For the last night of Chanukah...
...the OTHER dreidel song!
Remember how I ever-so-subtly implied that dreidel is not the most, um, complicated of games? Well, this song does not have the most complicated of lyrics. If you live outside Israel the lyrics translate to:
Dreidel spin, spin, spin
Chanukah is a good holiday
Chanukah is a good holiday
Dreidel spin, spin, spin
A happy holiday it is for the nation
A great miracle happened there
A great miracle happened there
A happy holiday it is for the nation
And if you live in Israel, the second paragraph translates to:
Spin, please, spin like this and that
A great miracle happened here
A great miracle happened here
Spin, please, spin like this and that
...because if you happen to live in Israel, the miracle of the oil happened "HERE" rather than "THERE," and both the dreidel and the song reflect that.
Now, you'd think that the only way to sing this song written for children would be to have children sing it, like this:
Video posted by Jewish Holiday Songs
(That was the Israeli version, btw.)
But you would be very wrong. There is a Blues version:
Video posted by BMAD
There's a Swing version:
Video posted by Kenny Ellis - Topic
Here's a choral version:
Video posted by Girl Choir South Florida
And then there's the classical version (quite lovely, actually!):
Video posted by Canadian Brass - Topic
***
Now, the only name I can find for the composer of the melody is "folk", which I take it means "lost to the vagaries of history" or even "beats me." But the lyrics I DID manage to find a name for: Levin Kipnis. Now you may not have heard of him before today, and I certainly never heard of him before today, but that's our ignorance, seeing as he wrote over 800 stories and over 600 poems/songs for children, in Yiddish and, mostly, Hebrew. He was born in Russia in 1894 and moved to what was then Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1913 where he taught and wrote, and in addition to his prodigious literary output found the time to found the Israeli children's theater.
Remember how I ever-so-subtly implied that dreidel is not the most, um, complicated of games? Well, this song does not have the most complicated of lyrics. If you live outside Israel the lyrics translate to:
Dreidel spin, spin, spin
Chanukah is a good holiday
Chanukah is a good holiday
Dreidel spin, spin, spin
A happy holiday it is for the nation
A great miracle happened there
A great miracle happened there
A happy holiday it is for the nation
And if you live in Israel, the second paragraph translates to:
Spin, please, spin like this and that
A great miracle happened here
A great miracle happened here
Spin, please, spin like this and that
...because if you happen to live in Israel, the miracle of the oil happened "HERE" rather than "THERE," and both the dreidel and the song reflect that.
Now, you'd think that the only way to sing this song written for children would be to have children sing it, like this:
(That was the Israeli version, btw.)
But you would be very wrong. There is a Blues version:
There's a Swing version:
Here's a choral version:
And then there's the classical version (quite lovely, actually!):
Now, the only name I can find for the composer of the melody is "folk", which I take it means "lost to the vagaries of history" or even "beats me." But the lyrics I DID manage to find a name for: Levin Kipnis. Now you may not have heard of him before today, and I certainly never heard of him before today, but that's our ignorance, seeing as he wrote over 800 stories and over 600 poems/songs for children, in Yiddish and, mostly, Hebrew. He was born in Russia in 1894 and moved to what was then Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1913 where he taught and wrote, and in addition to his prodigious literary output found the time to found the Israeli children's theater.
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