Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" gives new life to Yiddish singer Sidor Belarsky

Sidor Belarsky (Courtesy of Isabel Belarsky)

The Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow and especially its big hit “Somebody To Love” is the music that is most familiar on the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ brilliant new movie A Serious Man, but the one song from Sidor Belarsky stands out.

Belarsky’s recording of “Dem Milners Trern,” a poignant Yiddish song that translates as “The Miller’s Tears” and evokes the exile of Jews from villages in Czarist Russia in the early 20th Century, is heard four times during the film.

“He was one of the leading Yiddish singers on the concert stage and discovered and arranged many songs,” says Chana Mlotek, music archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York and an authority on Yiddish song. “But he was also a leading bass baritone of the opera and sang with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.”

In fact, Belarsky (his first name is pronounced SEE-dor) was a graduate of the State Conservatory at Leningrad and former leading basso of the Leningrad State Opera Company. He came to New York with his wife and young daughter—and barely a samovar--in 1930.

“My father’s uncle had a turkey business in Utah and arranged for him to come and teach singing at Brigham Young University,” says his daughter Isabel Belarsky, who is now 89 and lives in Brooklyn’s “Little Russia” neighborhood of Brighton Beach. She has made it her life’s mission to preserve her father’s name and music since his death in 1975.

“He sang opera in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York,” Isabel continues. “Then Toscanini heard him and he sang Fidelio on NBC Radio.”

He also performed with other eminent conductors and orchestras throughout the world, and gave over 22 solo concerts at Carnegie Hall between 1931 and 1961. After singing at an event where Albert Einstein was the guest speaker, Einstein insisted that Belarsky sing at all his speaking engagements.

“They became great friends and Einstein took him everywhere,” says Isabel. “Little by little he sang the Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian Jewish songs that he knew from childhood, and he became very popular with the Jewish community.”

According to Moishe Rosenfeld, who heads America’s leading booking agency for Jewish music and performing arts Golden Land Concerts & Connections, Belarsky was “an amazing man and the best Yiddish singer of his day. He was the most definitive interpreter of Yiddish art songs—nobody sang Yiddish songs as beautifully and soulfully as he did.”

Rosenfeld grew up listening to his parents’ Belarsky recordings, then studied music under him in New York at the Jewish Teachers Seminary.

“He went to the lyrics at the heart of a song and found the truth in them and then infused it into the music,” says Rosenfeld, conceding that “it’s tough to be articulate about him other than to say he was incredible.”

To pianist Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater who served as Belarsky’s last accompanist (he is also the son of Chana Mlotek), Belarsky’s impact on the Yiddish musical world was huge.

“He was one of the first classically trained singers to embrace the cannon of Yiddish music,” says Mlotek. “He even published a songbook with his arrangements.”

Isabel Belarsky’s apartment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean is filled with her father’s recordings, photographs and other memorabilia. At this time, however, she’s most proud of an expanding file of press clippings that make mention of her father’s contribution to A Serious Man.

She gives the Coens complete credit for choosing her father’s music.

“They opened a new life for me,” she says, her eyes moistening. “Nobody really picked up on it like they did—from that one song. To me it’s a miracle!”
 

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