Tag: Handwritten Music Manuscripts

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Research Summary

Chune Wolfsthal, Galician klezmer composer

part of a manuscript page of sheet music with a black and white portrait of a bearded man superimposed on the righthand side

Lately I’ve been rereading some things about Galician klezmer musicians in preparation for a talk I’m giving this December. An interesting figure who receives a lot of coverage in sources is Chune Wolfsthal (1853–1924), a cellist and prolific composer who went from being a bandleader in Ternopil to a composer of operettas in Lviv after 1889. I got so interested in him that I wrote a Wikipedia biography while I was at WikiConference North America in Edmonton last month. (The sources I read about Wolfsthal also pushed me to write one about his colleague Yankev Ber Gimpel.) Reading historical descriptions of Wolfsthal’s compositions only made me more curious. And I became aware that, other than the song Fraytik oyf der Nakht, any of his compositions which are still performed are probably passed off as “traditional” tunes.

I won’t retell Wolfsthal’s life story here; you can read it in the Wikipedia article I wrote, or in the sources I cited there. To my knowledge, no one has ever written a thorough biography of him, and so most are one or two pages long, with the longest being seven pages in Perlmutter’s Yidishe dramaturgn un teater kompozitors (1952). Most cover similar ground, with a few disagreements on dates and other minor facts. And we get into the problem of mythologizing and the spreading of errors from one source to another. Guzy-Pasiak describes Chune as “not an anonymous figure, though not much is known about him. Some information, largely imprecise or incorrect, can be found in dictionaries and encyclopaedias dedicated to klezmer music.” (p.62)

Portrait of Wolfsthal accompanying his entry in Zylbercweig and Mestel’s Lexicon of Yiddish Theatre, Volume 1 (1931).

He is generally portrayed a gifted composer who lived and died poor while his compositions were being performed far and wide. I give more weight to the writers who knew him in real life, including his nephew Karol Rathaus, and his former colleague Sholom Perlmutter. Other biographical and encyclopedic entries seem to cobble together statements from these earlier texts or reproduce them wholesale, including Zylbercweig and Mestel’s Lexicon of Yiddish Theatre and Stutschewsky’s Jüdische Spielleute. (Although the Lexicon does cite a few newspaper articles about him from Galician newspapers in 1924 which are as of yet not digitized! I would love to read them!)

Karol Rathaus (1895–1954)

Wolfsthal’s nephew Karol Rathaus, a modern composer who ended up in the United States, wrote at least two essays about his uncle. The first was a memorial printed in the Berlin paper Jüdische Rundschau a few months after his death: “Ein Musikant Gottes, Chune Wolfsthal zum Gedächtnis” (A Musician of God: In Memory of Chune Wolfsthal). This piece seems to have been a source for a number of subsequent biographies of him, and the mythologizing of him as a forgotten composer who didn’t get compensated in his lifetime:

He was self-taught and played several instruments with great mastery; the only formal training he ever received was during his time in the military, where he served as a musician. Even then, his talent manifested with elemental force. A whole series of military marches, waltzes, and various types of dance music originated during this period; military bands in all the major cities of the monarchy copied the sheet music and performed Wolfsthal’s compositions. They achieved great popularity and widespread circulation—yet it never occurred to the composer to capitalize on this success or to secure a lasting foundation for his work by having the pieces published. Consequently, only a few of these works have survived through the performance traditions of certain bands, while the vast majority have long since been lost.

(machine translated, with apologies, from ‘Ein Musikant Gottes,’ 1925.)

Wolfsthal’s entry into the world of Yiddish theatre after 1889 was surely a revelation to him, but it was not a musical rupture, as he applied his rich musical vocabulary to this new format. Per Rathaus’ 1925 memorial essay, this new Jewish art music incorporated all the elements of folk culture, calling it “angewandte volksmusik” (applied folk music).

