Over the Rainbow The Story of the Jews

'At first, it seemed like a place of utter desolation...

'..but then I saw them,

'the stylised angels' wings hovering over the ceiling.

'Out of the dust burst the colours - the blues of heaven,

'the reds of the kings of Judah, the rainbows coming through the glass.

'And then, amidst all this absence, I began to sense the presence,

'the cantor's chant, the murmuring banter,

'and there in the galleries were the women of Jewish Kosice

'and down below, the men in silks and hats.'

'In the spring of 1944, 15,700 Jews from Kosice -

'the entire community, were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz,

'but this wasn't a place that sat passively

'waiting for its death sentence.

'Before the Holocaust, Kosice,

'like thousands of Jewish towns and villages

'strung across Central and Eastern Europe, was alive,

'thriving, confident, noisy -

'the opera and the klezmer,

'the schnorrer beggars and the prosperous merchants,

'the pushcart pedlars and the street-corner revolutionaries.

'That this world somehow flourished

'despite all the pounding storms that would come its way

'is an escape act so epic

'that it counts as one of history's all-time redeeming miracles.

'Even when systematic annihilation overwhelmed the people,

'the world that had nourished them survived.

'This is the story about how this unique culture

'of faith and ferment, of poetry and music,

'of a search for deliverance from brutality and oppression,

'did not get pulverised by the hammer of history.

'It just changed its address -

'from Minsk to Manhattan, from the shtetl to Hollywood

'and ultimately from destruction to salvation.'

HE HOLDS NOTE

'Eastern Europe was once home to more than five million Jews,

'the largest population of Jews in the world.

'They were the Ashkenazim, Yiddish speakers who first came east

'from the valleys of Germany and France in search of refuge

'from persecutions and expulsions some time around the 13th century.

'They would find it in what was then

'the largest and most tolerant state in Europe -

'the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom.

'Pragmatists, not sentimentalists,

'the Polish kings asked the Jews

'to harvest their taxes,

'allowing the Jews

'not just to settle, but to prosper.

'But when, at the end of the 18th century,

'the Kingdom was carved up

'between Austria, Prussia

'and Russia, 'most Jews fell under Russian rule.

'For Russian merchants,

'this new Jewish population was unwanted competition.

'Russia's response was to expel

'the Jews from the major cities

'and confine them

'to the Pale of Settlement

'stretching from the Baltic

'to the Black Sea.

'Somewhere at the northern end of it,

'in the neck of these Lithuanian woods,

'were my mother's family - the Steinbergs.

'Like many Jews in the small towns of the Pale, called shtetls,

'they eked out a living as best they could, trading in illegal liquor,

'hustling in the markets and felling trees in the woods.'

You don't really think about the Jews as woodland people very much.

In fact, in Jewish tradition,

the woods are where demons lurked. Yet, somehow,

the Steinbergs and countless thousands of them

had to make a living

in what was called the lumber business.

The rich Jews got to ship it off to Hamburg and places west.

My lot would cut and stack and log and pile.

In our family, there were stories of the wolf attacks.

My mother used to talk about her great-uncle

showing off his wolf scars on his birthday.

The Lithuanian Jews, the Litvaks,

took a kind of pride in the harshness of their world.

They'd be kind of fierce and flinty.

I'll tell you how you can tell the difference,

the way Lithuanian Jews felt about themselves,

and Polish Jews to the south.

Lithuanian Jews never put sugar in their gefilte fish

the way the Poles did.

They only liked it...salt, tough, briny, kind of fish,

and they were fierce in their religion too,

but it wasn't, at least, however harsh, a solitary life.

Everything the villagers of the shtetls did, they did together.

They worked together, they sang together, they ate together,

they lived together, they died together.

The word "individualism", I think,

doesn't have a translation in Yiddish.

They were never individuals.

They were a cahal, they were a community.

'There's little left of the Jewish Lithuania the Steinbergs knew,

'but its ghosts have materialised in the most unlikely places.

'In 2001, someone reached into a sofa

'of this gloomy St Petersburg apartment

'and pulled out a miraculous treasure trove

'of over 350 hand-printed photographs of shtetl life

'taken between 1912 and 1914 by a group of Jewish ethnographers,

'led by the writer and socialist revolutionary Shimon Ansky.

'They had set off on what they called an expedition

'into the dark continent of the Pale

'to document everything they could find -

'the streets, the schools,

'the extraordinary wooden synagogues...

'..and the countless ways the Jews made their living.'

So many of the cliches, you know,

take a beating in these incredible pictures

and there is nothing in these shtetls that Jews aren't doing.

It's not true that they're just tailors and pedlars.

They're blacksmiths and they're bakers and they're weavers,

and this cobbler is quite fantastic.

He's not going to pose for the camera.

This is actually someone living,

he's not a folk caricature in any way,

but there is, I don't know, Yunkel the local grocer,

who's sitting there patiently on the bench

waiting for his soles to be repaired.

And here's, er... SIMON LAUGHS

..here's three incredibly dirt-encrusted, nebbishy types.

You know these, these are the bad uncles, really,

who've had a bit too much vodka

and there they all are, just sitting there, a bit curious.

This is a world that lives and breathes

and dances and sings, really.

And it's not sentimental - it's real.

'Shut out from the cities, from professions and universities,

'forbidden to own land,

'shtetl Jews looked inwards to their own culture for enrichment.

'To the outside world, they looked impoverished,

'but they had the treasure of their holy books

'bequeathed by countless generations of sages.

'From the kheyder schools,

'where the Hebrew teacher taught fidgeting children

'every word of the Torah and Talmud...

'..to the deep culture of self-help and charity, where everyone,

'from the rabbi to the old folk in their retirement home,

'had an allotted place. The shtetl was a wraparound world,

'a micro-state shaped to survive

'amidst the repressive policies of the Russian tsars.

'And perhaps one of the most enduring and painful memories

'of shtetl life

'was the forced conscription of Jewish boys as young as 12

'into the Russian Army for up to 25 years.

'It's hardly surprising, then, that there were times

'when the shackles would be cast off in a collective frenzy of joy.'

Times are hard in the shtetl.

The rabbi's on his last legs, nobody can make a living any more.

The Cossacks are round the corner.

What do we all need? We need a simcha!

And the best simcha of all is a hossnah, a wedding.

Weddings are the time when the whole shtetl comes together.

In these streets around here in the shtetl,

at the beginning would be the niggun -

the procession, slow, dignified -

the bride being led into the square by the two mothers,

two mothers, one on each side, under the chuppah they go.

Their friends say the seven blessings - the Sheva Brachot -

the groom stamps on the glass finally,

with the left or right foot, I can never remember which,

because in all weddings, in all simchas and all moments of joy,

there must be a moment of sorrow.

We must remember the destruction of the Temple,

sorrow and happiness - such a Jewish idea.

The crowd go crazy. "Mazel tov!" they shout.

The klezmorim, the cream of music from all around,

the skirling clarinet, the cimbal, the cimbalom,

the whirling fiddle, the drums.

Dancing starts, and maybe even if the rabbi is not so well,

he starts the dancing,

the men on one side, the women on the other.

Rasanka, mazel tov, and the rabbi himself dances

and dances with his eyes burning, because an old Jewish saying says,

"Every man is an instrument and his life is the melody."

'For many shtetl Jews, feeling the joy,

'letting it course through the body,

'wasn't something that should be reserved for a wedding.

'And that deep craving for an ecstatic Judaism

'sparked the astounding mass phenomenon of Hasidism.'

ALL SAY PRAYER TOGETHER

VOLUME INCREASES

'Unlike traditional Jewish Orthodoxy,

'that centred almost exclusively

'on the study of the Torah and the Talmud,

'Hasidism also urged Jews to commune with God directly

'through joyous bouts of singing and dancing

'and ecstatic trance-like prayer.

'That's what God wants.

'Turn somersaults before the Ark if the holy mood takes you.

'The idea was to melt the soul into the Shekinah,

'the divine radiance that flows through all earthly things.

'Hasidism has left an extraordinary imprint on the Jewish world,

'but to understand why it emerged

'one has to travel further into the Pale and back 300 years.

'The shtetl of Satanov in Ukraine was once deep Hasidic country.

'The number and sheer exuberance of the gravestones

'reveal the prosperity and vitality of the Jewish presence here.

'They burst with animal energy and Hasidic high spirits.

'Hares spin on a cosmic wheel,

'bears clamber for grapes on the tree of life,

'lions are rampant as Jewish lions must be.

'This community clearly didn't tremble in terror,

'but terror was never far away descending on Satanov,

'not just in the form of famine and plague,

'but rampaging Cossacks who singled out Jews for slaughter

'as the protected people of their hated enemy, the Polish king.

