Re: Recording Artist Isa Kremer.

[Lori Cahan-Simon <lsimon...>]

Dear Joel, 

Here is the material on Isa Kremer from pp. 28-29 in my book _50 Years of
Yiddish Song in America_, written and edited by Mordecai S. Yardeini,
published by Jewish Music Alliance, New York, 1964:

"To hear Isa Kremer sing Yiddish folksongs was, for the average Jew, as
well as for the Jewish intellectual, a profound experience, because in her
interpretations one could feel a great measure of love for both the words
and the melody.  Isa Kremer did not have a "big" voice (she was a soprano),
buat she had her individual color which added charm to the song, the color
of the rich Bessarabian earth and clear transparent blue skies, with a
radiant resonance and sprightliness which was really incomparable.  She was
a "born" singer and her juicy Bessarabian Yiddish bubbled from her lips
with a rare warmth which got into your blood, as though you were drinking
good home-made wine.

At the age of 12, Isa Kremer together with her parents, left her native
city of Belz and the Bessarabian earth with its fragrant vineyards, and
tobacco plantations and green fields, rich pastures, sweet watermelons,
apples, pears, tasty plums, good food -- and moved to the bright, merry
city of Odessa -- the "Beauty of the South."

Isa Kremer gave her first concert of Yiddish folksongs in Moscow.  Her name
immediately resounded through Russia and the rest of Europe and America as
well.  Everywhere she sang, she was acclaimed.

In her songs were whole _shtetlech_ of Jewish girls, whose joy and
laughter, sorrow and tears, secret loves, tender lovers' touches,
whispering, heartaches, warm caresses, secret kisses, echoed amazingly in
our ears and pierced our hearts.

Yes, Isa Kremer "sang for" the small-town young girls, just as the "reader"
in the Women's galleries of the synagogues used "read for" the untutored
women."

        



By the way, I think Dr. Demento, not Dimento, is correct.


Lori
Lori Cahan-Simon

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+