The Songs They Carried

Tuesday, April 4, 20175:30 pm

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Hazzan Natasha Hirschhorn

Hazzan Dr. Ramón Tasat

The Songs They CarriedTuesday, April 4, 2017

5:30 pm

Washington, D.C.

Introductory Remarks by Yaron Gamburg, Minister of Public Diplomacy, Embassy of Israel in the United States

 

As Part of an International Conference:

The Hundred-Year Legacy of the Russian Revolution and the World Today:

How the Revolution Divided, Unified, and Shaped a Continent

A joint conference by the Kennan Institute, the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the POLIN Museum of Jewish History

April 3–5, 2017, Washington, D.C.Hosted by the Kennan Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

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The Songs They Carried

CONCERT BILL

Roiz roiz Yiddish Folk Song

Beloi akatsii grozdia dushistye Mikhail Matusovsky / Venyamin Basner

Proshchaniye slavyanki Vladimir Lazarev / Vasily Agapkin

Ne poi krasavitsa pri mne Alexander Pushkin / Sergei Rakhmaninoff

Revolutionary and Zionist song medley

In vaytn kaltn Sibir Yiddish Folk Song

Dos lid fun broyt Avrom Reisen / Mark Warshawsky

Vu bistu geven Yiddish Folk Song

Golden Opportunity Natasha Hirschhorn

Moises Ville Jevel Katz

Siniy platochek / Tkhol haMitpakhat Mikhail Maksimov (Russian) / Avraham Shlonsky (Hebrew) / Yezhi Peterburgsky

Serdtse / Rina Ivan Lebedeff-Kumach (Russian); Natan Alterman (Hebrew) / Isaak Dunayevsky

Smuglianka / Neurei zahav Yakov Shvedov (Russian); Idit Hahamovitch (Hebrew)/ Anatoliy Novikov

A brivele der mamen / Mikhtav le ima Solomon Smulewitz

Boublitchki / Bagelach Yakov Jadow 

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The Songs They Carried

PROGRAM NOTESBy Izabella Tabarovsky

The Russian revolution unleashed waves of migration that continued throughout the twentieth cen-tury, with emigrants reaching such faraway places as New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Palestine, Israel, and Harbin. Besides their suitcases, the emigrants carried with them their favorite songs. As they settled into their new homes, they adapted those songs to their new environments, creating unique musical fusions.

Russian folk songs and Soviet popular hits became the basis for early Israeli pioneer songs. Rus-sian romances traveled abroad with their composers and performers to become a signature style of the Russian urban song. And the tunes of the would-be violin boy-wonders of Odessa, famously described by Isaac Babel in his Odessa Stories, merged with the budding tango culture of Buenos Ai-res, adding a dash of particular Eastern European musical sensibility to this eclectic genre of popular music.

This program explores themes of exile, nostalgia, and search for new identity identified with the displacement that was so characteristic of the era and the decades that followed. These aspects of dislocation confronted the millions of sojourners who fled the lands that the celebrated historian Tim Snyder would later refer to as “bloodlands.” The songs on the program, performed in Russian, Yiddish, English, and Hebrew, will take you on a moving and uplifting journey, unveiling the emotions of those who sang them in their daily lives.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Perhaps for no other ethnic group is exile as much a part of felt experience as it is for Jews. Much Jewish liturgy and folklore center on the experience of exile, expressing a longing to return. And as can be found in African American folklore and liturgy, this longing often expresses as well a longing to come home to God.

The first selection, Roiz roiz (Rose, rose), reflects that dual yearning for earthly and divine homes. Legend has it that a Chassidic rebbe (a teacher of the mystical strand of Judaism, which originated in eighteenth-century western Ukraine) was teaching his students outdoors one spring day when they were interrupted by a local shepherd singing a lovely Ukrainian song that conjured up the rose and the forest of his birthplace. The rebbe was very much taken by the song and reintroduced it to his students as a Yiddish song about longing for the Shechinah—the dwelling of the Divine Presence—and the pain of long exile.

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The experience of exile was well known to many groups in the Russian Empire. The free-thinking intelligentsia and rebellious members of the aristocracy, such as the Decembrists, knew the pain of exile as well. Such distant locales as Siberia and the Caucasus became places for the czarist regime to send rebels to keep them at a safe remove from the capitals.

