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Ode to Joy

Rokhl’s Golden City: Bringing Beethoven into Yiddish

by
Rokhl Kafrissen
April 22, 2020
Inset image: Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Inset image: Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Inset image: Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Inset image: Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Just how did Santa Claus get a piano down a New York City fireplace? That’s just one of the questions raised by a Schubert Piano Co. advertisement from December 1911. The ad copy reads (in Yiddish): “A Piano or Player Piano for Hanukkah.” An elegantly dressed man and woman gaze rapturously at the piano, posed in front of the fireplace, while a mischievous St. Nick crouches behind it.

It’s an odd thing to find in the pages of the Yiddishes Tageblatt. But as historian Sarah Litvin argues in “The Piano In The Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture In New York,” not so odd given the economics of the time. This was an era of exploding Jewish immigration to the United States. It was also a peak moment for piano production. “By 1910, more American homes had a piano than a bathtub,” she writes. And piano ads were everywhere in the Yiddish press. With a down payment and installment plan, almost any family could afford one.

Though Santa was drafted into service for Hanukkah sales, Sukes became the yontev (holiday) around which new piano sales were pushed, much as Jews had traditionally bought new clothes for the High Holidays. Litvin argues this was part of a process by which the piano was brought not just into Jewish homes, but into Jewish culture. Musical education, not to even mention owning a piano, was out of reach for most Jews in Eastern Europe. Owning a piano was financially prohibitive, and Jews were often restricted from conservatories and other places of formal musical education. But at the turn of the century all of that started to change. In America, the piano became a locus for acculturation and Americanization. Yiddish-speaking Jews began to negotiate a Jewish place for the piano, making it their own (with a little help from Santa).

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, where mass-produced pianos were not yet available, it wasn’t an instrument mediating between Jewish and Western high culture, it was an artist: Beethoven.

Since the late 19th century, modern Yiddish culture had been focused on two tasks: first, creating a language that could serve artists and audiences as well as any Western language. And second, setting out an army of translators to bring the best of world art and culture into Yiddish. And not just via translation, but by transformation.

Of course, Beethoven wasn’t the only artist to be brought into Yiddish. But Beethoven was the quintessential Romantic artist in the West, the model of the suffering artist, in touch with nature and moved to create by his inner inspiration. Beethoven was the first composer to attain financial independence by taking control of his publishing arrangements. Because he was able to move away from the demands of patrons and those with the funds to commission new work, he was able to create according to his own desires.

The heroic Beethoven featured in a number of books for Yiddish-speaking children, including Dovid Kasel’s novella, Beethoven, published in the late 1910s in Warsaw. It opens with an eminently relatable (if not entirely accurate) young Ludwig in front of his mirror, trying to wrestle his soon-to-be famous shock of hair into something more presentable. His brothers are mean to him and girls laugh at him. He despairs! If only he knew what greatness awaited him …

The end of the novella is a kind of pastoral fantasy, in which the sounds of nature awaken the adult Beethoven inside the child. He comes to understand that sounds can express more than words. Through the “orchestra of nature” he experiences the deep feelings an artist must feel, the sadness and hope, “libe un mesires nefesh” (love and self-sacrifice). Beethoven is never presented as anything other than a non-Jewish daytsh (German), but throughout the novel he is subtly faryidisht (made Yiddish). Indeed, it’s hard to imagine describing a non-Jew as experiencing such a culturally specific experience as mesires nefesh. But that is the sublime experience of a man who would transcend human expression like no one else had.

This “sublime,” heroic Beethoven can be seen explicitly in a work like Romain Rolland’s 1903 biography of the composer. Rolland writes, “The strong and pure Beethoven himself hoped in the midst of his sufferings that his example would give help to other unfortunate ones ... that the unhappy being may be consoled in finding another as unfortunate as himself, who in face of all obstacles has done everything possible to become worthy of the name, MAN.”

Rolland was a French author who was well known to the multilingual cosmopolitans shaping modern Yiddish literature in Warsaw. If you read the autobiography collection Awakening Lives, for example, he’s mentioned often by young readers. In 1924 his Beethoven biography was translated into Yiddish.

But Beethoven wasn’t just a figure in literature. When the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg set out to present a “canon” of Jewish music (as it were), appropriate for the modern home and school, Beethoven was presented alongside Yiddish folk song, Hasidic melodies, and liturgical music. Their 1912 Lider-zamelbukh far der yidisher shul un familye (Song Collection for the Jewish School and Family) contained, among other art songs, a Yiddish translation of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven had famously used for the last movement of his Ninth Symphony. Mordkhe Rivesman’s Yiddish translation (di Freyd, or The Joy) hews fairly closely to Schiller’s original, though without the Elysian fields.

