All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.the.Jews.4of5.Over.the.Rainbow.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

'At first, it seemed like a place
of utter desolation...

'..but then I saw them,

'the stylised angels' wings
hovering over the ceiling.

'Out of the dust burst the colours -
the blues of heaven,

'the reds of the kings of Judah, the
rainbows coming through the glass.

'And then, amidst all this absence,
I began to sense the presence,

'the cantor's chant,
the murmuring banter,

'and there in the galleries were
the women of Jewish Kosice

'and down below,
the men in silks and hats.'

'In the spring of 1944,
15,700 Jews from Kosice -

'the entire community, were sent
to their deaths in Auschwitz,

'but this wasn't a place
that sat passively

'waiting for its death sentence.

'Before the Holocaust, Kosice,

'like thousands of Jewish towns
and villages

'strung across Central
and Eastern Europe, was alive,

'thriving, confident, noisy -

'the opera and the klezmer,

'the schnorrer beggars
and the prosperous merchants,

'the pushcart pedlars and
the street-corner revolutionaries.

'That this world somehow
flourished

'despite all the pounding storms
that would come its way

'is an escape act so epic

'that it counts as one of history's
all-time redeeming miracles.

'Even when systematic annihilation
overwhelmed the people,

'the world that had nourished
them survived.

'This is the story about how
this unique culture

'of faith and ferment,
of poetry and music,

'of a search for deliverance
from brutality and oppression,

'did not get pulverised
by the hammer of history.

'It just changed its address -

'from Minsk to Manhattan,
from the shtetl to Hollywood

'and ultimately
from destruction to salvation.'

HE HOLDS NOTE

'Eastern Europe was once home
to more than five million Jews,

'the largest population
of Jews in the world.

'They were the Ashkenazim, Yiddish
speakers who first came east

'from the valleys of Germany
and France in search of refuge

'from persecutions and expulsions
some time around the 13th century.

'They would find it in what was then

'the largest and most tolerant
state in Europe -

'the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom.

'Pragmatists, not sentimentalists,

'the Polish kings asked the Jews

'to harvest their taxes,

'allowing the Jews

'not just to settle, but to prosper.

'But when, at the end
of the 18th century,

'the Kingdom was carved up

'between Austria, Prussia

'and Russia,
'most Jews fell under Russian rule.

'For Russian merchants,

'this new Jewish population
was unwanted competition.

'Russia's response was to expel

'the Jews from the major cities

'and confine them

'to the Pale of Settlement

'stretching from the Baltic

'to the Black Sea.

'Somewhere at the northern end
of it,

'in the neck
of these Lithuanian woods,

'were my mother's family -
the Steinbergs.

'Like many Jews in the small towns
of the Pale, called shtetls,

'they eked out a living as best they
could, trading in illegal liquor,

'hustling in the markets
and felling trees in the woods.'

You don't really think about the
Jews as woodland people very much.

In fact, in Jewish tradition,

the woods are where demons lurked.
Yet, somehow,

the Steinbergs and countless
thousands of them

had to make a living

in what was called
the lumber business.

The rich Jews got to ship it off
to Hamburg and places west.

My lot would cut and stack
and log and pile.

In our family, there were stories
of the wolf attacks.

My mother used
to talk about her great-uncle

showing off his wolf scars
on his birthday.

The Lithuanian Jews, the Litvaks,

took a kind of pride
in the harshness of their world.

They'd be kind of fierce and flinty.

I'll tell you how you can tell the
difference,

the way Lithuanian Jews
felt about themselves,

and Polish Jews to the south.

Lithuanian Jews never put sugar
in their gefilte fish

the way the Poles did.

They only liked it...salt,
tough, briny, kind of fish,

and they were fierce
in their religion too,

but it wasn't, at least,
however harsh, a solitary life.

Everything the villagers of the
shtetls did, they did together.

They worked together, they sang
together, they ate together,

they lived together,
they died together.

The word "individualism", I think,

doesn't have a translation
in Yiddish.

They were never individuals.

They were a cahal,
they were a community.

'There's little left of the Jewish
Lithuania the Steinbergs knew,

'but its ghosts have materialised
in the most unlikely places.

'In 2001, someone reached
into a sofa

'of this gloomy
St Petersburg apartment

'and pulled out a miraculous
treasure trove

'of over 350 hand-printed
photographs of shtetl life

'taken between 1912 and 1914 by
a group of Jewish ethnographers,

'led by the writer and socialist
revolutionary Shimon Ansky.

'They had set off on what
they called an expedition

'into the dark continent of the Pale

'to document everything
they could find -

'the streets, the schools,

'the extraordinary
wooden synagogues...

'..and the countless ways
the Jews made their living.'

So many of the cliches, you know,

take a beating
in these incredible pictures

and there is nothing in these
shtetls that Jews aren't doing.

It's not true that they're
just tailors and pedlars.

They're blacksmiths and they're
bakers and they're weavers,

and this cobbler is quite fantastic.

He's not going to pose
for the camera.

This is actually someone living,

he's not a folk caricature
in any way,

but there is, I don't know,
Yunkel the local grocer,

who's sitting there patiently
on the bench

waiting for his
soles to be repaired.

And here's, er...
SIMON LAUGHS

..here's three incredibly
dirt-encrusted, nebbishy types.

You know these, these are
the bad uncles, really,

who've had a bit too much vodka

and there they all are,
just sitting there, a bit curious.

This is a world that lives
and breathes

and dances and sings, really.

And it's not sentimental -
it's real.

'Shut out from the cities,
from professions and universities,

'forbidden to own land,

'shtetl Jews looked inwards
to their own culture for enrichment.

'To the outside world,
they looked impoverished,

'but they had the treasure
of their holy books

'bequeathed by countless
generations of sages.

'From the kheyder schools,

'where the Hebrew teacher
taught fidgeting children

'every word
of the Torah and Talmud...

'..to the deep culture of self-help
and charity, where everyone,

'from the rabbi to the old folk
in their retirement home,

'had an allotted place. The shtetl
was a wraparound world,

'a micro-state shaped to survive

'amidst the repressive
policies of the Russian tsars.

'And perhaps one of the most
enduring and painful memories

'of shtetl life

'was the forced conscription
of Jewish boys as young as 12

'into the Russian Army
for up to 25 years.

'It's hardly surprising, then,
that there were times

'when the shackles would be cast off
in a collective frenzy of joy.'

Times are hard in the shtetl.

The rabbi's on his last legs,
nobody can make a living any more.

The Cossacks are round the corner.

What do we all need?
We need a simcha!

And the best simcha of all
is a hossnah, a wedding.

Weddings are the time when
the whole shtetl comes together.

In these streets around here
in the shtetl,

at the beginning
would be the niggun -

the procession, slow, dignified -

the bride being led
into the square by the two mothers,

two mothers, one on each side,
under the chuppah they go.

Their friends say the seven
blessings - the Sheva Brachot -

the groom stamps
on the glass finally,

with the left or right foot,
I can never remember which,

because in all weddings, in all
simchas and all moments of joy,

there must be a moment of sorrow.

We must remember
the destruction of the Temple,

sorrow and happiness -
such a Jewish idea.

The crowd go crazy.
"Mazel tov!" they shout.

The klezmorim, the cream of music
from all around,

the skirling clarinet,
the cimbal, the cimbalom,

the whirling fiddle, the drums.

Dancing starts, and maybe
even if the rabbi is not so well,

he starts the dancing,

the men on one side,
the women on the other.

Rasanka, mazel tov,
and the rabbi himself dances

and dances with his eyes burning,
because an old Jewish saying says,

"Every man is an instrument
and his life is the melody."

'For many shtetl Jews,
feeling the joy,

'letting it course through the body,

'wasn't something that should be
reserved for a wedding.

'And that deep craving
for an ecstatic Judaism

'sparked the astounding
mass phenomenon of Hasidism.'

ALL SAY PRAYER TOGETHER

VOLUME INCREASES

'Unlike traditional
Jewish Orthodoxy,

'that centred almost exclusively

'on the study of the Torah
and the Talmud,

'Hasidism also urged Jews
to commune with God directly

'through joyous bouts of singing
and dancing

'and ecstatic trance-like prayer.

'That's what God wants.

'Turn somersaults before the Ark
if the holy mood takes you.

'The idea was to melt the soul
into the Shekinah,

'the divine radiance that flows
through all earthly things.

'Hasidism has left an extraordinary
imprint on the Jewish world,

'but to understand why it emerged

'one has to travel further
into the Pale and back 300 years.

'The shtetl of Satanov in Ukraine
was once deep Hasidic country.

'The number and sheer exuberance
of the gravestones

'reveal the prosperity and vitality
of the Jewish presence here.

'They burst with animal energy
and Hasidic high spirits.

'Hares spin on a cosmic wheel,

'bears clamber for grapes
on the tree of life,

'lions are rampant
as Jewish lions must be.

'This community clearly
didn't tremble in terror,

'but terror was never far away
descending on Satanov,

'not just in the form
of famine and plague,

'but rampaging Cossacks
who singled out Jews for slaughter

'as the protected people of their
hated enemy, the Polish king.