'That's why Satanov's Jews built their synagogue as a fortress.

'And if the horrors receded, the memories didn't

'and many Jews felt that the traditional leaders

'of the religious community,

'the severe masters of the Talmud,

'fell short of answering their spiritual and emotional needs.'

Into the breach stepped a group of itinerant mystics

called the Baal Shem, the Masters of the Name.

Whose name? Well, God's, of course!

And these were masters who, through secret knowledge,

could manipulate the letters of God's name to protect you from harm.

'Those secrets were derived from the ancient mystical tradition

'of the kabbalah, a doctrine of esoteric knowledge

'revealing profound truths about the nature of God and the universe.

'Kabbalistic tradition has it that the very substance of the world

'was made of letters, alef for air, shin - fire, mem - water

'and the most powerful and dangerous letters of all

'were the many holy names of God,

'which could be rearranged and chanted

'to perform miracles on Earth,

'bringing the infinite of the divine into the finite world of man.'

MAN SINGS

'It was an extraordinary moment in Jewish history,

'a moment when wonder-working rabbis,

'ascending into the heavenly courts of God

'to defend their people from harm,

'struck a profound chord with the people of the Pale

'and the most legendary of them all

'was the man who came to be known as the founder of Hasidism,

'the Baal Shem Tov - the Master of the Good Name.

'And over the next 100 years, his followers, known as tzaddiks,

'righteous men, became kings among Jews,

'creating courts with tribes of young followers,

'founding dynasties, some of which survive in Hasidism even today.'

Hasidism was so popular and so successful, I think,

because, essentially, it was a response against helplessness,

against the autocratic states that took Jews for cannon fodder

and every other kind of fodder, for that matter.

Against those states, Hasidism created states of faith,

complete with a righteous man - a prince, Messiah, scholar -

at its centre, the Tzaddik, and around him an entire spiritual army

and with him a great body of fabulous lore,

tales of wonder and healing and resurrection.

The Tzaddik prince could make barren fields fertile.

He could make the impotent virile.

He could communicate with the stars.

He was the possessor of secret mysteries

which would keep away demons.

Now, how could enlightened despots

and, for that matter, enlightened Jews in their city suits

compete with that?

ALL PRAY TOGETHER

'Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,

'Hasidism has returned to the land of its birth.

'In the Ukrainian town of Uman, 30,000 pilgrims visit the grave

'of one of the most charismatic tzaddiks, Rebbe Nachman of Breslev,

'on Rosh Hashanah every year, two centuries after his death.

'They come to ensure the Tzaddik's protection for the year ahead.

'Hasidism is still a cult of ecstatic communion,

'and it holds true to the principles of its birth.'

I think today it's very difficult to live as a religious Jew

without Hasidic way

because Hasidism teaches that you can find God

in anything. Even very bad things?

This is our purpose,

to reveal holiness in anything that we deal with -

money, business, food, intimacy.

'This is his mission in this world,

'and joy is that you know that you do the right thing'

so that you live the meaningful life.

'But not every Jew fell into the redemptive raptures

'of Hasidic prayer.

'If you craved more than ecstatic visions,

'if you had a restless Jewish mind and even more restless feet,

'then the world of the shtetl could bring on attacks of claustrophobia

'and there at the very bottom of the Pale

'facing the Black Sea was one place,

'a port city with eyes open to the world,

'that drew those Jews like moths to a flame.

'Its name was Odessa...

'..a city of grand boulevards and brothels, of theatres

'and progressive schools that taught Jewish boys Russian,

'politics and mathematics.

'"The flames of hell burn seven miles around Odessa,"

'the rabbis warned.

'And it was soon full of modern Jews who loved that hellish heat -

'grain merchants and gangsters, tarts and klezmer fiddlers,

'poets and Jewish thinkers who hung out at cafes

'where they smoked and sang and read radical Russian literature.

'Here they'd ask themselves the big question -

'how to be Jewish in the modern world

'without resorting to Hasidic miracles in the sky.

'Two of them would make a profound impact on the world of the Jews.

'Moshe Leib Lilienblum was a religious runaway from Lithuania

'who'd turned his back on what he regarded

'as the stifling relic of Jewish Orthodoxy.

'His friend, Dr Leo Pinsker,

'was the son of an enlightened Hebrew teacher

'who'd been taught that Jews must live in the real world,

'not in their mystical version of it.

