Jane Makes It Plain -- in Yiddish, Of Course

Khevre --

Just received an e-mail from Jane Peppler (I suspect a lot of you also got it), and there's a lot to chew on quite happily. First, she was the grand prize winner in the second annual "Der Idisher Idol" competition in Mexico City. (Who knew such a thing existed? Okay, a lot of Jews in Mexico City and the vicinity knew.)

She included a link to a presentation she recently gave at the Library of Congress, "Yiddish Songs of the Jazz Age," and noted that her collections of Yiddish songs with English subtitles now number over a hundred on-line videos in two locations, Yiddish Theater Songs and Yiddish Penny Songs.

I have to admit, though, that the news that pleased me most was the publication of Jane's new 382-page book,"American Yiddish Penny Songs by Morris Rund and Others," a compilation that includes facsimilies of some 200 Yiddish songsheet broadsides from 1895-1922. You can purchase the book as a PDF download for $7.00 here. You can also buy her book of Yiddish songs from Warsaw in the early 1930s and CDs she has recorded of some of the rarer material from these volumes at the same location. How could you go wrong with Mexico's own Yiddish Idol?