Dumai

2025-12-20 (last edited 2025-12-21)

errata.zone

Dumai is a song by Daniel Kahn. It takes the melody of an old Satmar folk song with refrain “dunai” which is about devotion. If my memory serves correctly, the refrain is derived from the river Danube. In Kahn’s version, the refrain is “dumai,” a Russian word meaning think. Sometimes it is written “dumay.” The song is about Zionism and Israel and Palestine. You can listen to Kahn introducing the song here (YouTube), or to Korolenko and Kahn introducing it here (YouTube). Kahn wrote the verse in Yiddish and translated it into English. Psoy Korolenko wrote a Russian translation.

There are a few versions of the song floating around: the one Kahn & Korolenko recorded as The Unternationale with Oy Division (Bandcamp) and the one Kahn recorded with his band the Painted Bird (YouTube, Oriente Music) are the two studio versions. Both of these have the verses in only Yiddish and English. The Unternationale studio version has a prelude with another short verse I can’t quite identify sung by an Oy Division guy, though I think it’s in Hebrew, and then another in Russian sung by Psoy.

My favourite version, however, is a live version performed by the Unternationale at the Levontin 7 club in Tel Aviv on 2008-11-05, according to a Youtube bootleg that has since went down. A video of the performance of Dumai alone is here on YouTube and backed up on this site here. This version also adds the main verse in Russian performed by Korolenko. There are some minor differences in wording and ordering between this version and each of the two studio recordings.

Here is my best shot at a transcription. I don’t know the first intro verse, nor Hebrew, so I’ve taken that transcription from the description of the YouTube video. A clearer singing of the Hebrew can be found in this recording (YouTube). The Yiddish and Hebrew are both romanized, since I don’t know the Hebrew alphabet. I also don’t know Yiddish, but I cross-referenced the video description with other lyrics on the internet for the main verse. The booklet (Painted Bird website) for the Painted Bird version was particularly helpful. The lyrics to Dumai are on page 16. I transcribed the Russian myself, since there are errors in the video description’s transcription. If anyone has corrections, or information about the Hebrew verse, please message me!

A more compact form of the transcription with the verses separated by language is here.

(transcriber’s note: the and in the line above should be an or, Kahn makes a mistake)

There are a few interesting lyrical differences with the later Painted Bird version:

  1. The position of “keyner vet undz frayhayt gebn / me’ darf nokh zi aleyn zikh shtrebn” is swapped with “vemen zol dos land gehern? / tsi folk fun levone tsi folk fun shtern?” The swapped version matches the English.
  2. Kahn sings “keeps us out of our own land” instead of “keeps the people from their land.” I don’t know why he made this change. Maybe he had a good reason. Not knowing that reason, I don’t like the change very much. The Painted Bird lyric carries to me an implication that Palestine is the land of the song’s narrator.
  3. “the people alone they say we can take what’s ours / they say without freedom, without land” is replaced by “we alone can take what’s ours / without freedom, without land.” I’ve seen other live recordings where he sings “they say we can take what’s ours / they say without freedom, without land,” like this one (YouTube).

There is another version of the initial Russian verse which appears in this recording (YouTube):

I started writing this post on May 1st, when I was singing this song and wanted a transcription of the Russian. In doing do, I realized that my previous post was subconsciously inspired by Dumai. Its title “If not us, then who?” is essentially “Если не мы, то кто же тогда?” in English. I didn’t finish this post until now, but here it is, and here’s to posting more.