'And like a lot of their fast-talking crowd,

'they believed that if only Jews embraced revolutionary politics

'and joined forces with a downtrodden people,

'their Russian comrades, they could change the motherland

'and that surely would be enough to make a better life for the Jews.

'But the bitter truth was that even here, in Odessa,

'the Jews couldn't escape the shadow of violence.

'On the 13th of March, 1881,

'Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in St Petersburg

'by the Russian left-wing terrorist organisation

'Narodnaya Volya - The People's Will.

'One Jewish girl was amongst the plotters and, within the month,

'a tidal wave of pogroms, from the Russian word "to destroy",

'was unleashed across the Pale.

'They hit Odessa,

'Kirovograd, Kiev,

'then Yekaterinoslav and Kishinev,

'followed by attacks on hundreds

'of shtetls across the Pale.

'And in 1903, the most violent wave yet,

'Minsk, Simferopol and Odessa once again, for the sixth time.'

In the morning of November the 6th, 1905,

people all over Britain were reading this in their Guardian newspaper

as they ate their bacon and eggs.

"The events in the suburbs

"of Moldavanka, Slobodka and Bugaieoka last night

"were of a most terrible nature.

"Immense bands of ruffians accompanied by policemen

"invaded all the Jewish houses

"and mercilessly slaughtered the occupants.

"Men and women were barbarously felled and decapitated with axes.

"Children were torn limb from limb.

"The streets were littered with corpses hurled out of windows.

"The houses of murdered Jews were then systematically destroyed.

"In this way, the Jewish population of the district was wiped out."

The morning that the reporter visited the hospitals of Odessa,

there were at least 3,000 people in the emergency wards.

It was, by any standards of outrage, the most appalling atrocity

in the entire blood-stained history of the Russian pogroms.

'For many Jewish intellectuals,

'this was the moment that shocked them out of the complacency

'that they might ever attain equal rights in tsarist Russia.

'One of the illusions was that non-Jewish leftists

'would come to their defence,

'but they hadn't and this bitter lesson

'threw them in different directions.

'Some would rush even further into the arms of socialist revolution.

'Others, like Lilienblum and Pinsker,

'would acknowledge the death of those dreams.

'Having devoted their futures to Russia,

'they now founded the first Jewish nationalist organisation.

'They called it The Lovers Of Zion.'

After the terrifying pogrom here in Odessa,

Pinsker published a small booklet which I read as a child,

and it had an electrifying influence on me, called Autoemancipation.

In that booklet, Pinsker diagnosed -

and he was a doctor, remember -

Judeophobia as a kind of fear of ghosts.

The problem, he said, was that Jewish national existence

had died a long time ago, but Jews were still alive everywhere,

and people treated them as phantoms and you get neurotic about phantoms.

The only way to cure it, for Pinsker,

was not for Jews to be beholden to others,

to receive civil rights, like charity given to a beggar.

The issue was to seize a sense of your own national identity

to make it happen somewhere,

and make it happen with power and moral strength.

Thereupon was a momentous departure.

Momentous absolutely for Jews,

and, as I need hardly tell you,

incredibly momentous for the world.

'For the countless Jewish multitudes,

'there was, of course, another way out.

'Why wait for Zion when there was another promised land

'lying across the ocean?

'America.

'It was known in Yiddish as the "goldene medinah",

'the golden sanctuary and it had long been on the lips of the Pale.

'Letters from relatives who'd already made the trip

'told fables of a land of miracles

'and if that sounds like something straight out of Hasidism,

'well, then, it's no coincidence.

'Maybe this is where the Messiah might be,

'even if this Messiah would be called American democracy.

'And the tales weren't all tall.

'Earlier Jewish immigrants had gone west and struck gold.

'In America, Motl the tailor could become Levi Strauss of Levi's jeans.

'Pedlars could build banks.

'A Jew, Adolph Sutro,

'could even become the 24th mayor of San Francisco.

'All of them had the same story.

'Emigrating from provincial Germany in the 1850s,

'they'd peddled their way across America,

selling soap, polish and cloth,

'opening stores and investing wisely

'in the industries that built America -

'the steel works, the mines, the railroads and the skyscrapers.

'In uptown New York, the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue

'shows just how established and successful

'this wave of Jewish immigrants would become.

'This was, and still is,

'the headquarters of American Reform Judaism,

'progressive, English speaking,

'not sticklers for the minutiae of Talmudic laws,

'but proud, unapologetic Jews nonetheless.

