Song from the Ghetto

One of the items that came out of the boxes of records that Der Nister acquired recently is entitled “Song from the Ghetto,” and includes four pieces of music recorded by Cantor Joseph S. Lengyel (aka Josef Schwarzmer Lengyel) on three 78 rpm records. Two of the songs were too long to fit on one side of the record. 

The existence of these recordings is a bit of a miracle. The Ghetto implied was Nazi Germany. Jewish culture, in the form of sound recordings, was being suppressed already by the mid-thirties under the Nazi regime. Noel Meadow explains in the liner notes to the album, 

“One H. Lewin, owner of a small neighborhood bookshop, found the record making equipment of a small Jewish company, Semer, which had somehow escaped the dragnet. Lewis proceeded surreptitiously  to turn out recordings by Josef S. Lengyel, a banned artist, who until the descension of forces of darkness, was leading tenor of the Berlin Staedttische Oper. Lewsn found additional master records and made clandestine recordings with other cantors and Jewish artists. With singular courage he listed them in a slight, crude catalog, a copy of which is now in America.” 

Lengyel fled Germany in 1936 (probably with his wife Hilda)  for the US. He managed to bring the masters for his own recordings with him and took a job as Cantor at Congregation Beth Israel in Richmond Hill, Long Island. The congregation continues on in the same humble looking building, built in 1915, that greeted the Lengyels when Josef began his tenure there. 

“Songs from the Ghetto,” was released on Stinson Records. The company was started in order to fill the need for recordings from the Soviet Union. “The Stinson Trading Company was established in 1939 by Irving Prosky (1893-1952), a Russian-born distributor of Soviet records in the US, and Herbert Harris, the owner of the Union Record Shop in New York who was a member of the Communist Party and the proprietor of a movie house that screened Soviet films. Harris and Prosky operated the concession to sell records from the U.S.S.R. at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, but when supplies fell short of demand he and Prosky set up their own record label to produce copies of Soviet and other eastern European recordings, including recordings by the Red Army Chorus.”

Stinson had a complicated relationship with Moe Asch.  During the Second World war the Japanese cut off much of the supply of the resources needed to make shellac. Shellac was used to coat the surface of 78 records. Supplies were rationed, with companies that pre-existed the war getting twenty percent of their prewar supplies. Moe Asch, later to found Folkways records, had quite a few recordings that he had been making, but no shellac. He made a deal with Stinson where they would share Stinson’s supply of shellac and they would distribute Stinson and Asch records in tandem starting in 1943.

Asch had released many cantorial recordings, so it seems likely that these recordings came to Stinson through Asch and were issued in this album between 1943 and 1945 or ‘46 when the arrangement was dissolved. Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Harvard and the National Library of Israel all indicate that their closest estimate of the date of the release to the 1940s, but not what year. Stinson also released an album “Hilda and Josef S. Lengyel sing songs of Palestine,’’ which the Lengyels recorded with the Palestine String Quartet (also undated, but obviously before 1948). I can’t find any trace of the other album except in the online catalog of the National Library of Israel. 

The tracks from “Songs from the Ghetto" can be found on Youtube. They were re-released on an album commemorating the Jüdische Kulturbund, a German-Jewish group that fought to produce Jewish culture under the Nazi regime. The song “Shomer Yisrael’’ can be found here. Meadow, in his liner notes places this track above Lengyel’s recording of Kol Nidre in terms of drama. 

Lengyel died in Florida in 1987 having snatched away a half century of life from the Nazi cult of death. 

These records with their association with Moe Asch art part another half-century project that preserved a vast body of the deep culture of the entire world, a monument to the very idea of humanity’s diverse greatness, a universalist vision built on a Jewish foundation. I’ll get back to you about that story soon.