Schiller wrote the first version of “Ode to Joy” in 1785 and it reflects the values of the nascent Enlightenment.

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly one, thy sanctuary!
Thy magic binds again
What custom strictly divided;
All people become brothers,
Where thy gentle wing abides.

It is merely “custom” that divides men, but nature, and sensuality, unites them. This is universality, but a universality that addresses men and recognizes a creator Father who dwells above. For the late 18th century, that was pretty good.

Indeed, the Ninth Symphony and “Ode to Joy” became an incredibly powerful symbol of brotherhood and Enlightenment, despite how impossibly earnest (and earnestly impossible) those things sound today. It wasn’t too long ago, 1972 to be exact, that the soon-to-be European Union adopted “Ode to Joy” as its anthem, a symbol of a unified Europe that had almost destroyed itself just a few decades previously. And in 2017, when Scottish MPs wanted to protest Brexit in the House of Commons, they began a whistle-in of “Ode to Joy.”

For Yiddish students of my generation, Beethoven and Yiddish are forever entwined via “Ode to Joy.” But not through Mordkhe Rivesman’s fairly faithful translation, but Y.L. Peretz’s translation, which appears in Chapter 5 of College Yiddish.

When I went back and looked recently, though, I noticed that only the first two verses are printed:

Ale mentshn zaynen brider
Broyne, gele, shvartse, vayse
Felker, lender un klimatn
S’iz an oysgetrakhte mayse
(All human beings are brothers,
Brown, yellow, black, white
Nations, lands, and climates—
it’s all made up.)

It’s hard to even call Peretz’s version a translation. It’s more like an “inspired by,” going much harder on the “universalism” than Schiller ever did. But because College Yiddish only printed the first two verses, I always assumed that Peretz was merely taking things to their next logical point.

But when I looked at the full text at the wonderful Open Siddur Project, I realized that Peretz’s Brider was something entirely else, much more bitter and cynical.

Everywhere the same mussar,
everywhere the same lie—
the whole world with their mouth,
the politician with their silence!
All people are brothers!
And they amuse themselves with frivolities,
Their souls are (as) little worms—
in pine cone snuff.

The translator’s note says: “In this poem, Peretz is shouting at the hypocrisy of a Europe that sings the Ode to the tune of Beethoven, but neglects its meaning.”

I mean, harsh, but fair. And I understand why Jewish choruses generally don’t sing the last verses. It’s a downer. But this is Beethoven’s 250th birthday year. YIVO and Carnegie Hall had been planning a lavish program of concerts and programming, celebrating the Jewish Beethoven. (YIVO’s program will be going forward in a somewhat truncated virtual form, see below.) To be honest, for me, the ideal celebration of Beethoven’s (Yiddish) genius would be a bunch of SNP MPs belting out all of Peretz’s verses at the (inevitable) next Brexit protest. Halevai.

WATCH: The livestream of YIVO’s April 20 Beethoven event is on their Facebook page.

ALSO: The translator and publisher of the new Yiddish-language Harry Potter will go live for a Zoom event called Harry Potter and the Yiddish Translation on April 23. Register here. … There are so many new, streaming opportunities for at-home learning. Natan Meir, whose upcoming book I quoted in my column about plague weddings, will be giving a six-week course called Creativity and Resilience: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, 1500-2020. The course is free but pre-registration is required. … Streaming on the Segal Center channel are new Yiddish translations of “The Ballad of the Triangle Fire” and “Bread & Roses” from their Bintl Brif show. Yiddish, French, and English lyrics here … April 25 is the internet premiere of Joe Papp at the Ballroom, Avi Hoffman’s dramatic recreation of Public Theater founder Joe Papp’s only concert. Streaming live at 8 p.m. … Yom Hashoah was observed on April 20. The Dorot Jewish Division at the NYPL has a new compilation of resources for Holocaust research, education, and remembrance online … The Jewish Labour Bund Melbourne has a brand-new podcast. Their first guests are the members of the enchanting family band The Bashevis Singers. … You can watch the recent Bund Seder online as well as the Congress for Jewish Culture and Workers Circle Driter Seder (in Yiddish) … If you want a sneak peek at my new play, join me and the creative team for Shtumer Shabes for an afternoon program about Yiddish theater and the dangers of ethnography

And finally, watch the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus perform (part of) Peretz’s translation of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (Brider)

Rokhl Kafrissen is a New York-based cultural critic and playwright.