Turn the dial to 1330 (AM) or 97.9 (FM), and you are in the world of radio station WEVD, where you may hear Yiddish crooners singing “Tsumisht, Tsutumult, un Farkisheft,” rabbis preaching the good Jewish life, dramatic vignettes of Jewish problems, troubles, and joys, and recipes for the serious Jewish housewife. WEVD goes on all week, but, Ruth Glazer tells us, its Friday afternoons have a flavor all their own.

I am hoping one day to confound the Hooper people when they call me by telling them that I’m listening to WEVD. Of course, this will only be so if it is Friday. Friday and WEVD somehow belong together, for reasons that have nothing to do with radio and a great deal to do with housekeeping.

I was brought up to understand that there was only one way to keep a house: namely to take it apart, clean it piece by piece, and then put it together again. It was only in my later years that I discovered, with some surprise, the American, or scientific, way of keeping house: Monday, vacuuming; Tuesday, washing; Wednesday, ironing; Thursday, scrubbing. And Friday? . . . Indeed, what of Fridays? This is the point at which I stick. On Fridays I find myself thrust by some atavistic instinct back to the way a baalebosta keeps house. I tear it all apart and begin cleaning it piece by piece.

What a world of difference between a baalebosta and a housewife, that limp, passive creature droning through some scientific schedule. One might say “just a housewife,” but never “merely a baalebosta.” Her household is her kingdom; the pride she takes in the gleam of her faucets, in the cleanliness of her windows, in the polish of her furniture, in the good smell of good baking and cooking shows itself in her bearing. But to accomplish all this she needs rather stronger spiritual support than her slenderer sister. Hence, WEVD. And on Fridays, when things reach a crescendo with a real baalebosta, we have a correspondingly heightened mood on WEVD.

On Fridays, therefore, I listen to WEVD. I’m not sure whether what I like best is the programs or the commercials (although it takes an expert to distinguish them). Or maybe it is the atmosphere that binds us all together—one great working force being exhorted, urged, preached at, denounced, and, very occasionally, entertained as we move through the day, from the earliest and darkest stages—the stove dismantled and soaking in the kitchen sink, the beds stripped, the curtains down—to the last touches of late afternoon—polishing the candlesticks, skimming the fat off the now cool chicken soup, plumping up the sofa pillows (the baalebosta doesn’t care for foam rubber), and filling the fruit bowl in the living room.

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We might, perhaps, begin with the musical entertainment, and with WEVD’s chief vocal star, Seymour Rechzeit, who appears On at least two programs daily, once as “The Melody Box” and once as “The Jewish Folk Singer.” Rechzeit has the kind of light, slightly nasal tenor voice that ladies of a certain age find irresistible. It quivers, it trembles, it vibrates. In point of fact, it bleats. While his taste is hardly irreproachable—he has been known to attempt patriotic anthems à la George Jessel, and he grows very maudlin at times—his position as a kind of Yiddish Liberace has been unchallenged for the past fifteen years. Rechzeit’s great specialty, although not unique with him, is his trick of singing popular American songs in Yiddish, using recordings by famous orchestras as accompaniment. By now he has built up a considerable repertoire in this art form, including: “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” “Black Magic,” “Night and Day,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (that goes particularly nicely into Yiddish as “Tsumisht, Tsutumult, un Farkisheft”) and “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Just the other day I caught a husky-voiced young lady singing to an unmistakably familiar tune, “Veil ich hob lieb mein yingele un shoin.” This was a rendering easily recognizable from the music as “Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine.”

Unfortunately, however, Yiddish is not the language of romantic love, so that in attempting to follow the plot line of hit tunes, Rechzeit finds himself singing complicated, high-flown philosophic essays. Occasionally he just gives it all up and sings the refrain in English. One language collaboration that did come off with spectacular success was “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The words to the chorus are:

Trugt mich, trugt mich, m’lochim,
In Gan Eden firt mich arein.
(“Carry me, carry me, angels,
Into the Garden of Eden lead me on.”)

