Menasha Skulnik (May 15, 1890-June 4, 1970) was a Jewish American actor, born in Warsaw, Poland, primarily known for his roles in Yiddish theater in New York City. Skulnik was also popular on radio, playing Uncle David on The Goldbergs for 19 years, and made many television and Broadway appearances as well, including successful runs in "The Flowering Peach" by Clifford Odets and Harold Rome's "The Zulu and the Zayda".

Skulnik's first name, Menasha, comes from the Old Testament. The hero Joseph, who had a coat of many colors, had a son named Menasha. At the age of ten, he ran away to join a circus. In 1913, he joined a Yiddish stock company in Philadelphia and began getting comic parts. His diminutive stature (5'4"), high nasal voice, mannerisms and appearance, made him a natural for comedy.

Skulnik knew exactly what he was in comedy: "I play a schlemiel, a dope. Sometimes they call me the Yiddish Charlie Chaplin and I don't like this. Chaplin's dope is a little bit of a wiseguy. He's got a little larceny in him. I am a pure schlemiel, with no string attached." Skulnik was dubbed the "East Side's Chaplin" by the New York Evening Journal in 1935.

He collapsed on stage in New Haven, Connecticut during a dress rehearsal of a show he was bringing to Broadway, and died several weeks later on June 4, 1970 in New York City

Stalin’s cultural ideologues planned to deploy the music of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the Soviet Union as a building block for the new Soviet music, whereas the Jewish religion with its traditional way of life was damned as counter-revolutionary. The anthology ”Shalom Comrade!” tells the forgotten history of Yiddish music in the Soviet Union and contains rare recordings from the archive of the ethnomusicologists Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin.
Featuring Misha Aleksandrovich, Mikhail Epelbaum, Marina Gordon, Emil Gorovets, Anna Guzik, Solomon Khromchenko, Nechama Lifshitsaite, Saul Liubimov, Solomon Mikhoels, Debora Pantofel-Nechetskaia, M. I. Rabinovich, Zinovii Shulman, Sidi Tal, and many others.
This anthology is part of WERGO's Jewish Music Series, edited by Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin.

