At the height of his popularity in the 1940s and '50s, Yiddish crooning sensation Seymour Rexite starred on 18 half-hour radio shows a week. At its outset his career comprised an all-Jewish repertoire that spanned from liturgical song to Yiddish popular music. But when he took to the Yiddish airwaves, the bill of fare diversified. Whatever song happened to be popular on American radio, his wife, Miriam Kressyn, translated into Yiddish and Rexite sang on one of his shows. He feared nothing, sang everything, and stayed on the air for the better part of five decades....And there is audio, too. My goodness, now I've listened to songs from Oklahoma!, plus "Tea for Two", and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic". In Yiddish. This, I have to tell you, is an experience.
The title link goes to the Seymour Rexite page at the Yiddish Radio Project.
3 comments:
What a fantastic link. I've always been sorry that no one in my family spoke Yiddish, since I think it's an unusually expressive language. And a fun one somehow, too.
BTW, I linked over to your article on my blog.
Thanks for the link!
What I didn't mention in my post, but definitely should have, is that Rexite and his wife are fantastic singers in the way that the best Broadway singers are good singers. Even not understanding the words they were singing, I could enjoy the storytelling as well as the voices and the music.
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