After the revolution, many who refused to accept the Bolshevik victory found themselves fleeing the country as part of the White emigration. The song genre that best represents this wave of emigra-tion is the Russian romance. Russian romances are known for their sentimentality and nostalgia and often show Romani (Gypsy) musical influences. At the same time, by the early twentieth century an upper-class romance had emerged, the so-called salon romance.

In this program you will hear two songs in the latter style that evoke the nostalgia and longing of exile. These two romances are situated on either side of a great divide in Russian history, one repre-senting life before the revolution, the other life after.

The first is Ne poi krasavitsa pri mne (Don’t sing, my beauty, your sad Georgian songs to me). The 19-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote this song, which is based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin, who knew exile personally. The song recalls the lands that hold magic for the Russian soul—the Caucasus generally, and Georgia in particular. The intricate melodic and harmonic language reflects a fascination with the exotic sounds of the East that was typical of nineteenth- and early twenti-eth-century Russian composers. Little did Rachmaninoff know that some 25 years later, his family, which came from old aristocratic stock, would also be forced to flee. After the revolution they settled in the United States, where Rachmaninoff lived until his death in 1943 at the age of 70.

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The second romance, Beloi akatsii grozdia dushistye (The white fragrant bunches of acacia), was originally written in the nineteenth century and then reworked in the 1970s for the movie The Days of the Turbins. Set in revolutionary-era Ukraine, the film is based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. The film explores the loss and separation experienced by those who were on the losing side of the revolution: the Russian intelligentsia, the aristocracy, and officers of the czar’s army. It is a meditation on the fate that demands we give up that which we hold most dear. In the movie, the ro-mance is sung by Elena, the beautiful elder sister of the Turbin family. The song is a nostalgic tribute to a past that is gone, and to the youth and innocence that are gone with it.

The revolution, of course, produced its own music as well, much of it memorable and stirring. This program offers a song that was actually written five years before the revolution but continued to change and evolve with the times, serving different causes and different states, Proshchaniye slavyanki (A Slavic woman’s farewell). The song’s composer Vasily Agapkin served as a trumpet player in a military orchestra in the czarist army. He wrote the song in 1912 and had it published in Kyiv in 1915. It became an instant hit, and eventually one of the most recognizable musical symbols of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union and modern Russia. The simple melody of the march, along with its original dedication to Slavic women seeing their men off to war, contributed to its rapid spread and popularity. Its primary motifs are nostalgia, separation, and the loss of what is close to one’s heart.

Proshchaniye slavyanki transitioned from being a symbol of pre-revolutionary military culture and an accompaniment to World War I patriotic fervor to the post-revolutionary world, where it initially was taken up by the White forces fighting the Bolsheviks. For a period of time the song fell victim to censorship, and performances in public were prohibited, no doubt because of its association with “anti-revolutionary elements.” Yet Agapkin, its composer, managed to retain his position in the Soviet military and even conducted the November 7, 1941, military parade in Red Square, an event of partic-ular poignancy for the Soviet Union, which was facing devastating defeat at the hands of the advanc-ing German forces. Whether the song itself was performed during the parade remains a matter of historical conjecture. However that may be, the song came back with a vengeance immediately after Stalin’s death, when it was featured in the 1957 blockbuster Soviet film, The Cranes Are Flying.

FROM THE PALE TO THE PROMISED LAND

Few other minorities in the Pale of Settlement—those vast areas encompassing parts of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia —stood to benefit as much from the fall of the czarist regime as did the Jews. Particularly oppressed in czarist Russia, prohibited from owning land, and subjected to a multitude of other restrictions, many Jews embraced the revolution and saw in it an opportunity for liberation.

The rich Yiddish musical culture that blossomed following the revolution reflects these aspirations. The cultural unfurling intertwined with the blooming of Zionist sentiment that occurred around the same time. But as the Soviet repressive machine gathered speed, the Yiddish culture was sup-pressed and ultimately all but wiped out.

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As a result, while the standard Soviet revolutionary repertoire became widely known, most of the revolutionary Yiddish songs fell into oblivion. But a few became a foundational part of Israeli musical culture, which was strongly influenced by emigrants from the Pale of Settlement—particularly, the Halutzim, or pioneers, whose role was to make the desert bloom.

