The Bagelman Sisters and Beyond: Moe Asch’s Sound Encyclopedia

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A young New York radio engineer Moses Asch (1905-1986) ran a small radio repair shop in New York in the 1930s. His family had fled Poland and settled there. He found that his customers were asking for Jewish recordings that none of the existing labels could provide. He soon found himself in the record business recording two sisters, the Bagelman (later Barry) Sisters singing in Yiddish. About the same time he went with his father, the novelist Sholem Asch, to see the elder Asch’s friend, Albert Einstein in Princeton. When Einstein asked Moe, what he wanted to do with his life, he replied he wanted to document all the world’s sounds in a sonic encyclopedia. Einstein told him “you’re just the guy to do it” That started his journey into Folkways Records and over 2000 titles in the next 40 years.