One of the Yiddish songs that is perhaps most well-known by Yiddish theatre music lovers is the song “Roumania Roumania,” which Aaron Lebedeff wrote and performed throughout his long and illustrious career. The song was written as a nostalgic and humorous tribute to Jewish life and culture in Romania, as he recalled his own experiences there.
As a child in Belarus, young Aaron Lebedeff sang for a cantor in a synagogue. At that time Aaron was not interested in receiving an education, nor in learning a trade, so he ran away and joined various acting troupes in some Russian theatres in Belarus, and he began to play in small roles on the stage.
He later would become a chorister, a roadie and a stagehand. He also would dress the actors, and he acted as a prompter, throwing lines to the actors who were on the stage.
He then debuted in a play and became a character actor with different itinerant troupes that performed across Russia.
He became engaged to play in various cities, such as Warsaw Poland, until he was pressed into service in the Russian Army and was sent to Harbin in Manchuria. There he would give concerts for the officers.
After leaving the service, he found work in a Yiddish troupe, but in order to actually earn a living, he often had to sing in the Russian language, or in English for the American Red Cross.
He later married, and with his wife Vera Lubow, gave concerts in Japan and China.
In 1920 both Aaron and Vera immigrated to America and were hired by Boris Thomashefsky’s National Theatre in New York City to act in Yiddish theatre. This was for the play called, “Liovke Molodietz,” which made Aaron a great hit with the public, and he became an overnight star of America’s Yiddish theatre.
Over the years he continued to perform in many of the famous Yiddish theatres of his time.
During the 1921-1922 season, he was a star in Boris Thomashefsky’s National Theatre. He continued to play there during the 1925 to 1932 seasons, including in two other well-known plays, called “Yankele Litvak” and “Volodke in Odessa.”
For the 1932-1933 season Lebedeff moved over to Kessler’s Second Avenue Theatre.
At the end of that season Lebedeff and the troupe in which he played guest roles, traveled to various cities in the United States.
On various occasions, Lebedeff played the role of "Max" in Goldfaden's "The Two Kuni Lemels,” and in Jacob Gordin’s "The Wild Man.”
His career in the Yiddish theatre lasted for decades.
The famous Yiddish composer Joseph Rumshinsky once wrote his impressions of him, after seeing him perform for the first time in the play, “Liovke Molodietz”:
“Aaron Lebedeff, on the first night of his appearance, not only acted, but he danced and sang for the fourteen to fifteen hundred people who then attended the performance, yet I felt, sitting in the theatre, that the applause and the laughter stormed the entire Yiddish-American theatre public in America.
Leaving the theatre, I still felt the excitement of the public, that what took the big stars thirty to thirty-five years, the Litvak did in one evening. Since then, since that evening, the greatest events have taken place before our eyes.
Whole kingdoms have fallen.
Modernism has already become classical.
An airplane already has the same effect as a carriage at home.
The greatest electrical lighting already looks like a kerosene lamp from home.
Atomic power is already spoken of as an ordinary event.
But Aaron Lebedeff is still on the stage as the young, fresh, eternal Liovke Molodietz.
The young see him go on the stage, in the streets and in the coffee houses, because he never gets old.
He will remain the Liovke Molodietz forever."