'That's why Satanov's Jews built
their synagogue as a fortress.

'And if the horrors receded,
the memories didn't

'and many Jews felt that
the traditional leaders

'of the religious community,

'the severe masters of the Talmud,

'fell short of answering their
spiritual and emotional needs.'

Into the breach stepped
a group of itinerant mystics

called the Baal Shem,
the Masters of the Name.

Whose name? Well, God's, of course!

And these were masters who,
through secret knowledge,

could manipulate the letters of
God's name to protect you from harm.

'Those secrets were derived from
the ancient mystical tradition

'of the kabbalah, a doctrine
of esoteric knowledge

'revealing profound truths about
the nature of God and the universe.

'Kabbalistic tradition has it that
the very substance of the world

'was made of letters, alef for air,
shin - fire, mem - water

'and the most powerful
and dangerous letters of all

'were the many holy names of God,

'which could be rearranged
and chanted

'to perform miracles on Earth,

'bringing the infinite of the divine
into the finite world of man.'

MAN SINGS

'It was an extraordinary
moment in Jewish history,

'a moment when wonder-working
rabbis,

'ascending into the heavenly courts
of God

'to defend their people from harm,

'struck a profound chord
with the people of the Pale

'and the most legendary of them all

'was the man who came to be known
as the founder of Hasidism,

'the Baal Shem Tov -
the Master of the Good Name.

'And over the next 100 years,
his followers, known as tzaddiks,

'righteous men,
became kings among Jews,

'creating courts with tribes
of young followers,

'founding dynasties, some of which
survive in Hasidism even today.'

Hasidism was so popular
and so successful, I think,

because, essentially, it was
a response against helplessness,

against the autocratic states that
took Jews for cannon fodder

and every other kind
of fodder, for that matter.

Against those states, Hasidism
created states of faith,

complete with a righteous man -
a prince, Messiah, scholar -

at its centre, the Tzaddik, and
around him an entire spiritual army

and with him
a great body of fabulous lore,

tales of wonder and healing
and resurrection.

The Tzaddik prince could make
barren fields fertile.

He could make the impotent virile.

He could communicate with the stars.

He was the possessor
of secret mysteries

which would keep away demons.

Now, how could enlightened despots

and, for that matter, enlightened
Jews in their city suits

compete with that?

ALL PRAY TOGETHER

'Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union,

'Hasidism has returned
to the land of its birth.

'In the Ukrainian town of Uman,
30,000 pilgrims visit the grave

'of one of the most charismatic
tzaddiks, Rebbe Nachman of Breslev,

'on Rosh Hashanah every year,
two centuries after his death.

'They come to ensure the Tzaddik's
protection for the year ahead.

'Hasidism is still
a cult of ecstatic communion,

'and it holds true
to the principles of its birth.'

I think today it's very difficult
to live as a religious Jew

without Hasidic way

because Hasidism teaches
that you can find God

in anything. Even very bad things?

This is our purpose,

to reveal holiness in anything
that we deal with -

money, business, food, intimacy.

'This is his mission in this world,

'and joy is that you know
that you do the right thing'

so that you live
the meaningful life.

'But not every Jew fell
into the redemptive raptures

'of Hasidic prayer.

'If you craved more than
ecstatic visions,

'if you had a restless Jewish mind
and even more restless feet,

'then the world of the shtetl could
bring on attacks of claustrophobia

'and there at the very bottom
of the Pale

'facing the Black Sea was one place,

'a port city with eyes open
to the world,

'that drew those Jews
like moths to a flame.

'Its name was Odessa...

'..a city of grand boulevards
and brothels, of theatres

'and progressive schools
that taught Jewish boys Russian,

'politics and mathematics.

'"The flames of hell burn seven
miles around Odessa,"

'the rabbis warned.

'And it was soon full of modern Jews
who loved that hellish heat -

'grain merchants and gangsters,
tarts and klezmer fiddlers,

'poets and Jewish thinkers
who hung out at cafes

'where they smoked and sang and read
radical Russian literature.

'Here they'd ask themselves
the big question -

'how to be Jewish
in the modern world

'without resorting to Hasidic
miracles in the sky.

'Two of them would make a profound
impact on the world of the Jews.

'Moshe Leib Lilienblum was
a religious runaway from Lithuania

'who'd turned his back
on what he regarded

'as the stifling relic
of Jewish Orthodoxy.

'His friend, Dr Leo Pinsker,

'was the son of an
enlightened Hebrew teacher

'who'd been taught that Jews must
live in the real world,

'not in their mystical version
of it.

