A Guest at the Forverts
A Talk with Dr. Jonathan Boyarin,
Professor, University of North Carolina
Program hosted by Itzik Gottesman
(in yiddish)
(tip o’ my hat to raf)
My grandparents had a records of Paul Robeson singing at Carnegie Hall that I always loved. Here are some youtube videos I found.
Here he sings ‘The Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion’ in Yiddish, performed in Moscow in 1949. The context of Stalinist repression is central to the description of the publication of this on youtube. His son (quoted in the youtube description) says that lyrics translate roughly as:
Never say that you have reached the very end
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend;
For sure the hour for which we yearn will not arrive
Arid our marching steps will thunder: we survive.
In this video he sings ‘Vi azoy lebt der kayser? (How does the czar live, how does the tsar drink tea?)’ Lyrics are subtitled.
Here Robeson sings for workers at the Opera House site, as it was being built. I love the songs he sings – ‘Old Man River’ and ‘Joe Hill’. ‘Old Man River’ for the inversion of lyrics from the original and defeated Showboat tune (“Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’; / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An skeered of dyin’, / But Ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rolling along!”) to the fighting lyrics of later years (“But I keeps laffin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I must keep fightin’; / Until I’m dyin’, / And Ol’ Man River, / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!”). And ‘Joe Hill’ because it is just such a great song and no one sings it quite like Robeson.
In any case, the picture of him singing on a worksite, in the dust of what is now an elite institution, always – somehow – slightly out of reach, is something special.
“It wasn’t til I was 15 I realised Yiddish was a language that could be spoken, not just shouted.”
The ACJC’s new “Yiddish Melbourne” website has a write up in The Age today, so I had a look around. I was moved and surprised, even, by some of the memoirs of Yiddish life in Melbourne. They are well worth a read, as is this extract below:
My feelings for Yiddish Carlton run the whole spectrum from love to hatred. Hate, because Yiddish is associated with being coerced; how it was thrust on me by parents, who were determined to keep it alive in our home. They had enormous expectations of me to excel at Yiddish school — to bring home the highest marks, and they did not spare the show of disappointment if I fell short. There is also the memory of coming home alone on winter evenings after a Yiddish class through half-empty streets, having to navigate past an army barrack, scared of being accosted by a predatory male.
Today, as I mellow, I love it because the language sits so well in the psyche, seeming to just flow from the innermost memories of countless generations…
The Kadimah, the focal point of Jewish secular life in Melbourne, was run mainly by the Bund, many of whose spokespeople were from Lithuania or Latvia. They adopted a tone of moral superiority and were convinced that they had precedence over Jewish culture and survival. From my perspective, the Kadimah had two functions: the Yiddishe Shule and the Yiddishe Teater. I had no option but to attend Yiddishe Shule. My parents perceived Yiddish and Yiddishe Kultur as a panacea, a saving grace — it was the only way to maintain a Jewish identity, to protect against assimilation, which for them signified a cardinal sin, even annihilation. It may have been a penance for the guilt they felt for having escaped the Holocaust, whereas their loved ones did not. Adherence to the language, and to the people who spoke it, was a haven from the essential alienation they felt as immigrants.
-Aviva Kowadlo Silbergeld
The site has a great bibliography for books and other resources on and in Yiddish, and an overview of the history of Yiddish in Melbourne, which is pretty valuable too. There’s a biography of many famous Melbourne Yiddish figures, such as the legendary Melbourne Yiddish actress Rachel, or Rokhel, Holzer, In fact, after reading about her on the site, I found this compelling write-up about her in the Jewish Women’s Archives, which I couldn’t help but include part of here:
…Holzer’s most legendary moment was in Melbourne, in March 1966, at a recital given by visiting Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Before an audience of six thousand, Holzer recited Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar, which tells of a ravine near Kiev where thousands of Jews were murdered by the Germans. Holzer whispered and roared as she became the mothers who had lost their children, she trembled as she embodied the grief and the loss of thousands of her people. Yevtushenko was visibly moved by Holzer’s haunting Yiddish recital, as were all present. There was not a dry eye in the audience. The Australian press described her recital as electrifying…
Holzer’s stage career extended across continents, lasting more than fifty years. She was a powerful presence in the Yiddish theater, a warm, wise, gentle and dignified actor and director, who was highly respected and deeply loved. Yiddish poets Y. M. Levin and A. Cykert published odes to Rokhl Holzer in Di Oystralishe Yidishe Nayes in 1979 and 1980 respectively.
While Holzer did not give birth to any children, believing that the world was an unfit place for a child, she became like a mother to the young actor Paula Kochen, whom she called mayn tokhterl [sic] (my little daughter). With Holzer as her mentor, Kochen too became a star of the Yiddish theater, first appearing in the Holzer production Be-Arvot ha-Negev (In the Negev Desert) in 1950.
