Voices From The Past

Schaechter, inset, has added new and younger voices to the chorus.

Schaechter, inset, has added new and younger voices to the chorus.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

This is not a music story. It appears in the arts section of this newspaper, and the ostensible reason for its publication is a concert. But this is not a music story.
It is a story about a small band of people trying to keep a language from dying.
“My father is Mordecai Schaechter, one of the world’s leading Yiddish linguists,” says Binyumen Schaechter, director of the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus, which is performing on June 1 at Symphony Space. “He wrote many books and countless magazine articles. His whole life was committed to the Yiddish language.”
Binyumen, who is 44, recalls his childhood vividly.

“My parents wanted us to grow up in a Yiddish-speaking household,” he says. “That was unusual at that time.

Most parents wanted their children to assimilate and seek success in America. My parents wanted my three sisters and me to be able to converse in Yiddish. They would insist that we answer in Yiddish [when spoken to in the home].”

Their language set the family apart.

“The only other [families] speaking in Yiddish were the chasidim and the Communists,” he says. “For the chasidim it wasn’t a purpose, it was a means. With the ultra-left households it was more of a goal but they didn’t insist that the kids answer in Yiddish, and many of the kids didn’t. So by the next generation, those families didn’t speak Yiddish anymore.”

Mordkhe (as the elder Schaechter preferred to be called) and Charne Schaechter were not going to let that happen to their children.

“Yiddish was the language of the house, period,” their son recalls. “We had to put a penny in the ‘pot’ if we spoke in English or, sometimes, there’d be no TV.”

It worked. All four of Mordkhe and Charne’s children speak fluent Yiddish. All 16 of the grandchildren speak fluent Yiddish and, as the New York Times noted in Mordkhe’s obituary in February, they spoke only Yiddish with their zeyde.

Of course, Mordkhe and Charne had a secret weapon that may have been more effective than withholding “The Brady Bunch” or collecting a penny for every linguistic faux pas: Yiddish music.

Charne was a musician, and she wanted all her children to take piano lessons.
As Binyumen Schaechter tells it, “My two older sisters were OK. My third sister was less than OK. I really took to it. My mom invested all of their piano lesson energy in me.”
He would go on to pursue a career in music, one that he acknowledges is not an easy one.

“There are a lot of ups and downs,” Schaechter admits. “At no point have I encouraged my kids to pursue a career in the arts.”

It looks like they may have wanted one anyway. At first, Daneel, Binyumen’s son, “a glorious boy soprano,” would join with his sister Reyna, and sing a few songs from the copious repertoire of Yiddish folk and vaudeville ditties, but when the boy’s voice changed, Reyna, a natural performer with a formidable belter’s voice, would sing with her dad. More recently, though, her sister Teema-Leeba, the youngest of the family, has proven her mettle and the two girls, ages 13 and 8 respectively, are performing as the “Shekhter-tekhter” (Schaechter daughters) with a beaming Binyumen as their accompanist. (The girls will be a part of the Symphony Space program on June 1.)

Of course Yiddish music represents an important part of the linguistic/cultural legacy that the Schaechters and other Yiddishists have been trying to preserve. So many Yiddish institutions have been buried under the weight of the Holocaust in Europe and assimilation in the Americas. These too, like the language itself, have become reclamation projects for impassioned advocates.

Consider the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus. The first JPPC was founded in Chicago in 1916 by Jacob Schaefer. Schaefer envisioned the chorus as merely one in a nationwide movement, and at its peak in the 1920s there were between 30 and 40 such choruses around the country, singing politically progressive Yiddish choral music, frequently composed specifically for these gifted amateur singers. (The chorus that will perform at Symphony Space was founded in 1922, merely one of many such choruses in the five boroughs at that time.) In the 1940s and ‘50s, the choruses moved in a different musical direction, singing about Israel mostly, but still in Yiddish. Hard times had arrived, not just for the left in the U.S. but for the Yiddish language across the globe.

By the time Binyumen Schaechter became the director of the one surviving chorus in New York City, “the average age of the members was somewhere between 75 and 80,” he says ruefully.

Things began to change in January 1998, when one of the members asked if the group could sing something special, more challenging, for their 75th anniversary. Schaechter “started calling and e-mailing anyone who liked Yiddish music, could hold a harmony and was free on Monday nights.”

In a short time, he had transformed the chorus, adding new and younger voices, many with significant musical training. They began performing more challenging material, much of it a cappella, and reviving older pieces that hadn’t been performed in concert in decades. The upcoming concert is fairly typical, showcasing a 28-minute oratorio by Maurice Rauch and Wolf Younin written shortly after VE-Day, “Fun Viglid biz Ziglid” (“From Lullaby to Song of Victory”), tracing two Jewish children’s lives before and after the Holocaust. It is very likely that the oratorio hasn’t been performed since its debut.
And that is the kind of resurrection that Schaechter’s father and mother undoubtedly had in mind when they started raising their children speaking Yiddish in the home, a returning to life of a vital part of Jewish culture, not really dead but waiting to be reawakened. n
The Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus and the “Shekhter-tekhter,” under the direction of Binyumen Schaechter, will be performing at Symphony Space (2537 Broadway, near 95 Street) on Sunday, June 1 at 4 p.m. For information, call (212) 864-5400 or go to www.symphonyspace.org. The JPPC’s CD, “Zingt” is available at www.thejppc.org.