'And like a lot of their
fast-talking crowd,

'they believed that if only Jews
embraced revolutionary politics

'and joined forces
with a downtrodden people,

'their Russian comrades,
they could change the motherland

'and that surely would be enough
to make a better life for the Jews.

'But the bitter truth was
that even here, in Odessa,

'the Jews couldn't escape
the shadow of violence.

'On the 13th of March, 1881,

'Tsar Alexander II was assassinated
in St Petersburg

'by the Russian left-wing
terrorist organisation

'Narodnaya Volya -
The People's Will.

'One Jewish girl was amongst the
plotters and, within the month,

'a tidal wave of pogroms, from the
Russian word "to destroy",

'was unleashed across the Pale.

'They hit Odessa,

'Kirovograd, Kiev,

'then Yekaterinoslav and Kishinev,

'followed by attacks on hundreds

'of shtetls across the Pale.

'And in 1903,
the most violent wave yet,

'Minsk, Simferopol and Odessa
once again, for the sixth time.'

In the morning
of November the 6th, 1905,

people all over Britain were reading
this in their Guardian newspaper

as they ate their bacon and eggs.

"The events in the suburbs

"of Moldavanka, Slobodka
and Bugaieoka last night

"were of a most terrible nature.

"Immense bands of ruffians
accompanied by policemen

"invaded all the Jewish houses

"and mercilessly slaughtered
the occupants.

"Men and women were barbarously
felled and decapitated with axes.

"Children were torn limb from limb.

"The streets were littered with
corpses hurled out of windows.

"The houses of murdered Jews were
then systematically destroyed.

"In this way, the Jewish population
of the district was wiped out."

The morning that the reporter
visited the hospitals of Odessa,

there were at least 3,000 people
in the emergency wards.

It was, by any standards of
outrage, the most appalling atrocity

in the entire blood-stained history
of the Russian pogroms.

'For many Jewish intellectuals,

'this was the moment that shocked
them out of the complacency

'that they might ever attain
equal rights in tsarist Russia.

'One of the illusions was that
non-Jewish leftists

'would come to their defence,

'but they hadn't
and this bitter lesson

'threw them in different directions.

'Some would rush even further into
the arms of socialist revolution.

'Others, like Lilienblum and
Pinsker,

'would acknowledge
the death of those dreams.

'Having devoted their futures
to Russia,

'they now founded the first
Jewish nationalist organisation.

'They called it The Lovers Of Zion.'

After the terrifying pogrom
here in Odessa,

Pinsker published a small
booklet which I read as a child,

and it had an electrifying influence
on me, called Autoemancipation.

In that booklet, Pinsker diagnosed -

and he was a doctor, remember -

Judeophobia as a kind of fear
of ghosts.

The problem, he said, was that
Jewish national existence

had died a long time ago, but Jews
were still alive everywhere,

and people treated them as phantoms
and you get neurotic about phantoms.

The only way to cure it,
for Pinsker,

was not for Jews to be beholden
to others,

to receive civil rights,
like charity given to a beggar.

The issue was to seize a sense
of your own national identity

to make it happen somewhere,

and make it happen with power
and moral strength.

Thereupon was
a momentous departure.

Momentous absolutely for Jews,

and, as I need hardly tell you,

incredibly momentous for the world.

'For the countless Jewish
multitudes,

'there was, of course,
another way out.

'Why wait for Zion when there
was another promised land

'lying across the ocean?

'America.

'It was known in Yiddish
as the "goldene medinah",

'the golden sanctuary and it had
long been on the lips of the Pale.

'Letters from relatives
who'd already made the trip

'told fables of a land of miracles

'and if that sounds like something
straight out of Hasidism,

'well, then, it's no coincidence.

'Maybe this is
where the Messiah might be,

'even if this Messiah would be
called American democracy.

'And the tales weren't all tall.

'Earlier Jewish immigrants had gone
west and struck gold.

'In America, Motl the tailor could
become Levi Strauss of Levi's jeans.

'Pedlars could build banks.

'A Jew, Adolph Sutro,

'could even become the 24th mayor
of San Francisco.

'All of them had the same story.

'Emigrating from provincial
Germany in the 1850s,

'they'd peddled their way
across America,

selling soap, polish and cloth,

'opening stores and investing wisely

'in the industries
that built America -

'the steel works, the mines,
the railroads and the skyscrapers.

'In uptown New York, the Temple
Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue

'shows just how established
and successful

'this wave of Jewish
immigrants would become.

'This was, and still is,

'the headquarters of American
Reform Judaism,

'progressive, English speaking,

'not sticklers for the minutiae
of Talmudic laws,

'but proud, unapologetic Jews
nonetheless.

