Yiddish performer sings love songs

A former Yiddish theater performer sang, reminiscenced and taught a little history during a 60-minute program at the Bloomfield Public Library titled, “While You’re Away: The Love Songs of WWII.”

Diane Cypkin, a professor at Pace and Hofstra universities, was accompanied by pianist Nina Panfilova during the Aug. 19 concert.

“Whenever anyone wants to do a beautiful song, they go back to the ‘40s,” Cypkin told her audience. “These songs were written by poets.”

She sang, among other pieces, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” and the tender, “La Vie En Rose.”

‘It’s the epitome of romance,” Cypkin said of this last song. “It’s in movies whenever you need romantic music.”

Cypkin created the program as a Valentine gift for Allied soldiers who liberated Europe and saved her family from the Nazis. Her family was from Lithuania; Cypkin was born soon after the war, in a displaced person’s camp, located in the American zone, in Munich. She spoke about herself several days later in an interview with this newspaper.

She said after the Nazis invaded Lithuania, in June 1941, 35,000 Jews were segregated into the Kovno ghetto, her mother among them. The people were used for forced labor, shipped to the Dachau concentration camp, killed outright or they miraculously survived.

In July 1944, with defeat inevitable, the Nazis set fire to the ghetto. The following month, the Russians liberated it. Kovno had been a former capital of Lithuania and a center of Jewish education and culture.

Of the few Jews that survived, and according to Cypkin that number was 90, her mother and brother, Louis, who had been born in the ghetto, were among them.

“Luckily, my mother’s three brothers had come to the ghetto,” Cypkin said. “And when the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground, they had built a bunker under a woodshed. They dug so far down, they hit water. They built a box for my mother and brother.”

That box saved 10 people, Cypkin said, all family members. After 30 days of fire, everything became very quiet.

“My mother went out of the bunker,” she said.

After hiding in darkness, Cypkin said her mother could barely see. But she made out the figure of a soldier wearing a Russian uniform. An ally! She knew the war was over.

“After the war, a lot of immigrants were let out of ghettos and concentration camps,” Cypkin said. “Those who wanted to go to America went to the American zone. But there was a quota to come to America.”

An immigrant also required a sponsor, someone already settled in the country who would vouch for them. Cypkin had four great-uncles living in America.

“I had a great-uncle in Brooklyn,” she said. “He had come in the ‘20s. My great-grandmother, the mother of my great-uncles, felt they had no future in Lithuania and
encouraged them to go to America. Lithuania was a very anti-Semetic country. In fact, they started killing Jews before the Germans.”

Her family arrived in America in 1949 having waited nearly three years. They settled in Brooklyn.

“My parents always loved musical theater,” she continued. “In Lithuania, they went to the Yiddish theater. The country had a vibrant Yiddish culture.”

Her father, who had been a dress manufacturer, wrote Yiddish lyrics to Russian melodies while in the displaced person’s camp. He also wrote plays for the camp. The plays did not survive, but Cypkin has done a concert of her father’s songs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. and has served as the Yiddish theater consultant for the Museum of the City of New York.

“Hitler destroyed Eastern European culture and it can’t be revived,” she said. “What Hitler did was like throwing a mirror on the ground and there are little shards. I do a lot of Yiddish shows. It’s like meeting relatives again.”

In the late ‘60s, she and her mother went to meet Jacob Jacobs, a Yiddish theater producer. Cypkin had been taking performance classes and her mother, speaking a pure, perfect Yiddish, asked Jacobs if he had a part for her daughter. A short time later, Jacobs called Cypkin.

“They were looking for an ingenue,” she said, “and that led to 25 years in the Yiddish theater. I was often the bride. There’s always a wedding in the Yiddish theater. I purchased all my rings in Woolworths and have them all lined up.”

What brings Cypkin to Bloomfield had its genesis in her research to become a full professor of communications at Pace University. Writing about America during World War II, she especially appreciated its songs of love, separation and remembrance.

‘I do things that mean something to me,” she said. “That’s what reaches an audience.”

The library will have its next free concert on Saturday, Sept. 30, at 2 pm. Argentine guitarist Carlos Pavan will perform.

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Daniel Jackovino

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