'This is where many of those Jewish American names

'you might have heard of,

'the Wall Street bankers and industrialists,

'like the Schiffs, the Warburgs and the Guggenheims,

'could sit together with their wives

'in their fancy hats

'from Bergdorf's, Macy's and Bloomingdale's,

'their fellow congregants' stores.

'Here was the promise of Jews out in the world becoming something,

'astonishingly realised in glass and stone.'

Anyone coming into this place could be forgiven for thinking

that they'd arrived perhaps in a third temple in Jerusalem,

and if this wasn't actually Jerusalem,

it must have seemed pretty much like it.

This stupendous, glorious decoration -

marble, mosaic, soaring Romanesque columns -

all will have delivered an astonishing proclamation

of Jewish magnificence.

Remember where the Jews of New York had come from, and now, uptown,

they could lay claim to one of the most extraordinary buildings,

not just in New York, but in the whole of the United States.

'A couple of miles downtown,

'most of the new wave of Jewish immigrants

'pouring into New York Harbor

'ended up just streets away from the boat,

'in the mega shtetl of New York's Lower East Side.

'It's THE iconic landing place

'in the Jewish American story for a good reason.

'Of the two and a half million Jews

'arriving in America between the 1880s and the 1920s,

'more than 60% of them began their new lives here,

'stuffed into a patch of land just one and a half miles square.

'This lot were deeply different from the uptown Jews of Temple Emanu-El -

'proletarian, drenched in old world superstitions or radical politics

'and, worst of all, Yiddish.

'And in many ways, the new world

'was just a high rise version of the old one they'd left behind.

'Here too were the pushcart pedlars

'and the street corner revolutionaries.'

MEN SING

'Here too were Orthodox synagogues

'built in the Moorish styles of Eastern Europe,

'where star cantors were shipped in from Odessa,

'albeit now on $2,000 contracts.

'Welcome to America!'

SINGING CONTINUES

'But in the shove and jostle of city life,

'the authority of the rabbi

'was soon overtaken by the institutions of democratic America.

'In particular, the socialist newspaper the Daily Forward

'and a Jarmulowsky Bank,

described as the two handles of the Torah scroll

'holding the community up.'

By the standards of 1912, these two buildings were skyscrapers,

the tallest boys in the block, and they're very close to each other,

two big animals ideologically locking horns.

'They were built on the same street in the same year

'by two immigrants from the Pale.

'On one side was Abraham Cahan,

'a revolutionary socialist from Lithuania

'who turned the Forward

'into the most widely read Jewish newspaper in America.

'Like a secular tzaddik, he fought the battles of the poor in print

'and initiated them into the novelties of American life,

'like baseball and voting.

'On the other was Sender Jarmulowsky, a new world banker,

'but always a good Torah Jew.

'Not only did he encourage Jews to save,

'in order to get themselves out of the Lower East Side,

'he also provided reliable shipping tickets

'to those they'd left behind in the nightmare of the pogroms.

'And just to make sure his building was taller than Cahan's,

'Jarmulowsky added a 12-metre cupola to his roof -

'such an American story.'

Look, it's possible to think of these big boys,

the socialist and the banker,

as locked in a battle for control

of the Jewish future in the Lower East Side,

but I don't really think of it like that at all.

I think both of them essentially embodied

the old Jewish principle right out of Hasidic Europe - tzedakah -

benevolence or charity,

the loving kindness of your fellow neighbour,

planted in that other meaning of tzedakah - justice.

Both these tall, big boys were the embodiments of Jewish justice.

# And I found my inspiration

# On the East Side of New York City... #

'Justice, charity, the community -

'words that had come straight from the shtetl,

'hardly surprising in the world of the socialist newspaper,

'perhaps more so in the world of New York banking.

# All form a part

# Of my tenement symphony... #

'But what's even more surprising is how shtetl idealism

'would cling to the next generation of American Jews,

'who'd take it right into the brassy heart of American popular culture.

'Growing up in the pressure cooker

'of the Lower East Side was a group of Jewish boys

'who'd go on to create the music that all America would sing.'

There was Israel Baline, who became Irving Berlin, super patriot,

the composer of God Bless America.

There were the Gershowitz brothers, shortly to become the Gershwins,

who took the cool of the jazz age and injected romantic warmth in it.

And then there was someone some of you might not have heard of,

Isidore Hochberg, who became Yip Harburg.

Now Yip had something entirely different in mind

for his great song lyrics.

