Friday in Encino, CA
Ghetto Tango
Friday, January 16, 2008
www.vbs.org
8:00 p.m. in Lopaty Chapel
Led by Cantor Herschel Fox
Kabbalat Shabbat & Festive Oneg
Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek
In the Jewish ghettos of Poland and Lithuania during World War II, a world of
dislocation, terror and death, cabaret music thrived. Jewish audiences gathered
in makeshift clubs and theaters to hear newly-created Yiddish songs, rooted in
Jewish folk and liturgical music as well as European operetta, American ragtime
and Argentine tango. .Jewish performers tuned these cosmopolitan songs in a
local key: satirical and elegiac, political and personal, angry and heartsick.
Together they created something rare, scarcely conceivable: art at the edge
of the abyss.

Adrienne Cooper, one of the world’s most acclaimed singers of Yiddish vocal
music, and Zalmen Mlotek, a leading figure in Yiddish musical theater, here
present ghetto songs collected during and after the war.