“A little girl stands on a table. Oil lamps light the room. There is silence in the warm night. Around her, dimly, she sees bearded faces, the round, proud smiles of the women. She is very little, this child, but her voice is no pipe — rich, golden, it sings the happier songs of Israel’s exile, and the songs which belong to the exiles’ home.
“One old man, gray-bearded, wipes a tear from his eyes. He speaks, when she has finished, and around him rises a murmur of voices in agreement. ‘She is a great singer. She will make men and women cry with joy,’ he says. That all happened in a tiny Bessarabian village, many years ago, but the old man spoke truth.”
Or, rather, not exactly the truth — since that whole vignette was invented for a fawning fan fiction-like introduction to the singer Isa Kremer in our paper in 1934. But it was true that Kremer, a published poet and trained opera soprano, and a Russian-turned-American-turned-Argentine, was once known around the world as an innovator in bringing Yiddish and other folk music to the stage for large popular audiences.
Although she’s little known today, if you were going to the theater 100 years ago in San Francisco, you would have had many opportunities to see the world-famous diva.
As we wrote in 1925, “Of the many concert artists who have come to America in recent years, perhaps no one has eclipsed the popularity gained by Isa Kremer, the singer of folk songs and ballads.”
Kremer was born in Belz, Russia (now part of Ukraine), in 1887, in a comfortable Jewish family. She was a trained classical singer who worked professionally in Russian opera theaters.
But then politics caught up to her. Kremer had married the editor of the Odessa News, which published her poetry, and moved in the intellectual, modern Jewish circles of the city. When the revolution happened, Kremer was singing in Istanbul; her husband was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for being the wrong kind of progressive and later was smuggled out, along with the couple’s daughter.
Kremer came to the U.S. in the 1920s, first on tour, then to stay. (Her husband remained in Europe and was killed by the Nazis.)
“Isa Kremer has sung in almost every music center in Europe. The fact that ‘she took America by storm’ can be judged when it became known that she gave in her first season six concerts in Carnegie Hall, four in Chicago, and sang return dates in Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Toronto, Cleveland,” we wrote in 1925.
While she was classically trained, her passion was folk music. Not only Yiddish folk music, but Arabic, Russian, French and African American songs as well.
(J. Archives)
“She can sing an Italian folk song that will make every son of Sunny Italy stand up and shout ‘brava,’ we wrote in 1924. “The French numbers would cause a whole regiment of poilus [infantry] to applaud, while with the Russian(s), Jews and the other inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe, she could sing for hours and not one would leave the hall.”
From reviews of her concerts, it seems her voice wasn’t the only pull; Kremer was an extremely charismatic and animated performer. However, she was most lauded among Jewish audiences for her Yiddish songs, which were wildly popular.
After a career in which she sang in front of huge audiences, including Albert Einstein and Israel Zangwill, among other luminaries, Kremer died of cancer in 1956 in Argentina. She’d moved there to marry leftist thinker and psychiatrist Gregorio Bermann, and the couple fell afoul of the right-wing government there, but Kremer continued performing as long as she could.
In 1950, a few years before her death, she was again performing at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
“Her program listed songs in seven languages. She sang and mimed them with a gusto and human feeling that had her sizable audience guffawing and applauding happily.”
Kremer was unabashedly proud of her heritage; she did many benefits for groups like Hadassah, and was a supporter of Zionism. She truly believed in the power of Jewish music to reach people.
“Do you know that this revival of Jewish music is doing something that our Jewish leaders have been trying to do for years?” she told the paper in 1926 in an interview that ran across the front page. “Here it is bringing religion back to thousands upon thousands who for years have been what you would call passive about their Judaism. For what is a greater appeal to the heart and the soul of man but music?”