Yiddish Curiosities: a library of wonderful but forgotten Yiddish songs from the late 1920s and after (includes Polish Jewish Cabaret). Have a listen!

UPDATED: Re-posted to add a brand-new new video of the song I recorded on the cd Lebedik Yankel, now with Yiddish text and translation, click below:


Or click on the album cover to hear the whole cd Lebedik Yankel.

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This is one of the happiest songs in the Itzik Zhelonek collection. Nothing bad happens! The narrator, probably a yeshiva bokher, hears somebody shouting in Russian in the woods. The unseen fellow is saying, in Russian, "Katarina, come here!" Our narrator knows Yiddish and Hebrew but not Russian, so he parses the Slavic words as if they a passage to unravel in his learning.

There's a gorgeous recording of this song by Nekhama Lifshitz - it's available at the Dartmouth Jewish Sound archive. Zhelonek wrote that this is a folksong but there are 1930s sheet music arrangements available.

The first line, in Hebrew, does not appear in Zhelonek's collection, but Lifschitz sings it.


When I recorded this song I had two sources: the words as Itzik Zhelonek had transcribed them from some performance in Warsaw between the wars, and Nekhama Lifshitz's recording. They differed from each other significantly. Years later I found sheet music for the song, and it differed from both of the versions I had. It also, as was often the case, was at war with itself: the person who typeset the Yiddish oysyes and the person who typeset the music and the transliteration were at odds with each other. So now I have four versions. I hope this helps to explain to you inconsistencies in what you hear and what you see in the video.

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Here's my translation:

Labels: humor & satire, religion, songs for sale