Those Were the Days

From Russian to Yiddish by way of Paul McCartney

Readers of a certain age may remember the 1968 hit record “Those Were the Days”. Paul McCartney recorded the song with singer Mary Hopkin and released it on the brand new Beatles record label, Apple Records. It was a standout on all the top 40 rock stations with its thrilling, melancholic Russian melody and instrumentation, which is no surprise because it was originally a Russian song.

Gene Raskin, the composer of the English lyrics, had multiple rewarding careers but “Those Were the Days” made him rich. He was a successful folk troubador in Greenwich Village during the heyday of the 1960’s folk revival and he cut records and performed internationally. Paul McCartney heard the song and fell in love with it when Raskin was performing at the Blue Angel, a club in London.

The Russian composer of the melody, Boris Fomin, died in 1948 so he was not around to protest when Gene Raskin copyrighted the melody as his own along with his English lyrics. When “Those Were the Days” became an international hit, Raskin was set for life. The song was translated into multiple languages but it crossed paths with Yiddish thanks to a little-known folksinger named Teddi Schwartz.

It’s hard to find much information about Teddi Schwartz. She was born in Harlem in 1915 and learned Yiddish music from her father, who was a klezmer musician in Europe. She was active in the American folk music revival that baby boomers like to think began during their 1960’s adolescence but that actually began about 20 years earlier under the guidance of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, and she was well-situated in New York, the hub of the revival. But while she participated in collecting and preserving American folk song, she also began to translate it to Yiddish. She was a choral director at camps and JCC’s and her name crops up in the Ruth Rubin Archive, usually as the composer of translations. It seems that translation was the contribution she wanted to make.

Teddi had two claims to fame. One was her English translation of Arn Zeitlin’s “Dona, Dona” which she wrote with poet Arthur Kevess. The recording of “Dona, Dona” by Joan Baez was an international hit and numerous translations into other languages followed. “Those Were the Days” was her other hit. Her recording, which is posted below, is titled “Geven a tsayt” and there’s also another translation online titled “Farbay di teg”.

Unlike me, Teddi Schwartz was most likely a native Yiddish speaker. But I like to think that, like me, American music had a critical impact on her identity and she was driven to find Jewish elements and overlap in the music she loved. Her approach was to bring traditional American folksongs into Yiddish and to bring Yiddish folksong to English. But some of the songs she chose to translate don’t stand the test of time.

In 1970 Teddi released an album, Kumt arayn. The title track was a translation of the top 40 hit “Walk Right In”. “Geven a tsayt” was included on the album, along with an alef beyz song set to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, just like the English version. The rest of the cuts are an eclectic selection, chosen perhaps on the basis of what was easiest to translate, or maybe just because Teddi liked the song. Songs like “Gedalia” (Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey”), “Bashke from Paik” (“Sweet Betsy from Pike”) and “Frumke and Yosl” (“Franky and Johnny”) verge into Mickey Katz-type parodies, but they are saved by authentic-sounding American folk instrumentation. And “Alter Donald” (“Old MacDonald”) is a definite improvement on the original.

But it’s an open question whether translating American songs into Yiddish is a worthwhile way to promote Yiddish. And saddest of all, Kumt arayn includes a Yiddish/English version of “The Hukilau Song”, a ridiculous “Hawaiian” song that was first released in 1948.

Geven a tsayt