אַ ניקל פֿאַר זיי, אַ ניקל פֿאַר מיר
Apparently I can no longer re-toast myself a signature half pastrami, half corned beef sandwich from Mamaleh's without spending the rest of the evening singing the same-named hit from a 1917 American Yiddish musical. The Folksbiene never seems to have revived it and if the rest of the score was as catchy, they really should. (I am charmed that the composer clearly found the nickel conceit tempting enough to revisit in a later show, but that line quoted about the First Lady, didn't I just ask the twentieth century to stay where we left it?)
At the other end of the musical spectrum,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?
Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.
P.S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.
At the other end of the musical spectrum,
spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.
P.S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.
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I mean, with that much brandy, it's wasteful not to!
(It's a little weird for an American Jewish family to make a Christmas pudding. Mine has my entire life. It seems to have started with my grandmother, according to my mother "because of friendship and the war": my grandmother was writing back and forth with a British flyer, and then when she married he thought it would be more appropriate for her to write to his sister, and his sister and my grandmother became and remained lifelong friends; my mother stayed with them in 1968 when she was backpacking around Europe and the UK. She believes the Lees may have sent the original pudding mold which endured for decades before the inner coating peeled itself off distressingly onto the pudding one year. They were definitely the source of the biscuit tin of memorabilia from the coronation of the Queen. The connection was lost with the death of my grandmother: I don't know if there are descendants and the letters are unlikely to have survived. The pudding endures, even the one year it actually did wick up enough of the brandy to start to burn like a sort of citron-peeled spirit lamp on its own time.)
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