Berl Broder

Berl Broder (actually: Berl Margulies , named after his place of birth Brody in Galicia ; * 1815 ; † 1868 in Ploieşti ) was one of the first Jewish folk poets and traveling folk singers ( Badchanim ) and as such a direct forerunner of Yiddish theater .

Life

He came from a poor family and was known for his eloquence and wit in his earliest youth. In his songs, which he improvised in pubs and inns while on the road as a hard-drinking bristle dealer, he addresses the suffering of the simple, always disadvantaged Jewish people and thus became the singer of the "disinherited" and "disenfranchised".

Social motives dominate his texts. He remained completely untouched by the raging battles between Haskala and traditionalists, none of which penetrated his chants.

Berl Broder successfully crossed Galicia, Russia and Romania with other singers and jokers who soon joined him and who were collectively called "Broder singers" . The first Jewish folk singer society performed in these places, not unlike the troubadours or minstrels , Broder's songs as well as older Jewish folk songs. Broder himself had soon given up his travel trade and turned completely to the new profession, had become popular, and his songs became the folk good sung all over the Jewish alley.

The songs were hardly recorded in writing, so that much is lost; smaller collections appeared in Lemberg and Zhitomir in 1876 and in Warsaw in 1882 (the latter under the title Schire simra ).

Berl Broder, who died in Ploieşti in 1868, was one of the teachers of the Jewish folk singer Welwel Zbarzer, who clearly excelled in the literary quality of his poetry .

literature

• Nathan Michael Gelber : Berl Broder, a contribution to the history of Jewish folk singers. Vienna 1909.
• Berl Broder. In: Salman Reisen : Lekßikon fun der Yidischer literature un press. Warsaw 1914.
• Berl Margulies. In: Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography. Vol. IV, Orient Printer, Chernivtsi 1930.
• Berl Broder. In: Georg Herlitz, Bruno Kirschner (ed.): Jüdisches Lexikon . Vol. I, Jewish publishing house, Berlin 1927.
• L. Slutzky:  Margulies Berl. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 6, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1975, ISBN 3-7001-0128-7 , p. 85.
• Shlomo Pryzament: Los Cantores de Brody (Broder Zyngier) (= El Judaismo Polaco. Volume 151). Union Central Israelita Polaca, Buenos Aires 1960.
• Israil Bercovici : O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România. Bucharest 1998
• David G. Roskies: The Jewish Search for a Usable Past. Indiana University Press, 1999