One of the most famous names to appear regularly is Abe Ellstein, a composer for the Yiddish theater, who conducts, with delicate irony, a program of “New Talent.” On one memorable program—not on a Friday as it happens—two candidates appeared. One, a young, and, if we believe Ellstein, beautiful girl trotted out that tired old war horse of Yiddish vaudeville, “Eli Eli.” Who can say how she sang it? Is it not enough that she chose it? The second candidate was a sixty-eight-year-old salesman of commercial refrigeration who had arrived in this country in 1906. In the banter exchanged before his offering, the old man referred to the fact that he had studied singing “noch in die haim,” a phrase I never fail to find touching. He also confessed himself to be a devotee of sports of all kinds including ice-skating—a confession which was not accorded the standing ovation it probably would have received on a network “Wake Up and Live” kind of program. His song was introduced somewhat quizzically by Ellstein, more or less as follows: “We will now hear how an old Jew who slides around on the ice sings ‘O Sole Mio’ in Russian.” And a rather remarkable performance it was.

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There are also any number of programs of recorded music of Jewish folk songs, Israeli songs, Jewish dance music, and orchestral music. In view of the vast quantity of sentimental trash, smutty and otherwise, that floods the current Yiddish stage and record market, WEVD maintains a remarkably high-toned and even high-minded atmosphere. This is perhaps best demonstrated by a commercial read over the air for a Yiddish play called Two Mamas. One of the selling points was that it was the sort of play that one could bring children to; that, in fact, it dealt with the dilemma first wrestled with by Solomon (and rather recently, I believe, by MGM) concerning which mother was the truer—she who had borne the child, or she who had raised it.

There is a stylistic integrity to the songs sung by Isa Kramer, Victor Chenken, Noah Nachbush, and Mark Olf (to name but a few of the excellent singers whose recordings are played over WEVD) that has practically vanished from Yiddish entertainment. Their songs are, I would guess, of turn-of-the-century, pre-World War I vintage. Some have almost achieved the status of folk music. Others were just simple popular songs to begin with and have not grown very much in anyone’s esteem since they were written. Their chief appeal today is in the pleasant nostalgic reverberations they evoke. (The kind of song I’m talking about might be compared with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”) Unhappily Yiddish is such a violent language that a singer’s emotional range is considerably more extravagant than it would be in English. And within this framework it is only to be expected that as he describes Rabbi Elimelech in his cups, Chenken will blubber, that Nachbush will reach heights of manic happiness in a celebration of Purim, and that Isa Kramer will sob her way through the last verse of a song about an old maid trying to get married.

It is when these old, popular songs are “rediscovered” that the trouble really begins, and all sense of proportion gets swept away. Instead of getting a song sung with a break in the voice delicately interpolated into the last stanza, we now have the same song sobbed from beginning to end through a rain of tears. One of the songs most frequently sinned against in this way is “Oif’n Pripetchik,” a song in which a ghetto child learning his letters is reminded of the hard life that he has been born into as a Jew in exile and is urged to take comfort from the reading of his Bible. It has a sweet little refrain imitating the child chanting his letters, “Kametz-alef, O, kametz-bes, bo,” which for some reason has American Jewish singers hypnotized. “Oif’n Pripetchik” is generally presented with heavy meaningfulness as an apotheosis of both Jewish thought and educational technique. And since Anglo-Jewish singers are even worse historians than they are artists, they make peculiar mistakes in their indiscriminate sentimentalization over the past. Polemical songs especially have a way of outliving their original purpose. One of these is a song written to mock the slavishness of the great courts of followers around the Hasidic rabbis. In this song, the followers are depicted as not only imitating everything their rabbi does, but also, in their enthusiasm, going him one better. If he walks, they jump. If he eats, they gobble. If he is silent, they are doubly so. If he sleeps, they snore, and, finally, if he swims, they drown themselves. I have heard this song piously introduced as portraying the touching devotion of the Hasidim to their rabbis.

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Even worse than the interpreters are the Anglo-Jewish composers and arrangers. It is a tribute to WEVD that very little of this sort of music is played for its listeners. Occasionally we do hear the mawkish ballads, sung almost exclusively by American-born Jews as deliberate tear-jerkers. One, which I heard over WEVD, is called “Ich Benk Ahaim” (“I Long for Home”). Now, as we saw in the quotation from our refrigerator salesman, “home” to the first generation always means the old country, the particular village or city from which they came. This sentiment used to be exploited cheerfully enough in the song “Mein Shtetele Belz” which even invaded the juke-box circuit for a while. But “Ich Benk Ahaim” isn’t cheerful. It sets out to capture its audience by pinioning it with its own very simple-hearted memories. “I Long for Home,” moans the fresh-faced girl, “I long for my childhood years.” This, to an organ accompaniment evoking a cantorial melody, is almost more than mortal flesh can endure. But we can hope it will not have any permanent future. As soon as American Jews have recovered some balance following their present headlong rush into “things Jewish,” they cannot fail to reject these songs.

