Dipped banana in smetana

So as soon as I saw that folk-punk Yiddishists Brivele had a new album out, the aptly named Cradle Songs, Grave Songs (2021), I bought it on the spot because any album that includes Tom Waits, Hirsh Glik, and Yiddish "Bread and Roses" could have been custom-designed for me even without the communal grieving of "Oyfn Ganikl" and the jingle for Barbasol, which means that inevitably I have spent the night falling down the totally unforeseen rabbit hole of "Shootin' with Ra-Ra-Rasputin." According to the liner notes:

This is a mash-up of "Rasputin" by Boney M. and a song that Hannah learned as "Shootin' with Rasputin" at Camp Thoreau-in-Vermont circa 1997, from which we have kept the dubious proxy Yiddish, dropped the Brooklyn accent, and replaced the last two verses (which as far as we can tell had already been folk-processed so many times that we are unsure of their original state). The song is also known as "The Palace of the Czar," and was probably written mid-twentieth century or earlier, judging by the HUAC reference in the final verse of at least one iteration of it. People on many an early-aughts internet forum have speculated as to the song's writer, hypothesizing such greats as Danny Kaye, Sylvia Fine, Bruce Adler, Gene Raskin, and Mel Tolkin. Based on an attribution in the playbill for the Broadway musical review Those Were The Days in 1990, we are tentatively postulating that "The Palace of the Czar" was written by Mel Tolkin. We haven't found a specific connection with Danny Kaye or Sylvia Fine, other than just doing similar work in the same era. The song was performed at the review by Bruce Adler, and the review's closing number and eponymous song was originally a Russian song, translated to English by Gene Raskin. We think this probably explains the confusion about whether Bruce Adler or Gene Raskin possibly wrote "The Palace of the Czar."

Glossing past the glitch that I always thought Raskin wrote new English lyrics to an extant Russian tune, "The Palace of the Czar" can be confirmed to have been written by Mel Tolkin, whose legendary career of stage and TV comedy included writing for Danny Kaye—and since Mudcat attests the song as far back as the 1940's, Kaye might well have performed it and his audience not unnaturally assumed that it had been written for him, like many of his most famous numbers, by his wife. Or he just attracted attributions for patter songs in rather the same way as Lincoln with inspirational quotes on the internet, which I would also believe. I'd love to get hold of Adler's recording just to check about a copyright date, but it's not as easy for me to drop by the library at Brandeis as it used to be. The thing that is actually driving me up the wall is that I've heard the song—the original, not Brivele's mash-update—and I have no idea where. (I've heard the Mudcat-cited penniless/Nicholas line, too, but let's face it: that gag is older than vaudeville. It just sounds like Kaye should have used it, right before he interrupted himself to never forget the time. My memory of whoever is saying it has a Lobachevsky accent.) It would simplify my life if the Limeliters had ever recorded it, but I am fairly confident I'd know it better if they had.

tl;dr, anyone who knows an obvious vector for this song that wasn't the generalized folk tradition, let me know. I'd be asking my grandparents if they were still alive. Also please admire Margalit Fox's obituary for Tolkin, which reads at times like one of its subject's routines: "In World War II, Mr. Tolkin served his country by playing the glockenspiel in the Canadian Army."