Yiddish Folk Songs with Their Original Airs: Introduction

Born in Vilna in the Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Yehudah Leib Cahan moved in 1889 to Warsaw, where he was apprenticed to a watchmaker after attending heder. At this time, Cahan began collecting Yiddish folk music under the influence of Warsaw’s leading Yiddish writer and intellectual, Y. L. Peretz, who was coming to see Yiddish-language folk culture as the core of East European Jewish ethnic distinctiveness and the cornerstone for a modern but authentic Jewish national culture. In 1901, Cahan moved to London as a labor organizer, founding the Forverts Zionist labor union. In 1904, he immigrated to New York, where he published his two-volume Yidishe folkslider mit melodien and cofounded the Yiddish publishing house Di naye tsayt (The Modern Age). Combining careful folk-song and later folk-story collecting with far-reaching (and dubious) theories about a secular Yiddish-language counterculture reaching back to the medieval era, Cahan played an important role in Yiddishist scholarly institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of his research and writings were destroyed with the YIVO archives in Vilna, with the remaining material published posthumously, edited by Max Weinreich.