Ben Marks collectorsweekly.com
July 10, 2020
Have you ever woken up on the couch in the middle of the night and found yourself watching a 1930s black-and-white movie flicker on the television? If so, your slumber may have been gently stirred by the movie's melancholy soundtrack. Floating between dream state and consciousness, at first you might think you recognize the metallic beat of a slow Argentine tango, but then discern a melody that suggests a nocturnal Chopin, albeit tuned to an even more somber minor key of an Eastern European klezmer dance number. Perhaps you're still dreaming?
In fact, you're wide awake and what you're listening to is a Hollywood version of Polish tango, a popular genre of nostalgic songs composed between 1918 and 1939 by classically trained Polish musicians, many of them Jewish. "That's the soundtrack of interwar Poland," says Juliette Bretan, a Lincolnshire-based journalist and researcher studying in London. "The music is very melodramatic and really sad, full of depressing lyrics about people wanting to take their own lives or the fights they're having with their lovers. But it's also a very mature sound, a very Polish sound. If World War II hadn't happened," he adds, "I think Polish music would have had an even bigger impact on the global stage.
~ (See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) Syrena-Electro was the leading Polish manufacturer of Polish tango records between World War I and World War II. This catalog is from 1934. Courtesy of Juliette Bretan. ~
At first glance, Bretan might not seem exactly the type to support this ancient and largely forgotten genre. Born in the UK, Bretan is a recent Cambridge graduate who has little affection for music: "I got as far as first grade on the piano," she admits, and although her father's non-Jewish parents were from the part of interwar Poland now called the Ukraine, her grandmother Maria died when she was just a child and she never knew her grandfather Gregory.
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) A scene on the streets of 1930s Warsaw. Note the signs in Polish and Yiddish. Via Rivka's Yiddish.
That probably explains why in recent years Bretan has embarked on the goal of learning about his Eastern European roots. "We know my grandmother was taken from Poland in 1941 to do slave labor in Germany," Bretan says. "We think she was in some camps for a while, but it's not very clear. After the war, she met my grandfather in a camp for displaced persons, but we don't really know what happened to her before that. They got married and then came here in '46 or '47, and that was it."
As Bretan delved into her family's history, Polish tango became her soundtrack. "I came across this music purely by chance," she says. "I find the sound intoxicating, so it became a connection to the world my grandparents would have known when they lived in Poland. On the one hand, for me, music is like a reconnection to my heritage, but on the other hand, what's there to reconnect to? That heritage no longer exists, so it's almost like I'm writing a new history of my family."
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) The band of Artur Gold (direction) and Jerzy Petersburski (on accordion), circa 1930. Via Wikimedia Commons. ~
Bretan fell in love with Polish tango which he described in an article for culture.pl. as "the fusion of old romantic and nostalgic Polish melodies with Jewish inflections and a more modern, high-pitched sound dripping with glissandos and vibratos."
The Jewish character of Polish tango is essential to understanding the source of these sounds, which means it is important for us in 2020 to understand what it must have been like to be Jewish in Poland during the interwar years. Simply put, it was far from easy, particularly given the overt anti-Semitism of the popular National Democratic Party, which organized boycotts against Jewish-owned businesses. For the fascists and racists waving the NDP flag, anti-Semitism was nothing less than a prerequisite for Polish patriotism.
Still, being a Jewish composer, musician or performer in Warsaw, whose population between the wars was roughly one-third Jewish, offered them a rare measure of personal and professional freedom. This was because many interwar Poles, with the experience of belonging to a country whose borders had been wiped off the maps by Russia, Germany and Austria in the late 18th century, were ready to celebrate their nation's newfound independence. Thus, for large sectors of the Polish population, especially those in Warsaw, Jewish composers, musicians and performers were tolerated and even welcomed, as long as they were entertaining.
~ (See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango)Clockwise from top left: a 1920 Syrena Grand Rekord record in Ukrainian. Via eBay Melody Electro was the company's second label for new artists, pasted in inferior shellac. Via culture.pl. In the 1930s, Syrena-Electro released Hebrew-language records for Eastern Europeans who had fled to Palestine. Via eBay "Rebeka" was a popular Polish tango hit with Jewish themes. Via eBay. ~
Among the many fascinating aspects of Polish tango is the fact that musicians who were members of Warsaw's Jewish community took at least some of their inspiration from their counterparts in Buenos Aires, which had one of the largest Jewish populations on the planet during the interwar years. Jewish immigrants living there had fled from less welcoming corners of Poland than Warsaw during the war, as well as from Russia and Romania. Some of them arrived in Argentina with violins in their hands, and these enterprising musicians soon found their way to the nightclubs, where the tango was king. For a while, Yiddish tangos even had their recognition in Argentina. Soon, news of the charms of tango had returned to the old country, where the musically inclined friends and relatives of these violinists gave a Polish touch to Argentine tango.
Tango also came to interwar Poland through the rise of radio technology, as well as American Swing Era jazz recordings pressed on 78-inch, 78 RPM shellac records, which brings us to a Warsaw music company called Syrena. Before the Great War, Syrena sold Edison phonographs in Poland and even manufactured a Polish-labeled gramophone, an invention of a German Jewish immigrant to the United States named Emile Berliner. Syrena also recorded, produced and distributed 78 patriotic songs, folk music in Russian, Polish and Yiddish, and the proto-jazz genre of klezmer.
