"Papir Iz Dokh Vays" - Charming Yiddish Folk Song - Beautiful Jewish Music - (cc)
Cantor Classics
2024-11-14
Views 12
Yiddish songs are diverse. The same goes for Yiddish folk songs. This Yiddish song, the title of which means "Just like Paper is White," is a beautiful love song.
(Please help us record rare Jewish music, especially Yiddish music, by becoming a Patreon member at www.patreon.com/CantorClassics , or by donating a small amount (or joining) at www.buymeacoffee.com/cantorclassics . It is so important that seldom-heard Jewish songs from the past be preserved for future generations. Recording these songs is so expensive. Please help keep the music alive. Thanks so much!)
Marc Berman sings the Yiddish ballad featured in this new recording, to his own musical arrangement. The song has also been recorded by Sidor Belarsky and Theodore Bikel, among others.
It is the song of a young man in love with a young woman. He feels that his very life depends on whether he can marry her. (In traditional Jewish society, marriages are often arranged, and are thus are not always the result of a pre-existing love between the bride and groom. Rather, the prevailing view is that true love , as opposed to infatuation, only can come after a couple shares both the joys tribulations of life. Interestingly, the divorce rate for such traditional marriages has always been low. )
"Papir Iz Dokh Vays" appears to be partly based on a folk ballad by the poet and badkhen (comic wedding entertainer) Elyakim Zunser (1840-1913), from his 1868 play "Mekhiras Yoysef" ("The Sale of Joseph"). Folklorist Y.L. Cahan (1881-1937) published the song in 1912.
(That Zunser wrote this wonderful love song, and made his living, at least in part, as a comic entertainer, is not without irony. His young wife and all nine of their children died before he reached 35.)
The recording of "Papir Iz Dokh Vays" presented here features the initial three stanzas, which are the most commonly performed. A fourth stanza also exists--but with differing lyrics.
The different versions of the fourth stanza do, however, clarify the somewhat cryptic last line of the third stanza. That is, when the young man singing the song states that his "death or life is in God's hands," the fourth stanza makes clear that he is asking God to help arrange his marriage to the woman he loves.
(Please help us record rare Jewish music, especially Yiddish music, by becoming a Patreon member at www.patreon.com/CantorClassics , or by donating a small amount (or joining) at www.buymeacoffee.com/cantorclassics . It is so important that seldom-heard Jewish songs from the past be preserved for future generations. Recording these songs is so expensive. Please help keep the music alive. Thanks so much!)
Marc Berman sings the Yiddish ballad featured in this new recording, to his own musical arrangement. The song has also been recorded by Sidor Belarsky and Theodore Bikel, among others.
It is the song of a young man in love with a young woman. He feels that his very life depends on whether he can marry her. (In traditional Jewish society, marriages are often arranged, and are thus are not always the result of a pre-existing love between the bride and groom. Rather, the prevailing view is that true love , as opposed to infatuation, only can come after a couple shares both the joys tribulations of life. Interestingly, the divorce rate for such traditional marriages has always been low. )
"Papir Iz Dokh Vays" appears to be partly based on a folk ballad by the poet and badkhen (comic wedding entertainer) Elyakim Zunser (1840-1913), from his 1868 play "Mekhiras Yoysef" ("The Sale of Joseph"). Folklorist Y.L. Cahan (1881-1937) published the song in 1912.
(That Zunser wrote this wonderful love song, and made his living, at least in part, as a comic entertainer, is not without irony. His young wife and all nine of their children died before he reached 35.)
The recording of "Papir Iz Dokh Vays" presented here features the initial three stanzas, which are the most commonly performed. A fourth stanza also exists--but with differing lyrics.
The different versions of the fourth stanza do, however, clarify the somewhat cryptic last line of the third stanza. That is, when the young man singing the song states that his "death or life is in God's hands," the fourth stanza makes clear that he is asking God to help arrange his marriage to the woman he loves.
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