Yiddish Folksongs Research Articles

Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz

Reviewed by: Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Luis S. Krausz, Deserto: Zwischen den Welten. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2017. 132 pp. Luis Krausz's Deserto offers a highly personal introduction to the Brazilian post-Shoah Austrian-German-Jewish community, and it challenges genre boundaries. This intriguing prose work examines ways in which an extended family copes with the trials of exile and uncovers effects of the Shoah and Nazi persecution in the generation of the grandson. Anecdotes, historical information, and a wealth of cultural insights pertain to the youthful narrator's journey from his native São Paulo to Israel and England. In these different settings he encounters members of his family and the Ashkenazic diaspora. The narrative perspective blends adolescent naiveté and an adult awareness, past and present. In the account the norms of the diaspora society become visible, as do the distinct traditions to which his relatives subscribe—Reform Judaism, Jewish orthodoxy, and secular cosmopolitanism. Not without a transgressive bent, the narrator notes the extraordinary traits of his society from an insider's point of view. His trip enables him to gain distance from Jewish São Paulo with its bourgeois homes hidden behind hedges and the cemetery [End Page 114] of Vila Mariana as the residents' final destination (16). Moving "zwischen den Welten," Krausz's narrator increasingly assumes the role of an affectionate, erudite interpreter. Krausz draws a cultural and historical panorama that extends beyond Central Europe, notably Vienna, into the destroyed world of the shtetl, where the Ashkenazic communities originated. Krausz's earlier novel Verbannung (2011) focused on the formative years of the narrator in Jewish São Paulo, but Deserto suggests an impending departure. The narrator is identified as the grandson of exiles, who, like the author, is beholden to the high culture of Austria and Germany: classical literature, music, and the humanities. To him, Europe represents an unattainable ideal as well as a forbidden fruit. Deserto foregrounds the narrator's travels to Israel and England and the exile milieu in which his relatives live. Like his parents, they escaped National Socialism, and like the Ashkenazim in Brazil, they assimilated themselves superficially while maintaining Jewish values and identity as expressed through their attire, practices, and food as well as a language rooted in pre-Shoah Vienna and Berlin speech. References to post-Enlightenment history and the ideal of Bildung epitomized by Heine, Freud, Zweig, Schnitzler, Mann, and Wassermann establish an intellectual cohesion in Krausz's novel. From German-Jewish literature and his elders' accounts, this Brazil-born grandson has constructed a text-based identification wiTheurope that instilled in him a longing for the mysterious "drüben" and for the past. Integral to this cultural profile are furthermore an appreciation for Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms; proficiency in German and classical languages; and the etiquette of the European bourgeoisie. Krausz also specifies language registers and accents that identify distinct groups within his circles, for instance the "altvertraute Wiener Vorkriegsdeutsch" (95) or the Jewish "Jargon," the Yiddish-accented German that the sixteen-year-old narrator understands but does not speak. For those who can afford it, the lifestyle of the exiles includes a household with maids, tailors, and pastry chefs from the territories of imperial Habsburg, Viennese-style furniture and soups, pastries, meat dishes, even "panierte Schweinsschnitzel" of the cuisine of Old Vienna, and the Jewish delicacies hamantashen, kugel, and tsimmes. In his memory book Die Tante Jolesch oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (1975) Friedrich Torberg mourned and celebrated Ashkenazic culture, which he considered forever lost. Krausz subtly revises the notion of finality and replaces it with a notion of diasporic dispersement evident [End Page 115] from the perpetuation but also the repression of Ashkenazic patterns. Cultural cohesion, he suggests, requires transparency as well as taboos, for example, traveling to post-Nazi Austria or Germany or breaking the silence about the Shoah and Eastern Jewish life. Uncle Richard's taboo-breaking but enjoyable trip to the Salzburg Festival is one example. It stands in contrast to Uncle Eugen's avoidance of a collection of Yiddish folk songs and early Zionist dances, which he keeps intact but does not share or...