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) "Tango Milonga" was Poland's biggest tango hit during the war. Via staremelodie.pl.
Before World War I interrupted its global expansion ambitions, Syrena had contracts to distribute a portion of the 4.5 million records it was pressing annually in the United States and the United Kingdom. After the war, Syrena struggled but soon became one of the leading music companies in the newly independent Poland. The optimism that accompanied the newfound sense of Polish pride resulted in a large audience for new Syrena recordings of contemporary dance music, including tango. Business was so good that in 1929 Syrena was able to build a state-of-the-art recording studio on Wiśniowa Street in Warsaw, an act of modernization that it celebrated by renaming itself Syrena-Electro and updating the romantic graphics on its label record in Art Deco style.
"In the West," says Bretan, "we are preprogrammed to think of interwar Eastern Europe as an economic and technological wasteland. But by the 1930s, Syrena-Electro was recording operas, plays, and all kinds of classical and contemporary music, which it sold internationally. While its catalog was certainly inspired by what was happening in London and Paris, Syrena was definitely on par with its international competitors."
Polish tango was at the heart of Syrena's repertoire, and Jewish composers working for Syrena wrote and performed the label's most popular volumes. First among equals was the prolific Andrzej Włast, who in 1929, co-wrote "Tango Milonga" with Jerzy Petersburski, whom Breton calls the father of Polish tango. Petersburski's cousins, brothers Artur and Henryk Gold, also wrote and arranged dozens of tango hits for Syrena, including those with that "sharp, modern sound, dripping in glissandos and vibrato" that Bretan described in the aforementioned article in culture.pl.
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) Score for "Tango Milonga", translated as "Oh, Doña Clara", performed by Al Jolson on Broadway in 1931. Via eBay.~
Other tangos were certainly successful for Syrena, but it was "Tango Milonga" that catapulted the genre's popularity. With new lyrics in German and later in English as "Oh, Donna Clara," "Tango Milonga" was even performed on Broadway in New York City in 1931 by legendary entertainer Al Jolson, who starred in a musical called "The Wonder Bar. " That production, theatrical makeup tableaux and all, finally made it to the big screen in 1934; how it could have made it to your television set in the middle of the night is anyone's guess.
For collectors, records bearing the Syrena-Electro label are prized, generally selling for between $100 and $200. The label's Art Deco design features a lyre in the center, flanked by a pair of gramophone horns, all set against a graphic sunburst glow. The lyre and gramophone horn were taken from more romantic label designs, when Syrena-Electro was known as Syrena Grand Rekord. Illustrations for labels from that earlier version of the company included depictions of mythical winged mermaids. Collectors also seek copies of records in the Syrena catalog that were translated into Hebrew for the community of expatriate Jews who, during the 1930s, left the increasingly hostile environment of Eastern Europe for Palestine. Also collected are Melodja Electro records, which was Syrena's second label that extracted records from inferior batches of shellac, along with Syrena record covers and sheet music of Polish tango hits.
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) Nazis evicting the last Jews living in Warsaw for relocation to extermination camps, 1943. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Unfortunately, we know how this story ends. In 1939, Hitler's troops marched on Poland and rounded up Jews who had not fled to places like Argentina and Palestine. Andrzej Włast and many others were murdered by the Nazis. Before his murder, Artur Gold was forced to perform Polish tango numbers for his Nazi captors disguised as a clown. Henryk Gold and a few others lucky enough to see the writing on the wall got out before the Germans got in; they continued to make music after the war in Israel, New York and Hollywood. For the most part, however, the death of interwar Polish tango was ruthless and bloody.
Nor was Syrena-Electro spared. In the early days of the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Syrena factory was bombed, and a year after that, Syrena's president, Hilary Tempel, was unceremoniously shot. Even the recordings of Poland's most famous classical composer, Frédéric Chopin, were destroyed - in the eyes of the Nazis, it was bad to be Jewish, but it was equally bad to be an accomplished Pole, as if the simple pressing of shellac could erase Chopin's musical legacy from history.
In the end, that's the thing about music: it stays with us, especially in the darkest moments. "This music speaks to me," Bretan says simply. "It takes the melodrama of the Argentine original, adds quavering vocals and high-pitched instrumentation, and combines Jewish musical history with Polish musical traditions to create something that is very distinctly Polish but also distinctly non-Polish, which is what makes it so enchanting." It crosses borders, history and time. I think that's why I like it so much.
~(See photo on page www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/polish-tango ) The Warsaw Sentimental Orchestra is one of many contemporary Polish bands reviving the music of Poland's interwar period. Photo by Karolina Majewska.
Today, Bretan is not alone in her affection for this sound, be it Polish interwar tango or Polish interwar swing. "A lot of bands in Poland are reviving interwar music right now," Bretan says. "Younger bands too, not just older musicians trying to recreate songs they might have heard in the 1950s after the war. There seems to be a general revival of the 1920s happening," he adds," I guess it's because it's the 1920s again." That sounds hopeful enough, but given what we know about the interwar years, let's hope a repeat of 1930s Poland isn't just around the corner.
(For more information on interwar Poland, visit Juliette Bretan's page on culture.pl or her blog.)
Translated from the original English text courtesy of the author.