Tsigelekh, Ukrainians, and the Market: Dyads of Jews and Others in Children’s Yiddish Folk Songs

• In Event: Rethinking Childhood

Abstract

Lullabies and children’s songs occupy a privileged spot in folklorist Ruth Rubin’s post-Holocaust anthologies and articles on Yiddish folk song: they are first. Rubin’s organization of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe followed the life cycle, starting at the cradle—a radical departure from previous collections, which emphasized themes of the Jewish nation. I argue, however, that songs for children and songs for adults are not so easily disentangled, and attempts to separate one from another only serve to reify the bonds between them.

Rubin understood the complexity of children’s songs, writing in 1952 that they “mirror two worlds, that of children and that of adults.” In the same decade English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott famously theorized the mother-infant relationship as an inseparable therapeutic dyad. My literary analysis of two seminal songs in Rubin’s collection—the classic Yiddish lullaby “UNTER YANKELES VIGELE” and the children’s song “MIKHALKU”—critically examines the dyadic relationship between MAME and baby and extends it to the nation and Jewish self. Yiddish songs of and for the young are generally received as nostalgic glimpses of the dreams and aspirations of a bygone world eradicated by the Holocaust. In this paper I argue that the two worlds reflected by children’s songs also mirror one another in profound ways, revealing how in Yiddish folklore, the child and the adult—as well as the nation and the individual—are entangled in a dyad of their own.

Rather than viewing Yiddish songs as ethnographic texts, my literary analysis excavates the world-building exercise at the heart of Ruth Rubin’s work: reconstructing the social universe of Jewish life after the Holocaust, when, as Rachel Kranson (2017) argues, American Jews reckoned with the European Jewish past and its imprint on the future. Rubin’s work resisted the nostalgic idealization of Ashkenaz, instead emphasizing a gritty urban, capitalist, class-divided society that held the keys to rebuilding Jewish life. Through her songs, I explore how Yiddish folklore powerfully mediates sentimental images that have come to dominate popular conceptions of pre-Holocaust Jewry.

Author

• Miriam Borden, University of Toronto