Unintentional History: Musical Moments in 1930s Yiddish Films

As Israel Adler has shown in a lifetime of work, the history of Jewish music is really a set of complex, interlocking histories. The researcher has to gather, sift, and problematize an extremely diverse set of source materials to create a portrait of a given Jewish community and time in terms of its musical life. One type of situation, which I call 'unintentional history,' arises from music created for a particular moment that suddenly passes due to the turbulence of Jewish life.  The commercially-inspired music of the Yiddish-language film of the 1930s in Poland and the United States provides an example of this sort of unintentional history of a vanished age of Jewish music, the short flowering of a vital, transatlantic Jewish cinema culture. Harsh economic and political realities combined with strong ties of family and sentiment produced an expressive system that spanned 'the old home' and 'the new world,' and that offers us today a tiny window into the crowded landscape of those societies. Not intending to document a soon-to-vanish world, filmmakers and film composers deployed a number of myths, strategies, and repertoires in an attempt to entertain a fickle, modernizing, even assimilating public. The cameraman who filmed the wedding-dance sequence in the Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny (nad Wisa) for Yidl mitn fidl in 1938 could not have known that he was producing the only surviving footage of spontaneous pre-Holocaust folk choreography. In the present brief contribution, I will cite just a few musical moments captured on celluloid by filmmakers unaware of our irony in watching those flickering images and sporadic sounds. I’ll concentrate on two types of condensed cultural statement: images of people praying and fiddling.