Holzer lived her last years in the Smorgon Wing of Montefiore Homes before dying on November 14, 1998. In an interview for her ninetieth birthday, she told Australian Jewish News journalist Peter Kohn, “I was born with this love [for the stage]. If I had my life to live again, I would choose a career on the stage again. Definitely.”
Melbourne Yiddish actress Rachel, or Rokhel Holzer on stage
On a side note, what seems missing from this site are resources about contemporary Yiddish language and culture, as the tone of the website seems to be very much an archive of a past era. This kind of Yiddish revival may not be huge in Melbourne, but is definitely something I know Melbourne yids my age (such as the writers for this blog, for example) are interested in, and have access to in this internet age. I mean bands like The Shondes, organisations like The Workman’s Circle, and projects like radio 613.
I finally saw Eat Pray Love tonight which I admit, I wanted to see, seeing so many women seemed to love the book. I’m not going to say much about it because this brilliant post from Jewschool a while back sums it up to a tee in three yiddish words that for me, highlight what I love about Yiddish: Fress. Kvetch. Shtup. (I linked to translations there if you’re not schooled in the Yiddish language…) The language in itself almost prevents one from taking oneself too seriously (which the self-indulgent main character could use a dose of in her self-absorbed, post-colonial, new age spiritual quest).
Whether or not you’ve seen the film, do read the Fress. Kvetch. Shtup. post by Raysh Weiss, which takes up a Jewish philosophical and ethical critique of the film which I quite liked.
There’s another good article on the NPR website which discusses Orientalism in contemporary Hollywood movies here.
Oh, and do you think this film passes the Bechdel test?
You know, despite this being a film about a woman and her oh-so-spiritual journey, I’m not sure if it does! The only conversations she seems to have with her superficial friends are about her oh-so-difficult relationships with a string of handsome men, and about how their boyfriends will still want to shtup them even if they have “muffin tops” (yeah right Julia Roberts).
So, I’ve been doing a bit of “research” (i.e, googling) for an idea for a blog series with the (working) title: an a-z of things to jew on. I thought that some alphabetical prompts might motivate me to write more, force me to come up with some ideas, or at least to find random shit on the internet and ramble about it… which is what I have done today.
A, in this case, is for Amy Winehouse: the songstress whom I admittedly love, although she is better known for her drug habits than her Judaism (though as Sarah Silverman once famously said, if Amy Winehouse isn’t Jewish, “someone should tell her face”…)
Amy has said herself that she has the music taste of “an old Jewish man”. But my googling prowess also helped me discover that old Jewish men also appreciate the music of ol’ Amy. Just check this strange vid out…
P.S Nominations for B-Z of “things to jew on” are now open 😉 so if you have any ideas, put em down below in the comments section.
There are so many great things written about, or for, Pesach. It’s really worth spending a bit of time looking around for them. So, here’s three things that have tickled my fancy, in past years and this year.
It’s been around a little while (five years, to be exact), but it’s still a great listen- the hip hop seder by Socalled, a Canadian musician is one of my pesach favourites, and it has songs in both English and Yiddish. You can listen to bits of it here or here. Go! Listen!
And a favourite from a couple of years ago…
But my new discovery this year, thanks to Bund historian extraordinaire, Dave Slucki, is the Haggadah from the United Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland, produced in 1900. So many golden moments, reinventions of the stories and questions which we know so well, including…
Father, I wish to ask you four questions:
Ma nishtana, how are we worse off than Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meir the banker, from Zarah the moneylender, from Reb Turdus the Rabbi? They do nothing and have food and drink, both by day and night a hundred times over, and we toil with all our strength the entire day, and at night we don’t even have a meal, as well?
They have great castles, shown off and drubbed up with all the trappings, beautiful rooms standing unbelievably empty—and we lie stuck together in a hole and they even want to throw us out of there?
They do nothing and wear the most expensive clothes—and we toil like oxen and have not a shirt on our bodies?
They eat a hearty dinner, drink a full-bodied glass of wine and go to sleep in a spacious warm bed and ‘Everything goes well among us’ and we lay ourselves down in a tiny corner on a straw mattress so that we can soon awaken to work?
Father, give me a reason for all four of my questions?
And here’s an offering from the Haggadah made by the Workmen’s Circle, English-Speaking Division, Los Angeles, in 1955, their reinvention of the ten plagues…
The ancient Egyptians were stricken with ten plagues before they saw the folly of the enslavement of the Israelites whom they were oppressing. Today mankind generally is oppressed with modern plagues that threaten to destroy civilization. These plagues are: Aggressive war, communism, fascism, slave labor, genocide, disease, famine, human exploitation, religious bigotry, and racial discrimination. These are some of the evils that afflict modern society. None of these evils is insurmountable. Man, by the right exercise of his intelligence can overcome all obstacles. To this task we rededicate ourselves at this Passover season. We shall now empty our cup of wine of one drop for each of these plagues.
