Echoes of song, fragments of emotion, wisps of memory. It’s a melody that still replays in your mind, years after its chorus first captured your heart.

What’s that tune that, when you hear it, brings you back to another place, time, and association? Or perhaps it’s an old, long-forgotten Jewish song, maybe one that never conquered the limelight but conquered your neshamah?

We asked readers and public figures to share some of those memories intertwined with old and forgotten songs — because when it comes to a niggun, past and present merge into a timeless inspiration

Rabbi Paysach Krohn

Song of My Heart: “A Succaleh, A Kleineh”

Album: Old Yiddish song, featured on Yiddish Classics Volume I

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hen I was a little boy of four or five, we lived on the second floor of a tenement apartment building in Williamsburg. The only place we could build a succah was on the fire escape, and only my father, Rav Avrohom Zelig Krohn, and my Uncle Label Ackerman could sit inside. I had a place on the windowsill that opened from the house, so that my feet were dangling in the succah. My aunt, Mrs. Chana Ackerman a”h, used to sing an old Yiddish song “A Succaleh, A Kleineh.” The words are about a small succah, and how the winds cannot knock it down nor blow out the Yom Tov candles within. The succah in the song is both literal and metaphorical — but in my childish perception, it described our own tiny succah. Sixty years later, the memory of my Tante Chana singing “A Succaleh” still brings tears to my eyes. The “succah” still hasn’t blown down, and this is a song that is a real source of inspiration for our times.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 710)