Music: Persian music and family

Tablet offered a wonderful story on cousin Galeet Dardashti's new CD, "The Naming," which honors the Bible's unsung women and also calls attention to Persian music.

Tracing the Tribe wrote a previous post here, and included where clips may be accessed.

Alexander Gelfand wrote a fascinating story which, among other issues, addressed Persian cantillation in the classical style, for which Galeet's grandfather Yona was well-known.

There's also family history in there. Her Aunt Tova prayed with tefillin, unusual for a woman in any Jewish community around the world, but especially long ago in Teheran.

“Gender hadn’t really been an issue for me up until that point,” says Dardashti, who leads the all-girl band Divahn and recently completed a PhD in cultural anthropology. “We were three girls in my family, and there was never any question that there was something we couldn’t do. But it suddenly occurred to me that, yes, I am a woman; and my husband and I are going to have really different roles in child rearing.”

In addition to considering the women who had been misrepresented in rabbinical commentary, such as Vashti or Sheba, she was studying the music Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, as well as the very different Persian tradition of her grandfather, often called the "Nightingale."

Galeet's father, Farid Dardashti, once a pop star in Tehran - one of his hits was "Malaguena" - is hazzan at Beth El Synagogue (New Rochelle, New York), introduced her to Persian cantillation, much like the classical music his father sang. Everyone in the family grew up on Yona's singing at gatherings and via the old recordings.

When she began singing this in public, “The reaction I got from older Sephardic and Mizrahi women was, ‘Wow, hearing a woman do this repertoire is really powerful!’ ” she said.

Gelfand, in addition to commenting on various tracks on the CD, also offers information on Persian music, which is different from Arab music that most Westerners know. It is based on a modal system called dastgah, while other Middle Eastern music is based on another system called maqam. And it has influenced Persian Jewish music as well.

Farid is on the "Endora" track chanting from the book of Samuel on “Endora,” which recounts the meeting between King Saul and the witch of Endor.

Galeet also uses Sephardic and Moroccan melodies in addition to the Persian, and they are very different.

It is an acquired taste, and one needs to learn the differences.

Not everybody appreciates these distinctions. At least some of the people who come to hear Dardashti perform this material think it all just sounds vaguely Islamic. “The most common question I get is, ‘What’s Jewish about this music?’ ” she said. “They’ll say, ‘It sounds like a muezzin’s call to prayer!’ ”

Gelfand writes that Galeet intended for the CD to focus on some of the slighted biblical female figures, but that she has also succeeded in calling attention to a vast body of music that has for many years been ignored by Ashkenazim.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Tablet: Roots and Family Trees

Today's Tablet Magazine has a book column focusing on family history in diverse ways.

The featured books include:

-- The 40 moves in 20 years documented in Brooke Berman's No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments (Harmony, June).

-- David Kushner’s account of harsh real-estate politics detailed in the 1957 integration of Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (Walker & Company, August).

-- Adam Langer’s The Thieves of Manhattan (Spiegel & Grau, July).

-- Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works (California, May), by Tablet’s poetry columnist David Kaufmann surveys the machinations New York City’s avant garde art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s.

-- The strange story of the Aleppo Codex, the oldest surviving edition of the Tanakh in book form, date to 939 CE, which Maimonides himself purportedly studied, and which lived in Syria before being smuggled to Israel in 1957, is detailed in Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex (JPS, July), by Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider. One can also see the Codex on the web.

... the Aleppo Codex has from time to time been the subject of fantastic claims and suspicions of forgery; in particular, the unscrupulous Crimean Karaite scholar Abraham Kirkovich (1786-1874) tarnished the manuscript’s reputation through his spurious claim that its author was a Karaite, rather than a Masorete.

-- University of Chicago historian Fred M. Donner surveys the first century of Muslim history in Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard, May).

-- Tracing the Tribe has already given a shoutout to Buzzy Jackson’s Shaking the Family Tree: Blue Bloods, Black Sheep, and Other Obsessions of an Amateur Genealogist (Touchstone, July), and Tablet provided a bit more.

[It] combines memoir and upbeat how-to elements as the author investigates her own family’s story through DNA testing, a Caribbean cruise, and old fashioned library research. Her father’s relations, with roots in Alabama, regale her with far-fetched family legends, but it turns out that the Galician Jews on her mother’s side tell one another “no stories about the old days or the old country.”

-- Genetics and DNA play a part in Jennifer Rosner's If a Tree Falls: A Family’s Quest to Hear and Be Heard (Feminist, May), as she describes discovering a history of deafness in her ancestors and a demonstration of "real" family ties:

When her two great-great-aunts, both deaf, were caring for infants, “they tied strings from their wrists to their babies at bedtime. When the babies fidgeted, they would feel their tugs and wake to care for them in the night.”

See the link above for more on each book.

Tablet: Pale of Settlement photos podcast

There's another podcast at Tablet Magazine - this one focuses on the ethnographic expeditions through Russia's Pale of Settlement from 1912-1914.

Read the text and hear the interview here.

Author S. An-sky recorded music, folk tales, photographs and every day life. Much of it had never been recorded before. A new collection of material - some 350 photos - has been recently rediscovered, resulting in a book with 200 of them.

He also recorded Jewish popular and liturgical music on wax cylinders. A few years ago, the University of Kiev digitally transcribed the music on those cylinders to CDs. I heard them at the Fehrer Music Archives at Beit Hatefutsot when Dr. Yuval Shaked was the archives director.

