“Bay dem rebn” Performed by an Unidentified Singer at the Daughters of Jacob Nursing Home

Bay dem rebn / At the Rabbi’s House 
Unidentified singer, recorded by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman [BSG] at the Daughters of Jacob Nursing Home, Bronx  1980s.

Commentary by Itzik Gottesman

This song begins with the Hebrew song “Hayta tsira bikineret” (There was a Young Woman at the Kinneret), which is then followed by a Yiddish verse. which then returns to the Hebrew beginning and so on and so forth. Israel’s Kinneret (also known as the Kinnereth, the Sea of Galilee and Lake Tiberius) is the world’s lowest-altitude freshwater lake.

The melody is from a Ukrainian folk song “Тече річка” “The River Flows”, which you can listen to here:

The most common version of the Yiddish verse involves a cat. However the one we present this week tells of a goat that eats up the skhakh, the sukkah covering (a sukkah or suke is the temporary structure that Jews build for the Sukkot holiday); so we felt this was an appropriate post during the current holiday of Sukkot.

Photo courtesy the Treehugger Blog

A thorough look at the origins and development of the Hebrew song including the Yiddish variants (but not this one) can be found at David Assaf’s Hebrew “Oneg Shabat” blog.

A recording of the song with the more common Yiddish verse about a kitten can be heard in the collection of recordings made by ethnomusicologists Sofia Magid and Moshe Beregovski, Unser Rebbe, unser Stalin. In that recording, singer Rakhmil Grin (1910 – 1943)  sings it for Beregovski in 1941, probably in Kiev (listen below).

Inge Mandos, a Yiddish singer from Hamburg, released a CD entitled Waks  (וואַקס, 2005) in which she re-imagines old Yiddish field recordings and includes Grin’s recording of “Bay mayn rebn iz geven a ketsle”

The Yiddish words and music to Grin’s version (the more popular version) can also be found in Undzer gezang (Bina Steinberg, ed. 1984), and are attached.

This is the first of a number of Yiddish songs that BSG recorded at the Daughters of Jacob Nursing Home in the Bronx. She was asked to edit a monthly Yiddish journal comprised of memoirs and folklore that she recorded from the elderly Jews living there. Unfortunately on the original cassette recording of this song the name of the singer was not mentioned. His Hebrew words do not match up entirely with the usual lyrics, and he makes a grammatical mistake. 

Thanks this week to Eliezer Niborski.

TRANSLITERATION (Daughters of Jacob version)

Hayta alma bakineret
asher bigalil.
Kol hayom hayta shira [!]
lanu mishirey galil.
Kol hayom hayta shira [!]
Shir akheyr hi lo yada..
hey!

Bay dem rebn hot di tsig
far hinger ofgegesn dem skhakh.
Hot di rebetsin mit der kotshere
ir gemakht di zakh. 
Tse keyver yisrul hot men zi gebrakht 
in an ofshrift hot men ir gemakht, hey…

Hayta alma….

TRANSLATION (Daughters of Jacob version)

There was a young lady at the Kinneret
that was in the Galilee.
She used to sing for us of
the songs of the Galilee.
A whole day she would sing –
no other song did she know. Hey!..

At the Rabbi’s house the goat
got hungry and ate up the skakh.
So the Rabbi’s wife with a poker
put an end to her. 
[literally: did the thing to her]
They gave her a Jewish burial
with an inscription, hey!

There was a young lady…

TRANSCRIPTION (Daughters of Jacob Version)

הָיְתָה עַלְמָה בַּכִּנֶּרֶת
,אֲשֶׁר בְּגָּלִיל
!כָּל הַיּוֹם הָיְתָה שִׁירָה
,לָנוּ מִשִּׁירֵי גָּלִיל
!כָּל הַיּוֹם הָיְתָה שִׁירָה
שִׁיר אַחֵר הִיא לֹא יָדְעָה
!היי

בײַ דעם רבין האָט די ציג
.פֿאַר הונגער אויפֿגעגעסן דעם סכך
האָט די רביצין מיט דער קאָטשערע
.איר געמאַכט די זאַך
צו קבֿר־ישׂראל האָט מען זי געבראַכט
.און אַן אויפֿשריפֿט האָט מען איר געמאַכט

…הָיְתָה עַלְמָה בַּכִּנֶּרֶת

 “Bay mayn rebn iz geven a ketsle” from Undzer gezang (Bina Steinberg, ed. 1984):

“Leyg ikh mir in bet arayn” Performed by Janie Respitz

Commentary by Itzik Gottesman

There has been much written about the once popular Yiddish song לייג איך מיר אין בעט אַרײַן (Leyg ikh mir in bet arayn / I Lay Me Down in My Bed) and its transformations, but I cannot find one LP/CD recording of the “original” Yiddish song and so I’m glad to have Montreal Yiddish singer Janie Respitz’s version (video recorded in October of 2017).

The Yiddish text, transliteration, translation and music to this song appears in Chana and Joseph Mlotek’s collection Pearls of Yiddish Song (see below) and there it is identified as a poem by Joseph Rolnick / Rolnik (1879 – 1955) and music written by the Yiddish poet Bertha Kling (1886 – 1979).

A translation of Rolnik’s autobiography זכרונות (Zikhrones / Memories) from Yiddish by Gerald Marcus is available in English entitled With Rake in Hand: Memoirs of a Yiddish Poet, 2016. There he writes that that this poem, adapted from a folksong, became very popular after Kling composed music for it; but he was ashamed of how the poem, which he considered unimportant, had become a hit. He walked out of a room if they greeted his entrance by singing it.

About the transformations of this Yiddish song… The Hebrew-language website Zemereshet  זמרשת presents a popular Hebrew version הרכבת (Harekevet / The Train), as well as the children’s song בין הרים ובין סלעים  (Beyn horim uveyn slaim / Between Mountains and Rocks). Historian David Assaf’s blog עונג שבת Oyneg Shabes presents additional versions and a more detailed history of the story of the song (in Hebrew). 

The Rolnik poem has inspired two new musical compositions. The first is by the Pulitzer prize and Grammy winning modernist minimalist composer David Lang (“Bang on a Can”) entitled I Lie.

The second has been composed by UK-based Yiddish singer Polina Shepherd, and is here sung by Yana Ovrutskay:

Shepherd currently performs this song with the group “Sklamberg and the Shepherds” (also featuring Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and clarinetist Merlin Shepherd). Both Shepherd’s and Lang’s compositions  include the fourth verse of the original poem which is included in the Mlotek booklet but not sung in the folklorized versions.

From Chana and Joseph Mlotek’s Pearls of Yiddish Song: