There is an interesting story about the last video in my initial post. It was originally composed as L'Estaca (Catalan pronunciation: [ləsˈtakə]; meaning "the stake", figurative sense "without liberty") is a song calling for Catalonia to be free from Spain, composed by the Catalanartist Lluís Llach in 1968. It was composed during the reign of the Dictator, Francisco Franco in Spain, and is a call for unity of action to achieve freedom. The song has become a symbol of the fight for freedom everywhere. The song was covered in Yiddish (under the title "Der Yokh") by the American klezmerband, The Klezmatics, in their 2016 album Apikorism. The Klezmatics version is above. The Catalonian Lyrics describe the struggle for Catalonian freedom using a metaphor of being tied to a stake.
The song is a conversation held in a doorway at dawn, where the main character asks Grandfather Siset "Don't you see the stake that we're all tied to? If we can't take it down, we'll never be able to walk." and the old man tells him that the only way to get free is by working together: "If we all pull, it will fall down. If I pull this way and you pull that way, it will surely fall, fall, fall, and we will be able to liberate ourselves."
The struggle for freedom is hard, it is never over, there is no rest. In recent years a Yiddish version of the song has become a regular part of the Klezmatics’ concert performances. The translation, by Yuri Vedenyapin, remains faithful to Llach’s Catalan original but gives the song a Yiddish flavor and resonance.
Llach says that when he original composed the song, he used the word 'column' instead of 'stake'. In the Klezmatic’s version, Der Yokh, the title refers to the wooden collar placed over a work animal’s neck attaching them to the cart they must pull. Also, in past history a yoke was often placed over the neck of a defeated person, often making them a slave.
Here is the Catalonian original.