'This is where many of those
Jewish American names

'you might have heard of,

'the Wall Street bankers
and industrialists,

'like the Schiffs, the Warburgs
and the Guggenheims,

'could sit together with their wives

'in their fancy hats

'from Bergdorf's, Macy's
and Bloomingdale's,

'their fellow congregants' stores.

'Here was the promise of Jews out
in the world becoming something,

'astonishingly realised
in glass and stone.'

Anyone coming into this place
could be forgiven for thinking

that they'd arrived perhaps
in a third temple in Jerusalem,

and if this wasn't actually
Jerusalem,

it must have
seemed pretty much like it.

This stupendous,
glorious decoration -

marble, mosaic,
soaring Romanesque columns -

all will have delivered
an astonishing proclamation

of Jewish magnificence.

Remember where the Jews of New York
had come from, and now, uptown,

they could lay claim to one of
the most extraordinary buildings,

not just in New York, but
in the whole of the United States.

'A couple of miles downtown,

'most of the new wave of Jewish
immigrants

'pouring into New York Harbor

'ended up just streets away
from the boat,

'in the mega shtetl of New York's
Lower East Side.

'It's THE iconic landing place

'in the Jewish American story
for a good reason.

'Of the two and a half million Jews

'arriving in America between
the 1880s and the 1920s,

'more than 60% of them began
their new lives here,

'stuffed into a patch of land
just one and a half miles square.

'This lot were deeply different from
the uptown Jews of Temple Emanu-El -

'proletarian, drenched in old world
superstitions or radical politics

'and, worst of all, Yiddish.

'And in many ways, the new world

'was just a high rise version of the
old one they'd left behind.

'Here too were the pushcart pedlars

'and the street corner
revolutionaries.'

MEN SING

'Here too were Orthodox synagogues

'built in the Moorish styles
of Eastern Europe,

'where star cantors were shipped in
from Odessa,

'albeit now on $2,000 contracts.

'Welcome to America!'

SINGING CONTINUES

'But in the shove and jostle of
city life,

'the authority of the rabbi

'was soon overtaken by the
institutions of democratic America.

'In particular, the socialist
newspaper the Daily Forward

'and a Jarmulowsky Bank,

described as the two handles
of the Torah scroll

'holding the community up.'

By the standards of 1912, these
two buildings were skyscrapers,

the tallest boys in the block, and
they're very close to each other,

two big animals
ideologically locking horns.

'They were built on the same
street in the same year

'by two immigrants from the Pale.

'On one side was Abraham Cahan,

'a revolutionary socialist
from Lithuania

'who turned the Forward

'into the most widely read Jewish
newspaper in America.

'Like a secular tzaddik, he fought
the battles of the poor in print

'and initiated them into
the novelties of American life,

'like baseball and voting.

'On the other was Sender
Jarmulowsky, a new world banker,

'but always a good Torah Jew.

'Not only did he encourage Jews
to save,

'in order to get themselves
out of the Lower East Side,

'he also provided reliable
shipping tickets

'to those they'd left behind
in the nightmare of the pogroms.

'And just to make sure his building
was taller than Cahan's,

'Jarmulowsky added a 12-metre cupola
to his roof -

'such an American story.'

Look, it's possible to think
of these big boys,

the socialist and the banker,

as locked in a battle for control

of the Jewish future
in the Lower East Side,

but I don't really think of it
like that at all.

I think both of them
essentially embodied

the old Jewish principle right out
of Hasidic Europe - tzedakah -

benevolence or charity,

the loving kindness
of your fellow neighbour,

planted in that other meaning
of tzedakah - justice.

Both these tall, big boys were
the embodiments of Jewish justice.

# And I found my inspiration

# On the East Side
of New York City... #

'Justice, charity, the community -

'words that had come
straight from the shtetl,

'hardly surprising in the world
of the socialist newspaper,

'perhaps more so
in the world of New York banking.

# All form a part

# Of my tenement symphony... #

'But what's even more surprising
is how shtetl idealism

'would cling to the next generation
of American Jews,

'who'd take it right into the brassy
heart of American popular culture.

'Growing up in the pressure cooker

'of the Lower East Side
was a group of Jewish boys

'who'd go on to create the music
that all America would sing.'

There was Israel Baline, who became
Irving Berlin, super patriot,

the composer of God Bless America.

There were the Gershowitz brothers,
shortly to become the Gershwins,

who took the cool of the jazz age
and injected romantic warmth in it.

And then there was someone some of
you might not have heard of,

Isidore Hochberg,
who became Yip Harburg.

Now Yip had something entirely
different in mind

for his great song lyrics.