Yiddish music played an important role in the cultural and political life of the Soviet Union’s several million Jews throughout the 74 years of communist rule. Soviet Yiddish music – and Soviet Yiddish cultural expressions in general – cannot be viewed as a monolith. It rather developed in several, overlapping phases and constituted a series of paradoxes. It exhibited both continuities with Yiddish culture in pre-revolutionary Russia and represented a radical departure from those musical expressions. After the revolution it existed both at the official level within tightly controlled state-sponsored frameworks and in less official contexts in a less controlled manner, such as in restaurants, at weddings, or as unannounced encores at public concerts. It was presented by artists who were part of the official Soviet culture apparatus, such as the members of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (”GOSET”, tracks 3, 20, 24), the Yiddish vocal ensemble Evokans (track 14), or the State Ensemble of Jewish Folk Musicians of the Ukrainian SSR (tracks 1, 9, 13, 16), by those who were known as specialists in Yiddish music, but who were not directly linked to the official Jewish ensembles, such as Sara Fibikh (track 6), Saul Liubimov (track 19) or Misha Epelbaum (tracks 11, 22), as well as by singers who were primarily known as classical musicians, such as Debora Pantofel-Nechetskaia (track 21) or Sofia Druker (track 18), or even those who were not Jewish at all, represented here by the beloved folk singer Irma Iaunzem (track 4).
The recordings **d in this anthology focus on two critical phases in the history of the Soviet Union: the period from the October Revolution until the anti-Jewish purges which took place from 1948 until Stalin’s death in 1953 and annihilated the Jewish intellectual elite almost in its entirety; and the period of the post-Stalinist thaw from the mid-1950s up until the Six-Day War of 1967, when Soviet policy towards Jews once again became more repressive and the refusenik movement emerged. A third phase, the Russian Jewish revival movement which began after the Six-Day War and continued on after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, is more active than ever today and is beyond the scope of this anthology.
The first period was characterized by official state support of Yiddish culture as a part of Soviet nationalities policy, which was extensive in the 1920s and 1930s and decreased thereafter. The nationalities policy encouraged cultural expressions of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union and seems to have had a twofold purpose: first, to demonstrate a politics of tolerance towards non-Russian ethnic minorities and, second, to encourage the process of Sovietization, which would eventually fuse the best attributes of the various cultures and ethnicities into a new, internationalist and proletarian Soviet culture. For example, in 1934 Maxim Gorky encourged writers and other cultural workers at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress to draw upon the cultural traditions of their respective ethnicities, and in 1937 and 1938, an All-Union Festival of Soviet Music was held (Veidlinger 2000: 6–7). It is clear, therefore, that the emphasis on Yiddish culture in the late 1930s was part of a larger national plan of Sovietization.
Ironically, the main musical activity during this phase corresponded to the years of the Great Terror (1937–38), when Stalin was in the process of consolidating absolute power and political and cultural functionaries – including a high percentage of Jews – were being persecuted in high numbers. Although the overtly anti-Jewish campaign would not start until 1948, anti-Semitism may have been on the increase during the time leading up to World War II, as a revival of Russian chauvinist sentiments was on the rise.
Recent archival evidence seems to indicate that the repression of ethnicities in general in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was larger in scope than has been previously accounted for (Martin 2002).
This early phase of Yiddish music in the Soviet Union was characterized – at least in the older generation of performers such as M. I. Rabinovich (tracks 1, 13) and Misha Epelbaum – by a continuity of folk, professional and art traditions from pre-revolutionary Russia, such as hazzanut (cantorial singing), Yiddish folk songs, instrumental klezmer music, Hasidic nigunim, and the music of the early Yiddish theater. These artists were born and, some, educated prior to the October Revolution. The men were not only familiar with Yiddish but also Hebrew, and many had had a traditional religions education. A number of the male singers began their careers as meshoyrerim (synagogue choir boys) before they enjoyed operatic training and entered the musical mainstream. Through these experiences, many of them were able to create a synthesis of folk-traditional and art forms which so characterizes much of the Yiddish music produced in the Soviet period. According to the memoirs of Zinovii Shulman (tracks 2, 17), there were already performances of Yiddish song in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, possibly even in the teens, and he still remembered performers from the pre-Soviet period as well, such as the Broder-zingerin (cafй house perfomer) Pepi Littmann in Odessa and his own father, the famous cantor Boris Shulman (Shulman 1967). At the same time, the school of Jewish national art music founded in St. Petersburg in the early years of the 20th century was continued on in a limited fashion in the Soviet Union.