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman

Reviewed by: Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman Hankus Netsky Walter Zev Feldman. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxiv + 413 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000333 As Jonathan Karp and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett note in the introduction to their seminal 2008 volume, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, "Much remains to be done if the arts are to figure more fully in Jewish studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines" (1). More specifically, within Jewish studies, Jewish music has recently been caught in the crossfire between the field's desire for scholarship compatible with its priorities (books and articles on contemporary American synagogue music or Israeli pop, for example) and the priorities of the many Jewish music scholars and activists who write about musical traditions that tend to resonate more outside the Jewish community. Throw in the landscape posed by the proliferation of such confusing buzzwords as "Ashkenormativity," and "postethnicity" (both regularly used in reference to east European Jewish culture), and those trying to figure out how to integrate the study of east European Jewish music into their curricula have been more likely to give up than to forge ahead through the increasingly foggy landscape. The recent publication of Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History and Memory gives those working in the field of Jewish studies an excellent opportunity to reassess their relationship with east European and other global Jewish ethnic musical traditions. Feldman, a multilingual scholar and virtuosic performer who spearheaded the reemergence of the tsimbl (the Jewish hammered dulcimer), is also profoundly respected for his work as a teacher of east European Jewish dance and universally acknowledged as originator of the English-language term "klezmer music" in the early 1980s, using it to specifically identify the virtuosic practice of east and central European professional folk instrumentalists who performed at Jewish celebrations. Feldman has long been considered the preeminent scholar in a field that has spawned numerous monographs in the era of klezmer's resurgence. Oddly, before Mark Slobin's pioneering work in the early 1980s, almost no English-language scholarship existed on the topic at all, despite the extraordinary musical accomplishments of its practitioners and klezmer music's ubiquitous position at Jewish celebrations for many hundreds of years in Europe and in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Until this book's appearance, the available literature on klezmer had focused primarily on the music's American incarnation and on the sociological implications of the recent (now over forty-year-old) klezmer resurgence, mainly zeroing in on New York's downtown scene and the bustling klezmer world of contemporary Europe. By positioning klezmer music as a significant component of a tightly interconnected European Jewish system that includes the world of Jewish prayer, hasidic gesture, Yiddish folksong, Yiddish literature, Jewish dance, Jewishthemed visual arts, and coterritorial revelry, Feldman offers a compelling argument for a total reassessment of the value of the klezmer genre as a major conduit of nonverbal cultural memory for Ashkenazic Jews. Feldman devotes over two hundred pages of this volume to providing support for that argument, including chapters where we learn about talmudic [End Page 248] study gesture as dance gesture; read richly ethnographic descriptions of Jewish dancing and music making culled from Yiddish literature; and learn about how Jews and their coterritorial neighbors interacted in constructing a culture that is arguably the most uniquely "Jewish" of any that ever emerged in the Diaspora. We read about a Jewish society whose members were bound together by shared customs that easily traversed ideological lines. Indeed, as Feldman observes, "The gradual demise of the klezmer—and with him traditional Ashkenazic dance—is a barometer of the increased polarization of Jewish society into various secular and religious camps lacking any shared aesthetic vision" (56). Feldman's much-anticipated volume is the product of over forty-five years of serious research, and, in putting the book together, the author has gone to great pains to parse through virtually all of the available literature in Romanian, Russian, Turkish, German, Polish, Yiddish, English, and Hebrew, not to mention an exhaustive selection of music folios...

Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection ed. by Kevin C. Karnes (review)

Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection. Edited by Kevin C. Karnes. (Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music, 11.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2014. [Pref., p. xi-xii; introd., p.xiii-xxxi; about the edition, p. xxxii-xxxvi; part 1. Songs from Keidan, 1899, p. 3-13; part 2. Songs from Latvia and Lithuania, 1924-1931, p. 16-29; part 3. Songs of Uncertain or Unknown Provenance, p. 32-109; references, p. 111-16; indices, p. 117-18. ISBN-13 978-0-89579-794-0. $150.] Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music holds curious yet crucial place in A-R Editions' catalog. Under Philip Bohlman's editorship since the late 1990s, the series offers vibrant gloss on orality as function of societies with long literate traditions: perspective more intuitive than paradoxical upon reflection. Each volume in the series functions on two levels: as conventional documentation of specific mode of cultural production, and as methodological treatise on presenting extra-literate practices in graphic form. Especially this second aspect takes advantage of A-R Editions' expertise in score production, allowing scholars to match the editorial integrity of explanatory texts with meaningful interrogations into notation as fundamentally human endeavor. Through such scholarly analysis, the series offers rich discussion about ontologies of intellectualism, shedding light on the layered nature of musical production and preservation along the way. The volume under review here, Jewish Folk Songs of the Baltics, deepens the series' engagement with Europe and Jews--topics factor into three and six, respectively, of the series' twelve published volumes--while continuing to interrogate entrenched conventions of folk song scholarship. As editor Kevin C. Karnes implies, the vast and rather fraught literature on folk song collection and publication, especially in the interwar period, reinforced pressures to study both Jews and Latvians as separate national groups. Karnes argues, however, the urge toward national identity lay in tension with quieter yet equally important reality: these so-called national narratives had to be distilled from rather more heterogeneous population. Consequently, Karnes's focus on narrow, curious case of crossover--a small collection of songs by Jewish informants gathered by nonjewish investigator--shines spotlight onto complicated questions of motivation and expectation in the larger project of folk song collection, potentially subverting assumptions about the nature of collection itself by looking under the hood. A mystery surrounding prominent Latvian folklorist, composer, and choral conductor Emilis Melngailis (1874-1954) comprises the volume's case study. While recognized for his many published collections of Latvian folk song, Melngailis credited a chance encounter with Yiddish folksong in 1899 as the event that sparked his lifelong passion for collecting vernacular musics (p. xiii). Although he reportedly collected about 120 folk songs from Jewish informants around time, almost no Jewish material appeared in his publications, eventually leaving the impression it had been lost. More than half century after his death, however, increased post-1990 access to Latvian archival collections showed otherwise. After pursuing an initial lead, Karnes, working with the late Israeli musicologist Joachim Braun and others, combed through major collections of Melngailis's papers in Riga's Archive of Latvian Folklore and Museum of Literature and Music. The sixty-four songs reproduced here, painstakingly reassembled and extensively annotated, comprise the fruit of research. Karnes takes classic approach to his material, starting with well-researched and thoughtful introduction triangulates Melngailis's life and career with concurrent trends and practices of both Latvian and Jewish folk music collecting. …

Funem (sh)eynem vortsl aroys?!—Approaches to the Study of Parallel Eastern Yiddish and German Folk Songs

Yiddish and German are two languages and cultures that are considered autonomous and important within the European cultural diversity. Although they are linguistically very close and historically interwoven, not much research has been done concerning the comparison of their folk cultures. The present comparative study of Eastern Yiddish and German folk songs is a first step towards a deeper understanding of the processes of cultural migration and transfer since the Middle Ages. The paper concentrates on three aspects: 1. Discussion of previous undervalued research by scholars in the twentieth century. 2. Uncovering the roots and routes of parallel folk songs. 3. The significance of this research for the development of a historically informed performance practice (hip) for Yiddish folk songs.

Between Jesus and the Besht

Two particular groups of poems from Itzik Manger’s largely unpublished early work (1921–1929), those about Jesus and those about the Baal Shem Tov, form a poetical polarity in his work; at the same time they act as complementary forces in the psychological unfolding of Manger’s creative process. As an itinerant poet travelling on Romanian back roads, Manger encountered many wayside crosses with scenes of crucifixion, and found in the image of Jesus a tragic companion, who embodied homelessness, helplessness, and human pain. From 1921 to 1928 this companion mirrors in Manger’s work the shadows of the poet’s soul and also engages his fascination; in the figure of Christ Manger was able to name the unbearable in his own life, experimenting in that process with symbolist and expressionist forms and models. In 1927, Manger discovered his deep connection to the Besht. Childhood memories of travelling with his grandfather in the Carpathian Mountains reinforced the connection. Mesmerized by the figure of the Besht, Manger then developed in a new group of poems a healing counter-world to the one depicted in the Christ poems, a world that is tangibly inhabited by the sacred. Manger thus moved from Golgotha into the open space between Kosev (Kosov) and Kitev (Kuty), and in so doing created poems with a new sonority, poignantly evocative of Yiddish folk songs. The Christ figure disappears once Manger becomes aware of this poetic and psychological fault line in himself, though Christian motifs remain part of his poetic vocabulary.

