VELVL
ZBARZHER (1826[1]-January
2, 1883)
He was born Binyumin-Volf Ehrenkrants
in Zbarazh, eastern Galicia. His father
Moyshe was a ritual slaughterer and a scholarly Jew. His son studied in religious primary school,
and the Talmud teachers considered him to have a “brilliant mind,” an astute
learner, but with an inclination toward horseplay. While still a youngster, he became enamored
of Enlightenment ideas transported to Zbarazh from the neighboring fortresses
of Enlightenment at that time—Brod (Brody) and Tarnopol. Surreptitiously, he studiously studied Tanakh
with Moses Mendelssohn’s commentary, and silently he devoured Enlightenment
books and the German classics. This
could not last for long as a secret, and to pry him loose from the wrong path
in life, his father married him off. He
was not even a full eighteen years of age at the time. He was already then writing poetry in
Hebrew. His young wife was swiftly
influenced by his Enlightened ideas, and she stood by him in his aspirations to
educate himself further and to write. To
bring her a little pleasure, he wrote a poem in simple Yiddish—“Der khosid un
zayn vayb” (The Hassid and his wife)—and he adapted a melody to this satirical
poem, which he sang. Such flagrant
heresy agitated his town, people began to persecute him, and his in-laws moved
heaven and earth to get their daughter a divorce. It thus became impossible for him to remain
in Zbarazh any longer, and with the apparent agreement of his young wife, in
1845 he left home and departed for Romania.
In Botoşani,
a city in Moldavia with a large Jewish population, he first attempted his hand
at business. In a short period of time,
he lost the small dowry that he had brought with him, and he became for that
time a modern itinerant teacher, instructing students in Tanakh according to
Mendelssohn’s commentary and teaching them grammar as well. This did not, though, last for long, and the Botoşani
Jews began doing everything possible to oppose him. He moved on to a neighboring village where the
innkeeper hired him as a teacher for his own children. In this village family, he quickly became a
welcome member of the family, and in fact here he was destined to have his first
audience. With his pleasant baritone
voice, he sang improvised songs for them in Hebrew and Yiddish. With time he began more frequently to sneak
trips back to Botoşani where he established acquaintances with local followers
of the Jewish Enlightenment. There began
to collect around him Enlightened young people.
A group would seclude itself in a wine cellar or in an out-of-the-way
schoolroom, and with a bottle of wine have a bite of roasted meat, and Zbarzher
would sing for them his improvised repertoire of songs. His reputation in Botoşani continued to grow,
the circle of his followers became ever larger, and his singing of songs—most
of them improvised—in taverns and teahouses became of itself his regular
profession. He started to receive gifts
and money for appearing in public, when he became fashionable in Botoşani. People began to invite him into the homes of
the wealthy for family celebrations or simply entertaining evenings, in which
his singing became the greatest attraction, and people would reward him
liberally. He was, though, all too
perceptive that he had to make his peace with the fate of a kind of new mode of
wedding entertainer. With time he
stopped accepting invitations in the opulent salons and preferred to perform
before common folk and the modern, aroused, alive young folk—in the wine
cellars, coffee houses, and tea shops. Before
them he could freely and frankly sing his prepared and often improvised
satirical songs aimed at Hassidic backwardness and hypocrisy, against communal
conduct and singing his so-called “licentious songs” against wine, women, and
love. For a longer stretch of time in
the 1860s, he lived in the capital of Moldavia, Iași, but mostly he would take on leading roles in
cities large and small in Romania, southern Russia, and Galicia, and he even
appeared on stage in Warsaw. He sang his
songs not only in Yiddish but also in Hebrew.
For him this was a means of distinguishing himself from the
run-of-the-mill entertainers and earned him dignity in his own eyes. With his singing in Hebrew as well, he was
drawn, in addition to the audience of workingmen, also to more well-to-do young
people and Enlightenment sorts. He would
be well paid, often “one hundred guilders” or more for a single evening—an
enormous sum for the time, but he would often squander his earnings at the same
place with good friends or just divide it up among everyone there, and not
infrequently he fell into a state of very difficult material need.
Zbarzher’s
first published works were in Hebrew. In
volume 12 of the monthly periodical Kokhve
yitsḥak (Stars of Isaac) (Vienna, 1848), there was published a reworking of
an old parable in his first collection of satirical poems aimed at Hassidim,
entitled “Ḥazon lamoed” (Vision of the time) (Iași, 1855). In 1864 Perets Smolenskin published in his
journal Hashaḥar (The dawn) in Vienna
Zbarzher’s poem “Rumenya” (Romania)—a stinging pamphlet against the
anti-Semitic Romanian government which was precipitating pogroms in a number of
cities in Romania—and wrote about this that the poem should be translated into
European languages and spread among the masses.
As for publishing his Yiddish songs in book form, for a long time Zbarzher
showed little interest. Only when other
professional singers began performing his songs with error-laden texts did he
start to show concern that they be published.