Much harder to eradicate will be the products with intellectual pretensions, like an ugly work I heard twice in two weeks over WEVD called “What Is Torah?” done in a Norman Corwin-Ballad-for-Americans style. “What is Torah?” a voice asks. “It is,” replies the narrator against a musical background, “a small room, a boy singing” [the boy is singing the refrain from “Oifn Pripetchik”], the land, mother earth, the triumphant song of exiles.” “What is Torah?” persists the voice. “It is,” replies the narrator, “Theodor Herzl, the Zionist Congress, Industry, Halutziut.” “What is Torah?” asks the voice again. “It is Israel’s gift to humanity, it is F.D.R. saying ‘All men are equal in the sight of God’ [to the musical accompaniment of “America the Beautiful” ], it is an ethical ideal.” I submit that this is senseless humbug, in a style that has held ad writers in some kind of vise since Carl Sandburg unwisely wrote “The People Yes.” Only the other day my eye was caught by a glossy bit of advertising in which we were asked “What is North Carolina?” We were then answered, this time in words and pictures—it is its rivers and harbors, a small boy going to school down a sunlit road, etc., etc. This kind of logic of definition would lead us by the construction of a very simple syllogism to the inescapable conclusion that Torah is North Carolina.

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All of this is fitted into the interstices of the main structure of the programming. On Fridays the rabbis, the orphans, the needy yeshiva students, the poor relatives in Israel, the aged, the blind, the sick, the halt, the lame, but not the heathen, all of these or their representatives appear at the microphones of WEVD. On the one hand there are the appeals for outright gifts to the yeshivas, old age homes, and other institutions. On the other hand, there are programs which sound like appeals for charity, but are actually appeals for business from food and appliance companies exporting to Israel.

One such program consisted of an interview with Mr. So-and-So who also happened to own an appliance export business on the East Side. Mr. So-and-So had just returned from Israel and this was his first appearance before the microphones since his return.

Announcer: Mr. So-and-So, how would you describe your impression of conditions in Israel as you found them?

Mr. So-and-So: Mr. Announcer, I am, naturally, very glad to give WEVD listeners the benefit of my fresh impressions, since, as you know, I have just returned. As you can well imagine, the spirit of our brethren in Israel is splendid. Their lot is hard and bitter, but they never falter. Despite the many daily difficulties that stand in the way of their accomplishing the great tasks which are set before them, and which must and shall be accomplished with the help of God, they never slacken in their perseverance and one can only admire their courage and strength of heart.

Announcer: Thank you for your fascinating personal report on life in Israel today, Mr. So-and-So. And now, dear and honored radio listeners, if you want to send a refrigerator to your loved ones in Israel do not fail to go immediately to the store of Mr. So-and-So, where he will be happy personally to help you select the right refrigerator for your beloved relatives in Israel.

Another program features a wailing-voiced woman who intones a fluent and colorless Yiddish with a marked American accent. She sells food certificates for Israel by telling lugubrious traditional tales illuminating rather doubtfully the spiritual benefits of charity. Her speech is full of pious mouthings, assuring her listeners of eternal blessing if they take pity on their relatives who, while enjoying all the spiritual benefits of life in Israel, still require the physical sustenance of gift certificates bought from her sponsor.

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Having shaken loose from her, we are ready to take on the rabbis, both the weepers and the shouters. The weepers, appeal. The shouters, demand. Among the former we find the appeal for a home for ancient sages whose representative with tears in his voice describes the abandoned fate of these men who are dependent on charity, but whose prayers, by virtue of their great learning and piety, yet have extraordinary power. For a very nominal quid pro quo, prayers will be said in whatever name is stipulated by the donor.¹ Another—this time a rabbi representing a yeshiva in the Bronx—describes the great need for the young students to have a one-week vacation during the summer and lyrically portrays how they would spend their time at camp not idly playing ball, but rather gaining strength through the fresh air to carry on their studies “on green grass in the shade of trees.” Each of these appeals is concluded with a listing of names of those who have responded to earlier appeals, accompanied by salutes such as: “Congratulations on the engagement of your daughter. You see you had no need to fear”; or, “Many thanks, Mr. Rosenfeld, and our prayers for the complete recovery of your dear wife”; or “Best wishes on the birth of your grandchild.”

The shouters begin by a vigorous attack on their audience, and on Friday, in particular, we listeners take a great deal of abuse for not being sufficiently diligent in observing the Sabbath, for not urging our friends, neighbors, and tradesmen to observe, and occasionally we are reminded how a dereliction in this particular duty lays at our door the possible break-up of our homes. Most of these exhortations conclude with a curt: “Candle blessing tonight: 6:35.” It will happen, sometimes, that a rival will say 6:36 or even 6:34, an act of mischievous carelessness very upsetting to the punctilious baalebosta.

We are used to being upbraided about our inadequate observance of the Sabbath. Occasionally someone—although there are not many who dare—will upbraid us about our observances of kashrut. This, for complicated reasons, is always a sore point with the baalebosta, and a man had best be on firm ground lest he arouse his listeners’ hostility. But no corner of modern life has escaped the acute observation of our radio rabbis, as the following incident attests. During the fight which had been raging in the Jewish community over kosher vs. non-kosher kitchens in its hospitals, one man argued that when a Jewish woman goes to a hospital to have a child and then thoughtlessly eats non-kosher food, not only is she committing a sin herself, but, if she nurses the child, she is at the same time polluting an innocent babe. Therefore Jewish women were urged to understand what they were doing, and when choosing their hospital to make certain they would be assured of kosher food. I have, since, often meditated on the bloody wrangles between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law that must inevitably have followed this piece of news.

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The most vigorous lecturer I have yet heard is. a rabbi who is a representative of a movement that he calls Anti-Shmad (“Anti-Conversion”). One Friday, shortly after Mother’s Day, he took as his theme the contrast between mothers of former times and the mothers of today, and devoted his sermon to the story of a poor widow who lived in the Russian Pale with an only child, a son of seven years. She lives in fear that her son will be snatched by kidnappers who will enroll him in the Czar’s service for twenty-five years and force him to renounce his religion. Then, one day, she sees the Czar’s agents enter her town for their annual recruitment. She hits on the desperate scheme of faking the death of her son by laying him out, covering him with a black cloth, lighting black candles, etc. But the agents are not so easily taken in by these mournful trappings, and lift the cloth to see if the child is breathing. Then they stick hot needles into the soles of his feet. Yankele does not stir. The agents depart satisfied and the mother discovers that Yankele is indeed dead. The style in which the narrator developed his theme was spine-chilling to anyone used to the cadences of English or American oratory. As he told the story, his voice would soar up to the emotional climaxes, until finally, unable to be contained within the bounds of even heightened speech, it would break into the chant of the magid. Then, at the very climax of the episode, he would break off and begin the next episode in the spoken inflection. Slowly the tension would mount, and again the voice would break into the traditional melodic chant of the preachers. That it was both melodic and chanted does not mean that it was soft, but rather that it burned with a power that speech could not have. His moral, which came almost as the epilogue, was as ferocious as it was brief. “Better,” said he, “that there should be a dead Jew lying in a cemetery than a living Jew converted.”

It is this fierce certainty that is characteristic of the programs produced by the Orthodox groups. Another Orthodox program, sponsored by a parochial school, began with the reading of a letter from a listener who wrote that he has a son, raised with great care and indulgence, who is now attending college. Despite his many advantages, he behaves in a way that distresses his father; he is moody, restless, and generally dissatisfied. The father asks for help, or an explanation.

The answer is simple. The son is unhappy because he does not have the true quietude of spirit that rests upon those who study the Holy Word, like the students who attend the parochial school for which the honored doctor is now about to plead for funds.

