Jewlicious

My Yiddishe Mama

15 years ago
14 Comments
by ck
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I’ve been known to give Ashkenazic Jews a hard time on occasion, from the collection of jokes my family used to tell around the table, to poking fun at abominations such as Geffilte Fish, I’ve been a little harsh on my little shtetly yidden. To make up for it, allow me to present this video clip of My Yiddishe Mama, a classic and heartwarming tune sure to bring comfort to all the vusvus reading this.

Oh. I may have forgotten to mention that this track is in Arabic. It is performed by Salim Hallali a Jewish Algerian crooner. Living in Paris during the Nazi occupation, Hallali avoided deportaion to the death camps thanks to the intervention of Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Paris Mosque who provided him false papers showing he was a Muslim and even engraved Hallali’s deceased father’s name on a tombstone in the Muslim cemetery.

Fun! More? How about French bon vivant Charles Aznavour singing it in French? Tom Jones singing it live? Here it is in German by legendary German singer Ivan Rebroff.

What? You want to hear it in Yiddish? Go ask your Zaiyde to sing it to you. I’ve got stuff to do.

ck
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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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14 Comments

  • We are a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your site provided us with helpful info to paintings on. You have performed a formidable task and our whole neighborhood will likely be grateful to you.

  • Oh yeah:

    Shouldn’t we properly be called “vusvusim“, not just “vusvus”?

  • I hate to break it to you, ck, but properly made homemade gefilte fish is the Da Bomb.

    The chaloshes in the bottles and cans that is sold to the unsuspecting public as “gefilte fish” cannot, indeed, be dignified with the appellation “food”. A very proper, blue-blood New England woman I know with WASP yichus up the yin-yang (married to a Jew, natch) referred to it, quite rightly, as a “failed biology experiment”.

    For a long time, I felt as you did about gefilte fish. Then one day I once invited to Shabbes lunch at the home of a very heimische guy (Israeli, interestingly enough, but very Ashkenazi) and I was dreading having to force myself to eat the gefilte fish that I knew would be served as a first course. The first bite was a revelation, a true epiphany. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was: it was delicious! I asked the wife where she had got it, and she told me she had made it from scratch.

    True, it was not loaded with red pepper and garlic and all of the Mizrachi spiciness, but it had a very delicate, clean, and subtle flavor.

    The only problem is that now that I know how good real gefilte fish can be, I can’t eat the other stuff at all.

  • and for those who may want more here is Australian singer John Farnham singing together with Tom Jones from a now defunkt ozzie TV kids morning show “hey hey its saturday”

  • You could easily have edited that froylein! Anyhow I fixed it. It now says “bon vivant.” I even added a totally German version of the song just for you and this is what I get? Feh!

    • Heh, sorry, I thought it was an expression I wasn’t familiar with. I can’t watch the German video as it contains “material protected by copyright in [my] country”.