“A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead.
Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb
And wrote upon the tombstone
For the eyes of dogs to come:
A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread…”
One moment of the play that caught my attention was Didi’s song from the beginning of Act Two. On reflection, I think it captures many of the recurrent themes of the play.
The first thing that stands out about the rhyme is its brutality: the tyrannical cook shows no remorse for the dog, taking up his ladle not drive him away but to beat him to death. The dog, for his part, is a pitiable figure, stealing not a loaf of bread as an indulgence, but a crust, presumably out of desperation. The hunger of the dog, next to the assumed plenty of the cook, underscores the inequality of their power dynamic. The other dogs fare no better; rather than pursuing vengeance against the cook, an action that would suggest strength among the community and hope for change, they simply bury the dead dog and turn the incidence into a grim admonition for “the eyes of dogs to come.”
The circularity of the verses affirms the inevitability of the tragedy. The entrenchment of the system of oppression that gave rise to the dog and the cook dooms them to repeat the scenario again and again and there is, as Didi and Gogo suggest elsewhere in the play, “nothing to be done.”
Like the rest of the play, the song is also ahistorical and ambiguous in its origin. The cook and the dog, like Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, and Lucky, exist in a timeless and placeless setting (with the only signifying features being the kitchen, for the former, and the tree and the moon for the latter). The origins of the nursery rhyme – who made it up, why, and how Didi came to learn it – are as obscure as those of the bizarre circumstances in which he now finds himself and his companion.
What did you guys think of the song? And which other moments of the play stood out to you?
I think this song is a powerful message that is apparent in our society today. I was wondering what the context of the song was and what the play was about as I did not attend?
I remember when I heard them talk about this, I thought of the Russian nursery rhyme I when I was a kid. It’s basically the same thing:
У попа была собака,
Он ее любил.
Она съела кусок мяса,
Он ее убил.
В землю закопал,
надпись написал:
(Then begin again.)
The priest had a dog,
And he loved her.
The dog ate a piece of meat,
He killed her.
He buried her in the ground,
And he wrote an inscription…
(Then begin again.)
Here’s the song oddly played in my favorite Russian cartoon, “Ny Pogody!” :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etd_YQh8Cg8
It holds such a heavy message, but I remember chanting it with such glee. Nursery rhymes are weird…
Sounds like it was a great experience! Unfortunately I was unable to go but I actually saw Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart on Broadway last year. Of course I read and watched the play in English whereas you watched it live in Yiddish with a projector that gave a translation. Was there anything that you felt was lost in translation? I can imagine Lucky’s speech in particularly was a problem :).
How funny! I used this “song” as a prologue in my Undergraduate Honors Thesis at the University of Rochester (Biology, 1970).
In the first draft, my advisor, Wolf Vishniac, scribbled it in five or six languages (he probably got bored – he was up to 8 or 9 when he died in Antarctica two or three years later) letting me know that it was a folk tale in most cultures he knew of.
I just thought of this diddy, sung by Didi, while thinking of the futility of life. In my thesis, I used it specifically to describe my research project as circularly futile.
I had no prologue in my Doctoral Thesis (Biochemistry, 1975 – Cornell, Ithaca).
I suppose Ecclesiastes did as well – or better. “Futility of futility, all is futile” (my translation – the Hebrew is much better!)
Elliot Hertzberg