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Michael
Tilson Thomas & Chana Mlotek |
Careers:
Chana Mlotek,
Folk Songs
The Woman Isaac Bashevis
Singer Called “The
Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish Music”
By Joan Baum, Ph.D.
Belying her age by
years, the sturdy octogenarian moves with purpose and quiet
determination, up the steps, down the steps, across the floor,
finally propelling visitors into a small office wonderfully
crammed with books, many by her—hundreds
of songs and poems and oral histories.
A couple of photos of
herself being hugged by the famous composer and conductor Michael
Tilson Thomas modestly adorn the wall, though it could easily
be wallpapered with honorary plaques and certificates, including
the Lifetime Achievement Award she received two years ago from
the YIVO* Milken Archive of American Jewish Music and the Jewish
Theological Seminary at an international conference in New
York on Jewish Music in America. At that time the much-loved
and admired writer for the Jewish Forward, whose detective
column, Perl fun der yiddisher poezye –“Pearls
of Yiddish Poetry,” a unique bi-weekly which includes
a Q & A” and a “Readers Recall Songs” section,
vowed that she would not be slowing down. “Every day
there’s something new to be done.” Now, two years
later, the indefatigable Chana Mlotek is still deep in research,
chasing down answers to queries that pour in from readers and
fans all over the world about Yiddish music. Indeed, as she
starts to speak to her visitors, the phone rings. “You
need art music songs? When would you like to come in? “The
computer in back of her blinks with a full screen of emails.
When the archival world started going digital, the energetic
Chana Mlotek learned about computers. No generation gap for
her. Her son, Kalman, a composer, conductor, arranger, and
the executive director of the Folksbiene Theatre, the oldest
Yiddish theatre in the world, assists with the column, her
older son Mark is on the board. But Chana is at the helm.
The Mloteks—husband Joseph, who died a few years ago,
and was Chana’s soul mate and partner—were a formidable
team for decades, sharing the column and pursuing and publishing
original and transliterated versions of Yiddish scores and
texts, providing historical accounts of provenance, context
and significance—Hasidic and liturgical pieces, ballads,
sad shtetl songs about orphans and young women left alone and
glad songs about rabbis, weddings and dancing. The Mloteks
also tracked down theatre music, operettas. poets, composers,
authors of Holocaust poetry. Shoshtakovitch, Chana notes, was
particularly taken with Yiddish music, as were Ravel, Prokofiev,
Gershwin. Much of what Chana and Joseph identified would otherwise
have never been known because so much was destroyed or lost
in the war. A letter arrives from a survivor who had been a
child in a concentration camp. One day, he recalls, a boy sang “My
Yiddishe Mama” so movingly that the Nazi officer gave
the Jews another bowl of soup. Chana publishes the account.
A week later, a letter arrives: I was the boy who sang the
song. A week later, another letter—I was in that camp,
it happened. (The song, written in 1925 by Jack Yellen and
Lew Pollack, was made famous a few years later by Sophie Tucker.)
Other examples only hint at the extent of Chana Mlotek’s
sleuthing. She discovered, for example, the oldest piece of
extant Yiddish music so far—an 1892 song by Sholem Aleichem,
who wrote it in Odessa and was later set to music by a student.
American born (her
parents came from White Russia, her husband Joseph from Poland
after the war), Eleanor “Chana” Gordon,
who got a B.A. from Hunter College and then took graduate courses
at UCLA, where she met Joseph in 1948, was, along with Joseph,
one of 12 participants in the first course in Jewish and Yiddish
folklore at an American university. Why the great interest
in Yiddish today, particularly in Eastern European countries
and Germany? Chana needs no moment to reflect: Klezmer, for
one, a movement to attract young people to music and Judaism.
But she also points out that the third generation, moving away
from assimilated parents who did not want to talk about their
own parents or the Holocaust, is embracing Yiddishkeit, Yiddish
culture, with joy, part of ethnic America’s search for
roots. The symbol of Yiddish folksongs, incidentally, is the
Golden Peacock. Want to know why? Mach schnell to 15 W. 16th
Street and to the remarkable Chana Mlotek.#
*YIVO (www.yivoinstitute.org),
the Yiddish Scientific Institute for Jewish Research, founded
in 1925 in Vilna, Poland (Lithuania) and since 1940, headquartered
in NY, is “the world’s
preeminent resource center for East European Jewish Studies.”