Another positive personage, though less simple in his certainty, is the “Jewish Philosopher,” a five-day-a-week feature of WEVD. The Philosopher is a reader and answerer of advice-seeking letters. He begins his programs with the tolling of a bell, three times, and a portentous, “God help you, my beloved friends.” He reads his letters in a rich dramatic style, and often not without an audible tear. His problems are all the great classic and not-so-classic circumstantial problems that can be found in a large Jewish community: children vs. parents, man vs. wife, man vs. conscience. The Philosopher never fails to take sides in these matters and soundly berate at least one of the parties to the dispute before offering his advice. Unfortunately, there are cases whose solutions elude even the Jewish Philosopher and he will recommend that his honored correspondent take himself off to a psychiatrist. This is the kind of advice that is naturally very disappointing to the listener, because the structure of the questions and answers, in general, has the pattern of a suspense story where the answer gives the resolution: yes, the wife will leave the husband, the young lovers may marry, etc. But if the inquirer is sent off to a psychiatrist, who knows what can happen, and how many long years off? The resolution passes beyond the view of the listener. Most unsatisfying.

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About dramatic programs, I shall have to prove a poor reporter. Recently I have not been able to work up the passion in the serials that I once felt for the Sunday series on Christopher Columbus, which I followed with bated breath, episode by episode, for some two years. The peculiarly fascinating thing about this serial was the distinct impression carried away by at least this listener that Christopher Columbus was really a Jew and Isabella his confidante and supporter in contrast to her worthless and anti-Semitic husband. The serials today, both daily and Sunday, are of the hair-pulling, shriek-and-moan variety, dealing with wayward daughters and errant sons, whose deeds we are left to mourn over in the company of an all too voluble assortment of relatives and hangers-on.

One of the best features of WEVD programming is its news and news commentary. The news is summarized straight at frequent intervals during the day and the interests of the commentators are by no means parochial. The news is another area where the high-mindedness of WEVD shows itself. There are no reports of murders, rapes, burglaries, or of crime in general. This information is confined to the women’s programs as a feature. And I have yet, even at the height of the season, to hear a single baseball score offered over the station. For the WEVD listener, the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Rose Bowl, the four-minute mile are all strange figments of the imagination of the younger generation.

My favorite program on WEVD is a fifteen-minute program of readings from Sholom Aleichem heard five times a week. Ben Basenko has the gift of seeming not to read, but rather to be actually telling the story extemporaneously, a great virtue with Sholom Aleichem, so that we proceed, imperceptibly making progress, day by day. With a cluck, a wheeze, a smack of the lips, a pause, and a sigh, Basenko brings to life the whole incredible gallery. On one program, when he decided (for perfectly ingenuous reasons, I’m sure) to play a recording of Howard Da Silva reading Sholom Aleichem in English translation, his efforts only resulted in exposing the impoverishment of the sentimentalized American style. Basenko’s own style brings us Sholom Aleichem with all the hardness and individuality that these portraits of ghetto life require.

WEVD probably has the most talented and versatile staff of announcers in all radio. Not only do the announcers announce; they are also program-makers, actors, commentators, script writers, interviewers, and even interviewees. Each of them also has a vividly distinct style of delivery as well as a favored area of specialization. Ben Basenko, who has an easy rolling voice (he would probably be a sensation as the relaxed cigarette smoker in a television commercial), seems to specialize in what we might call the secular programming. In addition to the Sholom Aleichem, he does a program called “Forward from Day to Day,” which seems to be extemporaneous readings from the daily Forward. There is a nice comfortable sound to the way he reads: the rustle of the large pages, the pause as he glances over a new page and finally decides where to read from it. He is also in demand for the lengthier commercials, and, although he is not as actively involved with the religious programs as another announcer, Zvi Scooler, he does them up very handsomely when he gets the chance. “Amen, Selah,” he will say as he steps to the microphone at the conclusion of a rabbi’s sermon.

Zvi Scooler has been famous for years as the Grammeister (“Rhyme Master”) of the “Forward Hour.” In this capacity he delivers an editorial on the news, drawing heavily on religious and Biblical allusions. As his title indicates, he speaks in rhymed couplets.

During the week Mr. Scooler reads and half acts the daily chapter from the serial, and very deftly handles the introductions for the many rabbis who appear before WEVD microphones. To fill in some sudden bald spots that temporarily appeared during the summer months, he read poetry by Bialik, acted as disk jockey for musical programs of a very high order (music by Bloch and Leonard Bernstein), and presented a program of readings from the Tsena U’reena (a simplified rendering in Yiddish of the first five books of the Bible, intended for women). These selections, as well as others from the Pirke Avoth (Sayings of the Fathers), were chanted in a beautiful and traditional style, with such simplicity that, listening, it was as if one were overhearing a scholar at his studies.