Karol Rathaus circa 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Rathaus revisited the topic of his uncle late in life, in a 1953 typewritten essay in his archive at Queens College; they were kind enough to send to me when I asked for it. (I became aware of it after reading the 2023 article in Musicology Today by Jolanta Guzy-Pasiak which I quoted above.) I’m not sure if Rathaus’ essay was meant to be delivered as a speech, or to be published. His description of his uncle is the most tender of these sources:

[…] the good angel who stood at the cradle of my musical birth. — A man with an emperor Franz Joseph beard. Large gray-blue eyes illuminating his lovely face! the big and generous mouth, a strong and well shaped nose and above all the coppola of a musicians forehead. Noble, intelligent and high. His hands were large too, but fatherly hands, soft and warm and dry. Tender hands and fingers. And fingers of a musician, who could play practically any instrument of the orchestra, particularly well the cello and the violin.

(p.1)

He describes his uncle’s hopes and difficulties, and his compositional process:

[…] Chune would arrive home, have a cup of coffee and lay down for a few hours. His dwelling was small: one room and one kitchen adjoining our larger apartment; while he was dreaming himself free from the musical compulsion of waltzes, endlessly repeated, of polkas, quadrilles and polonaises, his good wife Sarah would do nothing, just sit. In order not to disturb the quiet of his rest, she hardly dared to read. And after all, who likes to read a book at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Finally, after a glance at the clock, she would disappear to modestly shopping for a frugal day. Back home, she would find Chune already sitting at the table in the kitchen and writing music. Composing. For music was the sweet abandon of his noble soul – and his curse. His obsession and revelation and his hard crust of bread. […]

Money, in Chunes sincere estimation was some-thing outside of composing music. He would do all kind of musical chores, go without sleep, live in utmost poverty and swallow the mute and not so silent reproaches of his wife—if only—after, or in between the chores he could sit down and start to compose music.

(p.1-2)

Rathaus describes his uncle’s transformation when he was invited to leave the life of a klezmer bandleader behind and compose operettas (although, of course, this took place a few years before Rathaus was born):

Confronted with the task never before tried, Chune Wolfsthal opened up like a stream. A stream of melodies, duos, overtures, tunes, waltzes and polkas, the whole light fare of the new genre: “a jiddisch drama with Tanz and Gesang” was brought to the fore, the libretto was fixed, music was set on paper, the score was written, parts were extracted and copied. Music was studied with singers, the whole thing was rehearsed, conducted and finally performed by my uncle Chune Wolfsthal.

(p.2-3)

Inside cover of the libretto for Bas Yerushalayim: historishe operete in 5 akten by Isaac Auerbach, with music by Wolfsthal. Source: Polona.

Sholom Perlmutter (1884–1954)

The next closest source was Sholom Perlmutter, a Galician-born Yiddish theatre playwright who had worked with Wolfsthal in Czernowitz at the turn of the century and later cofounded the Hebrew Actor’s Union in New York. He was very fond of Wolfsthal and, I think, contributed a lot to his reputation as a somewhat tragic composer. Like Rathaus, Perlmutter published an obituary about Wolfsthal in the press not long after his death.

In the 1950s, Perlmutter revisited the topic of Wolfsthal in a biographical chapter which seems to have been expanded and revised from the 1925 obituary. In it, he discusses his compositions and their reception at length:

He was a serious artist, in love with his art. He didn’t use synagogue nigunim, nor opera melodies or motifs from foreign songs—all of his creations were original, and a lot of famous Yiddish composers who for years drew their inspiration from Wolfsthal’s talent. […]

His modesty, his introversion was the reason why “the world” was barely aware of him. The name Wolfsthal may still sound unfamiliar today in certain music circles. His compositions were played everywhere, Jewish and non-Jewish singers sang his melodies, but very few people knew him personally, and many musicians and stage actors even at that time did not know from whence these beautiful, pleasant melodies originated. Wolfstal’s melodies and compositions are so “in their blood” that it didn’t even occur to them to ask who the composer is.

(my translation, from Yidishe dramaturgn un teater kompozitors, p.332)

Portrait of Sholom Perlmutter in 1924. Source: Yidishe dramaturgn un teater kompozitors.

It seems to me that those comments refer to his turn-of-the-century theatre compositions, but Perlmutter also had secondhand impressions about Wolfsthal’s earlier life as a klezmer composer in the 1860s and 1870s:

Even as young bocher Chune played with the klezmers from his shtetl, and he composed new “pieces” for them. Years later, all five [Wolfsthal] brothers relocated to Tarnopol, where they established their own orchestra, the so-called “Brothers Wolfsthal,” and thanks to Chune’s compositions the “Wolfsthal Orchestra” became beloved and popular all over Galicia. […]

In this environment, Chune’s musical refinement developed rapidly, and his compositions resonated with true connoisseurs. But as Chune’s own brothers did not put much stock in his musical creations, he used to send many of them to well-known bandleaders in Austria and Hungary, where they became popular. Those bandleaders would transcribe his compositions and sell them to other conductors, or simply print them under their own names. It was only when his brothers found out that all the oriental marches, the various terzettos, quartets and melodies that Chune had created for well-known German, Polish and Jewish songs were really his, that they changed their opinion and quickly understood what a great musician their brother was.

(my translation, p.332)

A part of me wonders whether this is Perlmutter projecting backwards from Wolfsthal’s underappreciated status as a composer of operettas to his earlier life. But he gets specific enough that maybe there is some basis to it!

His surviving theatre compositions

Performance scores for several of Wolfsthal’s operettas have been digitized as part of YIVO’s Vilna collection. As I understand it, these were orchestral parts made while his plays were touring in Europe at around the turn of the century and ended up amongst all the other Yiddish theatre materials in this archive; lyrics are not included. In some cases the dates on these versions are a decade or more after he originally wrote it.

Detail from the cover of the 1st violin score for Die Tochter Jeruschulajims from Norbert Glimer’s troupe. Source: YIVO Vilna Collection.

Some of his other compositions have ended up in YIVO’s Sholom Perlmutter collection. It isn’t inventoried or digitized yet, so I’m not sure which pieces are in there. Because they were widely performed, I’m sure other manuscripts will turn up in other collections. A few of his compositions were also recorded on 78rpm during his lifetime, although not under his direction. You can stream two of them over here at Forgotten Galicia: Freitag auf der Nacht sung by G. Z. Weismann of Warsaw, and Sukos-lied from Die Tochter Jeruschulajims, sung by Frau Zwiebel-Goldstein. Freitag auf der Nacht was also recorded many times subsequently, but I think that earliest version has a lot of character.

Thinking about his klezmer compositions

What feels like more of a loss to us as klezmer musicians is the lack of any documentation of his klezmer works which, according to the sources above, were widely popular during the 1860s-80s. What did these pieces sound like? Do we know some of them as ‘traditional’ tunes carried over to New York or recorded on 78rpm in Europe? Were they anything like the 19th century pieces collected from Pale of Settlement areas by Kiselhof or Beregovsky?

The sources I cited in the Wikipedia article various describe his pre-theatre compositions in different ways. Perlmutter talks about “idishe lider un naye kompozitsies” (“Jewish songs and new compositions”, 1925 obituary) and “orientalishe marshn, di farshidene tertsetn, kvartetn, un di melodies vos Khune hot geshafn” (“oriental marches and various trios, quartets and melodies that Chune created,” 1952 book). Rathaus writes of “Militärmärschen, Walzern und Tanzformen aller Art sind damals entstande” (“Military marches, waltzes, and dance forms of all kinds emerged at that time”, 1925 obituary, referring to his time in the army). Others copy these descriptions exactly (Solomon Wininger, Zalman Reisen) or don’t describe the compositions at all (Joachim Stutschewsky, Issachar Fater).

Musical passage from Act 2 of Wolfsthal’s Die Tochter Jeruschulajims. Source: YIVO Vilna Collection.

I do think klezmer musicians could find some interesting passages in Wolfsthal’s operettas, which, after all, he is said to have poured his own folkloric musical aesthetic into. Recall the description in Rathaus’ 1952 essay that his uncle’s theatrical works are full of “melodies, duos, overtures, tunes, waltzes and polkas, the whole light fare of the new genre” and in another part “the musical compulsion of waltzes, endlessly repeated, of polkas, quadrilles and polonaises“. Something to consider for those who want to explore the forgotten Yiddish musical heritage of 19th century Galicia!

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As Seen Online Research Summary

Thoughts on the new Joseph Moskowitz archive

a collage of an old black and white portrait of Moskowitz; a page of a musical score titled The Night is Young, Leibowitz Sirba; and a newspaper clipping in Romanian.

As an amateur cimbalom player and klezmer fan, I’ve long had a soft spot for Joseph Moskowitz (1879–1954), a Romanian-born cimbalist, prolific recording artist, and colourful character from old New York. In editing his Wikipedia page years ago, I noted that his obituary credited him with having composed at least a hundred melodies. Searching for other compositions by him kickstarted my project to request klezmer scores from the Library of Congress, as I noted in my first blog post and this one about Moskowitz scores from the LOC. We also have quite a lot of material recorded by him, including the 40 or so 78rpm recordings and the LP Cymbalom Melodies he made late in life. But obviously a lot of his work had been lost.

That’s why I was very pleased when, in Union Square in Manhattan last spring, Pete Rushefsky sat me down and told me how he had just returned from the D.C. area, where he had spent hours photographing scores and photos from a newly rediscovered box of Moskowitz materials found in a relative’s attic. (Pete is Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, in addition to being a fellow cimbalom player and Moskowitz megafan.) Pete was scrolling through images on his phone, showing me Moskowitz as a young man in Europe, newspaper clippings, and old handwritten music manuscripts. Very exciting!

The materials themselves were donated to the Library of Congress, which is entirely appropriate. But their priorities are not the same as ours—I could imagine a scenario in which none of us outside of the D.C. area ever see them or hear about them again—and so I think it is good that Pete has put up a preliminary access version of his photographs here at josephmoskowitz.org. The collection is not organized or catalogued, beyond broad categories of image type. But it contains so much priceless old music and ephemera. Here are some of my takeaways about the music and music history side of it. I won’t even get into the photos or his handwritten memoir.

1. There is a lot of great unknown klezmer in here

So much great new-old klezmer music has been uncovered in the last decade, be it Sherry Mayrent’s amazing 78 rpm finds, old Russian Empire and Soviet klezmer digitized as part of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky project, the LOC’s Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music collection, family collections published by people like Dave Levitt and Susan Watts, and so on. We really live in a rich age of rediscovery. I’ve tried to do my part by ordering and making available copyright scores of forgotten material from the LOC, too. We now have access to so much rediscovered music that we don’t need to be sticking to the few dozen tunes known to klezmer revivalists in the 1980s and 1990s. Here at the monthly KlezWest sessions over here in Vancouver, I have been adding pieces by Moskowitz, Israel J. Hochman or Herman S. Shapiro to the usual Brandwein and Tarras tunes we love to play.

This Moskowitz archive is yet another new addition to this era of musical rediscovery. In addition to his restaurant “Muzak” and other eclectic materials, we can find around a hundred klezmer/Romanian pieces. It’s hard to get a clear count, because some have been photographed more than once, and others appear several times in the collection in different drafts or arrangements. If I had to estimate, I would say there are about 40 sârbas (sirbas), 30 horas of various kinds, 30 chusids (basically their name for a freylekhs) and 10 bulgars. There are also waltzes, tangos, doinas, and many untitled pieces that would have to be played to be categorized. Some are known to us from his old recordings, but most are not.

For Greenbaum Wedding, a waltz from Moskowitz’s collection.

I tried to make sense of it in this spreadsheet last year, and I’ve gone back to update it a bit recently as the collection has been put online. I will probably continue to add notes as I play the scores and observe new things.

2. Moskowitz’s Jewish repertoire was extremely Romanian

Or should it say Moskowitz’s Romanian repertoire was extremely Jewish?

I’ve been working on a talk about golden age New York klezmer composition and repertoire to give at Klezcadia in June. It made me think once again about the way in which the music industry apparently worked to homogenize old New York klezmer into a common sound. Back in the first decades of the 20th century, New York klezmer musicians from diverse regions of origin played together in orchestras for hire and the idea of klezmer we know from old recordings was created. This sound was brassy, clarinet-centric and tended towards music from Southern Ukraine and Moldova, full of bulgars, freylekhs and zhoks. But other artists seem to have had their niche outside this general trend, and Moskowitz was one of them. Although I’m sure he was familiar with their music and played it, his focus here is above all on sârbas, chusids and horas, music from his home region of Romania, filtered through his eclectic tastes picked up elsewhere in Europe and America. Contributing to the tally of sârbas are pieces by Max Leibowitz (who was also born in Romania) and others.

A husid, followed by a short sârba, signed by Max Leibowitz.

Remember, Moskowitz owned a series of Romanian-style restaurants in New York and could play whatever he wanted to please the customers. (To evoke the scene, here is an uncredited appearance in an old Yiddish film.) Although he clearly played weddings and concert stages as well, his main gig for decades was a place he could cultivate a highly specific niche repertoire.

Moskowitz’s recorded output contains plenty of this Romanian-Jewish crossover repertoire, giving us lots of evidence for how he would have performed these types of pieces, and how he would have had them accompanied by a pianist or orchestra. (DAHR lists 6 pieces titled sirba/sarba, but in a few other places he plays untitled ones following a doina or other melody.) Add to this old Romanian music recordings and the output of other Romanian-Jewish klezmer musicians like Abe Schwartz and Max Leibowitz, or Ukraine-Romania borderlands musicians like Israel J. Hochman and Al Glaser, and we have a lot to work with in bringing these scores back to life.

To step out of the old Lower East Side Jewish world for a bit, all of this repertoire is a reflection of the musical milieu Moskowitz grew up with in turn of the century Romania, where many such pieces were being composed and published. (Take a look at the Romanian National Library’s digital collection, and do a search for sirba, sarba, hora etc.) A few of his recordings, like Nunta Taraneasca (1916) are more straightforward performances of those kinds of published folk music suites. Someone with a finer ear for this music could probably do a fascinating study on Moskowitz’s compositions in this style and what differentiates them, if anything, from the pieces from back home.

One of the many sârbas in the Romanian National Library’s digital collection.

3. The collection is a total mess

This is not a knock on Pete, who graciously photographed and made available this collection for all of us to access. But there’s no denying that, from an archival or casual use standpoint, the archive is still in a relatively unstructured and cluttered state. Contents have not been fully assessed, listed, or even cleaned up from the original photographing session. There are duplicates and junk files. We just have to work with that for now. Hopefully over time an effort will be made to catalogue and structure this archive into something a bit more usable, especially now that a professional archive (the LOC) holds the originals.

But there is another way in which it is a beautiful mess: they are just things Moskowitz collected over the years and threw into a box. Compare Dave Tarras’ intentionally curated collection he donated to YIVO. That collection does not contain messy drafts, notes to himself, abandoned materials and so on. In Moskowitz’s messy box of scores we can see on the page just how he developed some of his pieces, either by taking a snippet and expanding it into a hora, or by writing and rewriting a piece, or by the way his favourite compositions appear several times in different arrangements.

A piece, maybe a sârba, written and rewritten by Moskowitz.

4. We can see Moskowitz’s musical community

As someone trying to do historical research into the relatively closed, undocumented and forgotten world of old New York klezmer, these papers are a great glimpse into who Moskowitz was playing with and for, who he hired and who hired him. We see signatures by other musicians, instructions for them by Moskowitz, and his notes to his copyists. We see performance instructions for himself or his pianists, including occasionally customer requests for a particular piece.

Compare it to the Tarras archive at YIVO which I mentioned above. That collection is relatively tidy, donated by Tarras who curated it to say “this is who I was, this was my music.” We see almost nothing of the many other people involved in his musicmaking, and the scores are the final product of a process of drafting and refinement. Not so for Moskowitz’s accidental archive.

And then there are the names of old New York klezmer people, known and unknown. The biggest set is this booklet sent to him by Chaim “Hymie” Millrad (1882–1971), a klezmer bassist & composer born in Mogilev. This set of 10 bulgars and chosids contains most of the pieces Millrad copyrighted with the LOC, but also a few others.

Cover of a booklet of original tunes sent by klezmer bassist Chaim “Hymie” Millrad to Moskowitz, with a dedication.
Two bulgars by Hymie Millrad in Moskowitz’s archive.

