Eitan: Welcome to the MetaShtetl, this is Eitan Binstock. I inherited the Yiddish language and culture from my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and I am interested in exploring the way it’s been flourishing in the 21st century. Specifically, how technology is being used to spread and proliferate Yiddish worldwide. Before I welcome my next guest, please note the full translations of the podcast can be viewed on my blog themetashtetl.com, feel free to follow along, and thank you for coming along on this adventure with me. And now for my next guest, Binyumin Schaechter, Director of the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, as we switch to the language we both hold dear. Welcome Binyumin, our honored guest, please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your personal history. Where are you from? Where did you study in general and what is your official title or profession? What role did Yiddish play in you childhood years?
Binyumin: My name is Binyumin Schaechter, I was born in Brooklyn in a neighborhood called East New York, at an address called 521 Eastwood Avenue, we lived there – my parents, my three older sisters and I, until I was three years old and then we moved to the Bronx to a neighborhood called Norwood Heights, at the address 33 Bainbridge Avenue, and that is where I grew up and spent my childhood years, I don’t remember my years in Brooklyn. My older sisters are named Rukhl, Gitl, and Eydl, and my parents decided before their kids were born that they will speak Yiddish with their children, in they want their children to answer in Yiddish. So they spoke only Yiddish to us and that’s how we learned to speak, read and write well, and my parents did this with love in a positive way, because none of us rebelled against this, and all of us got married and spoke Yiddish with our children, so my parents, who are now in Yener Velt [passed away] have sixteen grandchildren who all speak fluent Yiddish. And most of these grandchildren now speak Yiddish with their children.
Eitan: Did you learn Yiddish outside the home as well?
Binyumin: I didn’t attend Jewish Day School or Yeshiva or Cheder, rather I attended Public School 56, and Junior High School 80, both in the Bronx, and later in High School of Music and Art, which at the time was in Harlem on Convent Avenue 135th street, now it’s next to Lincoln Center but at the time, it was there, and I went to a Yiddish school after school – Sholem Aleichem Shul 21 which was on Bainbridge avenue 208th street at the address 3301 Bainbridge Avenue, and there I went until third grade when it closed, it no longer had enough students, so my parents hired my oldest sister, the Bechora, Sure Rukhl, she should be my Yiddish teacher for three years and that’s how it was. Then I went to the United Middle School which at the time was at 69 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, and there I went for one year until that closed so my upbringing in Yiddish was shorter than it was my older sister Rukhl and Gitl, for Eydl it was a little longer than it was for me because she is two years older than I am, but she and I both did not get to the end of every possible Yiddish school. Eydl is two years older than me and she did finish the Yiddish school in the Bronx, and then the United Middle School in Manhattan, but she didn’t get to go to the Yiddish Teachers’ Seminar because it closed before she was old enough. My two oldest sisters Rukhl and Gitl did go to the seminar, and my Yiddish education was cut short in comparison to theirs.
After I finished high school I went to Columbia University for two years and then I transferred to Manhattan School of Music, there I got a Bachelor’s degree in musical composition, and I did not study further for a masters or doctorate degree, I became a musician: a director, a composer, and arranger. An accompanist for singers, and lately I have also become a lecturer, I give lectures with sing alongs, I don’t have a singular title but I do all these various things in various places and various ways.
My father was a Yiddish linguist, his whole life and career was dedicated given to the Yiddish language. He wrote and redacted many articles and journals and books about Yiddish, in Yiddish, because of Yiddish. He was a professor in Columbia University’s summer program that is Uriel Weinreich’s which at the time was at Columbia, and he had many students who later became professors around the country and around the world – on Yiddish literature, Yiddish linguistics, Eastern European History from between the two world wars, and so on. So all of those wanted and needed to learn Yiddish so they came to him and he became as he was known – the teacher of teachers.
Just as he was an expert on the Yiddish language, so too he was a one-man-hotline so to speak. When The New York Times or Newsweek or The Wall Street Journal or whichever newspaper or journal had a question about how to use a Yiddish word and how one uses it in a sentence, they always called him for his wisdom.
