The Malavsky Family Revisited: the Next Generation
Readers of the Conversations series may recall that I have written several posts about the Malavsky Family Singers, major stars of Jewish American music in the post Holocaust period and an unusual exemplar of women’s voices being foregrounded in the presentation of cantorial music. The family choir, led by father Cantor Samuel Malavsky (1894-1983) featured his six children, four daughters and two sons. The lead soloist in the choir was Goldie Malavsky (1923-1995), one of the outstanding voices in American cantorial music and an important exponent of the khaznte movement of women cantorial singers working in the period before the advent of ordained women cantorial clergy in the liberal synagogue movements beginning in the 1970s.
An article I wrote about the khazntes was recently accepted for publication in Jewish Quarterly Review, but after clearing the rings of fire of peer review, I still needed to get permissions to use some archival images of Jewish women singers I hoped to use as illustrations. This led to me reaching out to Jeffrey Malavsky, a grandson of Samuel Malavsky and son of Morty Malavsky who sang bass in the choir. Jeffrey was responsible for the donation of important Malvsky archival materials to the UCLA Ethnomusicology Department. A beautiful scrap book of memorabilia and press clippings has been digitized and is available online.
https://archive.org/details/calauem_202004_amra114
Even more exciting, numerous reels of recordings of the Malavsky Family, including live recordings of holiday services, have been digitized and are available online.
https://uclaethnomusicologyarchive.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1912
In addition to kindly giving me permission to use a historic publicity image of his aunt Goldie, Jeff also offered to arrange a meeting between me and two other Malavsky grandchildren, Judy Goldman and Lisa Eber, two of Goldie’s three daughters. In two interviews we conducted on Zoom, I got a chance to discuss the Malavsky family with the family itself and to learn from them more about their family’s lore and musical memories. In our second interview I was greatly honored to meet Ruthie Malavsky, one of the original family choir members who Jeff brought into the zoom meeting by calling her and putting her on speaker phone
In the space of this blog post I will offer a snapshot of images from our conversations, highlighting some of the memories that were touched upon that reflect the way the family understands itself and their place in the history of Jewish American culture.
The Malavsky grandchildren noted the complete integration of music into all aspects of their experience of the family. While Judy, Lisa and Jeff were born too late to participate in the family band at the height of their popularity, they remember being present at the Malavsky Family performance at Carnegie Hall in the 1950s.
In addition to singing in the family choir, Trudy and Goldie Malavsky had two “pop” vocal duos: The Polka Debs, their country project, and The Marlin Sisters, a duo in a light jazz vein that scored a minor hit with the novelty song Toolie Oolie Doolie in 1947. Trudy worked as a studio vocalist with R&B pioneer Ray Charles, and also sang backup for pop star Perry Como for ten years.
In the years after the Malavsky Family Choir had mostly ceased to perform, Goldie continued to be involved in music on a local community level. Goldie’s daughters recalled how their mother would make them sing at local old age homes on the holidays and encouraged her daughters to participate in the choir she led at a local Conservative synagogue near their home in Lakewood, New Jersey. Lisa recalled, “She gave me all the solos she used to sing. She would teach b’al peh (Hebrew, orally, i.e. without sheet music). She taught some pretty serious compositions. She didn’t sing in the choir because she wanted the community to have the solos. She kept everyone on key. Sometimes she brought them home to keep practicing.”
Lisa stressed her mother’s modesty in her self-appraisal and her commitment to the equality of the participants that kept the Family Choir so successful. “I don’t think she knew the impact she had on people. She was very modest. She didn’t consider herself different from the other members of the family. They were a unit.” Indeed, the family choir included multiple highly professional and accomplished singers.
According to Lisa, her mother accepted the limits of the gender boundaries that prohibited women from leading services. “Goldie did not lead services.” Yet the gender alterity of Goldie’s voice is part of the family lore about her artistic power. “She sounded like a boy. It’s like the Yentl story,” she said, referring to I.B. Singer’s well-known story of gender bending in the all-male environment of the yeshivah. The prominence of women’s voices was outside of the norms of what synagogues were willing to accept in the Orthodox-oriented cantorial music scene of the mid 20th century. They believed that Israel was more prepared to accept the gender boundary breaking than in America, as evidenced by the Malavsky Family’s remarkable success there. Surprisingly, the grandchildren told me they did not hear the term khaznte to describe women singing cantorial music and had only become familiar with the term in recent years.
Jeff suggested that his grandfather Samuel “was decades ahead of others in terms of the women’s lib movement. The went out and found their own Torah,” referring to the Torah scroll that the family acquired in order to lead their own services in hotels and resorts, outside of the purview of rabbinic authority. Jeff said, “I can remember the Poconos or the Catskills on the High Holidays. There were thousands of people.”
The grandchildren told me that rumors about Samuel rejecting religion in his later years were false. Instead, they framed his state of mind in regard to religion as disappointment at the rejection of his family’s offering. Judy told me, “Everything I know about Judaism I learned from him.” She noted that Samuel’s Yiddish language sermons during the High Holidays in the hotels were a significant part of the appeal of their services.