He wasn't interested so much in escaping from this world,

the world of the Lower East Side, as taking its passions and its concerns

right slap bang into the heart of American show business.

PIANO INTRO PLAYS

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr EY "Yip" Harburg.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Thank you all.

'Yip Harburg was born on the sixth floor of a walk-up on Allen Street

'to two Yiddish-speaking immigrants,

'Louis and Mary Hochberg from Minsk in the Pale.

'She was deeply Orthodox.

'He was a little bit less so,

'taking work in the sweatshops whenever it was on offer.

'Their grandson, Yip's son Ernie Harburg,

'still lives on the Lower East Side.'

They were all desperately poor.

They worked six days a week and then the mother used to work on Sundays.

I think she made, er...some kind of hats for people, all right?

And it was all work. You had to work all the time

and the parents spoke Yiddish.

They never spoke English, so Yip was the intermediary between them

and the outside world, no matter what it was -

the landlord, the postman, anything.

They had to get Yip to play the man of the house, see, right?

So, you know, he grew up pretty fast.

And the one thing that startled me a little bit was to know,

because it was an Orthodox, or, at least, a moderate Orthodox family,

that the father actually told the mother

that he was taking Yip to shul,

to the synagogue, and they wouldn't go there,

they went to the Rialto musicals along on Second Avenue there.

'It was a household immersed in the sweatshop socialism

'of the Lower East Side,

'which sent Jewish America into a fever of unrest

'in 1909 and 1910,

'when over 80,000, mostly Jewish, garment workers went on strike.'

The father was, er...read the socialist daily paper to them,

the Daily Forward, I think it was, every night, and read them poetry

and I think the left-wing leaning of the fathers

was handed down to the sons and the daughters.

'Desperate to get his parents out of the tenements,

'Yip gave up his dreams of becoming a songwriter

'and set up a company selling home appliances to New York housewives,

'which, by 1929, was worth a quarter of a million dollars.

'But then, on the 29th of October, 1929, came the Wall Street Crash,

'which brought his business and America to its knees.

'Four million unemployed almost overnight.

'The industries that had built America -

'railways, mines, steel plants -

'all put into what seemed like an eternal deep freeze.'

NEWSREEL FOOTAGE: When do we work?

There's nothing wrong with me.

I can still work, I'm OK.

'By 1932, the Great Depression

'had become the battleground for a new election.

'President Herbert Hoover

'versus Franklin Roosevelt,

'the Governor of New York,

'who put the blue collar working man

'at the heart of his campaign.'

ROOSEVELT: These unhappy times call for the building up of plans

that build from the bottom up and not from the top down,

that put their faith once more in the forgotten man

at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

'But if it was America's nightmare, it was Yip Harburg's salvation.

'Yip had written enough songs to land a job

'on a new satirical show on Broadway called Americana,

'which was to centre on Roosevelt's forgotten man.

'And it was with an unknown Tin Pan Alley composer,

'another Jew, Jay Gorney, that he wrote the song

'that would become the anthem of the Great Depression.

I didn't want a song to depress people.

I wanted to write a song

to make people think.

In other words, it isn't a hand-me-out...a hand-me-up song

of, "Give me a dime, I'm starving, I'm bitter."

It wasn't that kind of sentimentality.

# Once I built a railroad, made it run

# Made it race against time

# Once I built a railroad, now it's done

# Brother, can you spare a dime?

# Once I built a tower to the sun

# Brick and rivet and lime

# Once I built a tower, now it's done

# Brother, can you spare a dime? #

'The melody was based on a Yiddish lullaby

'that had been sung to Jay Gorney

'by his grandmother back in the Pale.

'And onto a song of suffering and hope

'Yip laid the poetry and passion

'of Lower East Side politics.'

The first line of their song runs,

"They used to tell me I was building a dream."

We all know who "they" are -

the fat cats who were surviving the slump - and what is this song doing?

Saying that American dream no longer survives?

You bet it was,

and it only got tougher still in Yip Harburg's lyrics.

'The song was a potted history of the American dream

'fallen into the ash can, a song about American heroes,

'the railway and construction worker,

'the veterans of World War I reduced to begging

'and it took two new Americans,

'two Jews immersed in the ideas of justice,

'to prick America's conscience.'

And above all, tragically, it's a dagger pointed at the heart

of what had become of buddydom, that deep American ideal of friendship.

"Don't you remember, I was your pal, buddy?"

For the first time, that word brother becomes,

"Buddy, can you spare a dime?"

# Say, don't you remember?

# They called me Al

# It was Al all the time

# Say, don't you remember

# I'm your pal?

# Buddy, can you spare a dime? #

PIANO CHORD PLAYS

It's not a bitter song, it's a man

who was proud of what he did.

Now, you would think the audience

out for a night out in Broadway would be horrified, be walking out.

They did nothing of the sort.

They stood every single night for an ovation,

cheered till they were hoarse.

Harburg and Gorney had not only written a song

that was an American history, they'd made American history.

The election was just a few weeks away.

Suddenly every crooner, Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee,

wanted to record this confrontational anthem

of the Great Depression.

The Republicans were terrified that it would elect Roosevelt

and attempted to ban it, and maybe it did.

He was swept to power.

Looking back on it, Jay Gorney said,

"That was the song of the American soul."

MAN SINGS

'Jewish soul, with its minor key melodies

'and plaintive but defiant vocals,

'finds its musical kin in that other great family of American song -

'Black soul music.'

SOUL SINGING

'This is Joshua Nelson, a Jewish African-American singer,

'who's married up "chazzanut", traditional Jewish cantorial music,

'with African-American spirituals in what he calls "kosher gospel",

'a fusion of kindred souls.'

So, Joshua, is there something about the structure of the music,

the sound of the music, the insides of the music,

which is common between Black and Jewish experience?

Kosher gospel music is experiencing that...

that shtetl experience in a way.

You know, when the old cantors would...

Nowadays, a lot of cantors,

the chazzanut, is not as intense as it used to be.

No, when I heard you sing it, it was absolutely electrifying.

Oh, thank you. It was like being in the 19th century.

And that's what soul is. Yeah.

Soul is the neshama -

it's the spirit inside of the body crying out from suffering.

Um, you take, for instance...

HE SINGS IN HEBREW

HE REPEATS THE LINE

HE REPEATS IT MORE SOULFULLY

..and, you know, it sounds very similar to... Yeah.

# When Israel was in Egypt's land

# Let my people go. #

Hebrew, English, but the same spirit, and it's something like,

I always wondered how African-Americans and Jews,

who lived two worlds apart,

wind up both in ghettos at some point in history,

the shtetl and the ghetto, and expressing themselves musically.

These are all songs that were about social action.

Yeah. It's very powerful

and I think it's not necessarily a Black or a Jewish thing.

I think it's a matter of humanity.

'What America had taught the Jews is that the dream that they could be

'both Jewish and part of the wider culture in which they lived,

'a dream that was impossible in the old world of Russia,

'did actually have a chance of working out.

'And not just working out.

'The success of their songs would take Yip,

'the Gershwins and Irving Berlin

'across America into the dream factory of Hollywood.

'Of all the American industries that the Jews had been involved in,

'this was the one that made the most powerful imprint on American life.

'In the 1930s, all the big studios had been created

'and were run by Jews -

'Paramount and 20th Century Fox...

'..Warner Brothers, run by Harry and Jack Warner.

'And the big daddy of them all, MGM,

'under the iron fist of Louis B Mayer.'

Those Jews had pretty much the same story to tell.

Their fathers, who'd been the immigrants

from the shtetls and Eastern Europe,

from the bad part of Germany,

had pretty much all been failures in the scrap metal business,

selling stuff off barrows on Hester and Delancey Street,

but their boys, their boys were hungry

for something bigger and more spectacular

and, very often, they took time off,

especially time off from Jewish observance,

to come to places like this, to vaudeville shows.

JAUNTY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Between the dog and pony acts and the busty sopranos

and the flat-footed comedians telling slightly off-colour jokes,

there they saw the future.

They saw little picture palace shorts,

news of the day, mini documentaries,

but sometimes little, tiny biopics.

And they saw how America would change through the movies.

'And it wasn't just about swashbuckling romances

'or making huge sums of money, though they'd certainly do that.

'They wanted the movies to be a school for working-class America,

'such a Jewish idea.

'They'd exalt it with history, with the noble epics of world literature,

'creating on screen an ideal America.'

No wonder, out of all the possible birth dates

that were claimed for Louis Mayer,

the one he chose was, of course, the 4th of July.

'In 1938, Louis Mayer would give Yip Harburg Hollywood's dream ticket -

'the job of lyricist on The Wizard Of Oz -

'a fantasy about munchkins and witches

'and a magical Utopian land in the sky,

'not too far removed from the Hasidic tales.

'This time, his composer was Harold Arlen,

'the son of a synagogue cantor from Buffalo

'who'd started his career in the vaudeville theatres

'of the Lower East Side.

'Together, they'd write the song

'that would come to define the golden age of Hollywood

'and which would win them the Oscar at the Academy Awards of 1940.'

To Harold Arlen and EY Harburg, for the year's best song,

Over The Rainbow from The Wizard Of Oz.

# Somewhere over the rainbow

# Way up high

# There's a land that I heard of... #

'It was a long way from the shtetl, or was it?

'For who could write this universal song of hope better

'than a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side?

'And what is Oz, other than America

'or any place where dreams of a better life really do come true?'

# And the dreams that you dare to dream

# Really do come true. #

It's amazing to think that the song which pretty much everybody believes

is the greatest movie song of all time almost never happened.

It wasn't in the book for The Wizard Of Oz.

The producers of the movie complained that it wasn't right

to come out of the voice of a little girl in Kansas,

but Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen believed in it passionately.

Why? Well, because it summed up all of the history

of Jewish yearning for deliverance from oppression.

All that back history of their own families,

but what they did was actually to channel

that specifically Jewish American sensibility

and marry it up with something authentically American -

the intense American faith in optimism - and, by doing that,

they made Somewhere Over The Rainbow a universal treasure.

'I wish the story could end there

'with the collective success of America's Jews

'and the dream world of Oz, but it didn't.

'Remember the date of that triumphant night at the Oscars?

'1940.

'What American Jews saw when they looked across the oceans

'at their old homelands

'were nationalisms inflamed by war

'that had grown ever more violently racist,

'and not just in Germany.

'And this was not good for the three million Jews who'd stayed behind.

'In the 1930s,

'the small town of Plunge

'in northern Lithuania, the land of my mother's family,

'was like any other shtetl community in what was once the Pale -

'half Jewish, half Lithuanian,

'and where life for the water carriers,

'merchants and Jewish grandmas

'still revolved around the old-world institutions

'of market and synagogue.

'But in 1941, the shtetl was engulfed in tragedy.

'Aged just 17, Jakovas was conscripted into the Red Army

'to fight the Nazis,

'which saved his life.

'But on his return to Plunge after the war,

'he found a shtetl emptied of Jews.

'His father, brother and grandfather all disappeared.'

How many...how many people were killed here, Jakovas?

'Jakovas is now the last Jew in Plunge.

'A carpenter, he's devoted his life to rebuilding its Jewish memory,

'carving a memorial in the woods

'and surrounding himself with the shtetl characters of his youth.'

'In the end, it wasn't the gas chambers of Auschwitz

'that killed the Jews of Plunge.

'The Holocaust had barely got into its stride by the summer of 1941.

'Instead, Plunge's Jews were rounded up

'and their wooden synagogues destroyed

'with the active participation

'of some of those who'd been the Jews' neighbours for generations.'

And as the grandchild of a Lithuanian Jewish family,

I need to tell you what happened.

What happened was this.

Those Jews who'd been rounded up were hermetically sealed

inside a synagogue -

locked up with no air, no water, no light for two weeks.

People died in their own filth. They were not even allowed

to throw the dead bodies of the old people, the children outside.

'When they were finally allowed out,

'they were forced to defile and burn the heart and soul of their faith,

'the Sefer Torah - the scrolls of the law -

'before being led into the forests where they had worked for centuries,

'but where they were now forced

'to dig their own mass graves before they were shot.'

So I suppose I should tell you...

..that the Jewish idea that the ethical spirit, that moral force

could vanquish physical force,

that the Shecinah, the divine presence fills the entire world,

came to an end in those stinking pits of broken bodies and horror.

But it didn't end.

It never does end.

It moves...elsewhere.

The Jews pick up their old, battered suitcases and find somewhere else

where there's a possibility of the decency

and the nobility of an ordinary life.

I remember something said by the Hasidic Rabbi, Shlomo of Karlin,

who said that the worst thing the evil urge can do

is to make us forget that men are all the sons of a king.

Even in a place like this, thinking of a time like that,

I wouldn't be Jewish if I didn't at least try and remember that.

YIP HARBURG: # Somewhere over the rainbow

# Bluebirds fly

# Birds fly over that rainbow

# Why then, oh, why can't I?

# If any little bird can fly beyond the rainbow

# Why, oh, why can't I? #