Migration and Remembrance – The Sounds and Spaces of Klezmer Music ‘Revivals (original) (raw)
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Migration and Remembrance – sounds and spaces of klezmer revivals
This paper discusses the cultural meanings of recent revivals in Yiddish music in the US and central Europe. It does this with reference to Adorno’s critique of lyrical celebration of the past as means of forgetting. It examines the criticisms that recent ‘Jewish’ cultural revivals are kitsch forms of unreflective nostalgia and considers the complexity of meanings here. It then explores the ways in which klezmer might be an aural form of memory and suggests that revivals can represent gateways into personal and collective engagement with the past. It further argues that experimental hybrid forms of new klezmer potentially open new spaces of remembrance and expressions of Jewish identity.
Coping Through Music: Displacement Music in the Jewish Identity (WWII)
Rebuilding Jewish identity in post-World War II displacement camps was a daunting task for any Holocaust survivor. Using the music of Henry Baigelman and The Happy Boys as a lens, displacement camp songs and their place in the new phase of Ashkenazic culture are explored. The songs “We Long for a Home,” “I May Fall in Love Only Once,” and “There Awaits the Day” are used as examples of Baigelman's work because they capture the attitude of eternal hope in spite of despair and destruction that characterized Jewish life after the Holocaust. Jewish Holocaust survivors continued to live in fear after the end of the Holocaust, especially in Poland, where anti-Semitic pogroms still took place regularly. Their identity as citizens of a European country had been compromised by persecution, and many were unwilling to be repatriated to their home countries. The only identity left to these survivors was their Jewishness, their Ashkenazic roots, the culture of which had been nearly annihilated. Through incorporation of pre-war musical and Jewish culture, a return to their religious roots, the advent of Zionism, and the versatile expression of music, a Jewish identity could be rebuilt and reframed, and the deep psychological scars of persecution and displacement could be soothed. The Happy Boys, as survivors from Vilna, Poland, exemplify these aspects by placing lyrics about the Jewish experience in displacement camps to songs (specifically jazz-influenced songs) that existed prior to the war, itself a meaningful practice in Ashkenazic folk culture. Through exploration of prior Jewish and European culture and of The Happy Boys, the traditionally based yet unique displacement camp song and its value in rebuilding an Ashkenazic identity among Polish Jews is revealed.
Music as an expression of Jewishness in contemporary Poland
Deleted Journal, 2023
Over half a century after the Holocaust, in Eastern European countries where the Jewish community remained only a small part of the population, products of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture), including music, have become vital components of the popular public domain. In Poland, there are festivals and concerts of Jewish music, more and more records with this music, Jewish museums, and renovated Jewish districts, with Jewish cuisine, and music that are offered to tourists visiting Poland as the main attractions. They attract enthusiastic-and often non-Jewishcrowds. I consider how non-Jews involved in this movement in Poland perceive and implement Jewish culture, why they do it, how much it involves the recovery of Jewish heritage, and how this represents the musical culture of Jews in museums and at events organized for tourists. I also consider the relation of non-Jews as a majority group to Jews as a minority group, as well as the impact of the musical actions of the former on the musical culture of the latter. The article is based on field research and observations I have made during more than twenty years, both among the remaining Jews in Poland and in mixed or non-Jewish communities where music perceived as Jewish is promoted.
Exiled nostalgia and musical remembrance: songs of grief, joy, and tragedy among Iraqi Jews
2018
This dissertation examines a practice of private song-making, one whose existence is often denied, among a small number of amateur Iraqi Jewish singers in Israel. These individuals are among those who abruptly emigrated from Iraq to Israel in the mid twentieth century, and share formative experiences of cultural displacement and trauma. Their songs are in a mixture of colloquial Iraqi dialects of Arabic, set to Arab melodic modes, and employ poetic and musical strategies of obfuscation. I examine how, within intimate, domestic spheres, Iraqi Jews continually negotiate their personal experiences of trauma, grief, joy, and cultural exile through musical and culinary practices associated with their pasts. Engaging with recent advances in trauma theory, I investigate how these individuals utilize poetic and musical strategies to harness the unstable affect associated with trauma, allowing for its bodily embrace. I argue that, through their similar synaesthetic capability, musical and culinary practices converge to allow for powerful, multi-sensorial evocations of past experiences, places, and emotions that are crucial to singers' self-conceptions in the present day. Though these private songs are rarely practiced by younger generations of Iraqi Jews, they remain an under-the-radar means through which first-and second-generation Iraqi immigrants participate in affective processes of remembering, self-making, and survival. iii For my mother, Rivka iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the network of colleagues, friends, and family across the United States and the Middle East who have encouraged, supported, and sustained me throughout this process. I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the Iraqi Jews I came to know during my time in the field, many of whom have asked to remain anonymous. I will be forever grateful for the many hours of stories, laughter, food, and conversation we shared, much of which forms the core of this study. I would like to acknowledge the following institutions, whose financial support was integral to this project. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture provided generous support during the writing phase of my project.
Introduction to Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders
Popular Music and Society
The idea for this special issue of Popular Music and Society was born out of a joint fieldwork project between the University of Cologne, Germany, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. It was our common interest in the sounding memories of antifascism that brought us together in 2015. All of us had formerly inquired into musical memories of the World War II antifascist resistances, focusing on the distinct locales of the former Yugoslavia (Ana Hofman), Italy (Federico Spinetti), and Germany (Monika E. Schoop). With the support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Slovenian National Research Agency (ARRS) through a bilateral exchange program, our research focus expanded as we set out in 2017 to pursue the trajectories of antifascist music across borders-a topic that had received hardly any scholarly attention. Our joint research led us to the market square of Rijeka in Croatia, where we documented antifascist songs from different times and geo-cultural areas performed by the Pinko Tomažič Partisan Choir of Trieste (Tržaški partizanski zbor Pinko Tomažič/Coro Partigiano Triestino Pinko Tomažič). The choir was founded in 1972 and is named after a Slovenian antifascist activist and member of the Italian Communist Party killed in 1941. Our inquiry brought us to the outskirts of Trieste in Italy, where we attended staged performances and the collective singing of antifascist songs on a 1 May celebration organized by the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party). We sang antifascist songs from Spain, Italy, Germany, and the former Yugoslavia at a communal singing session at the bar Weißer Holunder in Cologne, Germany, an event hosted by organizers of the Edelweißpiratenfestival, which commemorates youth resistance against the Nazi regime. We further traced transnational networks of persecution, inquiring into the fate of young Slovenian resistance fighters at the site of the former youth concentration camp of Moringen, in the vicinity of Göttingen, Germany, the camp to which also members of the Swingjugend (Swing Youth) from Hamburg were deported during World War II. Like other youth groups who refused to conform to Nazi ideology, these young people who listened to swing and jazz, and dressed in a distinct style that clearly set them apart from the Hitler Youth, were classified as subversive by the German secret police Gestapo (Lange). Our research stems from and indeed corroborates the perception that antifascism is a transnational phenomenon. Traveling across borders, the sounding memories of CONTACT Federico Spinetti
Music and Memory at Liberation
2016
How do we receive personal musical memories emerging out of the Holocaust experience? My question is addressed to that moment of individual hearing: to the intimate point where we encounter experiences shared with us, where we are positioned as listener and witness. This article draws on a series of oral history interviews made in 2008 in Sydney with Jewish Holocaust survivors who participated in a project of documenting and preserving private musical experiences and memories during the Nazi era. In presenting these cases, I am arguing for two considerations. First, I wish to advocate a scholarly model of care, of attentive listening to a wide variety of archival material, including living musical testimony of survivors. It is fairly uncontroversial to acknowledge that sonic experiences remain in memory and travel with us throughout our lives, providing moments of nostalgia, evocations of past connections, ties to culture, friends and family, frames of reference. Is it confrontational to extend this ability of our sonorous bodies to imagine that musical memories of dark, distant and difficult times continue to be embodied within and around us? Second, and more specifically , I wish to draw attention to the diversity of experiences at the point of liberation. The resonance of a musical memory awakens the fragility of an aporetic moment between oppression and freedom, where the testifier may allow themselves the space for doubt, uncertainty, questioning and absurdity.
Music and Politics, 2021
Since 2008, the cross-generational and transcultural group Bejarano and Microphone Mafia, comprising of Auschwitz concentration camp survivor Esther Bejarano, her son Joram, and Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino of the hip-hop duo Microphone Mafia, has made use of music to memorialize the Nazi period and the Holocaust in particular. In this article I examine the sounding memories of Bejarano and Microphone Mafia, drawing on participant observation in various performance contexts, semi-structured interviews with the group members, as well as an analysis of selected songs. Building on Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework of “multidirectional memory,” I inquire into the songs and performances of the group as multidirectional musical memory work. Uncovering the multifaceted memory dynamics unfolding in their music and performances, I analyze how sounding memories of the Nazi period, and more recent memories of racist violence and far right terrorism—including the torching of refugee centers in the 1990s and the killings perpetrated by the neo-Nazi network NSU in the early 2000s, as well as memories of migrants’ experiences—especially those of the so-called Gastarbeiter generation—emerge in dialogue. My interrogation shows that songs and performances do not only serve as media of memory but give rise to new forms of solidarity and are envisaged as agents of change and social justice, which gain importance in the face of persisting racism and mounting calls to “move forward” from the Nazi past.
From Klezmer to Dabkah in Haifa and Weimar: Revisiting Disrupted Histories in the Key of D
world of music (new series), 2018
During the summer of 2017, a musically and culturally diverse group of fifteen young musicians from Haifa, Israel, and fifteen from Weimar, Germany, came together for ten days in each city to form the “Caravan Orchestra,” a new ensemble that sought to reopen lost musical connections between cognate Jewish, Arabic, and European rep- ertories. Seeking to explore an “often-overlooked historical, transnational cultural matrix” rooted in the long arc of the Ottoman empire, the Caravan project proved to be a wider voyage of discovery, in which a large group of stakeholders from two countries—ethnomusicologists, musicians, students, funders and institutions—ex- plored what such a conversation might entail. Like many intensive musical projects, the Caravan Orchestra was a transformative experience for many of those involved, marked by the exhilaration of producing good music on a concert stage and validated by audience applause, dancing and ovations. Yet beyond aesthetic satisfaction, what kind of insights can such a project offer into the “disrupted musical histories” that it seeks to explore? In this article, I explore this question via three elements of the Caravan experience: musicianship, repertory, and identities.