14 November 2nd, 1946
Link to Forverts edition
The song "God’s Wonders" which was once popular and famous among Yiddish theater audiences. – How it often went in the theater when the prima donna Berta Tanzman used to sing this song.
Like many other actors who joined the Yiddish stage in those years when you didn’t expect any great luck, I also never fell into despair when I went through bad times. I made peace with the fact that this is just how the theater profession is, and this is just what the life of an actor is: suddenly you are distinguished and it goes well and you earn enough money acting, and then all of a sudden it goes badly and you had to “put your teeth on the shelf”1, as we used to say in Ukraine, and after a while it will start to go well again.
I never thought about leaving the stage. Not even in the worst times. Such a thought never even occurred to me, and it was difficult for me to understand those Yiddish actors who - for one reason or another - left the stage and went to something else, as was the case with Yisroel Weinblatt, Rudolph Marks, and others.
This kind of thing really annoyed me. I particularly I resented that Rudolph Marks left the stage, because he was such a very talented actor and an excellent comedian, and in theater circles it was said that even Mogulesko quietly considers him a rival…
In general, I just couldn’t understand, intellectually, how an actor could leave the stage because he couldn’t have as big a name as someone else, or because he had to go through difficult times…
So that’s how thing were when I went back to Brownsville from Boston. It was very bad for me then, and together with the comedian Frank, I managed to pull through and earn a few dollars from a performance here and there, but it wasn’t really working. Once, I mustered the courage to go to Adler, the Nesher Hagadol himself, to see if he would include me into his troupe. He actually received me well. He said that he has already heard a lot of good things about me, but he still couldn’t include me in the troupe, because it’s not up to him.
– Talk to them - he said - with the company; If they don’t mind, I’ll let you in…
And who was “the company?” The actors of the troupe. And with them there was nothing to say…
And then Abba Schoengold came to my aid again, and things started to go well again.
Restless as ever, Abba Schoengold was back in Boston, and he sent me a telegram telling me to come there immediately with my wife, because he had big plans and had assembled a really impressive troupe. The manager of the troupe was none other than Lazar Mitnick himself, a Jew who really loved the theater up to his ears, and among the actors were the famous prima donna Berta Tanzman and her husband Avrom Itzhik Tanzman, who wasn’t “just anybody” but someone the public loved very much. Dramas, melodramas, and operettas will be staged, and - it will be good…
Of course, I drove straight away back to Boston, and there I soon saw that the leading man on the stage was not Schoengold, but Tanzman. That really wasn’t to my liking, because I got along better with Schoengold than with Tanzman. I knew that the main thing on Tanzman’s mind was that his wife the prima donna be the main attraction on the stage, and on top of that, he didn’t like when another actor performed better in a role than he did…
Because of his wife, Tanzman decided that in Boston we would start with an operetta, with Goldfaden’s Meilitz Yosher2 That’s what he wanted, because in this operetta his wife would have a very good role, and most of all she excelled in the song "God’s Wonders" which the really audience loved to hear.
In general, audiences back then loved Yiddish showtunes, and more than anything they loved Goldfaden’s songs, and possibly this is due to their subject matter. The songs were authentically Jewish3, and people quickly learned them and sang them everywhere.
Today, most of these songs have been forgotten and are no longer sung, neither in theaters nor at home. And that’s why I think it’s necessary to mention them, and that’s really what I’m doing in writing about my life at the Yiddish theater. It is really worthwhile to remember those Yiddish songs of yesteryear - songs that were sung on the Yiddish stage and in hundreds of thousands of Jewish homes all over the world. I will also do the same, then, with the song "God’s Wonders" from Goldfaden’s operetta Meilitz Yosher, which was so beloved by audiences, and so I implore those who still remember the song to read it and sing the song to yourself, and you will certainly enjoy it very much.
So let’s all sing it together4:
5 Once, the nation concerned itself
With listening to an influential man,
who declared that there is one God,
He was a Hebrew.
And God spoke to him:
Listen to Me, Ovraim’el6
Look upon heaven and earth,
this will be my store.
I’ll make you great,
from you will come
a people who will be Godly;
Nature, I myself,
I will take care of it.
And you will turn the pages of the book.
And in every generation
I will yet
show great wonders
if you’ll just be
happy and good and fine,
faithful children of mine.
That is what the prima donna sang, and soon the whole chorus sang along with the last line:
If you’ll just be
happy and good and fine,
faithful children of mine.
And you had to see how the audience gaped when the prima donna sang it. It was a joy. The song warmed the soul. And the prima donna then sang:
Before He brought his children
to him, in Jerusalem,
they spent four hundred years
in the land of Egypt.
They were very oppressed there
Until God heard their lamentations,
And he sent unto the land
wondrous plagues -
A beast, that devoured,
Hail, a pestilence,
A dark Angel of Death,
until Pharaoh himself
told them to go.
And even gave them travel expenses.
And so, I shall unto you
show many
great and powerful wonders
If you’ll just be
happy and good and fine,
faithful children of mine.
And then the chorus sang along in the refrain again, and the prima donna sang on. And what she sang was, just like before, a chapter of Jewish history which has been remembered since the times when the khumash7 was studied in kheder with Rashi - a chapter of Jewish history in song:
They wandered forty years
in the hot wasteland
Of water there was no trace,
Only sand and stones;
From a stone he drew water out for them,
Moses the illustrious.
And from heaven they grabbed
bread-like manna;
Many birds
Suddenly came down
flying right to them -
“Cut off our heads
and cook us in the pot,
and let yourselves be happy.”
In this way, the story of the manna in the desert, where Moishe Rabbeinu8 led the Jews of Egypt back to the land of Canaan, was translated into song. And when the prima donna saw how the faces of all the Jews sitting in the theater lit up with joy, she added even more fire to the refrain:
And so, I shall unto you
show many
great and powerful wonders
if you’ll just be
happy and good and fine,
faithful children of mine.
Everyone knew what was coming next, and they were very, very anxious to hear it. It appealed to the heart. It spoke to the soul. They licked their fingers and delighted in it.
Nu, let’s sing together again:
They had barely left Egypt,
When Pharaoh ran after them;
With his whole army, by the sea
he found them.
He wanted to finish them off
they would have been lost.
But God gave a whistle – in fear
the ocean hardened.
And Pharaoh’s soldiers
in the sea
found their burial place.
And our people
from the other side
happily sang songs.
Here, not only the chorus, but also the crowd joined in to sing refrain, and the entire theater was brightened by the joyful song. And after that came the moral of the song:
I have not translated these final lyrics, since they were not provided at the Yiddish Penny Songs link, and my attempted word-for-word translation is mediocre. Instead, here is the gist of the “plot”:
In this verse, they receive the 10 commandments. God warns he will punish the Jews if they forsake him, and they will no longer see his wonders or miracles if they do not remain his good, kind, faithful children.
Thus went Goldfaden’s song "God’s Wonders" in this historical operetta, which he called Meilitz Yosher, oder Rabbi Yoselman. And no one should have any complaints for me because I have given the whole song here, from beginning to end9. I simply could not resist the temptation and I had to convey it here in its entirety, because while writing it I was singing it to myself, and I felt that I had to sing it the the whole way through. And I’m sure that those who still remember this song will also sing it to themselves when they read it, and they will be pleased that I reminded them of a beautiful old Yiddish song, that was once sung on stages everywhere that Yiddish theater was played and also in thousands and thousands of Jewish homes all over the world…
This is an idiom, meaning to be starving - after all, if you aren’t eating, you don’t need your teeth anymore so you can put them on the shelf.↩︎
Read the whole play, in Yiddish, in Google Books.↩︎
עכט–יידיש↩︎
You can sing along too with the first two verses, with lyrics in Yiddish and English!↩︎
This translation is from Yiddish Penny Songs, but rearranged to better match the order of words in Yiddish. The lyrics at the link are somewhat rearranged for English speakers.↩︎
Abraham↩︎
Torah, in book (not scroll) form↩︎
Moses↩︎
Indeed, his full set of lyrics may be among the last remaining transcriptions.↩︎