I especially enjoyed the music recorded in our TALALAY ancestral town of Mogilev, Belarus, when branches of the family still lived there. There were recordings by hazzanim, and likely the same people our family heard in person, as well as popular songs, which they likely sung themselves. It was a very connecting experience!

The photos bring to life the lives of our ancestors.

An-sky - his pen name - wrote popular plays, such as "The Dybbuk."

The photos are the most comprehensive visual record available of these small towns and the people who lived there.

The book (pictured above) is Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions, edited by Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav, professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about the importance of this collection for anyone interested in shtetl life in the Russian Empire.

David G. Roskies, author of "Yiddishlands: A Memoir" wrote about this new book:

“Here, recovered and recorded at the last conceivable moment, is the living shtetl, those market towns large and small that were once home to the majority of Jews in the world: a bucolic landscape amidst the poverty and mud; school children posing with their nattily dressed teachers; mug shots of potential nannies; Jews of every age engaged in all manner of trade; a huge outdoor wedding; beautiful synagogue interiors, complete with chandeliers and signs of the zodiac; ritual objects and sacred graves; the Rabbi’s house and the local church. Here, also, is the story of the intrepid explorers, children of the shtetl themselves, who tried to salvage this Yiddish-speaking civilization for future generations. No less miraculous are their spiritual offspring, who authored this superb collection of essays and discovered these remarkable photographs.”

The list of editors, some names are familiar to readers, is here:

Eugene M. Avrutin, Assistant Professor of History and Tobor Scholar in Jewish Studies, University of Illinois. Valerii Dymshits, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Interdepartmental Center, “Petersburg Judaica,” at the European University, St. Petersburg, Russia. Alexander Ivanov, Senior Researcher at the European University, St. Petersburg. Alexander Lvov is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the European University, St. Petersburg. Harriet Murav, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois. Alla Sokolova, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the European University, St. Petersburg.

The Tablet link provides a gallery of photos from the book.

Tablet: Death of the Polish shtetl

Tablet's Adam Kirsch reviewed Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer's "The Death of the Shtetl."

According to the article, the book focuses on "one under-researched aspect of the Holocaust: the experience of the shtetls of eastern Poland between 1939, when they were occupied by the Soviet Union, and 1944, when the Red Army returned to find the shtetls completely destroyed."

While the story covered the book's premise and history on the ground in some detail, Tracing the Tribe was dismayed to see Kirsch's sentence:

We might add that, unlike other immigrant groups, American Jews can have no living link with their ancestors’ world; there are no old homes to visit or distant cousins to meet (or if there are, they are in Israel or the United States by now).

I believe that many Jewish genealogists can refute those claims rather easily, and I added a comment at the page above.

No living link with our ancestors' world?

No old homes to visit?

No distant cousins to meet?

How many have traveled "home" to our ancestral shtetls? Many have found our ancestors' old homes. Quite a few have indeed located distant cousins - a surprise to everyone involved - around the world, and the media covers these stories.

How many synagogue and cemetery restoration and preservation projects in those shtetls have been undertaken by their descendants?

As I wrote in my comment to the article, the sentence quoted is in the same vein as "our name was changed at Ellis Island." A myth to be sure - as we know not one documented case has ever been found. Unfortunately, that myth is repeated time and again by those who perhaps should be more aware of the giggling in the room when genealogists read it.

Read the complete article at the link above, and feel free to comment on it.

Tablet: A fine young criminal

Tablet magazine is presenting a series of articles based on historic newspaper accounts.

The introduction to the series reads:

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Tablet previously carried the Benjamin Nathan case, and today's piece is the story of Yitzhok Farbarovitsh, a yeshiva boy who became a gang member and then wrote about it in plays which "portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality, complete with nasty language and foul behavior."

Read Eddy Portnoy's story about Farbarovitsh, later known as Urke Nahalnik (Yiddish, brazen master criminal).

Yitzhok Farbarovitsh was known as a good kid in the shtetl of Vizne, a small town in Russian-ruled Poland, in the years just before World War I. He excelled in cheder, Jewish elementary school, and, when he reached his tweens, was sent to another town in the Pale of Settlement to attend a yeshiva. Yitzhok was on track to fulfill his mother’s dream that he become a rabbi. But not long after his bar mitzvah, his mother died, sending the Farbarovitsh household into a depression, and throwing Yitzhok’s life onto a different track.

The detailed story contains blockbuster elements: sex, crime, religion, jail, bad boy makes good, theater, spicy Yiddish slang and mentions YIVO along the way.

About one of his plays, the story relates:

Warsaw’s Jewish underworld was not the only group dissatisfied with the play. The socialist Bund’s arts magazine fulminated angrily against what they called theatrical “trash.” On the front page, an editorial griped that “when the prostitutes are on stage, talking their dirty talk, and the thieves are doing business in their pubs and hideouts, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting…. For three hours, the audience and the theater is dragged through the mud.”

The critics didn't like it, but the people did and it was a minor hit.

Farbarovitsh was also involved in some of the first attacks on the Nazis, according to the article, and demanded funding from Jewish underground leaders to organize attacks against the Nazis. Although they refused, he returned to his town of Otwock, outside Warsaw, where he sabotaged rail lines to Treblinka and helped Jews escape the trains and hide in the forest.

He was caught by the Germans in 1942. As he was being led to his execution in Otwock, he attacked his guard and nearby soldiers fatally shot him.

Read the complete story at the link above. Tracing the Tribe is waiting for the next article in the series.