And he and my mother decided that they would speak Yiddish with their children and they did so. When I was young, they moved with my three older sisters and me to the Bronx, to live on a block where there were two other families, the Fishmans and the Gottesmans, who also were speaking Yiddish to their children. That’s how they formed a community of families – a mini community of sorts – of families who speak Yiddish with their children, so the children would have no only their parents with whom to speak Yiddish but also other children their ages with whom they can have experiences in Yiddish. There was also the Sholem Aleicvhem school across the street, so that was another reason why all three of those families moved to that block – in order to attend a school that had a good name because of the teacher who was teaching there at the time, who was called Chava Goldstein.
Eitan: Which other lnaguages do you speak and where did you learn them? How do the various languages you speak weave together in your life?
Binyumin: English and Yiddish are my two main languages. I speak English better than Yiddish, simply because we live in a country where English is the dominant language. And one speaks English with more people, one reads more in English, one hears more English, so that’s why my English is surely stronger than my Yiddish, but my Yiddish is of course also fluent, because I speak only Yiddish with my sisters, and my nieces and nephews, and my children, and other friends and acquaintances who speak Yiddish – I speak Yiddish with them, but with most of the world I speak English. Those are the two main languages, I also learned Spanish in school, and I can speak Spanish slowly, I remember most of my vocabulary, but I need always think about the grammar, so Spanish is in a distance third place after Yiddish and English. I can read Hebrew because I can read Yiddish, but I understand Spanish better than I understand Hebrew. The Hebrew words I understand are because of the Loshn Koydesh [Holy Tongue] words that are in Yiddish; I know they are pronounced differently and I know generally how they are pronounced and I understand what they mean generally because not in every case is it the same meaning in Hebrew than in Yiddish, but certainly Hebrew is not a language I would say I know.
Eitan: What is your main job? Can you talk a little about your profession? Do the Yiddish language and culture have a connection to your main profession? Or do you feel that your profession and Yiddish occupy separate channels in your mind and in your life?
Binyumin: When I’m asked what my main work is, the answer must include the Yiddish Philharmonic Choir. In English it’s called The Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus before it was called the Jewish People’s philharmonic Chorus from 1948-2021, and before that it was called the Freedom Singers Unit (Frayhayt Gezang Farein) from 1923-1948. At the time it was associated with the newspaper Di Frayhayt, which was a communist newspaper, in Yiddish we call is the Left Newspaper, but later during the McCarthy era, the choir changed the name and the previous singers left and the repertoire changed to include fewer workmen songs and more general Yiddish songs. So that is my main work. Now it is no longer a [politically] left choir, we are not politically affiliated, sometimes we sing workmens songs, sometimes Holocaust songs, or songs about Israel, songs about Jewish history, folksongs, theater songs, songs translated from other languages, for example among, them we have sung Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro in Yiddish in a four part harmony, and the musical theme from the Godfather, translated into Yiddish in a four part harmony, and Auld Lang Syne translated in Yiddish in a four part harmony, so it’s certainly not - some pole when they hear it’s Yiddish music, they have a certain association with that and our repertoire and the sound of the arrangements and what we sing, is very different from what’s expected it’s not the traditional sound of Yiddish music.
Besides my work with the choir, a few years ago during the pandemic, I created the Yiddish Song Workshop and Singalong on the internet, where I lead singalongs over zooms on various topics, and we prepare files and whole books with texts and musical translations, which can be usedf to sing along, or to listen to and learn how the words sound and what the words we sing mean. So we have already done singalongs about the subjects of Chanukah, Purim, Pesach, Itzik manger, Holocaust Songs, and simple Yiddish Songs. So those are the themes we have covered so far, and we have many ideas of other themes we would like to cover. And these singalongs, the Yiddish Song Workshop and Singalong, has already gathered more than a thousand people who have registered around the world, because even though they are far away, it gives them an opportunity to participate in something which is on the other side of the world, and to feel like the part of a community that sings Yiddish songs and learns Yiddish songs. So that’s’ something we started in the last few years.