The next most common name is Max Leibowitz, who I’ve mentioned above a few times already, fellow Romanian immigrant musician and recording artist who himself tried to get into the Romanian-Jewish steakhouse restaurant business as well. A few pieces initialed M.L. in the collection might be him too. And we find pieces by minor figures from that era, like the Galician-born violinist-bandleaders Sigmund Goldring (1888–1947) and Beresh Katz (1879–1964), or Polish-born vaudeville musician Nat Kornspan (1878–1949). Other names on klezmer pieces are unknown to me: Hershkowitz, Schuster, Himmelbrand and Gold. Even the point of the names is not always clear, is it saying this person composed it, or he was playing it with this person, or the person requested it? And so on.

The unknown musician Isidore Moscovitz, who I wrote a blog post about before, is also in here with some of the same pieces he copyrighted with the LOC, including a published version I hadn’t seen before.

A published score of Romanian-style dances by Isidore Moscovitz.

Some of the scores involve people Joseph recorded with, like his longtime pianist Max Yussim, who has an arrangement of Kol Nidre in here, or the well-known bandleader Alexander Olshanetsky (1892–1946) who Moskowitz recorded with in the late 1920s. There’s an arrangement by him of one of Moskowitz’s compositions, a waltz titled Salika.

Finally, I haven’t mentioned them yet, but there are 3 booklets containing 40 of Moskowitz’s compositions arranged for piano late in his life by a guy called Tony Charuha. They were clearly intended for publication. They are titled Rumanian Dances, Folk Dances, and Israeli Dances, although really this is just all Moskowitz’s typical Romanian-Jewish stuff he had been performing and composing for decades. We find a few of his greatest hits as well as many pieces which don’t appear anywhere else.

One of Moskowitz’s dances I’ve heard him play on a radio appearance, rebranded here as an Israeli Dance for Purim.

5. Even the corny restaurant music arrangements are fun

The last thing I wanted to mention is that a lot of the scores are his arrangements of popular or cosmopolitan pieces he was playing for a broader audience than Romanian-Jewish immigrants. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been listening to his old recordings for a while now; some of his best recordings are things like Operatic Rag and Argentine Dance (both from 1916).

His written arrangements here may be more interesting for cimbalom players like me, but I encourage people to take a look at them and try them out too. They contain Russian, American, German, etc. compositions which he was clearly having fun with while appealing to a broad audience.

Moskowitz’s cimbalom and piano arrangement of Ivan Vasiliev’s famous Russian song Two Guitars, complete with cues to switch cimbalom sticks.

Thanks for reading to the end, and feel free to tag me or get in touch if you end up performing or recording materials from this archive. I would love to hear about it.

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Biography

Rosenbergs, Halmescos and Brauns: ‘Egyptian’ families in the P.M.B.S.

historical black and white photo of a dusty street with shops on both sides, a few pedestrians
Street scene in Port Said, Egypt, c.1920. Source: Wikimedia Commons/KITLV.

Note: I have updated this post in March 2026 after speaking with some family members, including William Halmesco’s granddaughter, who helped me clarify some of the facts here.

I’m still sorting through many of the unknown families and individuals buried in the two Progressive Musical Benevolent Society cemetery plots, and I came across several intermarried families who don’t fit the usual profile. Rather than coming directly from the Russian Empire to New York City, as did the majority of P.M.B.S. members, they were European Jews of Austrian/Romanian ancestry who were born or who lived extended periods in Egypt during the colonial era, and came to New York during or after the First World War. These were the families of three New York musicians and P.M.B.S. members, Charles Braun (1887–1947), Charles Isaac Rosenberg (1884–1929) and William Halmesco (1890–1952).

I don’t know enough about early 20th century Egypt to really give much context to their lives there. (Although I did take a memorable course in Modern Egyptian History with Paul Sedra at SFU 15 years ago.) I wouldn’t even know where to go looking for documentation of their lives over there. The French-language Cairo newspaper ⁨⁨Israël⁩⁩ is searchable on jpress from 1922 onwards, and while I did not find any of these family names in it, searches for “musique” and “musicien” brings up plenty of results. One gets the impression of a bustling cultural life between Europe, the long-resident local Jewish community, traveling musicians, and colonization projects in nearby Palestine.

