Both the Tarras and Glaser collections contain an eclectic mix of what an old New York klezmer played, including Yiddish theatre pieces, medleys of Hungarian, Greek and Russian music, klezmer shers and bulgars, old published Romanian music, and so on. There was too much to photograph everything, but feel free to take a look in my google drive for whatever caught my interest in the Glaser boxes.
One of the folders, which contained a small spiral-bound notebook, was labeled as Glaser’s original compositions. It contains 16 pieces, many of which are horas and sirbas titled after places in Bucovina, where Glaser was born. Others have generic Jewish titles, and one is named after Decca Records, where he recorded in 1939.
The same pieces, and a few others, appear again in other folders, consistently numbered and rewritten or transposed for other instruments. One of the notebooks says “MY OWN” before another set of these numbered tunes; the only indication in the documents themselves of Glaser’s claim to having composed them.
These are the pieces:
Hora Bucovina
Sirba la Claca
Hora din Săveni
Sirba Suceava
Sirba Decca
Hora Gura Sucevi
Hora Rădăuților
Hora Daciel
Sirba Sereth
Najer Sher
A Gite Heim
Eishes Chail
Czortkover Zemerl
Russian Sher
Chaim Shaie
Skrip Klesmerl
As men Ken mit aruber
Серце [sertse] Tango
I asked my only acquaintance who plays Bucovina music professionally what he thought of these pieces, and whether they were really Glaser’s originals. After all, the old New York klezmer world is full of musicians claiming existing melodies as their own creations. Christian Milici, multi-instrumentalist resident in Suceava, didn’t recognize them but thought that many of them seemed like old-style pieces from that region. He conceded that they could be “Bucovina-style” compositions.
Here are the other versions of these tunes that I could find in Glaser’s collection, often out of order or mixed in with other music.
I admit I haven’t looked at them closely to see if they match any of Glaser’s known recordings, or known melodies from other contexts. My friend the accordionist Christina Crowder thought she recognized one from a military brass band collection. Anyhow, true originality is not something I’m worried about. It’s also interesting to think of his ‘set’ of tunes that he performed over the years and rewrote for different instruments.
For now I’m putting them up here as potentially being Glaser’s original klezmer and Bucovina-style compositions. Looking forward to playing them sometime.
I’m currently in New York where I’ve come to do some research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research about old NY immigrant klezmers, their life trajectories, families and professional connections. I received the Fellowship in East European Arts, Music, and Theater with the general topic of “Immigrant Klezmer Musicians during the Golden Age of Commercial Recording,” which leaves me plenty of wiggle room to figure out what I can from their archival collections.
Needless to say it’s not a great time to arrive in the US. I even boarded my plane on the day of the supposed impositions of tariffs against Canada, although Trump backed off of it, or maybe deferred it for a month.
I’ve been here a week so far, but the research space at the Center for Jewish History has only been open for 3 days of it, so I’m definitely still at the start of my work and trying to make sense of which collections I can use. I started with some obvious klezmer collections, like the papers of Dave Tarras and of the Al Glaser Recording Orchestra (more on those in a later post). But those aren’t the real reason for my visit, as they are made up of musical scores with minimal contextual or biographical information.
I’ll probably spend most of my time looking at landsmanshaft and mutual aid and cultural society papers, of which YIVO has a rich collection. The first I requested was the Glinianer Young Men’s Benevolent Association (a mutual aid society for immigrants from Glina/Hlyniany); I already knew that klezmer violinist Beresh Katz was active in it around WWII, as was rather briefly the ex-klezmer Jeremiah Hescheles. It was full of dates and receipts about musical events put on by the Association and I even found the meeting minutes when Katz vouched for the newly-arrived Hescheles to become a member.
Klezmer violinist and Association vice president Beresh “Ben” Katz from a 40th anniversary booklet for the Glinianer Young Men’s Benevolent Association
That was an easy one, but I know much less about the ties of klezmers or old Jewish musicians to the many other mutual aid societies of old New York. For the rest it’s a matter of ordering boxes one by one and looking through their contents to see what connections I can make. I started with cities and towns that known NY klezmers came from; for example, Israel J. Hochman (see this old post about him) was from Kamianets-Podilskyi and his father was from nearby Zhvanets, so I looked at landsman or relief organizations associated with those places.
