The Yiddish Radio Project
Series Continues with 'Gems from the Yiddish Radio Archive'

Gems from the Yiddish Radio Archive This week's feature: "Vacation in the Mountains," an editorial in verse by Zvee Scooler, WEVD's legendary rhyme master. Zvee Scooler Photo © 2002 Sound Portraits Productions Zvee Scooler, AKA the grammeister ("rhyme master"), took to the air every Sunday on WEVD to present 10 minutes of news and commentary -- in rhyme. A master poet, Scooler is the spiritual descendent of badkhns, poets who oversaw weddings in Eastern Europe. In this segment, first broadcast on August 20, 1947, Scooler considers the plight of the "Catskill mountain refugee," the quintessential retired New Yorker looking to escape the steamy metropolis for breezier climes.

Learn about WEVD's "The Forward Hour" on which Zvee Scooler was regularly featured.

Stories from the original 10-part series heard on All Things Considered:  March 19 -- Series introduction  March 26 -- Yiddish Melodies in Swing  April 2 -- The radio dramas of Nahum Stutchkoff  April 9 -- Charles A. Levine, the first transatlantic passenger  April 16 -- Yiddish radio's unique commercials  April 23 -- C. Israel Lutsky, "The Jewish Philosopher"  April 30 -- Seymour Rexite, the "Yiddish Frank Sinatra"  May 7 -- Ground- breaking radio programmer Victor Packer  May 14 -- Rabbi Rubin's on-air people's court  May 21 -- Holocaust survivors and Reunion

The recent 10-part Yiddish Radio Project series from npr.org and YiddishRadioProject.org continues online with a 26-week festival of Yiddish radio.

Every Tuesday, "Gems from the Yiddish Radio Archive" features another classic recording from the Yiddish radio vaults -- presented it in its entirety, with simultaneous English text translations.

Musician and historian Henry Sapoznik collaborated with Dave Isay, the MacArthur Award-winning radio documentary producer, to create the ongoing series celebrating these recordings, and the forgotten radio geniuses of the golden age of Yiddish-American broadcasting in the 1930s to '50s.

The Yiddish Radio Project stems from one fateful day 17 years ago when Sapoznik walked into an old New York City storeroom.

There, among looming stacks of broken records and musty pamphlets, Sapoznik made the discovery of a lifetime: a handful of single-cut aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from the 1930s and '40s.

In the years since then, Sapoznik has combed attics, flea markets and even dumpsters in an attempt to find and preserve all of the last surviving remnants of Yiddish radio.

The collection has grown to more than 500 hours of recordings on 1,000 fragile disks, with everything from man-on-the-street interviews and news programs to searing dramas and swinging music shows -- the last recorded vestiges of a people in the midst of a cultural renaissance.

"You have to remember, these are one-of-a-kind recordings," explains Sapoznik. "So much was so close to being lost forever. What choice did I have?"

Isay says listening to the rare cache of broadcast disks "was like opening up King Tut's Tomb."

"Taken together, the collection give us this incredibly intimate snapshot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and '40s.

"You see the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land, and the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean."