10.7

**Dead medium: The Aluminum Transcription Disk**

From paul_AT_harpers.org (Paul Tough), disay_AT_well.com (David Isay)

Hey there, Bruce. I received this press release (with a cassette tape) in the mail yesterday, and thought immediately of the list. The dead medium is the 16" aluminum Transcription Disk, but as you'll see, the story is a much about a dead cultural medium as a dead technological one.

Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 07:48:44 -0700 From: disay_AT_well.com To: paul_AT_harpers.org Subject: Re: hey

ON THE AIR: YIDDISH RADIO 1925-1955

A decade ago, ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik (credited with sparking the Klezmer music revival in the United States) tripped over a pile of 16" aluminum disks in a musty storage room in New York City. On the worn-away labels he could make out some writing: WEVD... WBNX... "Yiddish Melodies in Swing".. "Stuhmer's Pumpernickel Program"... "Bei Tate Memes Tish" ("Round the Family Table")..."Life is Funny with Harry Hirschfield, Sponsored by Edelstein's Tuxedo Brand Cheese"... In all, more than 100 discs. He paid $30 for the collection. The seller was thrilled.

Sapoznik tracked down an old Transcription Disc turntable and sat down to listen to his find. He put on the first disc. A clear, strong voice announced: "From atop the Loews State Theater Building, the B. Manischewitz Company, world's largest matzo bakers, happily present Yiddish Melodies in Swing..."

Fanfare. Drum rolls. Clarinets begin to swing. Two announcers continued:

"They do it to Eli Melekh!" "They do it to Reb Dovidl!" "They even do it to Yidl Mitn Fidl!" "Who does what to which?" "Yiddish Swing takes old Yiddish folk songs and finds the groove for them in merry modern rhythms.... The B. Manischewitz Company proudly presents Sam Medoff with the Yiddish Swing Orchestra... Hit it, maestro..." And the band launched into a raucous, swinging rendition of Dayenu.

"It was simply unbelievable. Unlike anything I'd ever heard," remembers Sapoznik. "I felt like I was being transported back in time to this real living moment in history == it was unreal. I was transfixed."

He was also hooked. Sapoznik has spent the past eight years searching for transcription discs of Yiddish radio shows [a transcription disc is the single 'air check' of a program used for archival purposes before the era of tape]. He's combed attics, flea markets == even dumpsters == in an attempt to rescue and preserve these remnants of Yiddish radio. "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?"

Over the years, Sapoznik has amassed the largest (and only) collection of Yiddish radio in the world == more than 500 hours of material. Rich, wonderful and irreplaceable material from this critical and tumultuous era in American Jewish history.

In its heyday in the 1930s, Yiddish radio flourished across America. Thirty stations in New York alone aired Jewish programming: advice shows, variety shows, man-on- the-street-interviews, news programs, music and game shows in both Yiddish and English. The programs in this collection afford us a snap-shot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s == the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land.

The radio rescued in the Sapoznik collection exists by pure chance == aluminum disks that survived WWII scrap metal drives and the grinding gauntlet of time. What's been rescued is random. There are more than five hours of DER YIDISHER FILOSOF ("THE JEWISH PHILOSOPHER") from the tiny Brooklyn station WFAB, and only 2 minutes of WEVD's THE FORWARD HOUR, the most important and popular Yiddish radio program ever. But what serendipity has preserved is magical == one-of-a-kind documentary evidence of the explosive and fertile collision of Yiddish and American culture in the 1930s == the sparks of which, in books movies and music, continue to rain down upon us to this day.

Listen to ON THE AIR and eavesdrop on this singular moment in American Jewish history.

Funding is requested for the production of ON THE AIR == 2 half-hour specials for broadcast on National Public Radio in 1997 [this undertaking will include a major oral history project involving veterans of Yiddish radio] produced by Peabody Award-winner David Isay and Henry Sapoznik. Funding is also requested for the preservation, storage and cataloging of the Sapoznik collection.

David Isay disay_AT_well.com Sound Portraits Productions, Inc. 230 East 12th St., Suite 9-H New York, NY 10003 (212) 353-2548