So my main work is with the choir, but even with the choir I have various jobs. I am the musical director, who teaches the singers what they need to sing and how they should sing it, and how they should pronounce the words and how they should act out the songs, because we don’t just stand on stage and sing simple words to music, I encourage them to, as much they can, act out the songs, and make the people about whom they are singing ‘come to life’ as they say. So I am both a music director and also an artistic director and regisor, and also for the concerts I am the conductor. And I create many of the arrangements that the choir sings, and sometimes I also compose pieces for the choir. What a composer is, and an arranger, what they do is almost identical, the only difference is that the composer also creates the melody; the arranger does not create the melody, but besides that it’s the same work, both of them create harmonies and counter melodies, and textures, ostenados, and pedalpoints and all these words that I don’t know in Yiddish so I say them in English, so they do more or less the same work except who creates the melody. But I do both of these with the choir, and like I said I am also the music director and conductor.
Eitan: What is your goal with your work as a musician?
Binyumin: Since my earliest childhood days, my goal was to be one of the four B’s: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Binyumin.
Eitan: How did you arrive at your role as director of the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus? Why did you choose that specific work?
Binyumin: When I’m asked why I chose this specific work, so first of all I didn’t choose it, I was asked to do it, but also when I was at the Manhattan School of Music I was a composer, that was my focus and that was my diploma -it was in musical composition. I was required to take a semester of choral conducting and a semester of orchestral conducting so one understands them but I never knew or thought that this would be something I do professionally. My goal was to be a composer.
Eitan: Do you have a favorite song or part of song that the choir sings?
Binyumin: In those early days the music was probably very simple. I don’t remember but I imagine it was very elementary, I played three notes and they had to sing back the three notes, something like that. But over the years, we were able to -as we say in English – raise the bar, and bit by bit we were able to raise the level of the choir. And now in 2023 you’d never know it was the same choir than it was in 1995 when I took it over 28 years ago.
So I then started a campaign to connect by email or phone with anyone I knew who I thought is musical, who I thought likes Yiddish music, who I thought is available Monday evenings for the rehearsals, and that’s how the core of the choir was created in 1998. And then a few years later I was able to audition singers, it was probably around 2001 or 2002.
Several years later in 1998, one of the old timers of the choir told me that it’s 75 years since they created the choir and he asked if we could do something special in honor of this milestone. So I thought for several days, nice idea, we can do a video recording and an audio recording, but then I realized, who will want to listen to a recording of the choir?
At the time the choir was not at a high level, most of the singers were not singers, they were elderly people who liked Yiddish songs, who liked to sing, and at the time there were no auditions for the singers, whoever wanted to could sing in the choir, so it was amateurish but it also included people who were entirely not musical since it was a folks choir and anyone was allowed to sing. So what happened was a few years later I started directing the Yiddish Philharmonic Choir in 1995 and that was not a position I was looking for, or even knew about. At the time my goal was to write a Broadway musical which would win a Tony award for best score, and I would give my acceptance speech in Yiddish – that was my goal at the time. I did other job, I was a substitute for Zalmen Mlotek for example, when he was absent for rehearsals as the director of the Workman’s Circle Choir, and there were two singers in the Workmen’s’ Circle Choir who also sang with the Yiddish Philharmonic Choir, and they liked the work I did for the Workmen Circle Choir so they asked me if I would take over the Yiddish Philharmonic Choir when their director left in 1995, Peter Shlosser was his name. So those two people, Mark Zuckerman and Nan Basis asked me to take over and I did it. It wasn’t my life goal but it was a job, and I was happy to do it.
My children speak only Yiddish with me, but they generally speak English with my wife. My wife and I generally speak English between us, but when she and I and the three children gather, Yiddish is the dominant language. Two of my children are married, one of them, my second old, married someone who speaks Yiddish so when he is here we can speak Yiddish no less than when he is not here. But my son, the oldest, the Bechor, married someone who does not speak Yiddish, so when the seven of us meet, we need to speak English so she should also be able to understand.
Eitan: What is for you the connection between the Yiddish language and music, or music and learning languages in general?
