Arts & Culture
The Yiddish Song That Kicked Off The Swing Era Is Due For A Comeback By Arielle Kaplan This article originally appeared on Kveller.
Image by Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer/ Getty Images
Printed in black and white and bigotry all over, Nazi official Hans Severus Ziegler’s brochure for his public exhibit in Dusseldorf featured an African American jazz musician with a Star of David on his lapel. Designed to ridicule and belittle Jewish musicians for performing “Negro music” as another tactic to contaminate German culture, “Entartete Musik” (“Degenerate Music”) opened in May, 1938 — just four months before Kristallnacht.
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By then a ban on “Negro jazz” had already been instated, three years prior, on German radio for its “hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races.” And yet, in spite of this, a curious historical phenomena transpired the same year this exhibit opened its doors: Hitler’s Germany was obsessed with “Bei Mir Bist du Schön” (“To Me You Are Beautiful”), the 1937 song that catalyzed the era of Yiddish swing. A subgenre of jazz, swing music is more upbeat and easy to dance, or “swing,” to than the style of jazz that originated in New Orleans that was born out of African music. In its golden age, Benny Goodman, the Jewish King of Swing, fought for integration in Tin Pan Alley and hired African American musicians to bring the new musical style to the masses.
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“The fundamentals of jazz are the syncopation and rhythmic accents of the Negro,” American music theorist Henry Cowell wrote in 1930. “Their modernization is the word of New York Jews… So jazz is Negro music seen through the eyes of the Jews.” Hailed by Jewish music scholar Neil W. Levin as “the world’s bestknown and longest-reigning Yiddish theater song of all time,” “Bei Mir Bist Du Schein” was written by Jews, performed by Black musicians, popularized by a Lutheran trio of Norwegian sisters, and beloved by the Nazis — until they discovered its Jewish roots, that is. (Under its Germanized title, “Bei Mir Bist du Schön,” many assumed the language was a southern German dialect.) A song so powerful that even the Third Reich couldn’t resist, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schein” launched the Andrews Sisters to fame overnight, fueled a growing counterculture against German fascism, and by way of blending American music with sounds of the shtetl, it helped ease Jewish immigrants’ assimilation into American society. The song was originally written by Sholem Secunda for a Yiddish operetta in 1935. After hearing the
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African American jazz duo Johnnie and George perform the song in the Catskills, Jewish lyricist Sammy Cahn bought the rights and rewrote the lyrics in English, preserving just the titular chorus in Yiddish. Within a month of the Andrews Sisters’ recording of the song, some 250,000 records and 200,000 copies of sheet music were sold. (Hilariously, American fans couldn’t quite catch the song’s title, confusing it for “Buy a Beer, Mr. Shane” or, my personal favorite, “My Mere Bits of Shame.”) “The lyrics were revamped for popular release to transcend the song’s Jewish roots and celebrate America’s melting of multiple languages and cultures,” writes Charles B. Hersch in his book, “Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity.” “As the song’s lovestruck protagonist imagines saying ‘bella bella‘ or ‘sehr wunderbar,’ each foreign tongue is simply a vehicle to express how “grand” the beloved is.” In America, the success of “Bei Mir” helped Jews feel they made the right choice in fleeing pogroms of Europe — through theatre and music they could, and did, cement See YIDDISH on Page
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Best wishes to all of my friends in the Jewish Community. Thank You for your continued support.
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