The medley showcasing this genre in our concert begins with In vaytn kaltn Sibir (In far-off, cold Siberia), which presents a revolutionary’s heartbreak at being exiled from his land and his people. The song expresses a longing for freedom and a repudiation of Czar Nicholas II. The melody was picked up and recorded by the famous Ukrainian Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovsky, who trav-eled throughout the Pale of Settlement recording the songs of Russian Jews.

The next two pieces of the medley, Dos lid fun broyt (The song of bread) and Vu bistu geven (Where are you going?), are songs of the Israeli pioneers. In Dos lid fun broyt, emigrants to the Promised Land sing about gathering sheaves of wheat under the bright sun as they grow their bread with their own hands: “May our children know that our bread and every bite of our food comes from our own fields.” In the next, humorous song, a daughter tells her mother that she is going to Palestine, the Golden Land, and makes it clear that she enjoys the company of pioneers. “What a delight!” she exclaims. Russian musical influences are undeniable in these songs, whose lyrics limn the beauty of the Promised Land and the freedom the emigrants experience away from the oppres-sive life of the Pale.

ARGENTINA

While the United States and Palestine are the better-known destinations for those fleeing the po-groms, wars, and revolutions of the early twentieth century, for a significant group of Jews from the Pale of Settlement Argentina was also an important destination. In the late nineteenth century, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German Jewish banker and philanthropist, bought land in Argentina with the goal of establishing a Jewish agricultural commune and resettling Jews in the New World in Argenti-na, Canada, and the United States.

In 1889, 815 Jews from Kamenetz-Podolsk in Ukraine landed on the docks of Buenos Aires, a city of immigrants, and made their way to the province of Santa Fe. There, 383 miles from the capital city, they formed the first agricultural Jewish colony in South America, Moises Ville. In the ensuing years, additional groups from Grodno, Bialystok, Bessarabia, and other parts of the Pale of Settlement arrived.

Somewhat improbably yet also understandably, these disempowered groups found Argentina’s gau-cho culture appealing. The love of freedom—and the ability to seize it—along with the strength and independence that the gaucho culture represented brought out something the new arrivals sensed they themselves were lacking. Thus a new social group was born, the Jewish gauchos.

On the program today, Moises Ville expresses the aspiration to become that kind of free person, as in these lines: “On the plaza stands a man, a saloonkeeper for sure, with baggy pants and slip-pers on his feet. Through his moustache, he whistles a Spanish melody. You can be certain that this saloonkeeper is a Jew!” Aspiration of this sort—for freedom and comfort in a new environment—is both uniquely Jewish and common of any group seeking its fortunes in a new land.

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FROM SOVIET TO ISRAELI

As the Zionist project gathered steam in Europe, and those Jews who were able to leave flooded the Promised Land, they took with them their favorite tunes. Hundreds of Russian songs were translated into Hebrew, acquiring new identities along the way. Frequently the lyrics were rewritten entirely and only the melody remained to remind listeners of the song’s origin. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 led to a further musical blossoming, with some of the greatest Soviet hits acquiring new life on the Mediterranean shores of Tel Aviv and Haifa.

The famous Soviet song Smuglianka (A swarthy girl) was written in 1940, in the style of a Moldovan folk song, to commemorate the female partisans of the post-revolutionary civil war. It became a Sovi-et favorite and eventually found its way to Israel, where it was given a new title, Neurei zahav.

Serdtse (Heart) is a popular 1930s Soviet tango composed by the prolific and profoundly gifted Isaac Dunayevsky, a native of the Pale of Settlement, who is considered one of the greatest Soviet com-posers. The song traveled to Israel, where it became known in its Hebrew version as Rina—a young woman’s name. But the romantic language of the original (“My heart, still you don’t want to rest. My heart, it is so good to be alive. My heart, I am so grateful that you can love so much!”) was replaced in the Hebrew version with satirical verses mocking sentimental love.

A song that merits particular attention in this category is Siniy platochyek (The blue kerchief), a beloved Soviet song forever associated with World War II. Originally composed in 1939 as an instru-mental waltz by a famous Polish Jewish composer, Yezhi (Jerzy) Peterburgsky, the song presents the first-person words of a soldier as he speaks about leaving his lover, then addresses her directly, confident that she will keep the blue scarf she wore on the evening of their last meeting as a sign of her love for him.

