How the Yiddish ‘poet of the people’ wrote more than 500 songs yet struggled to be heard
Arriving in America in the 1890’s, Shloime “Solomon” Smulewitz became the epitome of the ‘Wandering Jew’
Though the influence of songwriter Solomon Shmulevitz was vast, his financial success was not. Courtesy of Henry H. Sapoznik
This essay has been adapted from a chapter in Henry H. Sapoznik’s new book The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (Excelsior Press).
One of the first 1900s Yiddish recording artists was fiddler, badkhn, cantor, rabbi, poet, composer, publisher, folksinger, and entrepreneur Shloime “Solomon” Smulewitz (1868–1943). Born in Pinsk, at the age of five his khazn father taught him cantorial singing and entered him in a yeshiva where he learned to read and write. (Smulewitz was later apprenticed to the great cantor Nisi Belzer, who would teach him to read and write music.)
With the death of his father, Smulewitz began singing songs of his own composition, and supplementing his income with a traveling Yiddish theater troupe or a cantor’s choir for his so-called esn teg (eating days; gigs that came with meals). In 1881 in Vilna, Smulewitz learned to fiddle, and in Minsk, badkhones, at which he soon became so adept that he was writing rhymes for other more established badkhonim. Smulewitz would publish several poems and a book before coming to America in about 1893.
Blessed with a pleasant and resonant tenor voice and a renewable resource of his own compositions, Smulewitz began giving concerts in vaudeville houses, making his first record in 1901 and continuing until 1920; about 150 records for every label, including Standard, Zonophone, United Hebrew Record, Edison, Columbia, and Victor. And Smulewitz, made it clear in the spoken introduction to his recordings how he wanted to be known: dikhter Smulewitz (poet Smulewitz).
While Smulewitz concentrated on his own songs (he recorded a number of them several times), he also sang the compositions of others and was an effortless collaborator as the lyricist in some, the composer in others. It’s unclear exactly how many songs Smulewitz wrote. Irene Heskes in her Yiddish American Popular Songs, 1895–1950 documents more than 300 songs and manuscripts registered with the copyright office. Zalmen Zilbercweig (the Boswell of the Yiddish theater) in his Lexikon fin yidishn teyater, estimates more than 500. However, given Smulewitz’s prolific output in other venues (newspapers, his Teyater Zinger [Theater Singer] magazine, private commissioned compositions, etc.), Zilbercweig and Heskes combined probably underestimated the number.
Smulewitz’s earliest known published American song is the odd “Er Hot Gelakht” (“He Laughed,” 1903), Yiddish in title only and rendered in a clumsy, tortured English:
At the ball he chanced to meet her
a flow’r she was, lovely and pure
He courted, with humor and wit, her
To him, married she was, to be sure
He swore to be faithful and true her
But she was not aware of his craft!
What delighted her most in her suer [sic]
Is the smiling, and he, well, he laughed!
But in the laughing there is chaffing
Sorts there are a score!
It may happen that this weapon
Pierce may, very sore.
Yet with its setting at a ball, a bouncy waltz time signature, and the subject of tragic misdirected love, it was nothing less than his homage to Milwaukee’s Jewish Charles K. Harris, the composer of the megahit “After the Ball.” In 1907, Smulewitz wrote his own megahit, “A brivele der mamen” (“A Little Letter to Mother”), a teary mixed-time ballad (unusual with its verse in three, chorus in two). The song, about a mother back home fruitlessly awaiting a letter from her son in America, dramatically captured that moment of peak Jewish emigration, starting a cottage industry of other Brivele compositions, of which Smulewitz produced not a few.
These two songs, and a surprising number of others, were written either from a woman’s point of view or in the woman’s voice in which Smulewitz portrayed women positively and showed himself to be keenly aware of the societal double standards that victimized them. One of those was also the first known recorded Yiddish parody of a popular English language song: “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” (1901). On his “Tsu Gefellen Mener” (“Getting Men to Fall for You”) Smulewitz turns the earlier treacly English music hall romantic love song on its ear, and in the woman’s voice coolly redresses the question of gender inequality:
With both grace and charm I’m blessed
Everyone is quite impressed
When they see me, they are all struck
I’ve got strength and I’ve got looks
Nothing you can get from books
I’m blessed with both good fortune
And good luck
Men all love me so they say
I just take their breath away
Just like straw I mow their poor hearts down
Swains all fall upon their knees
I’m so wearied by their pleas
And I laugh at them
Just as you would a clown
But to get men to fall for you
You must be smart
And my plan will really do
Just for a start
I know my looks are key
Vengeance is my plan
Men just lay down for me
And don’t get up again
Men are guilty to be sure
When women are made impure
Men are guiltless, avoiding blame
All their lovey dovey chatter
Meant to fool and meant to flatter
And the phony tears they well up without shame
It’s so hard to figure out
We’re just human there’s no doubt
So, we fall for it and we pay the price
But in no time flat you’ll see
That the kind of man is he
Who’ll grow distant from his wife
And turn to ice.