I thought an examination of the lives of these musicians would be an interesting demonstration of the different paths people took to end up as members of the P.M.B.S. in New York.

The families in Egypt

The parents of the Halm(esco) family, Solomon Rosenberg and Annette Halm, may have been born in Romania or Bucovina in the second half of the 19th century, lived in Vienna for a time, and settled in Egypt by the 1890s. Their four known children are Sophia (or Sofica, b.1885), William (b.1890), Bertha (b.1891) and Alexander (b.1894). Sophia was born in Austria-Hungary and the three latter children may have been born in Egypt. (William’s descendants insist that he was not born in Egypt, and that he said he was on U.S. documents later for some unknown reason.)

Solomon Rosenberg was a musician. According to his descendants, he left the family for a younger woman at some point, and so two of his sons renounced his name and went by their mother’s maiden name, Halm. All four children could play music, and the two daughters married musicians. Sophia married Charles Isaac (Yitzchok Chaim) Rosenberg, a violinist from Chernivtsi born in 1884, who was living and working in Egypt. I’m not sure if he was related to Solomon Rosenberg. Bertha married Charles (Chaim) Braun, a bassist born somewhere in Galicia in around 1887, who was likewise working in Egypt. William married Mathilda Meyer, daughter of a German Jewish family long resident in Egypt, and became a cornetist or trumpeter. The youngest sibling Alexander became a clarinetist.

According to the family, the brothers fought in the Ottoman army in the First World War and were interned in a POW camp in Malta. They also said that some of the older relatives spoke Arabic and French (the latter being the language of education available to European Jews there), or German in the case of the Meyer branch of the family.

Life in New York

The earliest among these folks to arrive was Charles Isaac Rosenberg, his wife Sophia & family, who left Alexandria and sailed to New York in the spring of 1915. At some point he joined the Progressive Musical Benevolent Society and started to play as a theatre musician. I’m unsure how he got connected with the P.M.B.S.; perhaps he was related to one of the many other Rosenbergs who were members, or met another member on the job. (The descendants weren’t aware of any other Rosenberg relatives in the Society.) On his WWI registration card he gave his employer as Loew’s Orpheum Theatre on 86th.

WWI registration card for (Charles) Isaac Rosenberg. Source: Ancestry.com.
Westchester Avenue at Stebbins Avenue, around the corner from the Rosenbergs’ home in the Bronx, 1930s. Source: NYPL Digital Collections.

Charles and Sophia, along with daughters Bella (Blanche) and Victoria, settled on Hewitt Place in the Bronx for the first decade of their time in New York. By the time of the 1925 census they were living on 111th in Harlem, and brother-in-law Charles Braun had arrived from Egypt and moved in with them. Bella Rosenberg had turned 18 and was now working as a pianist. According to the family, she worked as a piano teacher and her sister Victoria was also a musician.

Charles Braun’s wife Bertha arrived in October ’25 along with their children Lazare (Lester), Solomon and Leon. Charles joined the musician’s union and the P.M.B.S.; per the union directory, Charles Braun started off as a flautist, but soon switched to playing bass.

Ship manifest showing the arrival of Bertha Braun (Halmesco) and children from Cairo to Providence R.I. in October 1925. They gave their intended address as Bertha’s husband Chaim (Charles) on 111th. Source: Ancestry.com.

Brother William Halmesco was the next to arrive, leaving Cairo with his wife Mathilda and arriving in New York in March 1927. According to the family, he had changed his name from Halm to Halmesco while working in Egypt, in order to sound more Italian. Before long they had settled on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx; William joined the P.M.B.S. and the musician’s union as a cornetist/trumpeter.

Ship manifest showing the Halmescos and some other Egyptian-Jewish musicians sailing from Alexandria in February 1927. Source: Ancestry.com.
The Halmescos’ building at 362 Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, in 1940. Source: NYC Department of Records.

