My Dreydl: A Song History

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"I Have a Little Dreidel" is a Hanukkah song about the dreidel, the four-sided top whose Hebrew letters stand for the saying "a great miracle happened there."[1][2] Samuel E. Goldfarb wrote it with Samuel S. Grossman in the 1920s, and the song is dated to 1927, which the Reform movement's account gives as the year of its original recording and JTA's Jewniverse as its year of publication.[1][3]

An ornate silver bench-type Hanukkah lamp with a row of oil wells and a decorated backplate

August Ferdinand Gentzmer, Hanukkah lamp, embossed silver, 1788. A Hanukkah lamp, shown for the festival of the dreidel song; it has no connection to the song.

Goldfarb, born in 1891, grew up in a Lower East Side tenement in a musical family and learned to read and play music from his brother Israel, twelve years older, who composed a melody for "Shalom Aleichem."[1][3] Samuel began by playing piano in theaters, including Yiddish ones, and JTA's account notes a Tin Pan Alley influence on the secular songs he wrote before the dreidel song.[1][3] The brothers compiled Jewish songbooks under the Bureau of Jewish Education of New York, which eventually made Samuel its musical director; he also led the music at a Seattle synagogue for many years.[1]

Its popularity grew only gradually, passed along by word of mouth rather than carried by any one hit record, and it became widely known in the 1950s (the early 1950s, in the Reform account), as Hanukkah took on a more commercial, Christmas-like profile in America.[1][3] Goldfarb's son Myron Gordon later produced Dreidel I Shall Play, an album of his father's songs in new arrangements by Craig Taubman that also carries a fragment of the 1927 recording.[1][3] Maureen Sellers includes it, in DAD tuning and under the title "My Dreydl," in Simply Christmas, a 60-page mountain dulcimer tablature book in her "Simply" series, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]

Our book that contains the song "My Dreydl"

Sources

  1. ReformJudaism.org: "The Hidden History of 'I Have a Little Dreidel'".
  2. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Dreidel".
  3. JTA Jewniverse: "The Secret History of 'I Have a Little Dreidel'".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Christmas".
  5. Image: August Ferdinand Gentzmer, Hanukkah lamp, embossed silver, 1788. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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