Kasatchok!

For years the Red Band in London, and then the Stroud Red Band, played a tune called Kasatchok. It's a Russian traditional dance tune, or so I thought. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we stopped playing it, not because we're boycotting everything that ever was Russian, but it didn't feel too good. Someone pointed out that a kasatchok was also a Ukrainian dance; did that make it better? Did the fact that it was a Ukrainian cossack dance make it worse again? After all fear and hatred of cossacks in part of Jewish folk-memory; my dad told me that in the 43 Group they used to call the mounted police in London "cossacks".

Then a friend reminded me that there are Italian words to the tune, which became a song of the Italian partisan resistance to the Nazis - Fischia il Vento. With that name it was programmed into a little electric keyboard that his child has. Here is a nice version by the Modena City Ramblers, an Italian lefty band...for some reason they are wearing kilts to perform this, perhaps because they think of themselves as playing Irish traditional music.

And then I remembered that the song used to be played a lot at Jewish weddings and barmitzvahs, at which the young men would try to dance a pseudo-Russian squatting dance that they would call the "kazotzkas", which would result in everyone getting very sore thighs. In fact I had once thought of it as a Jewish tune, and I recalled that there was a Hebrew version. I'm pretty sure we sang it once or twice in my Zionist youth movement, and it turns out that it was translated into Hebrew as early as 1945, probably as part of the Socialist-Zionist love affair with all things Soviet.

And finding the Hebrew version on YouTube, I also came across this, which has to be a strong contender for the weirdest thing on the internet - a Yiddish version, syncopated, performed by some sort of folk choir from Birobidzhan, in a made-up Jewish folk costume. Are these people actually even Jews? What tradition does this costume, and this song and dance, form part of?

Of course it turns out that the tune is not a traditional one but was written by Matvey Isaakovich Blanter,  a Soviet (Jewish) composer in 1938.