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Martha Schlamme was an Austrian-born American singer and actress. She was best known for singing a large repertoire of international folk songs as well as songs composed by Kurt Weill. Martha Haftel was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna in 1923. Her parents were Meier Haftel and Gisa Braten. Forced to flee to France in 1938 after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Haftel soon joined her family in England, where they were interned as 'enemy aliens' on the Isle of Man. It was there that she made her acting debut, appearing in a German-language production of As You Like It. At the internment camp, she heard a concert by the Danish-Icelandic folk singer Engel Lund, which included traditional Yiddish songs; the concert inspired Haftel to pursue a musical career of her own. Living in London after the war, she supported herself doing office work while studying voice and piano and occasionally performing on stage and radio. Shortly before emigrating to the United States in 1948, Haftel married Hans Schlamme. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)