He wasn't interested so much
in escaping from this world,

the world of the Lower East Side, as
taking its passions and its concerns

right slap bang into the heart
of American show business.

PIANO INTRO PLAYS

Ladies and gentlemen,
Mr EY "Yip" Harburg.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Thank you all.

'Yip Harburg was born on the sixth
floor of a walk-up on Allen Street

'to two Yiddish-speaking immigrants,

'Louis and Mary Hochberg
from Minsk in the Pale.

'She was deeply Orthodox.

'He was a little bit less so,

'taking work in the sweatshops
whenever it was on offer.

'Their grandson,
Yip's son Ernie Harburg,

'still lives
on the Lower East Side.'

They were all desperately poor.

They worked six days a week and then
the mother used to work on Sundays.

I think she made, er...some kind of
hats for people, all right?

And it was all work.
You had to work all the time

and the parents spoke Yiddish.

They never spoke English, so Yip was
the intermediary between them

and the outside world,
no matter what it was -

the landlord, the postman, anything.

They had to get Yip to play the man
of the house, see, right?

So, you know, he grew up pretty fast.

And the one thing that startled
me a little bit was to know,

because it was an Orthodox, or,
at least, a moderate Orthodox family,

that the father actually
told the mother

that he was taking Yip to shul,

to the synagogue,
and they wouldn't go there,

they went to the Rialto musicals
along on Second Avenue there.

'It was a household immersed
in the sweatshop socialism

'of the Lower East Side,

'which sent Jewish America
into a fever of unrest

'in 1909 and 1910,

'when over 80,000, mostly Jewish,
garment workers went on strike.'

The father was, er...read the
socialist daily paper to them,

the Daily Forward, I think it was,
every night, and read them poetry

and I think the left-wing
leaning of the fathers

was handed down to the sons
and the daughters.

'Desperate to get his parents
out of the tenements,

'Yip gave up his dreams
of becoming a songwriter

'and set up a company selling home
appliances to New York housewives,

'which, by 1929, was worth a quarter
of a million dollars.

'But then, on the 29th of October,
1929, came the Wall Street Crash,

'which brought his business
and America to its knees.

'Four million unemployed
almost overnight.

'The industries that had built
America -

'railways, mines, steel plants -

'all put into what seemed like
an eternal deep freeze.'

NEWSREEL FOOTAGE: When do we work?

There's nothing wrong with me.

I can still work, I'm OK.

'By 1932, the Great Depression

'had become the battleground
for a new election.

'President Herbert Hoover

'versus Franklin Roosevelt,

'the Governor of New York,

'who put the blue collar working man

'at the heart of his campaign.'

ROOSEVELT: These unhappy times call
for the building up of plans

that build from the bottom up
and not from the top down,

that put their faith once more
in the forgotten man

at the bottom of
the economic pyramid.

'But if it was America's nightmare,
it was Yip Harburg's salvation.

'Yip had written enough songs
to land a job

'on a new satirical show
on Broadway called Americana,

'which was to centre
on Roosevelt's forgotten man.

'And it was with an unknown
Tin Pan Alley composer,

'another Jew, Jay Gorney,
that he wrote the song

'that would become the anthem
of the Great Depression.

I didn't want a song
to depress people.

I wanted to write a song

to make people think.

In other words, it isn't
a hand-me-out...a hand-me-up song

of, "Give me a dime,
I'm starving, I'm bitter."

It wasn't that kind of
sentimentality.

# Once I built a railroad,
made it run

# Made it race against time

# Once I built a railroad,
now it's done

# Brother, can you spare a dime?

# Once I built a tower to the sun

# Brick and rivet and lime

# Once I built a tower,
now it's done

# Brother, can you spare a dime? #

'The melody was based
on a Yiddish lullaby

'that had been sung to Jay Gorney

'by his grandmother
back in the Pale.

'And onto a song of suffering
and hope

'Yip laid the poetry and passion

'of Lower East Side politics.'

The first line of their song runs,

"They used to tell me
I was building a dream."

We all know who "they" are -

the fat cats who were surviving the
slump - and what is this song doing?

Saying that American dream
no longer survives?

You bet it was,

and it only got tougher still
in Yip Harburg's lyrics.

'The song was a potted history
of the American dream

'fallen into the ash can,
a song about American heroes,

'the railway
and construction worker,

'the veterans of World War I
reduced to begging

'and it took two new Americans,

'two Jews immersed in the ideas
of justice,

'to prick America's conscience.'

And above all, tragically, it's
a dagger pointed at the heart

of what had become of buddydom, that
deep American ideal of friendship.

"Don't you remember,
I was your pal, buddy?"

