Radio Days, Yiddish-Style

Everyone knows what Charles A. Lindbergh accomplished in the summer of 1927. But what about Charles A. Levine?

Who knew that Levine, a self-made millionaire in the junk business, flew the Atlantic just two weeks after Lindbergh? Who knew--or, more to the point, even cared--that, too late to sponsor the first pilot, Levine settled for being the world’s first transatlantic passenger?

The listeners to Yiddish radio, that’s who knew. And cared.

As detailed in one segment of National Public Radio’s irresistible “Yiddish Radio Project,” Levine’s feat gave him celebrity status in the Yiddish-speaking world. Numerous songs were written about him, including the delightful “Levine and His Flying Machine,” with the lyrics: “Levine, Levine, just an ordinary name, but you brought it everlasting fame. We welcome you home from over the foam, Levine and your flying machine.”

Clearly, Yiddish-language radio, which thrived in the U.S. from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s, was a world all its own, a world that is visited in loving detail in a 10-part series to be broadcast as part of “All Things Considered” every Tuesday evening starting today. Vintage material, some unheard for decades, will be deftly interwoven with translations read by actors such as Eli Wallach and Carl Reiner.

“It’s like opening up King Tut’s tomb,” co-producer David Isay of Sound Portraits Productions says of the breadth and surprise of what the radio segments cover. Co-producer Henry Sapoznik adds, “It’s a parallel universe where stuff was handled so differently. What else but Yiddish radio would think of rhyming the news?” (“Grammeister” Zvee Scooler did it for years on New York’ s WEVD.) Noting that the CBS radio network broadcast Yiddish programming nationwide for a brief period, Sapoznik adds, “I can only imagine what people in Sioux City, Iowa, thought when [cantor] Yossele Rosenblatt came on the air. That was the real ‘War of the Worlds.’”

Everyone knew about Yiddish radio, especially in cities with large Jewish populations (24 stations existed at one time or another in New York City alone, some with power as low as 50 watts.) But no systematic attempt to collect it was made until Sapoznik, a key player in the klezmer music revival and at the time working as the sound archivist for the YIVO Yiddish archive, went to a clearance sale put on in 1985 by New York radio and television personality Joe Franklin.

“Joe was being cleared out of his Broadway Danny Rose offices looking right out over the center of the universe, Times Square,” Sapoznik remembers. “The place looked like it was decorated in early Visigoth, it was completely chaotic,” so much so that he literally stumbled on a pile of 30 extra-large, acetate-covered recorded discs, some made of aluminum, some even of glass.

“They were 16 inches in diameter, so at first blush I thought they were Vitaphone records made for early sound films, but there were Jewish words on the label, and though the Warner brothers were Jewish, they weren’t that Jewish.”

Sapoznik eventually determined that these were one-of-a-kind air checks, reference recordings mandated in case the Federal Radio Commission received any complaints about a given broadcast. Though many of them had been melted down during World War II scrap metal drives, Sapoznik over the next 15 years collected some 1,000 discs containing approximately 500 hours of programming.

One of the rediscoveries he is proudest of are the radio dramas of Nahum Stutchkoff, whose long-running series “Round the Family Table” is excerpted on NPR. A polymath who wrote for eight weekly series and still found time to compile a landmark Yiddish thesaurus, Stutchkoff specialized in emotionally wrenching tales that often dealt with the pains of assimilation.

“In Jewish radio,” Stutchkoff’s son Mischa explains, “we didn’t escape from our problems, we would escape into them.” The younger Stutchkoff remembers frequently seeing his father in tears as he wrote his scripts. “‘If it doesn’t make me cry,’ he would say, ‘my audience won’t cry either.’”

Stutchkoff also wrote mouth-watering commercials for his sponsor, the Manischewitz matzo company, and that and other ads are featured prominently on “Yiddish Radio Project.” Among Sapoznik’s favorites are a promotion for something called home diathermy, which promised to cure what ailed you with the aid of radio waves, and, in a boggling cross-cultural collaboration, a Yiddish musical spot for celebrated clothier Joe and Paul arranged by Tito Puente.

One of Yiddish radio’s longest-running shows, lasting from 1938 to 1955, was the remarkable “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” which succeeded with its ability to, in Sapoznik’s words, “reference both sides of the aisle.” The program’s opening, with references to traditional Yiddish melodies and current hipster slang, shows how it was done: “They do it to ‘Elimelech.’ They do it to ‘Reb Dovidl.’ They even do it to ‘Yidl Mitn Fiddle.’ ‘Yiddish Melodies in Swing’ takes old Yiddish folk songs and finds the groove to them in merry modern rhythm.” Only in America.

Probably the most emotional of the “Yiddish Radio Project” episodes concerns “Reunion,” a short-lived program that reunited Holocaust survivors with family members they had not seen and often assumed were dead. We hear young Siegbert Freiberg reunited with his father, and we hear him today, age 74, talking about what that experience was like.

Vital as this project is, Sapoznik found it was not universally supported. He remembers meeting the late Irving Howe, author of the definitive study of Eastern European Jews in America, “World of Our Fathers,” and asking him why there was no section on Yiddish radio.

“He looked at me,” Sapoznik reports, “like I’d asked about Jewish circus geeks. It was something he didn’t consider important. But this is like archeology. You can only learn so much if you excavate palaces and temples. Only in garbage dumps do you find out what ordinary people were doing.”

*

“Yiddish Radio Project” can be heard during “All Things Considered” Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9), and at 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. on KPCC-FM (89.3). KCRW also is co-sponsoring a live “Yiddish Radio Project” performance event on April 15 at the Skirball Cultural Center. The evening will include clips from the series and music by the Yiddish Radio All Star Band, four of whose members are age 75 or older.