Today, Labeleh, what a name?

Today I am going to tell you why I called my label Labeleh.

It goes back many years, to some time in the beginning of the 20th century.During those days, many immigrants arrived in the US from Eastern Europe. Many of them were Jewish people who could not keep on living under the threat of pogroms, people who saw the promise America has for new immigrants, regardless of their descent.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a term, something one can not really translate, relating to a tradition of happiness that has nothing to do necessarily with artistic commitment. There is no word in the English language that really captures its meaning.

The word is freilach. It is something within your body that creates happiness for you and those around you regardless of the reality of life.

It is what we experience in the entertainment business, be it singing, dancing, acting, or any other form of art.
In many ways, freilach has evolved into legitimate forms of entertainment. Some elements of the freilach have contributed to what we know today as stand-up comedy.

In Wikipedia, freilach is associated with folklore, a way of life, lifestyle, cultural behavior of a community, habits, happiness, tradition and more. However, none of these terms really comes close to defining the essence of freilach.
To me, freilach is the survival kit that made it possible for Jewish people in the Diaspora of Eastern Europe to keep moving, to find moments of relief to reflect on all aspects of human existence, be it mourning loudly when enjoying a hot ball of soup after some one whom you know left, or sigh when having a good meal, laughing when life gets difficult, and crying from happiness after surviving a crisis.There were families associated with freilach; you could tell by the name.

Bitenski, was one such name. I wrote it with ignorance Bitansky when I was 13. I had to write my name in my English note book, but there was nobody to teach me or to show me the difference between Bitansky (which is associated with the boots) and Bitenski, which has no English equivalent.
Well, my late father Chaim was born to a family associated with freilach, wisdom, and the spirit of revolution.They wanted to become part of the society they were living in, for the first time, between the two World Wars.
Jewish people in Poland were allowed to join workers unions, so one brother became a leather man, another a builder, and the third, my father, a tailor.I always sing “My father was a tailor”, reflecting on the “House of the Rising Sun”, the classic I first heard by the legendary Animals.

My father and mother always had the radio on. While listening to the radio, I used to help in easy works around his tailoring. He always encouraged me to go wherever I wanted, withno borders or limitations. For my parents freilach is genius, and their son is a genius.
They will do all that they can and can't do to make me happy.

Anyway, after many years in the music business I have realized that the ties between music business and textile world are so much stronger than I thought could be.I first heard the name Labeleh when my mother told me of a neighbor I played with when I was just one year old. His name was Labeleh.

My father explained to me that in Yiddish, ‘labe” is a lion and “labeleh” is a young lion. Thus, a baby whose name is “Lion” would become known as “Labeleh” as he got older.In addition, the Polish and Jewish people used to call the tziziot (ritual fringes worn by religious Jews) “Labeleh.”

To make a long story longer, when those immigrants from Poland and Russia came to the US by the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century, many of them dealt with different aspects of the textile industry while others were musicians, actors, writers and storytellers.

Since life was so much easier for the textile people, they supported the artists. They needed the artists in the same way that a flower needs a gardener, and the art that was created in their new homeland came as water for the plants.

New stories, songs, and plays made the link between past present and future and created a platform to allow the new immigrants reinvent themselves or, more accurately, re-plant themselves in the new soil where old and new roots co-exist in the building of a new life structure.
So, it happened that the likes of Irving Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and many others where financed by entrepreneurs from the textile industry.This is where our long story becomes longer.
When they listened to a song they sponsored, they would tell their friends, "This is my label"Since they were obliged to put a label on the shirts and jackets they manufactured in the new world, they did not bother to search for a new term and simply called the songs they payed for “my label”.
This is how a record company became synonymous with the term “label”.

Freilach. Textile. Survival. Reinvention of one's life

All in all, what we call “creativity”.