The Pious Ones by Joseph Berger

Author:Joseph Berger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12

A MODERN MENSCH

The place took his breath away.

Mendel Werdyger was six or seven years old when his broad-bearded father, a synagogue cantor, brought him along to a recording studio in midtown Manhattan. His father was there to make a recording of songs favored by a grand rabbi famed for the original melodies he spun for Shabbos and holiday prayers. This was 1963 or thereabouts, so the sound waves were being etched into the grooves of a 33 rpm long-playing vinyl disc. Still, there was Mendel’s father, Duvid Werdyger, a survivor of the Schindler’s List slave laborers and several concentration camps, standing in front of the Jackie Goldstein Choir belting out a new version of the traditional Sabbath morning prayer, “Yismechu B’Malchusechah, Shomrei Shabbos” (“Those who keep Shabbos delight in your realm”), in his lyric tenor. Mendel was dazzled by his father’s virtuosity and by the stately choir. But just as mesmerizing was the studio itself, outfitted with the kind of electronic hardware he had never seen before.

“It was like Alice in Wonderland,” Werdyger, a tall and broad-shouldered 53-year-old father of six, told me. “You saw all the big machines and a lot of lights and tubes. They still had tubes then! And there was this huge room with a mike and a big stand. The mike stand alone cost fifteen hundred dollars. Today it goes for a hundred dollars. They recorded the whole song on a mono track, the choir and cantor, all in one room, on one track. No stereo. No nothing.”

This was a world that was especially novel for young Werdyger because in his Hasidic home—the family allies itself with the Gerer Hasidim—there were few of the electronic devices that in the early 1960s might be found in a typical American home. Like most Hasidic families, their home did not have a single TV set. Young Mendel did not go to Saturday movies the way many American children did—verboten on Shabbos—and could not have seen the many movies about Al Jolson or Glenn Miller, or the Kirk Douglas movie Young Man with a Horn, that featured entertainers in recording studios. So this visit to a studio provided some splendid new sights for this young boy with peyes.

Still, cantorial music—the Jewish Sabbath and holiday liturgy that is sung with individual flourishes by a musically trained prayer leader—was not a novelty for the Werdyger family. Performing as a cantor was partly how Mendel’s father put food on the family table. He led the Sabbath and holiday prayers at a widely respected Orthodox synagogue in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Congregation Meir Simcha Hakohen. The synagogue was led by Rabbi Jacob J. Hecht, who was known for both his translations of Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and for his commentaries on a weekly Jewish radio show on WEVD, Shema Yisrael.

And Mendel was not entirely a performing novice. When he was not yet two years old, his father placed a microphone in front of him that was attached to a tape

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