Why a Specific Cultural Identity Does Not Exclude Universality in Teaching Yiddish Folksong

After a time of silence, Jewish identity often appeared to be reclaimed, or redefined, through connecting to Yiddish (folk-) song. Since Yiddish songs have become a kind of musical historic archive, Jews find in this repertoire different expressions of Jewish identity. They are able to embark on a joyful learning process as opposed to the sadness or silence they have been confronted with before. Meanwhile, the interest of non-Jews for this subject teaches them about a multi-faceted Jewish life, as opposed to only learning about the Shoah or the dramatic political struggles of Israel. This kind of cultural exploration becomes a strong tool for intercultural dialogue and peace. Both Jews and non-Jews participate in an inclusive learning-experience about a European Jewish heritage, which appears to be a discovery for both, on different levels. Depending on the choice of repertoire and a specific pedagogical approach, this particular way of learning appears to contribute to consciousness and universal thinking. The usual chauvinism that might result from reclaiming one's ethnic, cultural or religious identity does not seem to occur in this case. This article details Europe's quest for Yiddish culture after the Second World War and its consequences for Jewish and non-Jewish life today, seen through the eyes of a singer and pedagogue of Yiddish songs.

Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive (review)

Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive (review)

Bagels, Bongos, and Yiddishe Mambos, or The Other History of Jews in America

"Bagels, Bongos, and Yiddishe Mambos" focuses on Jewish-Latin recordings of the 40s–60s. Arguing that standard models of understanding Jews and race are inadequate in thinking about the mid-century Jewish-Latin interchange, this essay suggests that Jews were drawn to Latin music neither to demonstrate their whiteness, nor to pretend to be Latin, but rather to find new ways of being Jewish.

Lomir ale singn: Die Musik der Juden Osteuropas (review)

Reviewed by: Lomir ale singn: Die Musik der Juden Osteuropas Rita Ottens Lomir ale singn: Die Musik der Juden Osteuropas, by François Lilienfeld. Zürich: Chronos, 2002. 178 pp., compact disc. fi29.90. In present-day Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the discourse around the field of Yiddish music and Yiddish music research has become one of ethnicity and race. At a time when the role of Jews in Germany is marginalized—yet expected to be drawn upon [End Page 173] whenever needed as part of the constituting of the new German Self—it is “Jewish” music that fills the space. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially the music of the main targets of the German Endlösung, the Eastern European Jews, has been turned into a ritualistic remedy, and is celebrated in festivals and concert series throughout the country. It is the milieu of this, the “Music of the Jews of Eastern Europe,” that François Lilienfeld has set out to “describe more thoroughly.” His “greatest intention,” however, is “to show that synagogue music, Yiddish folksong and klezmer music represent three facets of one culture, three elements which are inseparably interconnected” (p. 7). The book contains sections on these three musical genres as well as chapters on hasidic music, the Yiddish language, Yiddish theater, and Yiddish film. In addition, it includes an annotated bibliography and discography, illustrations, and notated musical examples, as well as a compact disc. The book does not, however, as it proclaims, deliver a “more thorough” understanding of the colorful tapestry of Eastern European Jewish musical traditions. That topic is broader than any one volume could encompass thoroughly, as recent publications by Moshe Beregovski (2000 Moshe Beregovski (2001), Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel (2001), Ellen Koskoff (2000), Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin (1999 Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin (2001), Kay Kaufman Shelemay (2001) and Mark Slobin (2000 and Mark Slobin (2002) have shown. Lilienfeld’s uncritical use of sources of varying approaches, reliability, and quality, as well as his inability to interpret and draw his own conclusions from these materials, leads to a confused depiction of the musical cultures that he set out to describe. What makes all of this even worse is the obvious attitude of the author that anything goes, as long as it fits into his world view. Especially after listening to the enclosed CD, one must come to the conclusion that the production was mainly undertaken for the purpose of self-promotion. The compact disc promises to give an “impression in sound of the described music” (cover text), but fails to do just that. Instead, the author offers the listener a cantillation in the German (not Eastern European) ritus—sung by himself shortly after his bar mitzvah—following on the heels of the voices of the famous early twentieth-century Eastern European cantors Rosenblatt, Sirota, and Pinkasowicz. Of the eighteen tracks on the CD, an additional five comprise interpretations by Lilienfeld himself, including two compositions in the German ritus by Louis Lewandowski, as well as a pseudo-hasidic piece with “ecstatic” oy-oy-oys written by the author himself. These illustrate acoustically Lilienfeld’s doubtful connection to Yiddish music, language, and culture, an impression which is also given by the text itself. For example, the complex, several-centuries-old modes of expression in Eastern European Jewish music are reduced to three, seven-tone “Jewish” scales (p. 142). What it is that makes this music “Jewish” or, more specifically, “Yiddish,” Lilienfeld is not able to explain. He fails to mention that all three scales are shared with surrounding ethnicities in Eastern Europe as well as those of the Middle East, and are of unknown provenance. Such reductionisms unfortunately [End Page 174] don’t give the reader any information on the typical melodic turns of phrase or ornamentation patterns associated with those scales—precisely the modal aspects which could be interpreted as “Yiddish.” In general, it can be said that Lilienfeld relies too heavily on outdated and second-hand general sources such as Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1929/1992) and Aron Marko Rothmüller (1960), despite the relative plethora of writings on Eastern European Jewish music published in the past two...

