What’s the Origin of the Phrase “Pennies from Heaven”?

Mr. Burstein, the author of the short-story collection that forms Ghetto Messenger, was Jewish, and of course the term “ghetto” originally referred to a section of a city that was predominantly Jewish, specifically the city of Venice. There’s a little controversy about why the area was called a ghetto, but the most sensible explanation is that there was a foundry—a getto–near the area. (I don’t know where the “h” came from.) Jews were often confined to certain sections of European cities, so the term became usual for any Jewish quarter; later it was used for any section of a city that was predominantly composed of one ethnic group and became associated with slum neighborhoods.

The “messenger” in the title isn’t a little boy at all; he’s a rather elderly man. The subtitle is “Sixty tales of a unique seventy-year-old messenger ‘boy.’” The scene is New York City, I assume—I haven’t read many of the stories, but they have a definite New York flavor—and specifically a telegraph office that’s located on the ground floor of a tenement building. Abie, the “messenger,” delivers telegrams, but that’s just his paid job. He’s not at all above writing up fictitious telegrams in order to take care of various problems he sees going on in the neighborhood as he sits in the office. In one story he notices that a beautiful Jewish girl is going out with a Gentile, and he knows that her parents will be heartbroken if she marries him. He gets acquainted with the young man and finds out his address and his plans. On the day that the couple is supposed to go off and get married, Abie delivers a telegram to each of them saying that the other one is backing out. So the marriage doesn’t take place, and the story ends there. Hmmm.

Okay, Debi! you say. Get to the point! What happens in the story about the pennies? It’s about another trick that Abie pulls with fake telegrams, this time to help out a friend of his, Reb Yossel Idelson, who scratches out a living giving Hebrew lessons to boys. We are told that the rabbi has “an extensive progeny.” The problem is that he isn’t very good at class discipline and his pupils aren’t learning much. He’s afraid that he’ll lose them to the bigger school down the road if he can’t get better results, and then he and his children will starve. So Abie tells his friend to really concentrate on one boy and get him to learn his lessons, and then Abie comes in with a telegram for that boy which says, “Heaven, Thursday. God is pleased with your reading and will reward you many times if you learn well . . . Angel Gabriel.” The boys are a bit doubtful, but Abie tells them, “Didn’t you hear about God writing everything down that you do here? Well, electricity comes through the air and carries messages even from Heaven, way up in the sky. Here, you can see the telegram for yourselves.” Of course, Abie has written the telegram on an official form, so the sight of the yellow paper convinces the boys. Then we’re told, “Charlie showed his telegram to his father. That gentleman, being cognizant of ‘pennies falling from heaven’ and other tricks of clever m’lamdin [teachers], appeared to take it seriously.” The boys all shape up so that they can get their own telegrams, the school is a success, and the story ends with Abie telling Reb Yossel, “Didn’t I tell you that Heaven would take care of you?”

So within Jewish teaching there was some kind of “trick” used to make children think that pennies were falling from the sky, but, as you can see, this particular story doesn’t have that happening. Instead, it’s a telegram that’s (supposedly) sent. I think in the end that the phrase is actually an update of “manna from heaven,” a reference of course to God’s provision of food to the Israelites in the Jewish Bible as they wandered in the desert. At some point the arcane item of manna (“with a taste like fresh oil”–kind of weird) was changed to the more understandable pennies. That’s my best guess, anyway.

I was hoping that I’d be able to trace a straight line from this story, originally published in 1928, and the song, which came out in 1936, but I haven’t been able to find one. The lyricist, Johnny Burke, worked for the Irving Berlin Publishing Company and, before he moved to Hollywood, lived in New York City from around 1930 to 1936. Was the phrase “pennies from Heaven” a common New York/Jewish expression at that time? Maybe. The actual lyrics don’t have anything to do with angels dropping stuff out of the skies, as you can see by scrolling to the bottom of this post where I have a full version of them. Instead, they’re about the fact that we don’t appreciate the good things in life unless we have the bad, and that indeed we have to have the rain in order to have the flowers. (Sounds pretty shallow in my words, alas.)

The story of the movie doesn’t have a thing to do with Hebrew schools or telegram messengers, and it’s so convoluted that I hesitate to even attempt a summary. I’ll just say that it has to do with an unjustly imprisoned singer, another prisoner on death row, and the singer carrying out the wishes of the condemned man to make restitution to his (that is, the condemned man’s) victims, including an orphan girl who’s on the sofa in the scene where Bing Crosby sings the song to her. Our good friend Wikipedia says that the screenplay is based on the 1914 novel The Peacock Feather by an English author named Leslie Moore, and it, unlike the Ghetto Messenger, is available in its entirety online. But oh man! I just couldn’t get through it. It has to do with a guy named Peter who wanders the countryside making enough to live on by playing his penny whistle, and at the end he’s united with his one true love. Along the way he touches the lives of various people. It’s 312 pages, folks. I dipped in here and there, but there didn’t seem to be anything about prisoners on death row or restitution in it. It’s pretty . . . soggy. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the stories I read in the Messenger and will probably read a few more before I have to return it to the library.

In the end, as I’ve said before, it’s usually impossible to know the exact sources of creative works. So we’ll just leave it at that. But here’s Bing Crosby singing the original song from the movie, which was a huge hit:

I had a hard time finding a decent choral version on YouTube, so instead here’s a men’s quartet doing a virtual performance: