there have to be the fundamental. You need a rabbi, you need a sexton, you need a cantor. So cantors emerged organically within the small black Hebrew congregations. The parallel black cantors were. And here there were maybe a half dozen. I identified maybe 10 cantors who were affiliated with the synagogue who were known to be religious. But there were black entertainers, not Jews, who mastered two separate repertoires. Yiddish popular and folk song and cantorial prayer. These are not only two different musical forms, they're two different languages. One is in Yiddish and the other is in Hebrew, Aramaic. And they were doing this to perform in the Yiddish immigrant world, not in the Jewish mainstream world, but to perform form for Jews for whom Yiddish was their primary language. And the idea of two performers taking on such a massive. There is no place that is easier to be revealed as a fraud is in the language, the shibboleth, the biblical admonition. If you can't say this word correctly, you're an outsider. And this is some sort of a game. This is some sort of. I have to say, when I first discovered about Thomas LaRue Jones, when I was working for Dick Spotswood, helping him compile the ethnic music on records, the listing of all 78s made in America foreign language 78s from 1895 to 1942, sort of compiled that list. And I was doing the Jewish catalog. So when I. In the. Okay. In the OK record ledger, there was a notation for Thomas LaRue Jones der Schwartzen. And no context, you know, OK. As, you know, was a. A label that had. They basically invented the idea of race catalogs of black performers in a segregated catalog. And yet here was a black performer on the segregated. Okay. Catalog in the white section. He was in the Jewish section. So I'm thinking, what the heck is this? I was. I thought for years, because I never. It took 40 years for the. For the record to turn up. I. Once I heard the record, some fear that I had carried around for years was. Was completely put. I thought, honestly, it was some sort of Bert Williams. It was a. It was a parody. It was something that was meant to evoke but was not it. And I thought, oh, okay, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be two black crows with a Hebrew accent. And once I heard, by the way, the press, you know, all of his press came out the hundreds and Hundreds and hundreds of articles I read about him all said what an amazing singer he was. But once I actually heard it and heard the deep cultural ownership of these performances, I said, this is truly a phenomenon. If it was, you know, if it was a vaudeville shtick, it wouldn't have been surprising. There were. But I was blown away at the ownership, the, the. The. The tremendous sense. And so I said, boy, what could be weirder? And you know what's weirder? A woman doing that. Which it was so not part of the landscape. Women in a synagogue. It was not going to happen for a half century that you would have women singing, being a cantor. It only happened within the last 30 years that a black woman so early in the cultural reimagining in the Jewish world. Her biography is even wilder than Thomas LaRue Jones. Thomas LaRue Jones. It almost makes sense that he would have gotten in. He was living in a Jewish community, in a Jewish soundscape community in Newark. She came out of a Baptist background and sang with jazz bands in Chicago. It's like if this was a script. No, no, no film company would agree to film it. They. They would said, this doesn't make any sense. Would you make up your mind? You know, so. But again, the sad thing is, unlike Thomas LaRue Jones, there is no recording of, Of. Of. Of. Of Sophie May, the sellers. And which is a tragedy because all of her press is even better than his press. Everyone said that she was an astounding singer. And there it was. It was a comet streaking across the sky for like a couple of decades where you had all of this traffic of black performers who had mastered and were popularizing this. And then right after World War I, I mean, it just. I mean, World War II, things just changed dramatically. So, yeah, so the black cantor thing would have stayed. Would have stayed undiscovered had not. And the record, where did it turn up? It turned it up. Turned up at the Yivo, at the sound archives that I had started, but it turned up after I left and no one knew I was looking for it. So it was like it was there waiting for me. Wow.
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Rob Snyder
There's a tendency to see the Lower east side of Manhattan as the embodiment of Yiddish New York. But your book reminds us that Yiddish New York manifested itself in many more neighborhoods than the Lower east side. What was Yiddish New York like in other parts of New York City?
- [35:37]
Henry Sapoznik
I think, again, we come back to the concentric circle from which Yiddish New York came was the Lower east side. This was. Everything else radiated outward from that. And it would only successfully radiate if it recreated the infrastructural posts that had started in the Lower east side. So what do you need? This is your, your founding chemical concoction. You need theaters, you need restaurants, you need synagogues, you need a variety of places which act as a bolster. So where are the, in declining numbers, the Lower east side? Manhattan is at the top. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. Queens is a very again, did not recreate. There were no theaters, there were restaurants. But those communities would still need to commute. They would still need to go to where the culture was being created. So they didn't reflect the same kind of diversity. But the movements from the lower side appear to be as part of an acculturation, moving uptown to the Bronx, moving out to Brooklyn. Those reflected a kind of a success story and so reflected these sort of like these cultural outliers, but they again all reflected the diversity of the original of the Lower east side.
