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The music in my heart I bore Long after it was heard no more.
(Wordsworth)
You thought things would never change. You'd hang Out on the comer, go to the movies with your friends, grow up, get married, go over to your parents for dinner. You thought Brooklyn would always be Brooklyn.
(Stewie Stone)1
UNLIKE SUCH POPULAR YIDDISH-AMERICAN SONGS AS "Bei Mir Bist du Sheyn" and "Der Nayer Sher," "Joe and Paul" never crossed over from Yiddish to American success. And yet this song remains a touchstone of Jewish memory.
Joe and Paul, a fargenigen Joe and Paul, men ken a bargen krign A suit, a koyt, a gaberdine Brengt areyn days klenem zin.
Joe and Paul, a pleasure Joe and Paul where you can get a bargain A suit, a coat, a gaberdine Bring in your little son.
Even today, few Yiddish-American songs are recalled with as much delight. The opening notes need only begin, and the knowing audience joins in with a collective voice, "Joe and Paul, a fargenigen." What was once shtick has become a classic.2
Who could have predicted such a future in 1947, when the Yiddish song was in decline, when Yiddish radio was about to become the voice of the past, when Yiddish itself was about to become a foreign language? Certainly not the Barton Brothers, who built their parody on a radio jingle. Yet "Joe and Paul" is still remembered while other Yiddish-American parodies have faded away.
Better than they could have imagined, the Barton Brothers captured a moment in Yiddish-American culture when that culture was more than ever a pastiche, when its popular expression was often a synthesis of Yiddish and English. With this post-war redesigned Yiddish, Jewish Americans helped develop a new language best expressed in comedy, a language that moved away from its insular Jewish origins to become American speech. As this Yiddish-English moved from street to stage, Jewish-American comedy was able to reach a wider audience and plant itself firmly on TV and in the movies.
Jewish-American comedy was born on the streets of New York and grew up in the Catskill Mountains. In the hotels, the bungalow colonies, the kuchalns, young Jews on the way to becoming comics worked as underpaid tummlers, poolside...