Starting in 1905, Smulewitz published his annual Teyater Zinger, a collection of his latest songs (words, no music), poems, witticisms and popular song parodies. Though Teyater Zinger lasted for five issues, it was clearly not easy (each edition had a different mailing address, possibly pointing to Smulewitz having to move for financial reasons). Smulewitz’s ideas about self-promotion were original and proactive, and he anticipated cross-marketing platforms years ahead of their time. Perhaps too far: For all his marketing prescience, his enterprises failed.
In 1912, in a move usually associated with someone crossing out of the Jewish world, Solomon Smulewitz changed his name to Small (something the corpulent singer was not) and so toggled uneasily between the two surnames for the rest of his life. That same year, on the first sheet with both names, Smulewitz composed, published, and recorded another timely ballad, “Khurbn titanik oder der naser keyver” (“The Titanic Disaster or the Watery Grave”) only weeks after the sea catastrophe. While the world was awash with other Titanic songs that also pointed out the underlying tragic hubris of the mighty vessel, only Smulewitz’s song called out the love and bravery of passengers Isador Straus (he of Macy’s fame) and his wife Ida, who decided to die together, an image splashed on the cover of Smulewitz’s Hebrew Publishing sheet music.
The post–World War I era saw a dramatic change in Yiddish popular music away from the folk autodidactic “singer songwriters” like Smulewitz. Now, jazz-influenced Yiddish theater music by Joseph Rumshinsky and Alexander Olshanetsky made Smulewitz’s songs seem even older than they were, and the bottom gave out with a sudden unforgiving ferocity. Smulewitz would make his last record in 1920, while his last published song would be a commission from Max Bernstein in 1927 for the opening of his Libby’s Hotel and Baths, a distinctly old fashioned march for the otherwise ultra-modern Libby’s.
Smulewitz became the embodiment of the wandering Jew, reduced to a grueling tour of provincial Jewish communities usually in the company of his daughter Dorothy (herself a fine singer), performing in a series of benefits (i.e., fundraising concerts closing with a description of his present dire circumstances). Yet even in his health decline and in poverty, Smulewitz continued to be productive and creative. In 1938, he self-published Origienele retenishn in ritm un raym (Original Riddles in Rhythm and Rhyme), a collection of puzzles and riddles in macaronic Yiddish and English with an ingenious answer code, whose extreme rarity points to just how badly it sold.
Without end, Smulewitz struggled against his “forgotten but not gone” status. In an Oct. 23, 1941, Forverts column Fun folk tsu folk (From People to People), Smulewitz wrote a letter about a previous article that referred to “A brivele der mamen” as “old and forgotten” (a description that also fit Smulewitz). “I would like to thank the writer,” Smulewitz wrote, “but the song is not forgotten. It’s heard in concerts and on the radio,” he noted. “It was even recently the subject of an entire film in which the song was the movie’s light motif.”
Smulewitz ended his letter with the rhetorical question: “Who is the author, is he still alive? And if not, his name should still be mentioned. His name? Solomon Smulewitz, old and broken but he still lives and writes new songs!”
When Solomon Smulewitz died on Jan. 1, 1943, a brief obituary appeared in the pages of The New York Times, but went unreported in the Yiddish press. Smulewitz’s zeal to be “the poet of the people” came at a steep price. His dizzying prolific output made his work omnipresent, but with it, a kind of “folk” anonymity set in, making him — but not his songs — invisible even to his greatest fans. In this way, Smulewitz was very much like the father of the Yiddish theater, Abraham Goldfaden, whose critical success and influence was vast but whose financial success was not. At the end of his life, Goldfaden, broken and broke, approached New York’s Jewish poohbahs and begged them for the equivalent cost of the monument they would erect to him after his death so he could comfortably see out his last days doing his work. Goldfaden was refused, and as predicted, he died in poverty. The monument erected to him in Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery is, indeed, impressive.
In this one way, however, Smulewitz had the final say by composing his own headstone elegy, a Yiddish acrostic (one of his favorite poetic devices) spelling out his name in a quatrain testifying to his lush literary legacy:
Silently, a life passes
Of poems written for the masses
Life’s tenor through his lyre
Of skits and humor and satire
Much like an illusion, lost, diffuse
O where is he? Where is his muse?
Now dead! But there’s no last word
So time creates, his songs will still be heard
Melodies, gazettes, and songs
Unstinting poems for the throngs
Loving heartfelt, the sweetest sound
Earnest awareness, true, profound
Wit and humor, each word bespoke
In the service of his folk
Talks and writings, with loving regard
Zion’s singer, Israel’s Bard