In the Enlightenment manner, he published the collections of his songs
with parallel Hebrew translations, with Hebrew-language prefaces, and with
Hebrew titles. The collections appeared
in four parts under the general title Makel
noam (Rod of pleasantness), “Collection of songs (folk songs) in the spoken
language among Jews in the countries of Poland to Moldavia with the ancient Hebrew
language,” part 1 (Vienna, 1865), reprint (Lemberg: Berl Lurye, 1869), 164 pp.;
part 2 (Lemberg, 1869), 269 pp.; part 3, “(New) Rod of Pleasantness” (Lemberg,
1873), 128 pp.; part 4 (Lemberg, 1878), 128 pp.
Several of these songs—for example, “Der bankrot” (The bankruptcy) and
“Der untsufridene” (The disgruntled)—were published anonymously in the editions
of L. Morgenshtern in Warsaw. His
satires, “Meshiekhs tsaytn” (Messianic times) and “Der khosid iber teater” (The
Hassid at the theater), were translated into Ukrainian by Ivan Franko. The Romanian Jewish writer Dr. Sotek, a
participant in the Czernowitz language conference, published in Brăila,
Romania, in 1902 a collection of his songs with only the Yiddish text in
Romanized transcription. Zbarzher’s song
collections are now rarities. Three of
his songs can be found in Moyshe Basin’s anthology, Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye (Five hundred years of Yiddish
poetry) (New York, 1917); six songs in Nokhum Shtif’s Di eltere yidishe literatur (The older Yiddish literature) (Kiev,
1929) and “Finf nit gedrukte lider fun velvl zbarzher” (Five unpublished song
by Velvl Zbarzher), Vakhshteyn-bukh
(Vakhsteyn volume), a work to the memory of Dr. Bernhard Vakhshteyn (Vilna,
1939). In Filologishe shriftn fun yivo (Philological writings from YIVO)
(Vilna) 2 (1930), B. Vakhshteyn published a handful of “Velvl Zbarzher’s
letters.” In Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO) (1941), pp. 49-68, Dr. Shiye Blokh
published an unknown pamphlet by Zbarzher to the Jewish community of Istanbul,
entitled “Musar livnei avla, oder dem hunt a shtekl” (Chastising the wicked, or
a stick on the dog).
He spent the years 1878-1880 in
Vienna. The well-off at local
restaurants and coffee houses competed among themselves to get the beloved
folksinger. Everywhere that he appeared,
audiences literally stormed the site. In
Vienna he became a close friend of Perets Smolenskin and the Vienna circle of
the Enlightenment with which he had become acquainted during an earlier
visit. To wrench himself out of the wine
cellars and so that he would not be drawn back into the livelihood of singing,
Smolenskin convinced the local rich Jews to provide Zbarzher with a monthly
stipend, but just as Zbarzher was unable to restrain himself from his Bohemian
life, they ceased paying the stipend to him.
His behavior among the society of his good friends and card players led
him to the point at which he had, according to a decree of the police, leave
Vienna with remorse and shame. In 1880
he moved to Constantinople, married there the “beautiful Malkele,” the owner of
a coffee house who came from Bucharest, where he had gotten to know her over
the course of many years (his first wife died a short time after he left her on
his way to Romania), and there he, too, died.
Many of Velvl Zbarzher’s songs—such as, for example, “Der bankrot,” “Der
filozof” (The philosopher), and “Der rebe af dem yam” (The rebbe on the
sea)—are to this day sung among Jews as folksongs.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 2,
under “E(h)renkrants,” with a bibliography; Z. Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Handbook of
the Yiddish theater), vol. 1, with a bibliography; Y. Tiger, in Yidish (Vienna) 3-4 (1928); Nokhum
Shtif, Di eltere yidishe literatur
(The older Yiddish literature) (Kiev, 1929), pp. 209-25; Dr. B. Vakhshteyn, in Filologishe shriftn fun yivo (Vilna) 2
(1930), pp. 1-42; Itsik Manger, Noente
geshtaltn (Intimate portraits) (Warsaw, 1933), pp. 95-103; “Finf nit
gedrukte lider fun velvl zbarzher” (Five unpublished song by Velvl Zbarzher), Vakhshteyn-bukh (Vakhsteyn volume)
(Vilna, 1939), pp. 181-92; Dr. Sh. Blokh, in Yivo-bleter 18 (1941), p. 61; Dr. Y. Shatski, in Yorbukh (Annual) (New York, 1943/1944);
A. Toybenhoyz, in Keneder odler
(Montreal) (April 11, 1955); M. Kosover, in Yidishe
shprakh (New York) (April 1958), p. 9; A. Sh. Yuris, in Heymish (Tel Aviv) (September 1959).
Borekh Tshubinski
[1] According to the Jewish
Encyclopedia, he was born in 1812; according to M. Vaysberg who wrote his
dissertation in German on Zbarzher, 1819; according to Zbarzher’s birth
certificate, 1923; and according to the inscription on his gravestone, 1826.
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