Two great concerts of Yiddish music from the Jazz Age in North Carolina in December! What, are we crazy?

This year everybody is marveling at the bizarre convergence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, giving us the last Thanksgivvukah for 70,000 years or so (anyway, a long time). But who is thinking about how dreary it's going to be when, Hanukkah over, Jews will have nothing to listen to but "Jingle Bell Rock" for weeks -- and no latkes to console themselves with.

I have a solution! My world music ensemble Mappamundi is giving two concerts of Jewish music from the 1920s and 1930s, music popular and beloved in the kleynkunst venues and Yiddish cabarets and theaters of Warsaw Poland, but now almost forgotten. We will project subtitles on the wall so nobody has to miss out on the jokes.

Info and tickets in advance from CabaretWarsaw.com.

The first, sort of a warm-up, is an hour long and just four of us, at the Carolina Meadows Auditorium on Thursday December 19 at 7:30 pm. The big show (we hope) is at the Carrboro ArtsCenter Saturday December 21, also at 7:30, a 90 minute show featuring me (Jane Peppler) on vocals, violin and concertina; Roger Lynn Spears and Aviva Enoch on piano (not at the same time); Ken Bloom on guitar, clarinet, and domro; Jim Baird on bass and guitar; Beth Holmgren on the sultry alto torch songs (she will present a few in Polish by Jewish composers of the time) and Randy Kloko, baritone, all the way up from Orlando Florida! He sang with me on the two cds of this music I released this year. Have a listen:

Here is our poster, created by Roger Lynn Spears:



Please tell your friends and come if you can. See you there!

Making animated music videos for Yiddish theater songs.

It's important to have captions for videos in a language few people understand any more. But in order for there to be captions, there have to be images. We haven't yet performed any of the music we recorded on "In Odess" and "Lebedik Yankl" so there's no concert footage. That's why I make animated music videos: so there can be subtitles!

Di eybike mame is an entertainingly melodramatic song about a mother who says being a mom is a chump's game. The hard-working, under-appreciated mother is a stock character in all Yiddish entertainment.

So, "The Eternal Mother" for your amusement:



It's the first video I've done using Adobe Illustrator. This is the current way I use it to do animation: import a photo into a blank file, blow it up big, use Illustrator to trace it on layers, then export it to Photoshop (which is a less finicky program and which will make animated gifs). Then I pull the animated gifs from Photoshop into Premiere Pro to build the video.

I stayed up late many nights to finish this, and then when I exported it, the still pictures were flickering, which made me a little queasy. There are several fixes suggested online, but finally the simplest one was the one that worked - why didn't I try it first? Premiere Pro has an anti-flickering filter! It's hard to find because all the text in the program is tiny and the background is charcoal gray and everything you want is hidden inside nested options.

I've taken a few lessons from Jason Comparetto and one of his suggestions was to storyboard each video in advance. That's sensible but not how I've ended up doing it: I gather images and sequences that seem illustrative or amusing, make sequences myself, and jumble them all together.

I stuffed the last chorus of this song with pictures of children I love. The protagonist in the song implies your kids will grow up and abandon you, that they will be callous and self-interested, and that's why mothers are "eternal fools." My favorite line: "One mother can take care of ten children, but then children (God Forbid!) will let one mother go begging."

That hasn't been my experience. It's not too late for my kids to abandon me but thankfully it hasn't happened yet!

No, to me the hard part is that you keep losing them. Those babies that play with their toes disappear and are replaced with toddlers who spill ink on the carpet when you don't pay attention to them and those toddlers become little kids that go off to school, and before you know it they're in high school and sneaking around behind your back doing things you don't want to know about, and then they run off to college and they're kind of - gone. A mom has to keep saying goodbye to the kid she loves in order to welcome the new (older) one that comes along.

I have a friend who's in her mid-eighties and she's still worrying for her kids. It never ends.

This is a picture of my daughter with her two preschool buddies. One of them is now a fireman who also grows flowers and the other has become a guy, so the little girl he was is really, really gone. I remember the day I took this picture and I miss these little kids.

The TJC Hanukah Songbook: Now also available as a pdf digital download

I put this songbook together a few years ago when I "retired" from my post as director of the Triangle Jewish Chorale. We got hired every year to do Hanukkah concerts and these were the songs we'd sing.

You can buy the songbook on Amazon (click the cover image to go to the order page) for $9.81 - or now you can get the pdf file of the book directly from me for $6.50 through PayPal (best option if you are in a hurry - Hannukah is coming up fast!)

Here are the songs in my songbook:

Banu Chosech

Cuando el Rey Nimrod

Drey, dreydele

Drive Cold Winter Away

Hanerot halalu

Hanerot Halalu (Hasidic version)

Hanukah (Frankel)

Hayo, haya

Hinei Ba

Imi nahtna leviva-li

Khanukah iz freylekh

Let Memory Keep Us All

Ma-oz Tsur (Italian version)

Ma-oz Tsur (Sunday school)

Mi-ymalel

Mizmor xir

Ner-li

Nerot dolkim

Nerotai

Oy, ir kleyne likhtelekh!

Oy, khanukah!

Shnirele perele

Simu shemen

Svivon sov sov sov

Time to Remember the Poor

Y'vanim

Yom Zeh l'Yisroel

Here's the mosaic I patterned my cover on:

One of the worst menorahs I've ever seen reminds me of another connotation-fail menorah idea.

Some recent discussion of Pinterest led me to log on for the first time in months. The first thing I saw was this awful menorah made of old Yiddish books - "with their covers removed, giving a nice neutral vintage paper look."

This is disturbing in so many ways. A giant connotation fail. Just what we love: defacing and/or burning Jewish books. The death of a culture - its books, now readable by few, tied together with strings, their covers removed, now reduced to a cute "vintage" object. The authors of these books: turning over in their graves.

Here is another one that makes me crazy in a "what were they thinking?" way: the Noah's arc menorah. All the rest of the world destroyed except this one crowded boat, and look how happy the animals are.

I call this "tone-deaf to yiddishkeit" (jewish culture). My son says, it's tone-deaf to books.