Morris Rund was by livelihood a baker but by inclination a rhymester, a lyricist, a bard of New York. He wrote many songs about awful wives; I don’t know if his wife was awful or if it’s just that songs with that theme were popular with his audience.

Rund was particularly obsessed with what the wives do when the husbands are off at work. To be fair, the whole idea of a single man living in very close quarters with one’s wife, the two of them home alone while the husband’s away … it might make any husband jealous.

Today’s song is both the longest and most explicit of the boarder songs and it brings to mind the dreadful hijinks and rampant romping celebrated in the fiction (and the real lives) of John Updike, Bernard Malamud, and other novelists of the mid-twentieth century.

Rund set his cruel text to the melody of “Dos heylike zekele,” which you can find on the Library of Congress Website spelled “Das Heilige Sekele,” with words by Louis Gilrod, tune by Otto Motzan, “sung with great success by the universally known sweetheart Mr. S. Hart.” (I don’t know who that was.) It was a far more serious song!

If anybody wants a recording of this Dos zekele I’ll make it, but basically we’ve seen its ilk many times before – Jews are persecuted, it’s so bad one might consider converting, but no, one is faithful to God. Luckily, America is a safer place, but one’s eventual goal must be Israel|Palestine|Zion|Tsiyen.