Writing on Water by Judit Niran Frigyesi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing on Water by Judit Niran Frigyesi Jonathan Boyarin (bio) Writing on Water By Judit Niran Frigyesi. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018. This is a very special book. It is a poetic, autoethnographic, and ethnographic memoir of research done first in the late 1970s and then in the 1990s among elderly and religiously observant Jews in Budapest (and a little bit in Prague). The research focused on the traditional liturgical music of these congregations, and then later, on the life histories of these elderly Jews. Although the research was conducted in the field of musicology, this is not a musicological study in the traditional sense by any means. Indeed, much of the eloquent reflection here is on precisely why the author found it impossible to do a comprehensive, "objective" musicological study of the old-fashioned sort. In doing so, she offers a very lucid (and to me, utterly convincing and recognizable) meditation on the fragmentation of memory and on the forms of spiritual identity or of being-in-the-world that are represented by the musical forms that were the ostensible topic of her research. Cumulatively, the book gives a very rich sense of the humility, tenuousness, and profundity of these peoples' lives. It is also an extremely valuable account of the flavor of life in Budapest during the last years of Communism. The author has gotten it right; both the form and the content ring true. I did not live or move in these circles in Budapest in those years, but I did do ethnography of elderly Polish Jews in Paris in the early 1980s, which I think is a good basis for judgment and comparison. There is a loving but not overly sentimental respect for the elderly here, and both the reasons for the author's attraction to their milieu and the distance she had to maintain from the full-scale adoption of traditional Judaism for herself are convincing. In the process, a great deal is conveyed about the dynamics of Jewish dis/continuity. The first part focuses on the period in the late 1970s, and details precisely—honestly but not pedantically—the author's visits to a range of Jewish prayer settings (from the Friday night gatherings of academics, to the Neolog synagogue, and the more intimate but less welcoming Orthodox synagogue), and her observations of and meetings [End Page 167] at home with a range of prayer leaders who became her guides to the traditional liturgy she was studying. A significant latter section, based on material collected in the 1990s, details early life memories of some of these same individuals and others whom she met later, and serves to give the reader a picture of the "traditional," pre-World War II and often small-town life in which much of this liturgy was first learned. The tone of the narrative throughout is personal but, far from being solipsistic, I find it extremely rigorous. Without indulging in extensive references to secondary or theoretical literature, it is very much within the scope of the turn to reflexive and self-critical ethnography. Precisely its refusal to hypostatize the "traditional culture" of the subject population, and the tension it depicts between the specificity of individual lives and the communal idioms in which they come together, are evidence of its author's very sophisticated scholarly sensibilities. The writing is overall beautiful and evocative, and sounds quite appropriately like it comes from another place. Ethnographers of music, Eastern Europe, and aging (and classes in these subjects) would be a natural audience for this book, as would anyone with a serious interest in everyday life in Central Europe under Communism, or the fate of "traditional" Jewish culture and sociality in the postwar decades. Giorgio Agamben, drawing on ideas first expressed by Walter Benjamin, wrote in The Man Without Content that "the breaking of tradition does not at all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence it never had before".1 Confronted with Judit Niran Frigyesi's Writing on Water, I am struck at once by both the power and the seductive...