A Reply to Mr. Sholem Aleichem

Joel Engel

1901

Precisely in the case of a new and difficult question like “Jewish folk-music,” [ . . . ] it is necessary to establish as much as possible [its] specific, objective characteristics . . . You make fun of all of the methods and scientific names with which I have tried to show that there is very little Jewish or even general musical quality in Mr. Warshavsky’s songs [ . . . However,] a Jewish music does exist, completely distinct and full of original beauty, and you, you, instead of recognizing its beauty, expanding it, purifying it, securing its path to growth and development, instead of all this you merely mock and debase those who devote their intellect and strength to the good of Jewish music. [ . . . ]

You must know that the spiritual life of the people is composed and constructed out of all of the phenomena which express its spirit. And if you agree that music needs to be withheld from the national spirit and one should dance to the pipe of European waltzes and polkas . . . be so good as to tell me why you do not raise the same objection with regard to Jewish literature and, more generally, to all Jewish life? Is it really possible, can it really be that you, a Jewish writer, do not realize that in this way you yourself are cutting off the branch on which you are sitting? And it’s left to me, a music critic for a Russian paper, to explain all of this to you, a Jewish “national” writer?

Translated by
James
Loeffler
.

Credits

Joel Engel, “A Reply to Mr. Sholem Aleichem,” originally published as “Feuilleton: On M. M. Warshavsky’s Jewish Folk Songs,” Khronika voskhoda, Mar. 8, 1901.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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Creator Bio

Joel Engel

1868–1927

Born in Berdyansk in the Russian Empire into a secularized and Russified family, Joel (Yoel, Iulii Dmitrievich) Engel completed his degree in law in Kharkov (today Kharkiv, Ukraine) in 1890 and then attended the Moscow Conservatory. After graduating, Engel became the music critic, and then an editor, for the leading Russian liberal newspaper in Moscow, Russkie vedomosti. In the 1890s, drawn to Zionist ideas of Jewish national revival, Engel began collecting Yiddish folk music and, working with cultural historians Shaul Ginsburg and Peysakh Marek, came to be the leading Jewish ethnomusicologist in Russia. In this context, he famously polemicized against conflating new Jewish popular music—particularly the vastly popular songs of Mark Varshavsky (author of “Oyfn pripteshik”)—with real Jewish folk song. He continued his ethnomusicological activism as a participant in S. An-ski’s ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement shortly before World War I. He also played a central role in efforts by a growing circle of Jewish composers to conceptualize and create Jewish art music in a classical mode. Alongside extensive collecting, editing, and disseminating of Jewish folk music and new Jewish compositions to Russian Jews, Engel composed his own work, including incidental music for the famed Ha-Bimah production of An-ski’s The Dybbuk and classical vocal settings of Yiddish and Hebrew song. He moved to Tel Aviv in 1924.

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