My name is King Cyrus, my order I give, you Jews can go back to your home
To build your holy temple again, in the land of Palestine.
We’ve sung and danced o’er the hot rocky roads, back to Eretz Yisroel’s land,
we worked with plow and rake and hoe, and we blessed the works of our hands.
My name is Ezra the Teacher man, I brought my scroll book along
I brought my flock to Yisroel, from that land called Babylon.
I’ll read you my Talmud Torah book, and the prophet’s dreams to you,
and you’ll be fertile and multiply, if you keep your Torah true . . .
In very rare exhibit displayed with this column, Guthrie writes what in retrospect are heartbreaking lyrics for his daughter Cathy Ann in this unpublished April 20, 1946 work shortly before she died in a fire at age four on February 9, 1947 (the print is a bit light, as it was written in pencil):
Cathy on guitar, guitar lays on rug,
and Cathy sits playing on strings and talking: Hm hm hm hm/
This is how the little kitten sounds/ hm hm hm hm/
And this is how the mama cat sounds and the mama cat is in the lake/
hm hm hm/
and the big daddy cat sees the mommy in the water and here is how he sounds/
And he sees hears the little baby cat/ Hm hm hm hm/
And the little baby cat is crying/He is crying on the sand/
He is crying for his Mommy in the water/ mmm mmm mmm/
And the Daddy kitty goes this way/mm mm mm/
And do you know what the daddy cat done?/no?/ mm mm/
No?/Don’t you?/Don’t you know?/
Did he jump into the water and pull the mama cat out?/
I don’t know/ mm mm/
I don’t know.
Aliza accepted the non-Jewish Woody as a son-in-law, but Marjorie’s more traditional father, Isidore, did not. However, Cathy’s tragic death led to a family reconciliation and later, when Guthrie was fighting Huntington’s Disease (it eventually killed him), Marjorie’s parents moved back to Brooklyn from Israel (they had made aliyah in the early 1950s) to help raise the grandchildren, including Arlo, Joady, and Nora.
Arlo – who later become famous in his own right, writing and performing the classic 18-minute musical monologue “Alice’s Restaurant” and performing at Woodstock in 1969 – occasionally sang a song about the lament of his “Bubbe Greenblatt” for Cathy’s death, saying it fit a lullaby that Bubbe often sang to the family.
And how’s this for a wonderful historical coincidence of the sort I love to feature in my Jewish Press columns: While Arlo’s Jewish friends went to Hebrew school, he was given private bar mitzvah lessons by a “sweet young rabbi” who came to the family’s home: Meir Kahane.