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The third in this galaxy of announcers, to introduce him by the least of his titles, is Nahum Stutchkoff. In 1950 Mr. Stutchkoff brought out, under the sponsorship of YIVO, a monumental 730-page Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language. For several years prior to this he conducted a program on Sunday mornings in which he would explain the origin and meaning of unfamiliar Yiddish words and phrases inquired about by his listeners. But his real gift is for setting down with electric brilliance intensely vivid vignettes of New York Jewish life. Every line rings with the solidity of truth and with the clarity of art; and the glare from the final likeness is sometimes too sharp to be borne. These talents are turned equally to the service of commercials and drama. These days the recipient of Stutchkoff’s major dramatic work is a hospital fund for whom he does a weekly story introduced, as one might expect, by three chords from an organ, followed by Stutchkoff saying lugubriously, “Tsores bei Leiten” (“People’s Troubles”). In these sketches the older generation speaks Yiddish, which in the context of the station, gives their characters depth and richness, and the younger generation speaks English, a particularly flat, nasal, and unappetizing brand of English, so that by contrast with the limpid speech of their elders they seem like incompetent, self-centered children. And, as it almost inevitably turns out, that is just what they are.

Not too long ago Stutchkoff had a sketch for Stuhmer’s pumpernickel which began with the sound of children playing ball and birds singing, all indicating a park locale. Then we hear the braying voice of Stutchkoff’s English-speaking young man. “What’s the matter, Uncle?” says he. “What are you doing sitting over here and eating your lunch all by yourself?” We grasp the situation immediately. This is the annual family group picnic. Everybody, including the bachelor uncle, whom nobody sees from one end of the year to the next, has been rounded up for it. The young man, obviously an organizer type, feels a little guilty about this and wants to make up for his year-round neglect with a bit of extra attention on this particular Sunday. Despite his good intentions, it is clear to us all that the uncle feels himself offended. What the exact offense is, is difficult to say. Perhaps he was not invited with sufficient ceremony. Or a nephew spoke carelessly to him. Or a great-nephew did not know his name. Or he was not specially escorted to a place at the picnic table. Whatever the reason, the situation leaves something to be desired. Feeling himself unwanted, he has retired to a shady spot removed a little from the chatterers and is preparing to have his own carefully prepared sandwiches, when he is accosted by this coarse-minded busybody. But Uncle (played by Stutchkoff) knows how to deal with these difficulties and decides to gloss over it casually and with a joke.

“What am I doing?” he says (in Yiddish, of course). “I’m sitting here quietly and having my lunch on Stuhmer’s pumpernickel.”

“But why can’t you sit with everybody? Why do you have to sit here all by yourself?” (The young man sometimes despairs at the difficulty of managing his family, especially the old ones with their inexplicable withdrawals and sulks.) Here Uncle fibs a little. “Oh,” he says, “last year when everyone saw my wonderful sandwiches on Stuhmer’s pumpernickel, they all grabbed them from me and I was left without anything to eat. But this year, I’ve decided to take the precaution of having my lunch in peace and quiet.”

The story bursts upon us. Uncle is finicky about his meals. More than that, he has strong notions on what is and what isn’t nourishing. Last year he came to the picnic and was revolted by the terrible concoctions he saw being fed to the children—frankfurters on roll, bologna sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Out of pity for their tender stomachs he had portioned out his own lunch among them—farmer cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel bread. But were the mothers grateful? The less said about it the better. The family reverberated with the scandal for half the following winter. “Who does he think he is,” his niece Zelda had said, “feeding my children behind my back!” Can we blame him if this year he had decided to avoid lunch altogether?