Cover of “Der Zvanitser,” annual journal of the Zwanitz Podolier Progressive Branch 277 circa 1939. This muscle-man art appeared in different colour schemes on several of these annual journals.
Some of the boxes aren’t of much use for music history research if they only contain non-specific invoices, cemetery documents, or cover a much later period than I’m looking at. So far I’ve found that the anniversary booklets, souvenir journals, etc. from the 1930s and 1940s to be the most interesting source because they usually contain at least one advertisement for a musician or orchestra. In the various Kamianets and Zhvanets books I’ve looked at so far, I didn’t find any Hochmans yet but I did find George C. Brandman, a Hochman relative and cornetist who I mentioned in my Hochman post, in a publication of the Kamenetz-Podolier Relief Organization.
Advertisement for George C. Brandman’s orchestra in a 1949 publication of the Kamenetz-Podolier Relief Organization, a charity organization which united the various local Kamanetzer landsmanshaftn to send aid back home.
Most interesting to me is if the musician is demonstrably a member of the association, as in the case of a member of the Radziviller-Woliner Benevolent Association, Harry Tepper, who appears in membership lists and personal greetings alongside his dentist brother(?) over a period of several years.
Advertisement for Harry Tepper’s Novelty Orchestra in Radziviller-Woliner Benevolent Association souvenir journal, 1931?
Other musicians who advertised in the Radziviler journals were definitely not members, like Naftule “Nat” Brandwein, or apparently not members, like Joe Magaziner.
Advertisement for Joe Magaziner’s Columbia Orchestra in Radziviller-Woliner Benevolent Association souvenir journal, 1936?
My current plan is to continue going through YIVO’s collections of these mutual aid associations for traces of old musicians, and to start linking them to old genealogy-type records, musician’s union records and old newspaper coverage. We’ll see where the research takes me after that.
Myself and YIVO sound archivist Eléonore Biezunski on my first day in the building, Monday Februarty 3, 2025.
An illustration of M. Beilis, from a postcard in the YIVO collection
This past week I was finally writing a Wikipedia biography for violinist Jacob “Jascha” Gegna (1879–1944), and in the process I came across a few old newspaper articles that gave more context to his well-known 1921 recording אַ תפלה פון מענדעל בייליס=A Tfileh fun Mendel Beilis. I had heard this piece many times over the years, but these articles clarified the context of the title and its significance to Gegna. It turns out that this was his own composition inspired, he said, by his own attendance at Beilis’ trial in Kiev in 1913. It became his signature piece in New York between 1914 when he arrived, and 1921 when he recorded it for Columbia Records. The recording can be streamed here on the Mayrent Collection, or here in Florida Atlantic University’s Recorded Sound Archive.
Mendel Beilis’ trial
Menachem Mendel Beilis (1874–1934) was a Russian Jewish man at the centre of an infamous antisemitic blood libel case in Kiev which took place from 1911–13. The YIVO Encyclopedia gives an excellent summary of it. Although Beilis was eventually acquitted of the accusation that he had ritually killed a 12-year-old boy, he spent several years in prison awaiting trial and was vilified by antisemitic right-wing Russian nationalists and opportunists.
Jacob Gegna, on the other hand, was a classically-trained violinist from a klezmer family who had until shortly before 1913 lived and worked in Poltava as a violin instructor and orchestral musician. He was living in Kiev at the time of the Beilis trial, or at least during its final weeks. He later claimed to have attended it himself and to have been moved by Beilis’ pleas for justice, or as some papers put it, his “prayers.” After he composed an instrumental violin piece in Beilis’ honour, mention of his personal connection to the trial accompanied notices about his earliest performances of the piece in New York:
“[…] the world-famous player Jacob Gegna. Mr. Gegna is from Kiev. He witnessed Beilis’ trial and he composed a ‘Tfileh L’Beylis.’ He will play it in this concert.”
