Chasidic in America

The song ‘Chasidic in America’ was originally sung by cantor Moishe Oysher and his first wife, singer and actress, Florence Weiss. They performed it on the theater stage, in concerts in North and South America, and in the 1937 Yiddish film The Cantor’s Son (Dem Khazns Zundyl). One of the most successful American Yiddish films, The Cantor's Son was directed by Sidney Goldin (who stepped down before the film was completed due to heart failure) and Ilya Motyleff (who completed the film and was officially credited as director). Oysher and Weiss also recorded the song in 1938 with Dave Tarras, the legendary klezmer clarinetist, accompanying them. Although widely associated with Oysher, it is not clear who composed ‘Chasidic in America.‘ Some credit it to Oysher himself (as can be found on the track's entry at the Freedman Jewish Sound Archive) while others to Alexander Olshanetsky, the composer who is credited with the music of The Cantor’s Son.

This virtuosic, wordless song consists of two distinctive sections. The first is a short melody in a style reminiscent of certain types of Hassidic niggunim. Both singers sing the same melody with Weiss harmonizing a third above Oysher. The melody rises from the tonic to the fourth and then works its way back down to the tonic. It is sung four times, with the only difference between them being in the cadences (the first time is open on the dominant, while the second time is closed on the tonic, this repeats once). In the first and third repetitions the final measure consists of Weiss yelping on the first beat and Oysher responding with an improvisatory scat singing passage, clearly reminiscent of similar vocal gestures employed by Louis Armstrong at exactly the same structural places in some of Armstrong's songs. This gesture situates the song in an ambivalent position between the Eastern European Jewish and the Afro-American musical realms. Indeed Hankus Netsky, klezmer scholar and leader of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, has pointed out that this song shows “just how astute Oysher was in mingling Hassidic chant with the popular scat-singing craze of the day.”¹

The second section of the song is in a distinctive instrumental (klezmer) style of Romanian-Moldavian extraction. Weiss sings an ostinato while Oysher sings a virtuosic melismatic solo. This section is followed by a return to the first, which repeats twice before the song ends. 

This song, with its nods through the medium of American popular music to both the Hasidic niggun and the Eastern European Jewish instrumental repertoires, can be seen as a reflection of the complex and ambiguous meeting point between traditional and modern culture which was strongly felt by Jews in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. This complexity can be seen in Moishe Oysher’s life, which fluctuated between the cantorial world of the synagogue and the popular music stage.

Oysher’s career has to be understood within its wider social context. The mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to America between 1882 and 1924 had a strong impact on cantorial music and on the status of cantors., as well as on all aspects of Jewish life. After arriving in America some cantors found that a loftier income was to be made by singing outside the confines of the synagogue, and began performing at popular music venues or in the opera. This new career path often caused a rift with the leaders of the Jewish community, as many did not approve of their cantors becoming popular stage artists.² This new ambivalent status placed the cantor as a kind of “spiritual middleman,” who negotiated “the realm between religion and show business as well as God and the congregation.”³ To be sure this phenomenon started earlier in Europe, but it became acute in America when cantorial music began to be performed more intensively outside synagogues, especially on Second Avenue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, the hub of Yiddish theater. In America cantors could also perform in vaudeville, and later on the radio and on the movie screen.

Oysher himself belonged to a long cantorial lineage and began singing in the synagogue at the age of six in his homeland of Bessarabia (Imperial Russia). After his immigration to America he began to sing light opera while continuing to perform some cantorial tasks on the side. In the early 1930s he began performing on the Yiddish stage and on the radio and made his Second Avenue theatrical debut in 1935. During this period he attempted to balance his popular stage and cantorial duties but this ambivalence was met with resistance by some congregants, who did not approve of having a popular singer chant the holy melodies for them. There is even documentation of a synagogue being surrounded by protestors, who objected to his singing there.⁴

By 1937 Oysher became a full time cantor and officiated in two synagogues, the main one being the splendid First Roumanian-American Congregation. It was in this year that The Cantor's Son was released. The film, considered an autobiographical take on Oysher's life, is about the son of a cantor who runs away to America to pursue a career on the stage. As the film progresses so does his longing for his family in Europe and the traditional way of life that he left behind. The protagonist eventually goes back to singing cantorial music and returns home to his family’s shtetl. The intersection between tradition and modernity in the song ‘Chasidic in America’ was further brought to the fore in 1956, when Oysher recorded a cantorial rendition of the Passover seder. Among the rich cantorial passages on the album, many of which were based on the traditional Ashkenazi nusah for the Haggadah, were two songs that quoted the melody of ‘Chasidic in America.’

The first song is ‘Dayenu,’ which briefly references the melody of ‘Chasidic in America.’ The second is ‘Chad Gadya,’ in which much of the melody draws from ‘Chasidic in America.’ We see here that the popular song from the stage and movie screen has moved into the realm of domestic religious ritual, the Passover seder. And yet, its extreme virtuosity rendered it impossible for regular people around the seder table to sing it. Thus also in its ‘Chad Gadya’ reincarnation, ‘Chasidic in America’ remained a stage song for professional performers, but now the cumulative structure of the Passover folk song turned it into an even more exciting piece.

The brilliancy of Oysher’s ‘Chasidic in America’ cum ‘Chad Gadya’ turned it into a tour de force for later Jewish artists. Several contemporary musicians have performed it, many with the text of Chad Gadya, turning it into a cantorial standard. It has been performed by both well respected cantors as well as contemporary klezmer bands. Most notably Frank London, the famed New York based trumpeter, has performed it with his Klezmer Brass Allstars on a number of occasions.

In 2005 Montreal based musician SoCalled (the stage name of Joshua Dolgin), who fuses klezmer music with hip-hop and funk music, released an album called “The SoCalled Seder: A Hip-Hop Haggadah.” Throughout the album he reworks parts of the Passover seder, fusing them with hip-hop beats, rap, and various archival recordings. His version of ‘Dayenu’ and ‘Chad Gadya’ are based on Oysher's recording of the seder. In early 2014, as part of the episode on Jewish music on the Canadian television show God's Greatest Hits, SoCalled gave a brief biographical introduction to Oysher, which was followed by a performance, along with singer David Wall, of ‘Chasidic in America.’ 

References

Hoberman, James. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

Netsky, Hankus. “Secular Jewish Musical Expression – Is Nothing Sacred?” in Jewish Secularity: The Search for Roots and the Challenges of Relative Meaning. eds. David M. Gordis and Zachary I. Heller. Lanham: University Press of America, 2012, pp. 77-90. Reprinted in: Journal of Synagogue Music 37 (Fall 2012): 173-86. 

Shandler, Jeffrey. Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 35-39.

Slobin, Mark. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, esp. chapter 3 (pp. 51-77).

Zylbercweig, Zalmen. Lexicon of the Yiddish Theater, vol. 3. New York: The Hebrew Actors Union of America, 1959, pp. 2407-2415.