Connections

A small audience gathered on May 21 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Battery Park Plaza in Manhattan for a multimedia show that put a National Public Radio program called "The Yiddish Radio Project" on stage. Some of you may have heard segments of it on "All Things Considered" last month.

Stephen and Alida Brill Scheuer, who had houses in East Hampton for many years, were, through their foundation, among the project's major sponsors, and my husband and I were privileged to be there as their guests.

The material of the Yiddish Radio Project was collected over 17 years by a musician and historian named Henry Sapoznik. He was the performance's narrator, master of ceremonies, and comic. Mr. Sapoznik had amassed 500 hours of radio programs on 1,000 fragile aluminum or acetate discs, as well as old photographs, clippings, and the like.

David Isay, a MacArthur fellow whose company, Sound Portraits Production, creates contemporary radio documentaries, joined Mr. Sapoznik in preparing the material for its own radio broadcast and as host of the evening.

At one time, there were 12 radio stations in New York aimed at Yiddish-speaking audiences and some 100 more throughout the country. The collected material ranges from commercials for Manischewitz matzoh and Joe and Paul's men's clothing store on the Lower East Side, through swing versions of Yiddish melodies, to an emotional reunion in 1947 of a father and son from Berlin who had been separated by the Holocaust.

Projected images were added to the sound and a band that played swing, klezmer, and jazz enlivened last week's program, as did Mina Bern and David Rogow, veterans of the Yiddish theater. When the story of the popularization of "Bei Mir Bist du Schon" was told, for example, you not only listened to the song, with lines spliced from one performer to nother, but saw photos of Sholem Secunda, the composer who sold its rights for $30, The Andrews Sisters, Benny Goodman, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others.

Like the Jewish people, who are said to be able to laugh at themselves and to toast life even in unhappy circumstances, Yiddish radio in the 1930s and '40s was often comedic although the shadow of World War II hung over it.

In May 1941, before this country was willing to acknowledge what was happening to the Jews of Europe, one of the best known Yiddish radio stations, WEVD, presented a dramatization by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman about the removal of Jews from their homes to be sent to concentration camps.

I doubt there was a dry eye in the audience when Siegbert Freiberg's story was told. Mr. Freiberg was 21 in 1947 when he was reunited with his father on a radio program called "Reunion." The elder Freiberg had escaped Germany and gotten to Shanghai, while his wife had died in the camps. Not long after the reunion, the younger man went back to Berlin to visit the Catholic family who had sheltered him from the Nazis for two and a half years, and he proposed to the daughter of the house. She said yes.

Mr. Freiberg had recorded the story for Mr. Isay but died three weeks before last week's program. His widow was in the audience, however, and she and her family were acknowledged with a standing ovation.

If you missed the Yiddish Radio Project on NPR, you can hear the 10-program series on your computer. Click on "Archives" at npr.org. You also can buy the soundtrack from the museum's gift shop. It contains some very funny material and a hilarious jazz version of "Dayanu" from the Passover Seder.

Helen S. Rattray