Velvel Zbarjer

Velvel Zbarjer (1824–1884 ¹), birth name Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkrantz (a.k.a. Velvl Zbarjer, Zbarjur, Zbarzher, etc.), a Galician Jew, was a Brody singer. Following in the footsteps of Berl Broder, his "mini-melodramas in song" were precursors of Yiddish theater.

Born in Zbarj, Galicia, he moved to Romania in 1845. According to Sol Liptzin, this move was occasioned by the offense his townspeople took at his "heresies and scoffing verses". [Liptzin, 1972, 47] He worked briefly as a schoolteacher in Botoşani, but soon became an itinerant singer, singing in the homes of wealthy Jews and in workers' cafes in Botoşani, Iaşi, Galaţi, and Piatra Neamţ, always glad to sing for a glass of wine or a meal. An actor as much as a singer, he variously sang the praises of his own footloose life and made up topical songs about whatever might be going on in the towns he passed through; the latter often described injustices, or made fun of the Hasidic Jews, and occasionally got him tossed out of various towns. [Bercovici, 36–37]

In 1865, having noticed that others were singing his songs without giving him credit, he published them in a Hebrew-Yiddish booklet. As he grew older, he settled down. He lived in Vienna from 1878 to 1889, then lived out his last years in Istanbul, where he married for a seconf time, to a woman known as Malkele the Beautiful. This end-of-life romance became the subject, in 1937, of a cycle of twelve verse epistles by Itzik Manger. [Liptzin, 1972, 47]

Notes

¹ This is the death date given by Bercovici; Liptzin gives 1883.

References

• Bercovici, Israil, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998), pages 36–37. ISBN 9739827225. See the article on the author for further publication information.
• Liptzin, Sol, A History of Yiddish Literature, Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, NY, 1972, ISBN 0–8246–0124–6.
• Byli tu anebo spíš nebyli (in Czech), site about klezmer and its antecedents.