| Our YouTube channel | MP3s from album | Song translations | Bios |
Jane Peppler (violin, viola, English concertina, vocals) and Aviva Enoch (piano, vocals) play swing music and folk music, specializing in Yiddish, klezmer, and Israeli music for concerts and Jewish weddings. Every time they play their show tunes, however, no matter what the audience, people get up and dance.
Jane and Aviva are part of the Cabaret Warsaw: Yiddish and Polish Hits of the 1920s & 1930s project; this is a cd and also a concert presenting songs popular in Poland between the World Wars.
We played for the Odyssey Stage performance Door to Door in 2010 and a podcast is available of our performance on Frank Stasio's The State of Things on WUNC-Radio, December 7 2010.
Videos from our first concert, taped for the television show called "Jewish Sparks," are posted at our Yiddish in North Carolina YouTube Channel.
Jane and Aviva's first album, issued by Skylark Productions, is available in October 2010 (in plenty of time for Hannukah!) and is called "I Can't Complain but sometimes I still do."
| Click to purchase "I Can't Complain - but sometimes I still do" for $9.99: |
Visit Skylark Productions for more albums and songbooks.
Click the arrows in the boxes below to hear full songs from the album (free, and no personal info required to listen, don't be afraid, just click!)
I learned Zing Brider! (Sing, brothers, sing!)
from Betty Reichert when I was studying Yiddish at the Medem Bibliotheqe in Paris.
Learned from Sheva Zucker for a Yom HaShoah holocaust program,
it lauds the settlement created by Stalin to be a "solution" for the Jewish problem - send them all to Central Asia!
A theater song from a show called "Der letster tants" (The Last Dance).
Sung in Hebrew, this is a famous folk dance melody
and the perfect processional for Jewish weddings...
Click to hear all the mp3 yiddish song files (free to listen)
Interested in our album cover? To see the original inspirations, and if you want to know what the chickens and dog are saying: Inspirations for the I Can't Complain Yiddish Songs cd cover.
Here's a song from our first concert, June 2010, at the Forest at Duke. You can hear the others at the Yiddish in North Carolina YouTube Channel:
Interested in sheet music, chords, lyrics, and translations of these songs and 16 others? There is a companion songbook - visit it or purchase at I Can't Complain Yiddish Songbook at Amazon's Createspace Click here for translations to the songs on I Can't Complain.
All photographs by Jim Shaw Photography except for young Aviva playing Fur Elise...
Jane has been performing world music since she joined the Yale Slavic Chorus in 1972. She studied violin with Syoko Aki Earle and played with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Yale Graduate School of Music Orchestra, and with the Locrian String Quartet in Boston.
Enraptured by the Yiddish language after attending the first concert by the New England Conservatory Klezmer Band, she wheedled her grandfather-in-law into helping her with the Jewish songs she began to accumulate.
She taught singing and instrumental "slow jams" at the Duke University Short Course Program for twenty years. She currently performs with Mappamundi, world music in North Carolina, an ensemble specializing in high energy acoustic "More-or-less Traditional Music of the Northern Hemisphere and the Previous Millennium" for concerts, festivals, workshops, and private celebrations of all kinds, and also with the Pratie Heads British Isles duo (English, Scottish, Irish, and early American music, a few songs and tunes we've written, a few surprises from elsewhere) with Bob Vasile. She was director of the Triangle Jewish Chorale for fourteen years.
She studies Yiddish with Sheva Zucker and has translated quite a few stories and three novels by Jacob Dineson: "Yosele," "Hershele," and "Alter," available from Jewish Storyteller Press.
Aviva has played the piano all her life; she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in piano at the University of Kansas and Emporia State University.
Through 1996, Aviva worked as a music announcer, programmer, and producer in three different public radio stations - including eleven years at WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill; the work expanded her musical palette and gave her an appreciation for a wide variety of jazz, folk and world music, as well as classical.
She has studied jazz piano with Ed Paolantonio, and directed a small choir called "Morning Glory Voices" in an ecclectic mix of acapella songs from madrigals to doo-wop. She has accompanied singers, instrumentalists, and dancers in a variety of different settings, and played for weddings, parties, and seasonal events. She currently serves as pianist at Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian church in Chatham County.
Aviva's been teaching in the Triangle for more than a dozen years. Her website is AvivaEnoch.com.
Aviva's family on both sides immigrated to the U.S. From Eastern Europe. Her great-grandparents spoke Yiddish as their first language. As a teenager, she and her family spent a couple of years in Israel, living on a kibbutz, immersed in the language and culture. She is naturally drawn to Yiddish folk music and feels it is "in her blood." She is happy to have been introduced to these wonderful songs!
This is the program we performed:
Epes fun gornisht (by Jane)
Birobidzhan
Don un Donye
Yam Lid
Di Elter
Fraytig oyf der nakht
Hilda's Waltz (by Aviva)
A bisl libe
Bobenyu
Harbstlid
A Yidishe khasene
Umru mayne
Ta-am Haman
Glik
Vot ken yu makh? S'iz Amerike!