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Stanisław Wielanek, Szlagiery starej Warszawy: Śpiewnik andrusowski
- from BOOK REVIEWS
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- By Gwido Zlatkes, studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and Jewish studies at Hebrew College and Brandeis University.
- Edited by Michael C. Steinlauf, Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 23 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2003, pp 526-527
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Summary
A Warsaw street music band might not appear to be an obvious place for a Jewish historian to look for materials or inspiration. But this would be a mistake, and it took me some six years to realize it. Szlagiery starej Warszawy: Śpiewnik andrusowski by Stanisław Wielanek was published in 1994 and should have been acknowledged in the subsequent volume of Polin. Fortunately, the present volume on Jewish popular culture in Poland presents an ideal opportunity to make up for that omission.
Stanisław (Stasiek) Wielanek, born about 1950, is the leader of Kapela Warszawska, a street band that usually performs for tips in an underpass near the Hotel Forum in the centre of Warsaw. They play mainly pre-war Warsaw urban folk music: songs like ‘U cioci na imieninach’ (‘Auntie's Name-Day Party’) and ‘Bal na Gnojnej’ (‘Party on Gnojna Street’). This is the repertoire for which Stanisław Grzesiuk is known as the last original master; Jarema Ste˛powski later presented a watered-down version to the public through the mass media. In other words, this music is regarded today as lowbrow culture of questionable authenticity. Wielanek recorded more than two dozen records with Kapela Czerniakowska and Kapela Warszawska, yet none of them seems to have had lasting artistic value. Few people would suspect that he is also a serious, passionate, and versatile collector of urban folklore. His 500-page volume contains a richness of material that is not only musical—including both scores and lyrics—but also literary and iconographic: from cabaret monologues and vignettes, jokes, bon mots, and (not always accurate) biographical and contextual information, to drawings, posters, photographs, and postcards. Alongside old Warsaw songs and criminal or lumpenproletarian ballads, the book includes a separate section on Jewish folklore in Polish which is nearly 100 pages long, and another fifty-page section on Lwów.
In the Jewish section, among some thirty songs, we find classics like ‘Mein Yiddishe Mame’ with Polish lyrics by Julian Tuwim, ‘Bełz’ with lyrics by L. Frey and J. Roman, and ‘Yidl mitn Fidl’ (‘Yidl with a Fiddle’) with lyrics by Józef Aleksandrowicz. Some lesser-known songs include ‘Komorne’ (‘Rent’) by Mieczysław Miksne, ‘Balia’ (‘Laundry Tub’) by Moryc Gebaj, and ‘Rebeka’ with lyrics by Andrzej Włast (Gustaw Barmitter). Not long ago ‘Rebeka’ was a popular hit in a magnificent rendition by Ewa Demarczyk.
Urke Nachalnik: A Voice from the Underworld
- from PART II - DOCUMENTS
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- By Gwido Zlatkes, studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and Jewish studies at Hebrew College and Brandeis University.
- Edited by Michael C. Steinlauf, Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 23 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2003, pp 381-388
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Summary
URKE NACHALNIK belongs to the underworld, perhaps even more so today than in his own time in Poland between the wars. Equally out of place in the sentimentalized shtetl and among the heroes and heralds of progress, he belongs to the unwritten part of the Jewish past that has nearly faded from collective memory.
We are venturing into uncharted territory. There is very little written about the Jewish underworld or Jewish criminals in Poland. The Encyclopedia Judaica entry for crime gives only a summary of crime statistics in the Diaspora. Practically the only scholarly work on the subject is a statistical study by Liebman Hersch of the University of Geneva, written as a series of articles in 1936–8 and published in book form in Polish translation in 1938. Hersch analysed official Polish statistical data for 1924–5 and found a lower level of criminal activity among the Jewish population compared to the general population. This applied to both the frequency and the gravity of criminal acts committed by Jews in two of the three examined categories: crimes against the person and crimes against private property. Only in the third category, crimes against the legal order (namely, avoiding conscription, profiteering, and begging), was the level of crime higher among Jews than non-Jews. According to Szyja Bronsztejn, the same trend continued in the 1930s.
We lack some of the most basic biographical facts about Urke Nachalnik, not to mention an authoritative biography. Two reference works, a new dictionary of Polish Jewish history and culture and an essential monograph on Jewish literature between the wars, do not mention him at all. There are two accounts of Nachalnik's life, an apologetic one by Abram Karpinowicz and a critical one by Stanisław Milewski. Both, however, are literary in character. They lack sources, they differ in significant details, and they are inconsistent with other sources including Nachalnik's own autobiography. Even Nachalnik's real name differs in the accounts of his life; it is variously given as Icchok Farberowicz, Icek Boruch Farbarowicz, and Icek Senderowicz from Białystok.
Urke Nachalnik was the underworld nickname that he retained as a pen name. The linguist Maria Brzezina tells us that the first name derives from the thieves’ argot, urka meaning a seasoned thief, in a form adjusted to the morphology of Yiddish (and the Yiddish-influenced Polish of Jews), and the second name comes from the adjective nachalny, meaning brazen or impudent.
Julian Tuwim, Utwory nieznane. Ze zbiorów Tomasza Niewodniczań skiego w Bitburgu: Wiersze, Kabaret, Artykuły, Listy, ed. Tadeusz Januszewski
- from BOOK REVIEWS
-
- By Gwido Zlatkes, studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and Jewish studies at Hebrew College and Brandeis University.
- Edited by Michael C. Steinlauf, Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
-
- Book:
- Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 23 November 2019
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2003, pp 524-526
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The title of this volume of miscellany by Julian Tuwim, Utwory nieznane (‘Unknown Works’), is somewhat misleading. The book is largely made up of cabaret pieces that were performed and known to the public; they simply were never published in written form. Still, the book's publication in 1999 was an important event, not only for poetry lovers and historians of literature, but also from a Jewish perspective. Jewish topics appear prominently and in many forms in this collection of poems, facsimiles, juvenilia, cabaret skits and songs, and private letters from various periods of the poet's life. This is in clear contradiction to the stereotype, predominant in Jewish historiography, of the pre-war Polish Jewish intelligentsia as thoroughly assimilated and uprooted. Tuwim's example demonstrates that the opposite was the case. Like many other writers he was in constant dialogue with his Jewishness, defending it when attacked, but also critical of Jewish obscurantism. ‘Far from antisemitism’, he wrote in his Wspomnienia o Łodzi (‘Memoirs from Łódź’, 1934), ‘I was always, and will always be, an enemy of men uniformed in beards with their Hebrew-German hotchpotch and traditional butchering of the Polish tongue. It is high time, gentlemen, to trim your long kaftans and curly sidelocks, and learn respect for the tongue of the nation in whose midst you live.’ (From today's perspective Tuwim's evaluation of Yiddish and traditional garb is questionable, but his appeal to overcome Jewish exclusivity is not.) This is one side of Tuwim's dialogue with Jewishness. The other is represented by one of the finest epigrams published in this book:
I heard this bastard say
I'm a Jewish leech.
Well, I'm a Jewish prince
While he's an Aryan kike.
Many of the poems presented in Utwory nieznane are satirical comments on the political situation of the time. In his response to growing radical nationalism in pre-war Poland, Tuwim resorted to all literary means—including parody, pastiche, and buffoonery—to mock and ridicule the adversary. His irony was sometimes misunderstood, which occasionally left him open to misinterpretation and to the accusation that he was taking an antisemitic stand.
Among the large selection of Tuwim's productions for cabaret presented in the book, the most revelatory are his monologues for the Quid Pro Quo theatre.