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<\/a><\/p>\nAmerican pop singer Connie Francis, circa 1960, the same year she released an album of Jewish songs, inset. (Archive Photos\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Now, Francis\u2019 death on Wednesday at 87 has drawn attention to another little-known element of her discography: her 1960 album of Jewish music, including songs in Yiddish and Hebrew.<\/p>\n
Francis, whose real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1940s, when the city was home to a large Jewish population (including Phillip Roth, four years her senior). \u201cIf you weren\u2019t Jewish, you needed a password to get in,\u201d she once told an interviewer, the Forward reported in 2018.<\/p>\n
Francis wound up deploying the Jewish culture and language she picked up in her childhood neighborhood as she emerged as a vocal star in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She performed at Borscht Belt resorts during their heyday, then recorded an album of Jewish music as part of an effort to make herself as widely known as possible in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n
\u201cConnie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites,\u201d released in 1960, contained renditions of \u201cTzena, Tzena, Tzena,\u201d the Yiddish classic \u201cOifen Pripetchik\u201d and \u201cHava Nagila,\u201d reflecting a wave of popular interest in the Jewish folk song.<\/p>\n
Francis\u2019 performances of the Jewish classics enamored her to a certain generation of Jewish Americans. Alan Feiler, the editor in chief of Baltimore Jewish Living, wrote following her death that his father-in-law had praised her Yiddish accent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn his own way, I think my father-in-law \u2013 the son of Eastern European immigrants \u2014 saw Francis\u2019 collection of Jewish classics as an affirmation of how far the Jewish community had come in America,\u201d Feiler wrote. \u201cIt seemed to indicate validation and acceptance in the New World.\u201d<\/p>\n
Francis died Wednesday, according to her publicist, who announced her death on Facebook. Married four times, she is survived by a son.<\/p>\n