Martha Schlamme

Martha Schlamme (born Martha Haftel, September 25, 1923 – October 6, 1985) was an Austrian-born American singer and actress.

She was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1923. Her father was Meier Haftel and her mother the former Gisa Braten, both Orthodox Jews. Forced to flee to France in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Haftel soon after joined her family in England, where they were then interned as 'enemy aliens' on the Isle of Man. It was in the camp that she made her performance debut, appearing in a German-language production of As You Like It. In the camp, she heard a concert of the Danish-Icelandic folk singer Engel Lund, and it was exposure to Lund's repertoire, which included traditional Yiddish songs, that inspired Haftel to pursue a musical career. Living in London after the war, she supported herself doing office work while studying voice and piano and occasionally performing on stage and radio.

Emigrating to the United States in 1948, Haftel married her first husband, Hans Schlamme. She supported herself performing an ever-increasing repertoire of folk songs in multiple languages in nightclubs and concert venues in the Catskills and elsewhere. Her early recorded work began during this period and was recorded in collaboration with the Israeli composer Nachum Nardi. In 1954, she recorded the album German Folk-Songs with the then blacklisted singer Pete Seeger. Besides this album for Folkways Records, she would later record for the Vanguard, Columbia and MGM labels. In 1959, her performance of songs from the operas and musicals of the German composer Kurt Weill at the Edinburgh Festival led to much wider awareness of her work; she herself said it made her "a star overnight." MGM released her albums The World of Kurt Weill in Song in 1962 and A Kurt Weill Cabaret in 1963. The label further issued (Martha Schlamme says:) Kissin's No Sin in the latter year.