Word: yiddishe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When an obscure Brooklyn composer named Sholom Secunda was writing songs for the Yiddish theater in the '303, he and Lyricist Jacob Jacobs would peddle the copyrights to music publishers for $15 apiece, and they were happy to get the money. One day in 1937, Secunda heard a familiar sound coming out of the jukeboxes of Flatbush. The Andrews Sisters had picked up one of his tunes, cut a record for Decca with new lyrics, and all over the U.S. people were dancing...
Last week the original copyright expired and, according to law, the authors (if living) could renew it. Secunda, 66, now writes liturgical music, and in summer is music director of a resort hotel in the Catskills. Jacobs runs a Yiddish vaudeville house in Miami Beach. Secunda has signed a new contract with Harms, Inc., music publishers, and the partners are assured that Bei Mir Bist Du Schön is still worth at least $5,000 yearly. They shrug off the $350,000 they might have had. Says Secunda: "Mother was convinced that the big day would come...
...Donna Donna, Miss Baez uses a flowing translation of a lyric song composed by Sholom Secunda for the Yiddish musical theatre. Although it has long been a favorite of Jewish folksingers, and was recorded recently by Theodore Bikel and Martha Schlamme, Miss Baez gives it a delicate, and very personal touch...
Part of the phenomenon is the author himself. André Schwarz-Bart, 32, is largely self-taught. Born in the long-embattled French-German border city of Metz, the son of a Polish-Jewish peddler, Andre spoke Yiddish as his first language and picked up French in the streets while selling newspapers to help support his family. At 14, after the Nazis invaded France, Andre lost his parents to the gas chambers, subsequently escaped a French internment camp to join the Maquis, and was finally mustered out of the French army at an underage 17. As a postwar tractor-factory...
...lactic accents in a series of private schools, Mike went on to the University of Chicago as a pre-med student but soon drifted toward the theater. A year younger than Mike, Elaine was equally adrift when they met in 1955. Born in Philadelphia, the daughter of the late Yiddish Actor Jack Berlin, she has seen the inside of more high schools around the country than James B. Conant, was married and divorced in her teens (she has a ten-year-old daughter). Together, Mike and Elaine took up with a Chicago campus theatrical group that later became the Compass...