Aside from the membership of all three families in the P.M.B.S., William is the only one who left us evidence of specifically klezmer music activity. Dave Levitt, descendant of two generations of P.M.B.S. members, has an old manuscript from Halmesco which somehow ended up in his grandfather Jack’s possession. The book, written up in 1945, contains bulgars and other klezmer materials. Probably some of them were William’s own compositions, as he was described in a 2006 profile of his daughter in the Staten Island Advance as a “musician and composer.”

William’s granddaughter was surprised to hear of an association between him and klezmer music, saying he was a classical musician above all. But she recognized his handwriting and the address on the manuscript. She wondered if he had been paid to copy it for someone, a way he occasionally supplemented his income.

Cover of a handwritten klezmer tunebook by William Halmesco held by Dave Levitt, which he posted on Facebook a few years ago.
A sample klezmer dance from the manuscript book in the previous photo. Source: Dave Levitt.

Charles Rosenberg was the first of the musicians to pass away, dying of a burst appendix in 1929. He was buried in the Society’s plot at Mount Hebron Cemetery. His wife Sophie—one of the Halm/Rosenberg sisters, if you recall—died a few years later, in 1935.

Charles (Isaac) Rosenberg’s gravestone in the Progressive Musical Benevolent Society plot at Mount Hebron Cemetery. Photo by Joel Rubin/Pete Rushefsky.

William Halmesco’s family was also struck with misfortune, as his wife Mathilda died in 1931 giving birth to their first child. This daughter was named Mathilda (Matty) in honour of her mother, and was sent to live in the Jewish Infants Home of Brooklyn until age 5, when she came back to live with her father. According to a profile of her in the Staten Island Advance in 2006, her father tried for several years to have her learn the violin, but finally gave up when she did not take to it.

WWII registration card for William Halmesco, listing him as an unemployed cornetist. Source: Ancestry.com.

In this era Charles Braun and his sons continued to work as musicians; mostly as bassists, but occasionally as drummers, in night clubs, and in Lester’s case, for the radio station WNEW for some time in the 1940s. The family moved into this newly built building in Brighton Beach, seen below, where a number of musicians seemed to live, per the 1945 local 802 directory, including the klezmer bandleader and cornetist Max Ellenson (1878–19??). I asked the family about this building, and they did remember it and that there had been parties with many musicians there, but didn’t know anything specific about why so many had lived there.

Entries for three of the Brauns under the bassist section of the AFM local 802 directory, 1945. Brother Leo was listed in the Drummer section of the same volume. Source: NYU.
Google Maps street view of 3091 Brighton 5th Street in 2011. The Braun family lived here in the 1940s, along with a number of other Jewish musicians and their families. Source: Google Maps.
black and white photo of a woman in a suit standing outdoors
Bertha Braun in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the 1950s, from a cropped family photo. Source: Ancestry.com.

When Charles Braun died in 1947, Bertha’s brother Alexander, who had left Egypt during the period of deteriorating conditions for Jewish residents, and moved in with them, as did Matty Halmesco, as we can see below in the 1950 census. William Halmesco, meanwhile, continued to live in the Bronx as he had since arriving in New York decades earlier. He died in 1952, and was buried in the P.M.B.S. plot at Mount Hebron cemetery alongside fellow cornetist Samuel Blank.

Braun family residence in the 1950 census at 3091 Brighton 5th Street. Source: Ancestry.com.
Grave of William Halmesco in the Mount Hebron Cemetery. Source: Joel Rubin/Pete Rushefsky.

With William gone, Matty got married to her cousin Bernard Halm (1920–1985), Alexander’s son who had arrived from Egypt, in Brooklyn in 1954. Born in Vienna, the family said he played in King Farouk‘s orchestra and left during the process of expulsion or exclusion of Jews from Egypt. They noted that Farouk helped pay for his departure. According to the 2006 profile of Matty, Bernard spoke nine languages and worked as an interpreter in a Manhattan hotel.

Detail of US Customs ship manifest showing the arrival of Bernard and Mina Halm, children of Alexander Halm, from Port Said in August 1951. Note that they are listed as stateless people. Source: Ancestry.com.

According to the descendants, some of the relatives are still in the music business, including William’s great grandson who works as a music director and organist. Thanks to them for all their invaluable information.