WINTER HOLIDAY MUSIC IS SO JEWISH

A Guest Post by Dr. Harold Goldmeier

I’m a baby boomer. American born Mom was the child of Polish Jews scrapping-by through the Great Depression in the land of plenty. They lost everything.  Nothing went to waste ever again. We barely threw a garbage bag out once a week.

Her favorite times of year were the baseball and holiday seasons. She loved winter-time songs, so many written by Jewish immigrants and their first born. The music reminded her of good times during a rocky early life. Judy Garland’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” captivated Mom. Carl Sigman’s 1949 lyrics to

A Marshmallow World performed by Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Arthur Godfrey, and half-dozen more artists always brought a smile to Mom’s face:

It's a marshmallow world in the winter
When the snow comes to cover the ground
It's time for play, it's a whipped cream day
I wait for it the whole year round…

Oh, The world is your snowball, see how it grows
That’s how it goes whenever it snows
The world is your snowball just for a song
Get out and roll it along…

Mom was a true-blue American tomboy. Mom was a near professional bowler and ballplayer.  Mom’s spirit of,  “I’ll do it myself,” and never complain especially about America, were her declarations of independence. Holiday music represented everything she loved about life and opportunities.  She married a German Jewish immigrant in the 1940’s. He spoke only German. Mom spoke English and a smattering of Yiddish. Mom cut the grass on hot summer days after watching father do it in a suit and tie. I can’t explain how they hooked up, but they thrived on mutual respect and love.

Mom’s kitchen smelled of fresh cooking and cigarettes. Holiday radio music played in the background when she cooked in the dark, early morning hours for Shabbat between Thanksgivings and spring times. It was deep winter cold, icy and windy Chicago. The kitchen window was frosted from the hothouse steam, and we drew hearts, wrote our names on the panes, and laughed together.

She koshered zaftig (juicy and succulent) fresh chickens bought from the neighborhood shochet  (slaughterer) every Thursday. Mom cleaved them into quarters, heavily smothering them in Morton Kosher Salt (the blue box with the young, umbrella holding girl in a short yellow skirt). My little sister and I cringed watching the mix of watered-down blood oozing into the sink. The chicken pieces and the sink were washed down with boiling hot water after an appropriate amount of time.

Some chicken pieces were plunked into a large pot bubbling atop the gas stove. Adding fresh vegetables and marrowbones, Mom concocted the greatest pharmaceutically curing and greasy chicken soup (next to my wife’s). Some quarters were roasted in a flat pan—never broiled or bbq’d.

By ten at night the soup cooled down, and the pot stuffed into the icebox (but that’s another story). By seven a.m. Friday out comes the pot with a good inch thick of fat congealed on top that you only get from fresh chickens. Christmas holiday music was playing on the radio only interrupted with news about the Korean War or the Cold War with Russia.  A frying pan was making sizzling sounds by the time I made it down to the kitchen. Mom scooped off the fresh chicken fat plopping each yellowish schmaltzy spoonful into a fry pan smeared with Crisco before the advent of non-stick pots and pans. The crackling frying fat smelled fantastic and its sounds kept to the beat of the music.

Crisco was a cheap, white, Procter & Gamble vegetable shortening introduced in 1911. Its ingenious marketing tag proclaimed, the “Hebrew race has been waiting 4,000 years” for Crisco.  The frying fat separated into crunchy popcorn-like morsels now called grebenes. Mom mixed it with her fried onions, sprinkled with salt and pepper, to create the original comfort food.  Grebenes was hot and ready to eat.

Mom poured the grebenes from the frying pan into a large bowl lined with paper towels to absorb the grease; this was her risk management technique like grebenes was now cardiac disease safe. All this happened by eight a.m. before we left for school.  Breakfast of hot chocolate (from hot water not milk and non-dairy chocolate powder), grebenes, and fried fresh eggs readied this ten-years-old patrol boy to face winter at its worst.

Ok, the radio music. Live disc jockeys introduced songs naming the writers and performers, while loading vinyl records onto players. Jews loved the holiday season music because it was inspirational, and the writers often children of the Tribe: “Let It Snow,” “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “White Christmas,” and that one about Rudolf, though it was unlikely any Jew had seen a live reindeer. For Mom, the music was decorous, not religious, personifying freedom and the American spirit.

There were other songs too that stirred the emotional stewpot. Mom wondered how Judy Garland could not be Jewish? Ms. Garland is now buried in the Beth Olam section of a Los Angeles cemetery reserved for Jewish people. Several seemingly reliable pundits tell the rest of the story. In A Journey into the Holocaust, 

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is about Jewish survival and founding of Israel. Lyrics by Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg), who also wrote April in Paris and Brother Can You Spare a Dime, was born to Russian Jewish immigrants. Yip grew up in a Yiddish speaking, Orthodox Jewish home in New York.

Harold Arlen (Hyman Arluck), a cantor's son, wrote the score. “The two men reached deep into their immigrant Jewish consciousness - framed by the pogroms of the past and the Holocaust about to happen - and wrote an unforgettable melody set to near prophetic words.” Read the lyrics in a Jewish context. They are not about wizards of Oz, but Jewish survival.

photo by Laura Ben David

Somewhere over the rainbow, Way up high,

There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue,

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops

That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow, Bluebirds fly.

Birds fly over the rainbow.

Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can't I?

The Jews of Europe and Russia looked to Heaven praying for centuries to escape pogroms, satrapy Czarist, and Christian oppression to fly beyond the rainbow. The 1938 song prophetically visualized the chimney tops of soon to be the hallmarks of Hell in concentration camps spewing the smoke and ashes of burning Jews flying beyond the rainbow.

Jews heard of a land "once in a lullaby," but it was not America. It was Israel. The lullaby is the story of the exodus from Egypt annually read the first night Passover. It is the most observed precept among Jews. A decade after the publication of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," the exile was over with the rebirth of the modern, defensible State of Israel.  Dreams Mom dared to dream really do come true.

Dr. Harold Goldmeier is a public speaker and writer teaching business and politics to international university students in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  His book Healthcare Insights: Better Care Better Business is available on Amazon.  His articles and reviews appear on Algemeiner, American Thinker, Arutz 7, Life in Israel, the Jerusalem Post, and more.  He was a research and teaching fellow at Harvard.

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