’s 1902 Sukkot poem “In suke.” Singers made it a folk song, and (חסידיש) (חסידי) communities still teach it to children before the holiday.
The version to hear first is Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman’s. She sang the song as she had learned it in Chernivtsi, with the wife still in it, and her son Itzik Gottesman recorded her at home in the Bronx in the 1980s. His article on Yiddish Song of the Week tells how she learned it and what the words are doing. It is linked with her recording below, and it is worth reading before the later versions.
wrote the poem, and he was not a (חסידיש) (חסידי). He came from a family of writers — his father Kalman was a poet, his sister Sarah a poet and translator, his brother Zalman the philologist of Yiddish — and Peretz printed him when he was fifteen. From 1895 to 1899 he served in a musicians’ unit of the Russian army, then settled in Warsaw. His poems are short and plain, about people with little. Some of the sharper ones were sung at secret workers’ meetings in the woods, and many, this one included, left the page and became folk songs.
He published it on 15 October 1902, at twenty-six, on the Sukkot cover of the Kraków weekly Yudishe froyen-velt, as “In suke,” under the pen name Alexander Solomon. A man builds a small sukkah from plain boards and a little skhakh. A cold wind nearly puts out the candle, and when he makes kiddush the flame steadies. His wife brings in the first dish, afraid the wind will knock the sukkah down, and he tells her it has already stood a long time. No earlier manuscript is known. School books soon printed a shorter text, and in his own collected works (New York, 1917) kept only the first four stanzas, without the wife. By 1913 people were already singing reworded versions. The tune most people know was arranged by Arno Nadel in Ost und West (Berlin, October–November 1916). Joel Engel published a different melody the same year, but his setting did not catch on.
(חסידיש) (חסידי) singers reshaped the song further. A daughter takes the wife’s place: she comes in pale and says, Tate, the little sukkah is about to fall, and he answers that it has stood nearly two thousand years. They also gave it a chorus on its own melody — a Yiddish “oy,” then the Hebrew “Ha-rachaman hu yakim lanu et sukkat David ha-nofelet,” “May the Merciful One raise up for us the fallen sukkah of David.” No one person is known to have added it, and it is not in ’s poem. The line is the Sukkot addition to birkat hamazon, the grace after meals, and it quotes Amos 9:11, “On that day I will raise up the fallen sukkah of David.” Readers of that verse took it to mean David’s kingdom, not a holiday booth; it was tied to Sukkot because both say sukkah. As a line of the grace it already appears in early printed benchers and in the seventeenth-century customs of Worms. Singers usually put the chorus at the close, and often between the stanzas as well.
The singing heard most often today is a short form. It is the one children usually learn, and the one large crowds tend to sing at religious and ceremonial gatherings, since it is the version most people know. It keeps only the opening, where he builds the little sukkah. In place of “I sit there in the sukkah at night,” singers often repeat “I made myself a little sukkah,” then sing again from “I covered the roof,” then “Oy, ha-rachaman” twice, and may start once more from the top. The daughter and the two thousand years belong to the longer text. Rabbi ’s recording ends in that simple way, on “Oy, ha-rachaman hu yakim lanu.” The Rabbis’ Sons, in 1968, sing the longer (חסידיש) (חסידי) rewording. ’s 1991 track with is another cut: it leaves out the daughter and continues into “Habeyt,” an ending heard less often.
Children still learn the song in (חדר) , (ישיבֿה) , and school in the days before Sukkot, in Israel as in New York. English and Hebrew versions exist and are sometimes taught too, in circles where speaking Yiddish is less common. However, no good online recordings of them could be located when this article was written.