Kum Tsurik Tsu Dem Tango – Return to the Tango, Jane Enkin’s concert of tangos in Yiddish, will introduce you to a fascinating range of songs from Argentina, New York’s Second Avenue theatres and Polish cabarets. Amazingly beautiful tangos, both tender and bitter, were written in the ghettos during the war years, and they will be at the heart of Jane’s performance.
Tango band leaders on tour from Argentina in the 1920s became stars in New York and Europe. Soon Jewish composers embraced the rhythms and emotional intensity of tango, and gorgeous new tango melodies were heard in the theatres of New York’s Second Avenue and chic clubs in Germany and Poland.
As Jews were forced into the ghettos of Vilna and Warsaw, they found in tango a musical language to express bitterness, sorrow, longing, irony and love in the face of the horror around them. After the war, thriving Yiddish-speaking communities in South America, North America and Israel sustained the Jewish love of tango’s bittersweet beauty.
Jane has performed Kum Tsurik Tsu Dem Tango in the Victoria Passion 4 Tango Festival and Winnipeg’s Music ‘N’ Mavens Concert Series.
On the page Listen to songs from Kum Tsurik Tsu Dem Tango you can hear three songs:
1 Tif Vi Di Nakht, an American song, features beautiful solos by Rodrigo Munoz and Richard Moody. My love for you is as deep as the night.
2 Shvayg Kindele, Shvayg Shvelbele, Hush Child, Hush Little Swallow is one of many versions of the anonymous song Treblinke Dort. The narrative tells of Jews tricked into coming out of hiding with the promise of three loaves of bread, only to be deported to Treblinka.
The verses of the song are set to the tune of a popular tango by Argentinian composer Eduardo Bianco.
Here is a link to a recording of Eduardo Bianco’s Oracion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YCMeiDgUDQ
Women in the Warsaw ghetto made up the words together, using a melody they all knew. The refrain, set to the melody of the love song Shvayg Hertsele, Hush, Little Heart, is in the voice of a mother leaving her child behind. “Hush little swallow — don’t let anyone know that you are a Jew.”
This version of the song appears in Chana and Joseph Mlotek’s book Songs of Generations.
Here is a link to a fascinating field recording of another version of the same song, sung by survivor Frieda Radasky.
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/music/detail.php?content=treblinka
And here is a recording of the survivor, Pinchas Gutter, who provided the version I sing to the archivist Chana Mlotek
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq-NyJVozxM
3 A Shod Dayne Trern, Too Bad About Those Tears, is a post-war Argentinian song. I love the ambivalence of this character, talking to herself: I just want to be left alone; I just want a word of comfort. Too bad about those tears, nobody’s going to hear you. Sing! The sounds of the Yiddish tango will lift my heavy pain.
Arrangements by Jeff Presslaff. Jane Enkin vocals, Jeff Presslaff on piano, Daniel Koulack on bass, Rodrigo Munoz on guitar, Richard Moody on violin.
In 2018, Jane recorded Yiddish tangos with the ensemble Tango Yona, on their CD Yiddish to the Heart.