Binyumin: Most of the singers in the choir do not know Yiddish. Out of the 30-35 singers, maybe 3 of 4 who are conversational in Yiddish. But the rest of them learn on the job as they say. I give them various materials they should be able to pronounce and act out the songs they are supposed to. Between them, I make recordings of the various voice parts -I make a tenor recording, soprano alto and base, of how I sing their voice part and play it on the piano so they hear how their part is supposed to sound with the music, and I make a separate recording which we call a words and acting MP3 and that’s for all of them, they should hear each word individually pronounced, and afterwards, the whole monologue without music, they should hear as we’d say in English, the ebb and flow of the language. These are two things I do, but a third is that the notes when I write them out, I highlight what needs to be highlighted, meaning I bold with fat letters the syllables that are important and I leave in plain font those that are less important and should not be highlighted. That also helps the know and understand which syllables to bring out and which not to.
And besides that, I give lesson, both face to face and over zoom, on the subject: Ashkenazi Family Names, What Our Names Mean About Our Families. And that’s something else that was well received whenever I go, everyone is interested in hearing about their family names, or even if they know what their own family name means, about other family names from friends, teachers, co-workers, famous people that they never thought that their names meant something and there’s a reason they have that name, they simply thought – that’s their name. So I teach them the history of Ashkenazi Jewish Names, when it started and why, and the various categories of names and people enjoy it so that’s something else that wherever I go it’s a popular subject, as long as one understand English – English or Yiddish. If it was an audience that knows only French or Spanish, it would be very difficult for them to appreciate, because I cannot speak Spanish very well and because I speak no French at all. But for an audience who speaks English or Yiddish or both, it’s successful and one learns a lot.
I give lectures and classes on other subjects, for example, To Sing In Yiddish so that it Sounds Like Yiddish. And also, Who Says There are No Funny Yiddish Songs? And nother subject is when I talk about my family, an autobiographical subject, which has already had several titles, but it’s another thing that interests people, whether or not they have a connection to Yiddish, they think because they heard that no one speaks Yiddish anymore. And to hear about a family where the parents spoek Yiddish to their four children, and the four children spoke Yiddish to their 16 children, and these 16 children speak Yiddish to their children, one has never heard of such a thing and one cannot believe that such a thing exists. So that’s why that’s also an interesting subject which I speak about often.
Eitan: What do you want people to know about you and your work?
Binyumin: Something that many people don’t know, or those how know me only from the last 5-10 years don’t know, but those who know me for a long time remember it from back then but don’t see it much anymore, I am also a pianist. And an accompanist of singers. The more I was a director and arranger, I had less time to be an accompanist and to play the piano. But it’s still something I do from time to time when the opportunity arises and it fits into my schedule.
Eitan: Who comes to your concerts? What demographics are interested in listening to Yiddihs music these days?
Binyumin: At our concerts, a large part of our audience are acquaintances or friends or family of the people in the choir. If there are 30 people in the choir and let’s say each one invited 10-15 people, you already have 3-400 people who comes to the concert. But the way our audience develops is that those who comes and enjoy, then invite their acquaintances and family, and the audiences grows from people who we do not know. There are always ticket sales directly from the box office and not through people in the choir, but the demographic from the beginning was older Jews, and older Jews who speak Yiddish or maybe one generation later who brough their older parents to the concert. But now that the singers in the choir are in the 20s and 30s and 40s, its no longer mainly older Jews who come, and certainly not just people who speak Yiddish. The majority of our audience cannot speak Yiddish. There are people in the audience who speak Yiddish ell and know many Yiddish songs, and those people are very pleased that we do something different with the Yiddish songs that they already knew than anything they’d heard until now. So the demographic is people in their 20s to people in their 80s and 90s. and sometimes people even bring small children or teenagers, so it’s certainly intergenerational – the choir is intergenerational and the audience is as well. Is it only Jews in the audience? No way. Not even all the singers in the choir are Jewish, that is one of the reasons which we changed the name of the choir from Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus to Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, because the essence is that the choir sings in Yiddish, not that the singers in the choir are Jews. In all the years I have directed the choir, there are non-Jews who sing in the group but they very much like Yiddish music or the Yiddish music that we sing, or for various reasons they choose to sing with us and stay with us but we are not exclusive: we accept religious [Jews] and secular [Jews], Orthodox, Reform, Jews, Non Jews, and so on. That’s both in the choir and in the audience
Eitan: As a young boy, I once attended a concert by the Schaechter Tekhter. Children were not allowed in [so as not to disturb] but my mother got special permission because she really wanted to me to hear the concert. My mother told me that story – I do not remember it personally – but I am familiar with the music of the Chorus and of the Schaechter Tekhter. The Schaechter Tekhter – your daughters – do they still sing? What are they doing these days?