For the first time,
that word brother becomes,

"Buddy, can you spare a dime?"

# Say, don't you remember?

# They called me Al

# It was Al all the time

# Say, don't you remember

# I'm your pal?

# Buddy, can you spare a dime? #

PIANO CHORD PLAYS

It's not a bitter
song, it's a man

who was proud of what he did.

Now, you would think the audience

out for a night out in Broadway
would be horrified, be walking out.

They did nothing of the sort.

They stood every single night
for an ovation,

cheered till they were hoarse.

Harburg and Gorney
had not only written a song

that was an American history,
they'd made American history.

The election was just
a few weeks away.

Suddenly every crooner,
Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee,

wanted to record
this confrontational anthem

of the Great Depression.

The Republicans were terrified
that it would elect Roosevelt

and attempted to ban it,
and maybe it did.

He was swept to power.

Looking back on it,
Jay Gorney said,

"That was the song
of the American soul."

MAN SINGS

'Jewish soul,
with its minor key melodies

'and plaintive but defiant vocals,

'finds its musical kin in that other
great family of American song -

'Black soul music.'

SOUL SINGING

'This is Joshua Nelson, a Jewish
African-American singer,

'who's married up "chazzanut",
traditional Jewish cantorial music,

'with African-American spirituals
in what he calls "kosher gospel",

'a fusion of kindred souls.'

So, Joshua, is there something
about the structure of the music,

the sound of the music,
the insides of the music,

which is common between Black
and Jewish experience?

Kosher gospel music is
experiencing that...

that shtetl experience in a way.

You know, when the old cantors
would...

Nowadays, a lot of cantors,

the chazzanut, is not as intense
as it used to be.

No, when I heard you sing it,
it was absolutely electrifying.

Oh, thank you. It was like being
in the 19th century.

And that's what soul is. Yeah.

Soul is the neshama -

it's the spirit inside of the body
crying out from suffering.

Um, you take, for instance...

HE SINGS IN HEBREW

HE REPEATS THE LINE

HE REPEATS IT MORE SOULFULLY

..and, you know, it sounds very
similar to... Yeah.

# When Israel was in Egypt's land

# Let my people go. #

Hebrew, English, but the same spirit,
and it's something like,

I always wondered how
African-Americans and Jews,

who lived two worlds apart,

wind up both in ghettos
at some point in history,

the shtetl and the ghetto, and
expressing themselves musically.

These are all songs
that were about social action.

Yeah. It's very powerful

and I think it's not necessarily
a Black or a Jewish thing.

I think it's a matter of humanity.

'What America had taught the Jews is
that the dream that they could be

'both Jewish and part of the wider
culture in which they lived,

'a dream that was impossible
in the old world of Russia,

'did actually have a chance
of working out.

'And not just working out.

'The success of their songs
would take Yip,

'the Gershwins and Irving Berlin

'across America into the dream
factory of Hollywood.

'Of all the American industries that
the Jews had been involved in,

'this was the one that made the most
powerful imprint on American life.

'In the 1930s, all the big studios
had been created

'and were run by Jews -

'Paramount and 20th Century Fox...

'..Warner Brothers,
run by Harry and Jack Warner.

'And the big daddy of them all,
MGM,

'under the iron fist
of Louis B Mayer.'

Those Jews had pretty much
the same story to tell.

Their fathers, who'd been
the immigrants

from the shtetls
and Eastern Europe,

from the bad part of Germany,

had pretty much all been failures
in the scrap metal business,

selling stuff off barrows
on Hester and Delancey Street,

but their boys, their boys
were hungry

for something bigger and more
spectacular

and, very often, they took time off,

especially time off
from Jewish observance,

to come to places like this,
to vaudeville shows.

JAUNTY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Between the dog and pony acts
and the busty sopranos

and the flat-footed comedians
telling slightly off-colour jokes,

there they saw the future.

They saw little
picture palace shorts,

news of the day, mini documentaries,

but sometimes little, tiny biopics.

And they saw how America would
change through the movies.

'And it wasn't just about
swashbuckling romances

'or making huge sums of money,
though they'd certainly do that.

'They wanted the movies to be
a school for working-class America,

'such a Jewish idea.

'They'd exalt it with history, with
the noble epics of world literature,

'creating on screen
an ideal America.'

No wonder, out of
all the possible birth dates

that were claimed for Louis Mayer,

the one he chose was,
of course, the 4th of July.

'In 1938, Louis Mayer would give Yip
Harburg Hollywood's dream ticket -

'the job of lyricist
on The Wizard Of Oz -

'a fantasy about munchkins
and witches

'and a magical Utopian land
in the sky,

'not too far removed
from the Hasidic tales.

