I often heard music coming from the living room. I still remember the album cover, which depicted an elderly man with a reddish beard. Sharp in my memory is the beautiful song Oyfn pripetshik by Mark Warshawsky.
My grandparents spoke Yiddish to each other, especially when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying, or when they met their friends at the park to play dominoes.
When I asked my grandmother, who was born in Crimea, to teach me Russian, she told me she would never speak that language again. Her hate of the Russians was almost as strong as her hate of the Germans. When she heard that I was going to emigrate to Europe, she begged me never to go to Germany. It was useless to try to reason with her, she wouldn’t budge.
To make up for the fact that she wouldn’t teach me Russian, she told me she would teach me Yiddish. But what use would I ever have for that language of old Jews? Now that she is no longer alive, I have great regrets, and I wish to re-establish that tie by means of the music that accompanied her during her lifetime.
The choice of this particular musical genre (klezmer, Yiddish, tango) symbolizes the synthesis of a lengthy journey, a journey made by my grandparents while escaping persecution, pogrom and misery. The many legs of this musical excursion closely follow their itineraries - their departures from Romania, Poland, Russia, and Crimea - a stop in Turkey, where my maternal grandmother stayed for a brief period of time – and, finally, their arrival in Buenos Aires, where they met, joined backgrounds and created new lives.
That is how my Polish grandfather married by grandmother from Georgia and how my Romanian grandfather married my Russian grandmother. In spite of their different provenances, they all spoke Yiddish, the language of fusion born on the shores of the Rhine river in the 9th-10th centuries and which later became the mother tongue of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
F.Kafka, in his “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language” says: “Yiddish is a trail which stretches from one end to the other of a people's migration. All this German, Hebrew, French, English, Slav, Dutch, Romanian and even Latin which live within it is taken lightly, but it takes a certain energy to keep these different languages united.”
Although it has almost vanished, Yiddish is experiencing a reawakening which is, among other things, due to the vitality, religiousness, pathos, and genuineness of its folk music.
The pieces of Yiddish tradition present in this program describe this culture and the many sentiments and vicissitudes which animate it; the traditional di mame iz gegangen on love, the extremely popular and tormenting oyfn pripetshik (one of the songs which symbolizes the shoah) about children, the entertaining di mizinke oysgegebn about a daugher’s marriage, the social protest of dire gelt and of Hey! Zhankoye!, the irony of a finf-un-tsvantsiger about the condition of musicians, the melancholy of kinder yorn by Mordechaj Gebirtig, singer-songwriter and carpenter, universally known as one of the primary interpreters of yiddishkeit, shot down by the SS during the destruction of the Krakow ghetto.
Another aspect of the Jewish musical culture is klezmer, a Yiddish word which in Hebrew is composed of two words: kle-zemer. It literally means “musical instrument.”
This musical form, intimately tied to synagogal music and to the interpretative style of hazan (cantors) of Eastern Europe, builds its melodies on the same type of synagogal style and instruments, especially the violin and clarinet, which imitate the voice of the cantor.
Nevertheless, klezmer is also the fusion of religious components and their interaction with the social and musical world of the Jewish community.
Contamination, inherent in this type of musical phenomenon, is clearly noticeable when listened to, echoing other musical traditions, such as Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian and gypsy.
Uskudar is a love song sung in different languages and known throughout the entire Mediterranean region, from Morocco to the Balkans. Among the many versions is a curious one of the Sephardi Jews, which mixes several languages: Italian, French, English and Arabic.
Buenos Aires, the last stop on this trip, represents, somehow or other, the slow assimilation which these immigrants experienced.
Tango with its “lunfardo” jargon, another fusion and contamination of languages, expresses the sentiments which most greatly torment this metropolis of immigrants: nostalgia and the pain of returning.
Volver, above all others, is the tango of exile.
The Jews, which made up the fourth largest ethnic group in Buenos Aires, are not strangers to the birth and success of the tango. The most important crime and prostitution organizations were comprised largely of Jews, especially Polish Jews. Even brothels became a meeting place between Jews and the tango.
Moreover, in tango orchestras we find Jews, mainly violinists (the violin was the main instrument of their folk music), in addition to composers, pianists, bandoneon players, orchestra directors, and publishing entrepreneurs.
Toward the beginning of the century, tango made its way to this side of the Atlantic, quickly arriving in Eastern Europe.
During the Second World War it became part of the ghetto and concentration camp life and was adopted as a musical genre, narrated in Yiddish. The Nazis tolerated and even appreciated this music. The macabre practice of having the orchestras play the “death tango” to accompany the prisoners on their march to the gas chambers is well-known.
Shpil zhe mir a tango in yiddish (Sing Me a Song in Yiddish), whose melody became popular with different lyrics and with the title shpil zhe mir a lidele (Song) in Yiddish, is part of the collection “lider fun getos un lagern” by Shmerke Kaczerginski, who managed to escape from the Vilnius ghetto and join the partisans, becoming the singer-songwriter of the Resistance. He later emigrated to Argentina. Following the tragic death of his wife in April 1943, Kaczerginski wrote the lyrics to friling. Abraham Brudno composed the music. After the destruction of the ghetto, Brudno was deported to the concentration camp in Kluga, Estonia, where he died in 1944.
Gabriela Soltz
When all nations realise they are in exile, exile will cease to be; when majorities discover that they, too, are minorities, the minority will be the rule and not the exception ...
In a world where we are fundamentally outsiders, the commandment “you will love strangers” is not simply an altruistic desire, but the very heart of our existence…”
I.B.Singer (Yiddish, the Language of Exile) |
a"sing me" - the performance 