Performances of arrangements and compositions by Joel Engel, Alexander Krein and Moshe Milner (track 5) appear on the Soviet Yiddish recordings, and younger, academically trained composers such as Lev Pulver (tracks 3, 20, 24) and Zinovii Kompaneyets continued in this tradition – despite the fact that Moshe Beregovski, the main scholar and one of the main ideologues of Yiddish music in the Soviet Union, railed against Engel and his compatriots as belonging to the ”petit bourgeois liberal-populist trend” (Beregovski 2000: 22). This tendency paralleled the use of the 19th century works of Abraham Goldfaden, Isaac Leybush Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem (track 24) by the revolutionaries of the Yiddish theater in the Soviet Union.
In the post-Stalinist period, Yiddish music continued to serve a political purpose: used in a restricted and controlled fashion by the state, it was to demonstrate to both the Jews of the Soviet Union and to the world at large that the Stalinist terror was over and the Jews could once again flourish. But in this policy lay also the seeds of its undoing, for a simple concert in the late 1950s and early 1960s by artists like Marina (Masha) Gordon (track 10), Emil Gorovets (track 25), Misha Aleksandrovich (track 5), Anna Guzik (track 8) or, especially, Nechama Lifshitsaite (track 26) was transformed into ”an exciting event of national self-expression and a demonstration of solidarity”, as musicologist Joachim Braun has written (1974: 409). This new group of performers was trained during the Soviet period, and some had little knowledge of Jewish musical traditions, such as Lifshitsaite. The audience, too, had changed: not all were knowledgeable in Yiddish or familiar with the music, and many especially younger people came to the concerts for the purposes of ethnic-religious-national identification.
The recording of Jewish music in the Soviet Union – all of which had to be of an official nature due to the existence of only one state-owned record company – was indeed very limited. The discographer Michael Aylward estimates that not more than 200 to 300 recordings were released up to 1967; more than 100 of them are in Rita Ottens’s and Joel Rubin’s collection which formed the basis for this anthology. This is in comparison to the approximately 10,000 European Jewish recordings Aylward has documented through 1956. In the 1966 Melodiya catalog, only twenty-four 78 rpm recordings of Yiddish music were availabile, even though narodnaia muzika (ethnic music) accounted for 30–40% of sales at that time (Gronow 1975: 93, 97). Yet, these figures are misleading, for the importance of the artists performing Yiddish music was immense for the Jews of the Soviet Union. Figures such as Solomon Mikhoels (track 24), Misha Aleksandrovich and Nechama Lifshitsaite were of international significance and as important as political figureheads as for their performances. The interpreters of this music were virtually all Jews and their audience was as well, yet, due to the mainstream nature of many of the performers – several including Aleksandrovitch, Pantofel-Nechetskaia or Solomon Khromchenko (track 23) belonged to the elite of the Soviet operatic world – Yiddish music was brought to a much wider audience than ** the several million Jews in the Soviet Union through their recordings and the inclusion of Yiddish songs in their concert programs of Russian and international classical and folk music.
Previous literature on Yiddish music in the Soviet Union, such as the writings of Joachim Braun and the historian Yaacov Ro’i, have stressed the poor quality of both the performers and composers, using parameters which are typically employed in investigations of Western art music. This approach tends to discourage an investigation of the music as a socio-political-religious phenomenon in light of both the catastrophe, rupture, and the dissolution of traditional communal structures experienced, as well as the idealistic fervor of the early Soviet period. It seems clear, however, from the high quality of the songs and the performances presented here as well as from the biographies of the performers, that many of these artists were not only major figures in Yiddish music, but in music in general. We argue that the songs and their performances can be viewed as important cultural productions in their own right: as negotiations between a complicated and complex Jewish identity and an existence as Soviet citizens that merged old and new forms and made possible distinct modes of Jewish expression within Soviet socialism (see Veidlinger 2001). Qualitatively, the performances of singers such as Shulman, Epelbaum and Gordon are on a par with those of many of the voices produced by the European or American Yiddish theater such as Kalman Juwelier, Jennie Goldstein or Aaron Lebedeff; the compositions of Lev Pulver and Samuil Polonskii (tracks 10, 18, 19) can stand up to the works produced by Chone Wolfsthal, Joseph Rumshinsky or Abraham Ellstein; and the texts of B. Bergolts and Iosef Kerler are equal on many levels to those of Solomon Smulewitz or Herman Wohl.
It is, of course, the content of some of the songs, their message, as well as the political context in which they were created which has caused the most problems with Western critics. The primary tenet of Lenin’s nationalities policy as formulated by Stalin was that all forms of cultural expression be ”national in form, socialist in content”. The assumption was that in the various markers of ethnic identity such as music, folklore, literature, and theater, the content could somehow be separated from the form, and the national content replaced with socialist content. It was expected that the raison d’etre of any collective, be it musical, theatrical or literary, was to aid in the building of socialism. Yet, surprisingly, the research of Jeffrey Veidlinger into printed editions of Soviet Yiddish song in the 1930s has shown that only about 10–20% of the songs found in most popular collections would fit into the category of ”New Soviet [Yiddish] Folk Songs” – i.e. those glorifying themes such as collectivization, the Jewish Autonomous Region (Birobidzhan), factory work, the Red Army, general social factors such as equality, or even Joseph Stalin himself – whereas more traditional themes such as love, weddings, lullabies, children, family life, work, war and history accounted for the vast majority. Veidlinger also goes on to speculate as to what extent these politically-oriented New Soviet Folk Songs were actually sung, even implying that their existence as ”folk songs” (i.e. that they were actually collected from singers and not simply published) may have been in some cases a fabrication. Yet it is clear that Ruth Rubin collected New Soviet Folk Songs during her fieldwork with immigrants in the United States (Rubin 1979). In this anthology, examples of such songs are also in the minority, yet still amply represented (tracks 5, 10, 19, 20, 21), and several other songs deal with poverty in a direct or symbolic way. Most of the rest stem from the folk song tradition of the 19th century, but the compositions of the ”Galician troubadour”, Mordkhe Gebirtig (tracks 8, 15, 25), also figure prominently, as do instrumental klezmer and neo-klezmer performances (tracks 1, 9, 13).
The presentation of seemingly naпve folk songs of the 19th century might seem incompatible with socialist realist ideology, but one possible e***anation which has been put forward by Braun is the idea of Jews being presented as a thing of past – and, hence, incompatible with the New Soviet Man (Braun 1978: 135). At the same time, this represents a possible contradiction between what the people wanted from Yiddish music and what Soviet ideology required of it. Many of the Yiddish-speaking citizens wanted to hear Yiddish music for cultural, artistic-aesthetic, nationalist-Zionist and, likely, also religious reasons. This led to clashes, as in the case where pressure was put on Evokans in 1937 to ** more New Soviet Yiddish Songs in its repertoire. The ensemble was criticized by Beregovski and others as focusing too narrowly on traditional folk materials (Veidlinger 2000: 18). At the same time, the arrangements of Evokans’ director Sheinin were criticized as being too abstract and far-removed from the original folk aesthetic of the materials (Wollock 2000: 21).
In this anthology we present most of the significant performers of Yiddish music in the Soviet Union up to 1967. Because of the lack of systematic documentation about most of these artists, huge gaps exist in our knowledge of their careers and artistic output. About some of them we hardly know anything. The paths traveled by the different singers and musicians are varied, and their fate during the Stalinist purges from 1948 to 1953 is, in most cases, unknown: some appear to have been ”disappeared”, for example, of Tatiana Vayntraub (track 16) and Sara Fibikh nothing is known after 1939; at least one was murdered (Mikhoels); some were exiled or imprisoned during the purges (Liubimov, Epelbaum, probably Shulman); some continued their careers after the death of Stalin (Shulman, Liubimov); some – and here we mean artists who were first and foremost opera singers or concert artists of Russian or classical music –were even able to continue performing during the darkest years. Some did not start their careers in Yiddish music until after the war, or even after the death of Stalin (Gordon, Gorovets, Lifshitsaite), while others emigrated as soon as they could possibly be granted exit visas (Aleksandrovich, Lifshitsaite, Gorovets, Gordon) – at least two of them becoming international cause cйlиbres in the process – or took positions in other countries (Khromchenko). Because of the seemingly arbitrary nature of the Soviet structures, it is probably impossible to know or reconstruct why some survived and flourished and others disappeared. Yet the success of an artist such as Pulver, who seems to have emerged from the traumas unscathed, seems somehow tainted by what he might have done in order to survive – yet how can we possibly understand him or the others and their works without fully taking into account the complexities of their existences? In the final analysis, we are left with their music, which represents an important phase in world history and comprises a major contribution to the cultural expression of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the 20th century.

The 12 tunes on this album ** a few repeats from previous albums, but Bell's humor still abounds. Most of the songs are in Yiddish with some English and Hebrew interspersed. But even if you are not fluent in Yiddish or Hebrew you will get the gist of what Bell is communicating. A wonderful mix of nostalgia and laughter.

Sidor Belarsky's exquisite voice reaches emotional heights and depths as he sings these songs of Jewish life. From the wrenching widow's plea for her son's return to songs of hope Belarsky takes you on an emotional journey through music.

Originally produced as a 10 inch LP this album has only 8 songs and melodies. Although far briefer than Bell's usual production, the flavor is still there. The tunes combine the best of English and Yiddish with a little Hebrew sprinkled in. A small treat to enjoy!