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From “Sadie Salome” to “Barber of Schlemiel”: Tracing the Roots of Mickey Katz’s Incongruous Operatic Parodies

Tue, December 17, 8:30 to 10:00am, Hilton Bayfront San Diego, Aqua 313

Abstract

When American Jewish jazz musician and comedian Mickey Katz released opera-themed Yinglish parodies in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s with such creative titles as “Carmen Katz,” “Barber of Schlemiel,” “Scheherazade,” and “Ikh der Trupadur,” he capitalized on audiences who ‘got the joke.’ Caught between the anxious, the absurd, and the humorous, Katz’s rhyming contrafacta replaced the lyrics of operatic classics with Yiddish-language foods, figures, and phrases. His symphonic orchestrations likewise accrued clarinet-infused klezmer breaks and bizarre sound effects. Several scholars (see Charles Hersch, Josh Kun, Donald Weber, Herbert J. Gans) examine how Katz’s creative output responded to a particularly emotional and ambivalent postwar historical moment. However, they do not look for the precedents that motivated Katz to compose opera-themed parodies guaranteed to amuse and unsettle mid-century American Jewish audiences.

This paper argues that Katz’s parodies evolved out of a lengthier historical tradition of Jews satirizing themselves in opera-themed materials. Engaging early twentieth century archival findings, such as Tin Pan Alley songs and records (see Larry Hamberlin), Yiddish press caricatures and short stories, poetry, and film clips, I explore how American Jews preceding Katz leveraged opera to work through their gendered, classed, and racialized anxieties about Americanization, acculturation, and modernization. By probing how and why these creations set the stage for Katz’s later work, we might better understand the shared role that “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture has played in the self-fashioning processes of American minorities.

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