- [37:36]
Rob Snyder
Did Yiddish New York overlap with the New York of other ethnic groups? And I'm thinking here especially of the Chinese.
- [37:44]
Henry Sapoznik
It's kind of interesting because speaking about the Chinese in the food part of the book, I talk about Shmulke Bernstein on the Lower east side and his son, who were the first ones in the 1940s, late 1940s and 50s to serve kosher Chinese food. And again, these, what might seem as kind of a freakish kind of novelty, really talked about in a way, the sort of provincialism of Jewish New Yorkers, especially those who really held to kosher. And for someone to say, wait a second, all we have to do to make kosher Chinese food is not serve pork and shrimp and they don't use milk anyway, so you're not going to really worry about that. And it became a kind of a liberating presence. But it also reflected, as I talk about in the book, that Chinese food reflected a kind of an exoticism that didn't exist in the Jewish diet for those Jews who wanted to assimilate. One of my favorite things, one of the long running ads in the forward was for a Chinese restaurant on Mott street at featured a jazz band. You have like three layers of different acculturation. They're advertising in Yiddish for a Chinese restaurant that has a house jazz band. So there was overlap to a certain extent. The most tangible Jews, of course, were moving into neighborhoods that the Germans had previously lived in and were there at the same time as, you know, as the Irish. So of course, how else are you going to end up with a bilingual James Cagney, whose Yiddish could stop a bullet. So, you know, it reflects also the strivers that popular entertainment in some respects would have certain amount of racism built in. That was part of the lubricant, but it was still not a bad way other than crime or sports. Right. To get out of the neighborhood.
- [40:28]
Rob Snyder
What's the significance of Yiddish New York for Jews today?
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Henry Sapoznik
I think it's a choice of self identity and it's no longer the monolithic that it was considered for so long. I mean, you couldn't have a World War II American movie without one of the guys being named Brooklyn and having kind of urban Jewish accent. I think this is one of the striations, if you choose, because again, there's not other than, you know, like the klezmer revival or there's not a movement afoot to reinvigorate the social world that created it. Of course you have lines down the block for cats as delicatessen and. But that kind of what I call folkloric cultural identity is, you know, it's what it is. I don't think people will say, oh, I live in New York and this was a New York Jewish tradition. It's part of a legacy or a heritage. If, if, if, if people are interested in it. There is so much that, that it, it produced in its time that you could become literate. And my favorite, I have to say, my favorite story is the B H Dairy, which just of all of the massive, luxurious, successful dairy restaurants like Ratner's, like Rapaport's, like Steinberg's, all of the huge, what survived a hole in the wall, runt of the litter, 19 seat former Jewish dairy restaurant. And how does it succeed? By having a Egyptian owner and his Polish Catholic wife and their Latino crew working as countermen.
- [42:49]
Rob Snyder
What.
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Henry Sapoznik
What more urban New York story could you possibly ask for? Here they are creating a diet, a menu that they themselves didn't grow up with, that their customers didn't grow up with. And yet they are in seamless continuity with a vibrant history. And they, you know, they're kind of blithely going on their way.
- [43:20]
Rob Snyder
And I'm one of their customers with enthusiasm, I have to say. And someday I'll buy one of their T shirts that says Hollow, por favor.
- [43:28]
Henry Sapoznik
I'm on my second one.
- [43:32]
Rob Snyder
I think we're going to have to close soon. But what are you bringing out next?
- [43:36]
Henry Sapoznik
Oh, as I mentioned, a long overdue book on Yiddish radio. After the Yiddish radio project, I kind of my orbit had to do something else. But I've been asked to do a book, and I am so glad. I am, because when I did the NPR series with David Isay, prior to that, I had been working with Andy Lancet on this series, and he and I conducted over 50 interviews with Yiddish radio performers, their families, station owners, audience members. None of that got used for the NPR series, and I, embarrassed to say it got misplaced. And the fact that I have just now refound it is one of the great gifts of my lifetime that I can now bring these voices out for a story that is not just a New York story. The amazing thing was how many stations from the beginning of broadcasting in 1922 into the 1950s, I was stunned. I said a reasonably low bars. Did a station at one time or another ever air a Yiddish radio show? And that was my not did they do it for years? Was it part of a larger. I just set that 274 stations around the country. I could not believe my eyes. But again, the great thing about radio research is that every newspaper had radio listings. And so all the research that I did with Andy Lancet 50, 40 years ago is now finally coming out. And I am so excited. It's really great stuff and it'll be, like I said, long overdue for me.
- [45:48]
Rob Snyder
Well, you're going to give us something to look forward to. I'm Rob Snyder for the New Books Network and the Gotham center for New York City History at the City University of New York. I've been talking with Henry Saposnik, author of the Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City, published by the State University of New York Press. Thanks for the conversation.
- [46:07]
Henry Sapoznik
Thank you, Rob.