Although they were young kids, the impact and excitement of these family-produced services still stay with them. They recall how standing room only audiences in the thousands would fill the cabaret rooms and social halls of resorts. On Passover, the Malavsky family presided over a community seder at which they would sit ensconced at a central table, reminiscent of the newlywed table at a wedding banquet.
As a lifelong fan of the Malavskys, getting the opportunity to speak to Ruthie Malavsky was a special treat for me. Ruthie is in her 90s and is a sharp conversationalist and a wonderful storyteller. She began our conversation with memories of growing up in a household dominated by music making. Her parents had in fact met through their shared love of music. Her mother’s father was a rabbi in a town in Connecticut where Samuel Malavsky had been invited to sing a concert. His scheduled pianist did not show up, and Hattie Hillman, the rabbi’s American-born piano playing daughter, filled in, leading to their eventual engagement. (Judy remembered her grandmother playing the old jazz standard “I’ll Be Down to Get You in a Taxi,” on the piano when she was a child.)
On Friday nights in Philadelphia when Ruthie was a little girl, her mother would serve homemade challie (a distinctive American Yiddish pronunciation of challah, the traditional Sabbath loaf). The family would sing zemiros (Sabbath hymns) and outside their window, a crowd of neighbors would be standing around listening. Her nephew Jeffrey interjected that most of the people listening were non-Jewish, as the family lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Later, when she was a teenager the family lived in San Francisco. Ruthie noted that the family moved every four years, whenever her father’s contract at a synagogue would be up. She recalled that as a teenage girl, “I never went on dates. On Friday nights I would stay home singing zemiros.”
Ruthie recalled how her father moved the family back to the East Coast, saying, “I want New York to hear my daughters.” She recounted with some nuanced differences a story she has repeated before to other interviewers about the Malavsky Family Singers debut in New York that led to a riot. Male yeshiva students disrupted a service they were leading, throwing stink bombs and threatening violence to protest women singing in a synagogue. In an interview that can be seen on the Milken Center online archive, the Malavsky sisters discuss a service at a synagogue on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn where this took place. In our conversation, Ruthie suggested that there was more than one synagogue service that was disrupted to by yeshivah “protestors.” Ruthie said, “We were gonna fight but our mother restrained us. She said we have to get along with all people. We had a shul filled with people. It wasn’t them who were against us.”
Ruthie recalled the dynamic of facing rejection from synagogue spaces, the “normal” space for the performance of the kind of prayer music her family was expert in and the workplace of her father for his entire life, since his childhood in Russia as a meshoyrer (child choir singer). “It was very hard for us. My father gave up his career. He was one of the greatest cantors in the world.”
Their recompense was their unity as a family. “We never fought. We always sang together.” The Family Singers went on to make their mark in non-synagogue spaces. They got involved with WEVD, the Yiddish radio station in New York, with a program on Friday afternoons and Sunday mornings. On the radio they collaborated with music director and organist Abe Ellstein, who went on to be their regular accompanist in concerts and on many recordings. WEVD was not the Malavsky’s first experience with radio. When Goldie was a little girl at the age of 11, she already had her own radio show in Philadelphia. Her father would accompany her on piano. In fact, the duo of father and daughter spent years on the road touring prior to the establishment of the Family Singers in the early 1950s.
The road became the home of the Family. “We put 150,000 miles on a ’38 Buick. They didn’t allow us in synagogues. We had to make a living. My father took us to hotels, the Irvington Hotel in Lakewood…” The opposition they had faced about gender “was never an issue in hotels. People came from all over the country to hear us.”
Ruthie stressed Goldie Malavsky’s brilliant talent. “Goldie was unbelievable. She was the star of the show. When she was retired [i.e. after the Family Singers had mostly stopped performing] she taught bar mitzvah boys. People would come to her house to hear her sing.”
Ruthie recalled taking trips with her sisters to the Brill building in midtown Manhattan, a location that was central to the music business, where they would spend the day recording demos for professional songwriters. For the Malavsky daughters, singing in the Family Choir was only one part of a musical livelihood, that included a variety of American genres.
The Malavsky Family Singers visited Israel in 1952, spending a month in the new state. Ruthie recalled the incredible adulation they received there. “We traveled for a month, doing two concerts a day. Kids lay down on the street in front of us. We were rocks stars. We had a car accident; we had all sorts of adventures. It was a wonderful time.” The Malavskys donated all of their concert revenue to a girl’s orphanage in Israel. Their impact on the local music scene continued to resonate for many years. A street is named after the Malavskys in the city of Herzliya. Every year, tribute concerts are held for them. One of their songs, Haben Yakir Li Efrayim, a melody for a section of the Rosh Hashana musaf service, became a hit record years later. The song was recorded by The Nachal Troupe, a band associated with an army division that had many popular recordings and served as an incubator for pop music stars in the national music scene.
While the Malavsky’s are no longer a household name in the Jewish American community, their music continues to inspire imitation by contemporary Jewish singers. Their work is uniquely situated at the juncture between the immigrant generation that had personal memory of Eastern European Jewish life, and the first generation of American born Jews who were at home in American culture but were still fluent in the language and sounds of Yiddishkayt. The Malavsky’s achievement in creating music that represented Jewishness in America without repression of the sounds of Yiddish culture belies the normative narrative of Jewish America as a march towards totalizing assimilation on the one hand and separatist Orthodoxy on the other.