Jewish Music: An Inside Look at Yossele Rosenblatt

Alex Halberstadt has a fantastic article on the life of the renowned cantor: Yossele Rosenblatt.He paints a very colorful picture of the cantor as well as his troubles:

by the mid 1920s, an investment in a failed Yiddish newspaper had bankrupted Rosenblatt. The crisis pushed him onto the vaudeville stage, a place that many among the orthodox considered undignified and possibly blasphemous. The cantor took it in stride. Billed as “The Man With the $50,000 Beard,” he toured the nation by train, entertaining at movie theaters between showings of Westerns and comedies. At a typical stop, at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco, he sang “Mother Machree” between screenings of Broken Hearts in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Louise Dresser. His opening act was “child memory marvel Dodo Reid.” Rosenblatt felt at home in front of the mostly gentile audiences.