Velvel Zbarjer (1824, Zbarazh – 1884), birth name Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkrantz (a.k.a. Velvl Zbarjer , Zbarjur , Zbarzher , etc.), a Galician Jew , was a Brody singer . Following in the footsteps of Berl Broder , his "mini-melodramas in song" were precursors of Yiddish theater .
4-564: Born in Zbarazh , Galicia , he moved to Romania in 1845. According to Sol Liptzin , this move was occasioned by the offense his townspeople took at his " heresies and scoffing verses". He worked briefly as a schoolteacher in Botoşani , but soon became an itinerant singer, singing in the homes of wealthy Jews and in workers' cafes in Botoşani, Iaşi , Galaţi , and Piatra Neamț , always glad to sing for
8-737: A Hebrew - Yiddish booklet. As he grew older, he settled down. He lived in Vienna from 1878 to 1889, then lived out his last years in Istanbul , where he married for a second time, to a woman known as Malkele the Beautiful. This end-of-life romance became the subject, in 1937, of a cycle of twelve verse epistles by Itzik Manger . Writing in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906), Isidore Singer and Peter Wiernik describe him as "a real folk-poet" whose songs, two decades after his death were "still sung by
12-497: A glass of wine or a meal. An actor as much as a singer, he variously sang the praises of his own footloose life and made up topical songs about whatever might be going on in the towns he passed through; the latter often described injustices, or made fun of the Hasidic Jews , and occasionally got him tossed out of various towns. In 1865, having noticed that others were singing his songs without giving him credit, he published them in
16-1146: The Jewish masses of Galicia and southern Russia." His first published poem, written in Hebrew and based on a Talmudical parable, appeared in " Kokebe Yizhak ," xii. 102-103, Vienna , 1848. His next work, " Hazon la-Mo'ed ," a satire on the Hasidim and their rabbis, is also in Hebrew (Iaşi, 1855). His Yiddish songs were published with a Hebrew translation in four parts, under the collective name " Makkel No'am " (Vienna, 1865, and Lemberg—now Lviv —1869–78). A new edition in Roman characters appeared in Brăila , Romania, 1902 (see Ha-Meliẓ , v. 42, No. 125). His " Makkel Hobelim " (1869) and " Sifte Yeshenah " (1874) appeared in Przemyśl . Gustaf Hermann Dalman 's " Jüdisch-Deutsche Volkslieder aus Galizien und Russland ," pp. 29-42, 2d ed., Berlin , 1891 reproduces some of Velvel Zbarjer's songs. He
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