Yiddish Folk Songs with Their Original Airs

Yehudah Leib Cahan

1912

Unfaithful and Unrequited Love [ . . . ]

22 (Galați, Romania)

She: I can’t hide it anymore
I’ll reveal my bitter, heavy heart
I can’t even wait till tomorrow
Because oh does it smart!
He: The pain of your heart
Doesn’t affect me as it used to
You shouldn’t even wish to miss me
Because I’ve found someone prettier than you!
She: You shouldn’t think that you’ll wean me
And marry another girl fancy free
You should get smarter and come back
We’ll love like new, you and me.
He: On your life, you mustn’t believe
That I’d still want to be your portrait.
When I think about it, it gives me the heaves
That you were the one I spoke with.
She: Consider my state, my bitter suffering
Since you’ve left me
Whenever I think about you, I’m crying
So much, I can’t even see.
He: I can’t even understand you
Since you’re crying so much.
You just want to get married
To me and no one else!
She: My tears are ink
And the writing paper is my hand.
The pens are my fingers
Writing a letter—you’ll understand.
He: C’mon. Your letters aren’t thoughtful, just bitter.
They’re nothing to me. That’s right.
If you keep on sending them, I won’t read them. No matter.
I swear it! This starts tonight. [ . . . ]

30 (Pereyaslav, Poltava Province)1

Brayne, oh no.
I’ve got a bone to pick with you.
Let’s go to the tea house.
Wear your red dress.
She thinks she’s hot stuff
When she comes to the tea house
When she sees a new lover
She pushes me out.
So long I’m lovesick.
So long I’ve loved her.
I’ll find a new love quick.
She comes to my house now.
I have a new love
I’m happy and lucky!
When she goes walking with me
She brings me back home.

Forgiveness [ . . . ]

3 (Kiev Province)

I once had a reputation
As an honest girl—
That was more valuable to me than gold.
But now a lying boy
Is badmouthing me.
Perhaps this is all God’s will.
I’m jealous of each and every one
Who has never heard the word Love.
It slaughters a world of young children.
Oh, Love is no good! [ . . . ]

8 (Warsaw)

Daughter, why are you suffering so,
Your head bent down like that?
My daughter, who has bothered you?
You’ve lost so much weight.
Let’s go to the doctor together
And ask him what the problem is.
He’ll write you a prescription—
Don’t let me live like this any longer!
No doctor can cure me.
There’s no treatment he might have.
Mother, I’ll tell you now, see.
I’ll tell you what’s going on.
I fell in love with a murderer.
The murderer stole my courage away.
He promised to be my chosen one.
Oh, it’s no good!
He grabbed me by the hand, is all.
He kissed my very footsteps.
But now I’m behind an iron wall.
Oh, it’s no good!
The wells opened up,
My eyes were swollen with blood.
He put on a mask to disguise himself.
Oh, it’s no good!

 

Translated by

Zackary Sholem 
Berger

.

 

Notes

[Sholem Aleichem was born in Pereyaslav in 1859.—Eds.]

Credits

Y. L. Cahan, introduction to Yudishe folkslider mit melodien oys dem folks-moyl gezamelt (Yiddish Folksongs with Their Original Airs, Collected from Oral Traditions), vol. 1 (New York: Yiddish Literary Publishing Co., 1920), pp. v–vii, xxv. Originally published in 1912.

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

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Creator Bio

Yehudah Leib Cahan

1881–1937

Born in Vilna in the Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Yehudah Leib Cahan moved in 1889 to Warsaw, where he was apprenticed to a watchmaker after attending heder. At this time, Cahan began collecting Yiddish folk music under the influence of Warsaw’s leading Yiddish writer and intellectual, Y. L. Peretz, who was coming to see Yiddish-language folk culture as the core of East European Jewish ethnic distinctiveness and the cornerstone for a modern but authentic Jewish national culture. In 1901, Cahan moved to London as a labor organizer, founding the Forverts Zionist labor union. In 1904, he immigrated to New York, where he published his two-volume Yidishe folkslider mit melodien and cofounded the Yiddish publishing house Di naye tsayt (The Modern Age). Combining careful folk-song and later folk-story collecting with far-reaching (and dubious) theories about a secular Yiddish-language counterculture reaching back to the medieval era, Cahan played an important role in Yiddishist scholarly institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of his research and writings were destroyed with the YIVO archives in Vilna, with the remaining material published posthumously, edited by Max Weinreich.

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