Jerzy’s story is itself worthy of a novel and is emblematic of the era. Born in prewar Warsaw to a famous Jewish musical family, the Melodistas, Jerzy formed a partnership with his cousin, Arthur Gold. Together they established a tango orchestra and entertained fashionable Warsaw with their tangos written in the Argentine tango style, which was conquering 1930s Europe. Some of Jerzy’s tangos, such as Utomlyonnoe solntse (The tired sun), which was translated into Russian, are performed to this day in Poland, Russia, and even the modern-day tango halls of the United States, Europe, and Argentina.

When the Soviet Union annexed part of Poland in 1939, Peterburgsky found himself in the Soviet Belarus. It was there that he composed the melody of the blue kerchief. The waltz was popular in the prewar dance halls. But it was not until 1942, when the rising star of Russian popular music, Klavdia Shulzhenko, first performed it as a song, that it really hit the right emotional tone with audiences. It became an instant classic. Performed during the most difficult period of the Great Patriotic War, the song put a human face on the collective suffering that was unfolding for the entire nation. It came to symbolize war’s emotional toll and offered inspiration bound up with the promise that those separat-ed by war would be reunited.

But as the Soviet audiences turned this song into an enduring hit, few knew what happened to its author and his family. Gold died with the majority of Warsaw Jews in Treblinka, where he was forced

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to entertain his tormentors up to the last moment by performing the very tangos he and his cousin had composed and played in prewar times. Peterburgsky miraculously escaped the near-complete annihilation of Polish Jewry and after the war moved to Argentina, where he worked at Radio el Mon-do and Teatro el Nacional.

After the war, Avraham Shlonsky, an Israeli poet born to a religious Jewish Chassidic family in Kryu-kovo, Ukraine, adapted the song and called it Tkhol haMitpakhat. While the Hebrew version kept the song’s romantic elements, it did away with the World War II context of the original.

TO AMERICA!

No other country was as much of a beacon of hope for the millions of the 20th century’s displaced and dispossessed as the United States. Three songs in the program represent this part of the twenti-eth-century emigration.

Natasha Hirschhorn’s The Golden Opportunity is written from the point of view of a newly arriving Soviet émigré in America. As it wittily explores cultural differences, linguistic mishaps, and the joy of having left the darkness behind, it uses irony to project the desire of new emigrants to make a home for themselves and to look to the future. Yet it also suggests that the immigrant’s preoccupation with adjusting and moving on in the new country has a price: “We don’t talk of the past, let bygones be

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bygones…. We are looking straight ahead, never right, never left, or we’ll miss that golden window of opportunity!”

The second song in this category, A brivele der Mamen / Mikhtav le ima (A little letter from Mama), by Solomon Smulewitz, became one of the most beloved songs of the early twentieth-cen-tury Jewish emigration, on both sides of the Atlantic. First published in 1907, it resonated with those who had left their loved ones behind. The song gained instant popularity. It is sung in the voice of a mother who pleads with her son to write her a “little letter” from America to ease the pain of sepa-ration. The son becomes successful in the new country, neglecting his mother, whom he left behind. At the end of the song he learns that she passed away while waiting for his letter.

In today’s performance, the singers juxtapose two versions of the song, a short fragment from a 1995 field recording made in Gomel, in Soviet Belarus, and the original composition by Solomon Smulewitz, which also includes a Hebrew translation. These are the versions of the song as it is known in the United States and Israel, respectively. “How remarkable it is, that the melody has survived through both World War I and II, Stalin’s and Hitler’s annihilations, and still carries the pain of the family separated by the waves of immigration!” observed Hazzan Hirschhorn, one of our per-formers today.

Our final piece is the rousing Boublitchki / Bagelach,a reflection of the urban culture of the 1920s Odessa. The original Russian song’s heartbreaking story of a poor young woman begging passers-by to buy bagels from her so that she can earn a living is somewhat undercut by the upbeat melody. When Jewish immigrants introduced the song to Brooklyn, it became a hit among the Yiddish-speak-ing New Yorkers. It is said that the famous Barry Sisters (whose original last name was Bagelman!) were discovered while humming the tune. Once the two became famous, they reportedly started every performance with this song. The song’s birthplace, Odessa, the city that brought forth numer-ous musicians and performers, reminds us of that city’s singular contribution to world culture.