Pent Nurmekund as the translator of Yiddish folksongs into Estonian

One can often hear the question: are there any Jews in Estonia at all? And if there are, is there any reason to speak about Estonian Jewry in the sense we speak about Polish, Lithuanian, Galatian Jewry? Indeed, Estonia has never been a “traditional” land of Jews: during the Russian rule it did not belong to the so-called pale of settlement. Estonia never met with the “Jewish question”, there was no ground either for everyday or for official antisemitism. The Department of Jewish studies in the University of Tartu was the first one of its kind in the Nordic countries. At that time it was not unusual that an Estonian understood some Yiddish, there are also examples of the students who studied seriously the language and the culture of Jews. Pent Nurmekund, a famous polyglot was one of them. Nurmekund had learned a number of Yiddish folksongs and later translated some of them into Estonian. The two songs we are going to speak about are “Toibn” and “Main fraint”. Nurmekund performed both a Yiddish and an Estonian version of the first song. Main fraint was recorded only in Yiddish, the Estonian translation was published in the literary periodical Looming.

Yiddish Folksongs in Russia

Yiddish Folksongs in Russia

Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong

Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong

Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folk Song

Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folk Song

Voices of a People. The Story of Yiddish Folk Song. Ruth Rubin. (Thomas Yoseloff, 8, East 36th Street, New York 16, N.Y., and 18, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.2.) 496 pp. $8.50. 55s.

Voices of a People. The Story of Yiddish Folk Song. Ruth Rubin. (Thomas Yoseloff, 8, East 36th Street, New York 16, N.Y., and 18, Charing Cross Road, London, W.C.2.) 496 pp. $8.50. 55s.

Yiddish Folk Songs Current in French Canada

Yiddish Folk Songs Current in French Canada

Nineteenth-Century Yiddish Love Songs of East Europe

Of all the categories of nineteenth-century secular Yiddish folk songs of East Europe, the love songs are the most numerous, popular, melodious and poetic. This fact challenged a number of writers on Jewish literature and folklore, who were not able to account for this type of song current in a community which was patriarchal in structure and strict in its religious observances.

Nineteenth-Century Yiddish Folksongs of Children in Eastern Europe

O NN E OF THE MOST INTERESTING CATEGORIES of folksongs is the children's folksong. The ditty, the counting-out rhyme, the chant, all play a very important role in the life of the child. In song are mirrored two worlds: on the one hand, the feelings of the child itself, its temperament, imagination, playfulness, wisdom, humor, and often satire; and on the other hand, the views and sentiments of its elders and certain current events. Both adult and child have created for children. Both have at one time or another edited and improved each other's compositions. Children's songs among various peoples are often similar. They may contain the remnants of a custom which existed centuries ago. They may possess social significance or poetic value. In a rhyme, sung to the jumping of a rope, skipping about, playing hopscotch, turning in a ring game, or merely chanted, we may encounter an expression which has long since disappeared from current speech. And again, we may come across songs and chants which were written only yesterday and relate to an occurrence in our day. Henry Bett says: was only with the rise of the new science of folklore which really dates from early in the last century, that these rhymes and stories began to attract attention. Then it appeared that they were to be found all over Europe and that they have analogies among uncivilized peoples all over the world. It appeared also that many of them are of incredible antiquity, bearing unmistakable traces of origin in prehistoric times .... children's rhymes contain recollections of chronicled history.' Certainly if the science of general folklore is new, the science of Jewish folklore is even more recent. Jewish folklore has ancient roots, but the serious study began in the early part of the twentieth century. J. L. Cahan, an outstanding collector of Yiddish folksong, writes: Many of our children's rhymes are remnants, bits of old, long-forgotten songs, which were sung originally by adults . . . some are centuries old and their origin is difficult to trace. Others seem to be not. so old and yet it is difficult to determine the time of their birth.2