Nahum Stutchkoff[a 1] (born 7 June 1893 in Brok near Łomża,[2] Russian Empire, now Poland; died 6 November 1965 in Brooklyn, New York City), was a Yiddish-Polish and later Yiddish-American actor, author, lexicographer, and radio host.
Nahum Stutchkoff was born Nachum Stuczko (or Nokhem Stutshko in Yiddish) into a Chassidic family living in the northeast of Congress Poland ("Vistula Land") in the then Russian Empire.
He broke off his traditional religious schooling to join the theatre company of the cultural organisation Hazomir (Hebrew for "the nightingale"), led by the author Isaac Leib Peretz.
He worked with many illustrious names of the Yiddish theatre, such as Molly Picon, Ludwig Satz, Sholom Secunda, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Menasha Skulnik.
Shortly after that, he started work as an announcer at WLTH, where he soon took over a children's talent show from Sholom Secunda and renamed it Feter Nokhems yidishe sho ("Uncle Nahum's Yiddish hour").
Stutchkoff quickly became popular and was hired by WEVD in 1932, a radio station which had been bought by the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward) after the American Socialist Party had founded it.
In the three following decades, Stutchkoff worked as a writer, director, and host of about one dozen serial programs and produced thousands of advertisements for his sponsors.
He also wrote many comedies for radio, such as Eni un Beni ("Annie and Benny"), In a yidisher groseri ("In A Jewish Grocery Store"), In a freylekhn vinkl ("In A Happy Place"), and An eydem af kest ("A Son-In-Law, living with and supported by the wife's parents").
He wrote the series Tsores ba laytn ("People's Worries") instead, which ended with a plea for donations to nursing homes and which ran for fifteen years.
In 1955, he left the project for personal and conceptual reasons after only three years: his pragmatic approach to lexicography was not compatible with Yudel Mark's scientific claim.
However, the destruction of the European Jewry by the Nazis made him an energetic supporter of traditional Judaism and an adversary of assimilation in language and religion.
The catalogue raisonné by Burko and Seigel[10] includes three dozens stage plays, including stage adaptations of Stutchkoff's own radio programs: two dozens translations of plays in other languages, such as: more than ten radio shows produced for the WEVD, including: uncounted advertisements (product placements and commercial sketches) around a dozen texts for sheet music, which Abe Ellstein, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Sholom Secunda put to music three books: Stutchkoff's written estate is kept in the New York Public Library (New York City), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York City), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), and the American Folklife Center (Washington, D.C.).
Literature (a selection) Obituaries Weblinks Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at de:Nahum Stutchkoff by the same author; see its history for attribution.