PERFORMERS

Hazzan Natasha J. Hirschhorn serves as the Music Director of Congregation Ansche Chesed since 2004. She is also the founding conductor of the AC Jewish Community Chorus, Shirei Chesed, and the Brooklyn Jewish Community Chorus, Shir Chadash. A native of Ukraine, Natasha has been exploring the music of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry since her studies in musicology, piano, and com-position at Moscow’s Gnessin State Musical College (now the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music) and the Kyiv Conservatory. Ordained by the Academy for Jewish Religion in 1999, Cantor Hirschhorn serves on the faculty of the cantorial schools both at the Academy and at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is also vice president of Shalshelet: The Foundation for New Jewish Liturgical Music, an organization that seeks to foster new music for Jewish congregational use and expose wider audiences to innovations in Jewish religious music. The author of numerous liturgical and secular compositions and an accomplished performer and recording artist, she has seen her compositions performed by congregations, at music festivals, and in concert halls throughout the country.

Hazzan Dr. Ramón Tasat serves Shirat HaNefesh (Song of the Soul) congregation in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Born in Buenos Aires and trained in five different countries, he received a doctor-

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ate in voice performance from the University of Texas. Ramón has toured Europe with the world-re-nowned Dr. Robert Shaw and has participated in international festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. His appearances include the Kennedy Center Concert Hall; the Israeli Embassy; the Jewish Music Festival of Berkeley, California; the Limmud Conference, UK; Saint Cére, France; Barcelona, Spain; and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival. He has received numerous awards, including first place at the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center’s Recital Competition, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His lectures, workshops, and programs range from “The Music of Modern Israel” to “Echoes of Sefarad.” Ramón’s recordings include the albums Fiesta Sefarad, Trees cry for rain, Te-shuva, and Kantikas di amor i vida, the latter a series of Sephardic duets performed together with the celebrated singer Flory Jagoda; his most recent recording is Yom shekulo shabbat. He has published several books on Jewish musical subjects.

Eugenia Chester was born in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), Russia. She graduated from the Sverdlovsk High School for Talented Musicians and studied at the Ural State Conservatoire until she immigrated to the United States in 1993. While studying at the conservatory, she was the second flute and piccolo in the Sverdlovsk Opera Theatre and served as the Director of Woodwinds for the Youth Orchestra in the City Palace for Children, also in Sverdlovsk. Together with the Youth Orchestra, she toured extensively throughout Russia and Bulgaria. In the United States she has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, the University of Hartford, and the Jewish Folk Arts Festival. She continues to teach and perform with various groups. In parallel, Eugenia has been pur-suing a career as an IT professional. Currently she works for the NIH. She lives in Frederick, Mary-land, with her husband and three sons and continues performing as a flutist.

Sally McLain received the Bachelor and Master of Music degrees with High Distinction from In-diana University, where she studied with and was assistant to James Buswell. She has participated in the Tanglewood Music Center, the Bach Aria Festival, and the New York String Orchestra Seminar. McLain was concertmaster of the Washington Chamber Symphony and a longtime member of the Theater Chamber Players. She has recorded the complete quartets of David Diamond and Quincy Porter with the Potomac String Quartet for Albany Records. She currently performs with the Left Bank Concert Society, Arlington, Virginia, and its resident quartet, the Left Bank Quartet.

Artem Starchenko is a singer, musician, and composer. He graduated from the Mikhail Glinka Novosibirsk State Conservatory in bayan (a type of button accordion). He is the recipient of regional and international awards in bayan and accordion competitions. He won awards at the first all-Russian competition of popular singers, “The Rainbow of Talents,” and the first all-Russian festival compe-tition of patriotic songs, “This Is My Motherland.” He has performed on all of Russia’s main stages (the State Kremlin Palace; the Hotel Rossia; in Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, and elsewhere). He has participated in the youth festival “Youth of the Planet”; the Mikhail Evdokimov All-Russian Festival of Culture and Sports; the International Festival of Arts “Slavianski Bazaar,” in Vitebsk, and others.

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