The rhetoric might be a bit heavy-handed, but the sentiment, I think, (sadly) remains important. You can find both the complete haggadot, along with another one, and various other Bund cultural greats, in David P. Shuldiner’s Of Moses and Marx, 1999.
continuing my love affair with young jewish radical new york music… the Shondes are releasing a new album soon, and are starting the promo for it. This is from the village voice:
Brooklyn four-piece the Shondes make bold, brassy lonely-heart rock with the snarl and swoon of classic ’90s Northwestern indie–all riot grrl bluster, K Records sentimentality, and a keening, wailing violin that’s more Nirvana Unplugged than Raincoats unhinged. Their debut album, My Dear One, due May 4 is one of the first records released by Fanatic Records, the label arm of the long-standing indie promo company. Separating themselves from Sleater-come-latelys, the Shondes have a little bit of steampunky clatter underneath their crunching riffs and a keen ear towards the Jewish music that raised each of its four members. “There are definitely moments in our music where you can tell we’ve been absorbing Jewish sounds our whole lives–in the spirit of the vocals and the violin especially,” says vocalist/bassist Louisa Solomon. “But it’s not something we are hyper-conscious of. It just happens because we write from the heart, and those old sounds live pretty deep inside us.” “Make It Beautiful” features Elijah Oberman’s violin swirling plaintively around the edges of a Jewish scale, while the rest of the band digs deep into a Cranberries-meets-Gossip alt-ruckus.
The Shondes vocalist/bassist Louisa Solomon on “Make It Beautiful”
What is “Make It Beautiful” about?
“Make It Beautiful” is a very simple song. It’s about the incredible value of friendship and collaborative songwriting, particularly in those moments you’re not sure you’re going to be able to get through.
[…]
How does traditional Jewish music fit into your music and your lives?
Well, we all come from different kinds of Jewish backgrounds, running the gamut from secular pinkos to Orthodox. At this point in our lives we all value Judaism in different, core ways, and have huge appreciation for Jewish music–traditional stuff you hear at synagogue, klezmer, Yiddish folk songs, new explorations like Girls In Trouble, etc. The influence it has on The Shondes’ music is hard to pin down. My zayde has said “Oh! I can hear the Jewish sound right there!” but I never know quite where he means. It’s subtle.
What’s your favorite place to eat in Brooklyn?
My current Yiddish motto–And yes, it rotates! Yiddish offers a lot of mottos!–is, “Tsores mit yoykh iz gringer vi tsores on yoykh,” which basically means, “Troubles with soup is better than troubles without soup.” So when it comes to eating in my neighborhood, I tend towards wherever I can reliably get hot soup to ease my troubles–my zayde would be proud. Zaytoon’s has delicious lentil soup with lemon, and Vegetarian Palate is my soup staple because their veg wonton heals most things.
And here’s a live version of the new single, from last year…
if, like me, you’re at work and looking for amusing ‘yiddish’ distractions…
*hat-tip to Michael W., my regular provider of entertaining youtube clips.
Last night I went to my friend’s Filipino family’s place for Christmas eve, while my brother went to his girlfriend’s family, who are German. Today my parents are spending Christmas day at their annual gathering of a group of (Jewish) friends. Tonight we’re all having shabbes dinner together, and tomorrow my brother and I are going to the cricket, for the Boxing Day Test.
This is (one of the reasons) why I live in diaspora.
Also because diaspora produces this:
Recently, I’ve been listening a fair bit to an album that was released a few years ago called Fresh Off Boat by a New York Klezmer band named Golem. I’ve also, as part of my research, been thinking about temporality: how we’re conditioned to think chronologically and how, as E.P. Thompson has argued, this works to discipline us. We think of time as always progressing, and as a commodity which is able to be traded (so we can say, it’s better/cheaper to pay someone else to do something rather than spending my own time). We can only think in this way because we think of time as continually moving forward and as able to be captured and comprehended. In turn, time is pacifying: there is only one way to think and act, and that is chronologically, always moving forward.
So what brings this new Yiddish music and temporality together? Golem’s song ‘Bublichki’.
In this song they sing predominantly in Yiddish, but there is one bit which is said in English. The lyrics go:
“Standing on this cold street corner, selling my bagels, nobody will buy!
I will starve to death on this corner. The blackness is covering my eyes.
My father’s a drunk and my mother, a cleaning woman.
My sister, she’s a street walker; such a shame to my family.
And my little brother, well, my little brother, he picks the pockets of hipsters on the L train.”
I like how this bit plays with time. For the most part, particularly as it’s Klezmer music, the listener (or at least me!) thinks we’re listening to someone talk about the early twentieth century – life, probably on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is tough. But then the last line comes in, talking about a very late-twentieth/early twenty-first century phenomenon – hipsters on the L train (who are, most probably, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn). So we have a temporal (as well as spatial) disjuncture, a sense that time is blurred, what’s old repeats, what’s new is also old but also that everything changes.
And that, I think, is a diasporic temporality that I like. It works to break us out of ourselves a bit, plays with the logic we’re thinking of, and brings a smile to the face (or at least it does to mine!)
Check out the song here (the English bit is at about 2mins 30secs):
jew on this 