Binyumin: The Schaecter Techter – that’s two sisters Reina and Temma, they and I travelled around the world and have concerts in Yiddish. They were active as a duo between 2008-2017-18 something like that. But Reina left for college in 2013, the older one of the two, so it became harder to rehearse. And Temma later left for college in 2017 to an even more distant university, so we could not longer meet to rehearse, and then Reina moved to California and Temma was in Rhode Island and it was no longer possible. But from the years that we did work together, the two of them with me at the piano and as the translator for the audience, we have put some of the tapes of the concerts on the internet, for example one can watch how they both sing the world premier of the Yiddish adaptation of Anything you can do I can do Better -if you search Anything You can Do Yiddish, it will bring the people right to their video. Also, there are two recording of Temma singing Over the Rainbow in Yiddish, if you search Over the Rainbow Yiddish Temma, it will bring you not one but two videos – one from 2013 when she was 13 years old, and one from 2017 when she was 17 years old. And it’s interesting, the same singer, what a difference four years make because it’s two completely different expressions of the song even though the words and the music are the same, but both are in Yiddish.
You can also find on the internet how Reina sings Di Goldene Pave, if you search Di Goldene Pave Reyna, it will bring you to a wonderful production that she sings and Temma sings harmony and I am at the piano, it’s a very moving expression of it. And there are other videos, there are probably 10-12-15 Schaecter-Tekhter videos on youtube.
But they no work together frequently since 2017-18 something like that. Temma is still active as an artist in Philadelphia, her profession is in psychology, but she sings in an acapella group which is not a Jewish group but they sing acapella music, and she was also accepted as a singer in the choir in the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, when they sing works that include a choir, such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the 4th movement, Temma sings in them. She was just accepted and she will begin working with them in September [2023] so she seeks every opportunity to sing, not specifically in Yiddish but with music.
Reina sings perhaps for herself, but she works for Peloton, based here in New York but she is in the Bay Area working mainly virtually, and it’s a job that takes up many hours and a lot of time so that’s why she doesn’t have as much time for music as she used to. So I am happy that at least of on my daughters is still active in music even though it’s not her career.
Eitan: What is Yiddish for you today as an adult? Why is it important to you?
Binyumin: Among my other activities which have to do with Yiddish, which are not related to my career or profession, I attend Yiddish Vokh every year. The organization Yugntruf Youth for Yiddish has a Yiddish Vokh [Yiddish Week] already for decades, which takes place for a week over the summer in august in Copake NY, on the New York side of the Berkshires Hills, and there we gather from all over the world to experience a week in Yiddish. All the lectures and discussions are in Yiddish, the singing and dancing is in Yiddish, the children program is in Yiddish, there is a reading group obviously in Yiddish, all sports are played -basketball, soccer, football, even tennis is played in Yiddish; it’s a rare opportunity to experience every year a week long entirely in Yiddish.
There I took my children -my wide and I, my wife Chayale and I took our children, they were very young, still in Chayale’s belly, and it was their home away from home, every year they looked forward to it to celebrate with their Yiddish speaking friends who lived in various parts of the country and they created friendships that stayed with them until today. So that’s something we did every year in a group of 5, my wife and I and our three children, and they generally keep coming. But this year specifically not, in 2023 for various reasons I will be the only one who goes, but in almost every other year there are various combinations of my family who is there. And also of my greater family – my sister Rukhl, y sister Gitl, with their husbands and their children, and their grandchildren, also come every year to the Yiddish Vokh and that besides the 130-40 others who come from around the world to experience Yiddish.
Eitan: Yes, I attended the Yiddish Vokh a few times and very much enjoyed it, hopefully we will meet there again sometime. Binyumin Schaechter, thank you for sharing your time with me and my audience so we can hear your thoughts about Yiddish in today’s modern world. Wishing you continued success and may you actually become that fourth B.