The claim continued to appear occasionally when he toured or performed. This short curiosity piece from Charles D. Isaacson’s “Weekly Music Chats” in a February 1920 issue of the Atlanta Journal sums it up:
From the Atlanta Journal, February 15, 1920. Source: Newspapers.com
If it’s hard to read in the folded scan, here is what the paragraph says:
When the Beylis trial was progressing in Russia, Jacob Gegna, the violinist, attended some of the last sessions. He heard the prayer made by the accused man to the judges just before the jury retired. Inspired by the scene, Gegna went home and wrote down his “Beylis’s Prayer,” one of the saddest violin sobs ever sounded.
The assertion that he was at the trial, in articles about his performance of the piece, continued to appear as late as 1923 as in this Yidishes Tageblatt article.
After arriving in New York in the summer of 1914 with his brother Max, a cellist, Jacob started to establish himself as a violinist and violin teacher. I don’t know if he composed the piece back in Kiev, as the newspaper claimed, but by that autumn it had become one of his signature pieces on the New York stage, and mentioned in a few dozen newspaper articles or advertisements between then and the early 1920s. He débuted it in the fall of 1914, including at a Sholem Aleichem evening where it reportedly made a big impression (per this and several other Forverts articles in early 1915).
Here is a typical example of an advertisement using the piece as part of the promotion:
Advertisement for Gegna’s recital at the Forverts Hall, from the November 21, 1914 issue of Forverts.
Although the newspaper mentions of this piece were generally repetitive, the exact title of the piece varied. At times it was “Beilis’es Gebet” (בײליס׳עס געבעט) in the November 1914 Forverts ad pictured above, “Tfilah L’Beilis” (תפילה לבײליס) in the Forverts, December 1914 and in the February 1915 Varhayt ad picured below, “Mendel Beilis’es Gebet” (מענדעל בײליס׳עס געבעט, Mendel Beilis’ plea) in the Forverts in January 1915, “Mendel Beilis” in the Yidishes Togblat in May 1915, or “Elegy (The Prayer of Beilis)” (in The Violin World, June 1915). An advertisement in the Forverts in April 1915 mentions it alongside another piece (or type of piece) he had recorded back in Europe: “his own awe-inspiring compositions ‘Tfileh L’Mendel Beilis,’ Chtsos, and classical numbers” (אײגענע פּרעכטיגע קאָמפּאָזיציע ״תפלה למענדעל בײליס״, חצות און קלאַסישע נומערען). Take a look at the Wiktionary entries for Tfileh and Gebet for the basics on their connotations.
Here is another ad from 1915 which mentions the piece in the fine print under Gegna’s name.
An advertisement featuring Gegna as a performer at a ball alongside Chazzan Meisels, Joseph Rumshinsky, and others. From Di Varhayt, 28 February 1915.
Excerpt from the column In the Music World (אין דער מוזיק װעלט), from the Morgen Zhurnal, New York, November 16, 1915.
The musical family in New York was enlarged with a young Jewish artist, a cellist. Max Gegna, a brother of the well-known violinist Jacob Gegna, who last year made his début on the East Side at the Sholem Aleichem reception in Cooper Union, and soon became a favourite of the Jewish public.
Jacob Gegna studied in Kiev and in Petrograd and in one year became director in the Imperial Society of Music [Keyzerlikher Muzik Gezelshaft]. Unlike most Jewish artists, Jacob Gegna was also interested in the situation of his unhappy brothers and in his first composition embodies the Jewish groans [ferkerpert der idisher krekhts]. Many will recall his “Mendel Beilis’ Tfileh.”
-translated by me from the above article.
I think they’re right that Gegna was fairly socially engaged, not only with regards to the Jews of Russia but labour and social solidarity too. His views in the 1910s and 1920s can be guessed at from the charities and benefits he donated his time to. I found mentions of him playing benefits for Jewish sanitoriums, for the Jewish Press Committee of the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon, for war sufferers and for displaced or stateless Russian Jews.