'This time, his composer
was Harold Arlen,

'the son of a synagogue cantor
from Buffalo

'who'd started his career
in the vaudeville theatres

'of the Lower East Side.

'Together, they'd write the song

'that would come to define
the golden age of Hollywood

'and which would win them the Oscar
at the Academy Awards of 1940.'

To Harold Arlen and EY Harburg,
for the year's best song,

Over The Rainbow
from The Wizard Of Oz.

# Somewhere over the rainbow

# Way up high

# There's a land that I heard of... #

'It was a long way
from the shtetl, or was it?

'For who could write this universal
song of hope better

'than a Jewish boy
from the Lower East Side?

'And what is Oz, other than America

'or any place where dreams of
a better life really do come true?'

# And the dreams
that you dare to dream

# Really do come true. #

It's amazing to think that the song
which pretty much everybody believes

is the greatest movie song
of all time almost never happened.

It wasn't in the book
for The Wizard Of Oz.

The producers of the movie
complained that it wasn't right

to come out of the voice
of a little girl in Kansas,

but Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen
believed in it passionately.

Why? Well, because it
summed up all of the history

of Jewish yearning
for deliverance from oppression.

All that back history
of their own families,

but what they did was actually
to channel

that specifically Jewish
American sensibility

and marry it up with something
authentically American -

the intense American faith
in optimism - and, by doing that,

they made Somewhere Over The Rainbow
a universal treasure.

'I wish the story could end there

'with the collective success
of America's Jews

'and the dream world of Oz,
but it didn't.

'Remember the date of that
triumphant night at the Oscars?

'1940.

'What American Jews saw when they
looked across the oceans

'at their old homelands

'were nationalisms inflamed by war

'that had grown ever
more violently racist,

'and not just in Germany.

'And this was not good for the three
million Jews who'd stayed behind.

'In the 1930s,

'the small town of Plunge

'in northern Lithuania, the land
of my mother's family,

'was like any other shtetl community
in what was once the Pale -

'half Jewish, half Lithuanian,

'and where life
for the water carriers,

'merchants and Jewish grandmas

'still revolved around
the old-world institutions

'of market and synagogue.

'But in 1941, the shtetl
was engulfed in tragedy.

'Aged just 17, Jakovas was
conscripted into the Red Army

'to fight the Nazis,

'which saved his life.

'But on his return to Plunge
after the war,

'he found a shtetl emptied of Jews.

'His father, brother and grandfather
all disappeared.'

How many...how many people were
killed here, Jakovas?

'Jakovas is now the last Jew
in Plunge.

'A carpenter, he's devoted his life
to rebuilding its Jewish memory,

'carving a memorial in the woods

'and surrounding himself with
the shtetl characters of his youth.'

'In the end, it wasn't
the gas chambers of Auschwitz

'that killed the Jews of Plunge.

'The Holocaust had barely got into
its stride by the summer of 1941.

'Instead, Plunge's Jews
were rounded up

'and their wooden synagogues
destroyed

'with the active participation

'of some of those who'd been the
Jews' neighbours for generations.'

And as the grandchild
of a Lithuanian Jewish family,

I need to tell you what happened.

What happened was this.

Those Jews who'd been rounded up
were hermetically sealed

inside a synagogue -

locked up with no air,
no water, no light for two weeks.

People died in their own filth.
They were not even allowed

to throw the dead bodies of the old
people, the children outside.

'When they were finally
allowed out,

'they were forced to defile and burn
the heart and soul of their faith,

'the Sefer Torah -
the scrolls of the law -

'before being led into the forests
where they had worked for centuries,

'but where they were now forced

'to dig their own mass graves
before they were shot.'

So I suppose I should tell you...

..that the Jewish idea that the
ethical spirit, that moral force

could vanquish physical force,

that the Shecinah, the divine
presence fills the entire world,

came to an end in those stinking
pits of broken bodies and horror.

But it didn't end.

It never does end.

It moves...elsewhere.

The Jews pick up their old, battered
suitcases and find somewhere else

where there's a possibility
of the decency

and the nobility
of an ordinary life.

I remember something said by the
Hasidic Rabbi, Shlomo of Karlin,

who said that the worst thing
the evil urge can do

is to make us forget that men are
all the sons of a king.

Even in a place like this,
thinking of a time like that,

I wouldn't be Jewish if I didn't
at least try and remember that.

YIP HARBURG:
# Somewhere over the rainbow

# Bluebirds fly

# Birds fly over that rainbow

# Why then, oh, why can't I?

# If any little bird can fly
beyond the rainbow

# Why, oh, why can't I? #