For many years during Passover, my family would sing a Yiddish song called The Apples Will Not Fall. For several years, I’ve been trying to find out where it came from. I eventually succeeded.
Structurally, the song somewhat resembles Chad Gadya -- there’s a cat, a dog, a stick, etc. But in Chad Gadya the actions just happen; outside of a theological allegory, there’s no obvious causality. In this song, the different items are sent, deliberately.
In my family’s version, a boss sends a worker into the forest to pick some apples. The worker won’t pick the apples, and the apples refuse to fall. The boss then sends the cat to scratch the worker; the cat refuses to scratch the worker, who refuses to pick the apples, which won’t fall.
The progression is similar to that in Chad Gadya, with the boss sending in a slaughterer, an ox, some water, a fire, a stick, a cat, a dog, a worker, all in a futile attempt to get the apples picked. Finally, the boss sends in the Angel of Death, who is willing to kill the slaughter. At that point, everyone starts co-operating, apparently out of fear: the slaughterer will kill the ox, which will drink the water, etc., up to the apples, which finally fall.
In a long-ago Netnews
posting,
Len Shustek 
mentioned a similar song in
his family. Apart from the fact that his song is about pears
instead of apples
(i.e., “the pears will not fall”),
it’s more theological: the Almighty sends
in a small boy to pick the pears. The boy refuses, at which point
a cat is sent in, a dog, etc., culminating again in the Angel of Death.
You can find his version here.
Here is his recording:
I’d speculated that the difference between the two versions may have to do with the labor movement: the worker is striking, so the boss keeps sending in enforcers to break the strike. My grandfather, from whom I learned the song, was active in the left wing of the ILGWU. But that may not be the full explanation; Len reported that his family was similarly involved in union activities.
My wife visited the library at YIVO, to ask about the song; they were unable to help, though she did run into someone whose family also knew the song. (Theirs was about pears, too, but had the boss and the worker.) Someone suggested that it might be in the Workman’s Circle or Shalom Aleichem haggadahs. We checked at the National Yiddish Book Center; the reference librarian there had never heard of the song.
Here’s a transliteration, prepared by a Yiddish-speaking aunt of mine. This
I eventually learned more about the song.
- The Cytrynbaum family of Montreal, Canada (originally from Ostrowiec, Poland, near Radom), has a version very much like my family’s.
- The Tischlers, whose family hails
from Klimintov, Belarus (now Klimontow, Poland)
also sing a similar version. Beth (Tischler) Becker of Cherry Hill, NJ, writes:
My version has a farmer who is supposed to shake the tree, etc and then god comes and everyone does what their supposed to. Odd for my family to have continued singing, esp since they were all Arbeiter Ring Atheists!
- Len’s grandmother is from Torchin, about 100 miles east of Radom; he suspects that that’s where his family’s song is from. His grandfather is from Vilna; it may be from there, too.
- In an old posting (that Len found), Itzik Gottesman said it’s quite an old song; see his posting here.
- The album Seder Nights with Sidor Belarsky has a song that starts "Shikt der har a poyerl in vald, a poyerl in vald". The tune is very different, but the song is about the same. It omitted the cat and stopped at water, though.
- The song may be French in origin. A late friend of mine, a Greek who jokingly described himself as “Orthodox but not Jewish”, learned a very similar French children’s song about a goat who wouldn’t plant peas. Then there was a cat that wouldn’t scratch the goat, a dog that wouldn’t bite the cat, etc., up to a judge who would punish the butcher. The full text, as my friend rememberied it, is here.
- Many sources point to a mid-16th century German folk song as the immediate source for Chad Gadya. (Chad Gadya did not appear in the 1525 Prague Haggadah; it did appear in the 1590 version.) The German version is very well known, in different forms; it’s been collected by (among others) the Grimm brothers. Some versions speak of a jokel, though Jockel is more common. Jokel is a cognate to the English word “yokel”. Bauer—farmer—also appears. Some versions are about pears; others are about cutting oats.
Eventually, my searches and hints from others led me to the American Folklife Collection at the Library of Congress, and specifically to the papers of Abraham Schwadron, a musicologist who studied the history of Chad Gadya. It turns out that Chad Gadya, The Apples Will Not Fall, and more all come from the same roots! Schwadron even collected recordings of many different versions, which you can get from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
If you have any other versions, I’ll be happy to add them to this page.
