Ben Gailing (1898-1999) Papers

Benjamin Gailing was born on December 25, 1898 in Krasnopol in the Suwalki province north of Bialystok. He had a traditional cheder education, but also wrote poems and songs and performed in a choir at his shul. When he came to the United States in 1913, he had been planning to continue studying in a yeshiva, however a visit to the Lower East Side Yiddish theater inspired him to instead become an actor. He soon joined Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, where he sang, danced, acted, and played the violin during performances. He also joined the Hebrew Actors Union and toured the Yiddish theater circuit, traveling to Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, and Toronto. At the same time, Gailing wrote articles, poems, and humorous pieces about Yiddish comedy and theater in various periodicals in New York, Montreal, and Philadelphia. He also composed several plays and published original songs and Yiddish translations of American popular songs.

In the 1920s, while living in New York, Gailing had a radio show on WABC and was a regular on the Socialist radio station, WEVD. These experiences would later inform his long-running Yiddish radio program in Boston. When Gailing realized that Boston did not have its own Yiddish theater troupe, he and his wife, Frieda Letwin, who he married in 1921, moved to Boston. He directed and produced Yiddish performances at Boston’s Grand Opera House, John Hancock Hall, and the Franklin Park Theatre, 1930s-1970s, with performers hailing primarily from Boston and New York. Gailing also had a column for the Boston edition of the Forward, “Ben Gailing Shraybt” (Ben Gailing Writes), and was active in the Labor Zionist movement, working and performing at Workmen’s Circle camps around Boston.

In 1931, Gailing, calling himself the “freylekher kabtsn” (happy pauper) after a Yiddish comedic play, launched the weekly “Yiddish Radio Show.” The show featured live skits, songs, editorials, celebrity gossip, history, and politics, all delivered in well-crafted Yiddish rhymes. He also read excerpts from his weekly humor column for the Forward, “Git a Shmeykhl” (Smile), which he wrote c. 1930s-1950s, and which was collected in a book, Git a Shmeykhl, a bukh fun laykhtn humor un satire far ale teg fun a gants yor (Smile, a book of light humor and satire for every day and all year), published in 1949. The show ran for sixty-eight years, until Gailing’s death, and served as a focal point for the Boston Yiddish-speaking community.

In the early 1960s, Gailing became the cantor at his synagogue, Temple Beth Abraham in Canton, MA, a position he held for twenty-six years. His wife, Frieda, died in 1988. Gailing moved to a nursing home in 1991 but continued to record the “Yiddish Radio Show” every Sunday until his death from pneumonia on March 27, 1999 at the age of 100.