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Tunesmith the bardsyoutube3/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Although Woody was not Jewish, she said, he always struck her as having a yidishe neshome, a Jewish soul. Nora served up fresh coffee and homemade cookies, and Marjorie began to speak about her own childhood and her lifelong relation to Yiddishkeit. Lansky describes the occasion on which he went to collect the library from Marjorie and her daughter Nora:Īfter the boxes were safely loaded we sat down with Nora and Marjorie at the kitchen table. ![]() As the center’s founder, Aaron Lansky, recounts in his memoir, “Outwitting History,” Aliza Greenblatt’s library, donated by Marjorie, was the earliest major foundation of the project. I was also amazed to learn of Marjorie Guthrie’s own part in the establishment of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, now the country’s leading repository of Yiddish-language texts. Then there was Guthrie’s loving relationship with his mother-in-law, whom he called “Bubby Waitzman,” a friendship as much artistically based as it was familial, with their correspondence revealing sustained discussions on poetics and philosophy. With the atrocities of Peekskill still resonating in his head when he moved into Fred Trump’s Beach Haven complex the following year, Guthrie sought a united front of Jews and African Americans to battle against the housing project’s de facto color line. I read of his vision forged in the immediate wake of the anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-communist Peekskill Riots against Paul Robeson in 1949, which he had personally witnessed. I pored over his bitter writings on the Shoah, such as his excoriation of Ilsa Koch, the so-called “Beast of Buchenwald.” I learned of his contempt for Churchill and the British Empire in the context of the birth of the State of Israel, which he steadfastly championed. I had long enjoyed Guthrie’s many other songs as first recorded by the New York-based Klezmatics on their two albums, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah” and the Grammy-winning “Wonder Wheel.” But I discovered so much more in the archives, such as Guthrie’s conscious associations between the Jewish refugees from the Third Reich and the “Dust Bowl Refugees” whom he championed. I was already familiar with some of the Jewish-themed songs that Guthrie had recorded for his producer, Moses Asch (son of Sholem), in the late 1940s - songs like “The Many and the Few” and “Hanuka Dance.” I had already known that Guthrie’s second wife was the celebrated Martha Graham dancer, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, daughter of Aliza Waitzman Greenblatt, one of America’s most celebrated Yiddish-language poets. Guthrie’s opinions on the Trump empire, uttered from six decades beyond the grave (he died in 1967), would prove a major intervention in the presidential election of 2016.ĭuring this trip, I also discovered the extent of Guthrie’s involvement with Yiddishkeit and Jewish history and culture. During this trip, I discovered Guthrie’s irascible writings - song lyrics, essays, letters, free-verse poems - condemning the racist housing practices of his Brooklyn landlord in the 1950s, one Fred C. The materials I found there not only fed into the writing of two books on Guthrie, but they also revealed some of the least known and most surprising aspects of the Dust Bowl Balladeer’s biography and output. In the summer of 2014, on the strength of a BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship, I spent a glorious few weeks researching in the archives in the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. ![]() In honor of that illustrious date, we are repubilshing this story that touches on Guthrie’s Jewish history. ![]() Editor’s Note: Woody Guthrie was born on this day in 1912. ![]()
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