Song
Rejoice, Make Merry, Children
Original Title: Hulyet, hulyet, kinderkekh
Mordecai Gebirtig, born in 1877 in Krakow, Poland, was a Yiddish folk poet and songwriter.
Gebirtig had three daughters, for whom he wrote and performed his poems. The words were set to improvised melodies, and most of his songs resemble entries in a diary. Many of Gebirtig's poems contain themes of eastern European Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s. The lyrics to "Rejoice, Make Merry, Children" contain a springtime motif that recurred in other Gebirtig works. In the lyrics, an elderly narrator urges children to play on and not waste a single day, for it is "only a cat's leap, you know, from spring till winter comes."