His composition received less and less mention in the press after 1915, perhaps because its novelty had worn out. I don’t think he played it in his Aeolian Hall show of March 1918, which was considered by many to be his arrival on the (non-Jewish) New York scene. At a glance, none of the reviews mention it.
Advertisement promoting his successful show at the Aeolian Hall. From Musical America, March 23, 1918. Source: HathiTrust.
But another round of mentions appears when Gegna toured the Eastern U.S. with one of his students, the child prodigy Sammy Kramar, in 1920. By all accounts, this six-and-a-half year old impressed audiences with his technique. The Mendel Beilis piece became a part of each performance, alongside duets with Gegna and classical repertoire.
Sammy Kramar, child prodigy and student of Gegna’s. From the Boston Post Sunday Magazine, 1920.
A 1920 article from Musical Americacalls it “an elegie, ‘The Prayer of Beilis’, composed by [Kramar’s] teacher.” In Musical Courier that same year says “The child then presented an ‘Elegie,’ by Gegna, in an inspiring manner, that proved the composition a worthy addition to musical literature.”
Sammy Kramar’s repertoire from The Republican, May 8, 1920. Source: Newspapers.com
I can’t say for sure, because there is so much content out there, but I think the 1920 Kramar tour was the last round of mentions of this piece in performance, with a few exceptions. I’m curious if the success of the piece on that tour inspired Gegna to record it himself, or if it had already been his intention.
Their relationship continued into 1921, as Gegna helped Kramar (then 8) submit a piece “Hebrew Air and Dance” for copyright in January (see it here in my Google Drive; I paid to have it scanned by the LOC).
The 1921 recording
In 1921 we arrive at the main reason most of us in the klezmer world know this piece and Gegna’s name: his recording of A Tfileh fun Mendel Beilis.
The label of A Tfileh fun Mendel Beilis, Columbia Records. Source: Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings.
Actually, to rewind a bit to November 1920, per Spottswood, Gegna went into the studios at Victor Records and made a test recording of a Taxim (an archaic kind of klezmer violin composition for listening), accompanied by composer Lazar Weiner on piano. The recording was not released, but Gegna was invited into the Columbia Records studio in New York a few months later and recorded his Mendel Beilis piece, as well as a Taxim. (He recorded the same basic piece a decade earlier in Poltava as “Fantasy on Jewish Melody”, you can listen to it on YouTube or on the Chekhov’s Band CD). The Discography of American Historical Recordings has a listing for A Tfileh fun Mendel Beilis, although it does not specify who the piano accompanist was. As I said above, the recording can be streamed here on the Mayrent Collection, or here in Florida Atlantic University’s Recorded Sound Archive.
Closeup of Gegna’s disc listed in the 1924 Columbia Records catalogue. Source: Internet Archive.
I’m not a violinist, but I feel confident in making some general statements about this piece.
Like Gegna himself, it sits partly in the world of the klezmer or East European Jewish style of violin playing, and partly in the popular or classical style. I would characterize it as a sentimental or meditative violin piece which does use klezmer techniques and musical elements, but in a very restrained way. I think many “Jewish” pieces recorded for a broader market in his time fit this description.
One need only listen to the other side of the disc, Taxim, to hear some of those klezmer musical elements: the quick runs of notes, the heavy use of the “krekhts” ornament and slides, etc., and the fact that it is followed by a lively klezmer dance. On A Tfileh fun Mendel Beilis, he uses a lot more vibrato than a village klezmer might, and appoggiaturas rather than krekhts. But I think some of the other elements sound very ‘klezmer,’ both modally and as a general matter of style. At time the melody sounds more generically sentimental to my ears, that is to say not specifically Jewish, but at other times (as in the “C section”) it sounds more like a nign.
Thanks to those who talked over this piece with me on Facebook while I was thinking of writing this piece, including Eléonore Biezunski and Christina Crowder. As far as I can tell, while the Taxim has been recorded a number of times by klezmer revivalists (most famously by The Klezmorim on their 1973 album Streets of Gold), the Mendel Beilis piece has received significantly less attention. The only re-recording of it I could find was on a 2001 album by the Klezmers Techter, a German group, but I couldn’t find anywhere to stream it.