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Probably the greatest commercial ever written was the one sponsored by Alka-Seltzer for its WEVD audience. Network radio has finally caught up with it in the spot announcements for Schweppes soda. But some ten years ago over WEVD you could hear an announcer drop an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water and then a sound of energetic fizzing. “Her vie es szhuszhet un buszhet,” he would exclaim. “Azoi vet es szhuszhen un buszhen bei dir im bauch.” (“Listen to the way it fizzles and sizzles. This is how it sizzles and fizzles in your stomach.”) This is the kind of creative advertising that comes off best over WEVD. The commercials that translate from the English slogans somehow miss fire. “Drive out stubborn dirt,” for example, is rendered literally in Yiddish as: “Treib ois akshunisdike shmutz.” This strikes the ear as an oddly foreign concatenation of words. Compare that phrase with the power of “Kvel oon fun Vel” (“Rejoice with Vel”), using a verb normally reserved to describe the way a doting grandparent will look at a grandchild, which also contributes an interlingual pun. Then there is the scouring powder which trumpets forth a clarion call: “Beryas!!² Reinigt eier haim gicher vie a riche” (“Housewives! Clean your house quick as a flash.”) The Kraft Oil people also seem to have made a close study of their market and emerged with a commercial that starts, “When King Solomon said, ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ he could not have foreseen Kraft Oil.” Not to be outdone, during the period between Passover and Shavuoth when weddings are forbidden, Hellman’s Mayonnaise urged WEVD listeners as follows: “During this time when we can attend no weddings, the longing for romance can be satisfied by making Wedding Ring Salad”—a gelatinous combination of fruits and mayonnaise. (At this point I always felt that the Hellman’s staff had been ill-advised, for I have yet to see a berya who troubled herself with gelatin salads.)

Recipes are taken very seriously on WEVD and the women’s programs run by women do not, on the whole, dare to engage so weighty a subject. Rather, they deal lightly with women in the news, and try to keep the listeners up to some very minimal mark as women and housewives. One quarter-hour program, for example, dealt with how to apply lipstick and keep it on, and described the process as if the listener had never held a lipstick in her hand before this broadcast. During one September, just before the holidays, the housewives were exhorted to make an effort to see that their tables were festively decorated for the holiday season. It was suggested that tablecloths be used, and further that apples and honey be placed on the tables as appropriate to the New Year.

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And what, one might well ask, does all this have to do with Eugene V. Debs and that great free-thinking socialist newspaper of the Jewish masses—the Jewish Daily Forward? I leave it to the reader to consider the chain of events which have brought these elements into such an intimate companionship.

In 1927 the Social Democratic party founded the station and named it for Debs. After four years of operation this group found itself in a shaky financial condition and came to the Forward with the suggestion that the Forward buy it out. A survey conducted by the Forward showed that it would have to put between $150,000 and $175,000 into the station to operate it properly. Undismayed, the Forward seized this opportunity to possess yet another instrument in the service of the labor movement. A committee of twenty-five was appointed to operate the station, and for the first three years the Forward supplied the funds to cover the deficit. Now occupying two and a half floors in a modest but substantial building on West 46th Street, Station WEVD considers itself an independent enterprise, although its spiritual connection with the Forward has not been entirely severed. The “Forward Hour” is, and has been for years, the high point of WEVD’s broadcasting week. The Forward has also traveled a distance since 1927, so that independently of one another, the Forward and WEVD have maintained a parallel course. Today both interest themselves sympathetically in Zionist affairs, report religious news respectfully, and take up an enthusiastic defense and advocacy of the position of the Jew in America.

The manager of the station, Henry Greenfield, a former Forward ad man, still harbors a bust of Debs in his office, as well as a 1938 Stromberg-Carlson console over which he listens to WEVD programs. He estimates that some one-and-three-quarter million Jews are at home in Yiddish in the New York metropolitan area, and it is to this group, naturally, that WEVD directs its first attention.

Of the ninety-three hours a week that WEVD is on the air, fifty-three are in Yiddish, fourteen are divided among eight other foreign languages, and the remaining twenty-six are English-language programs of a public-service, general cultural nature, which are presented in the evening.

For the Jews, of course, the real WEVD exists during the working day between eight and four, before the strange sounds of Spanish maraccas begin to fill the air. And there is a seriousness and intensity with which the older generation listens, if a letter from one of their representatives to the Jewish Philosopher gives any clue to their temper. In this letter the writer, a grandmother, describes her differences with her daughter over the upbringing of her grandchild, and writes in conclusion, “Must I believe, as she tells me, that all the wisdom of present times is confined to the younger generation?” But here in the company of some very talented and charming gentlemen, the old lady is assured that not all the chips have been won by the other side.

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¹ Listeners are also reminded of the value of these prayers should they be preparing to undertake a journey or enter into new business ventures.

² In a paradigm in which baalebosta would be the comparative form, berya would be the superlative. Or the impact of this advertisment might be likened to a situation in which a field of dray horses was suddenly addressed as “Stallions!”

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