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After the fiddles and ouds, Yiddish songs hit all the right notes

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/29072/full/29072/after-the-fiddles-and-ouds-yiddish-songs-hit-all-the-right-notes/ After the fiddles and ouds, Yiddish songs hit all the right notes Friday, April 21, 2006 | by dan pine I got strung along at the Jewish Music Festival's community music day. The Berkeley Hills were alive with the sound of Jewish music all that afternoon, and I was there to savor every downbeat and quartertone. Four-string fiddles, 8-string mandolins and 86-string Turkish kanuns set the air a-thrumming. Local chorales, singers, klezmer ensembles -- even a mandolin orchestra -- took the stage in the packed Berkeley Richmond JCC auditorium. But much of the action took place in classrooms along the JCC's perimeter. The "instrument petting zoo" gave plucky kids a chance to strum a saz or toot their own horn (or sax or clarinet). In another room I met a dude with an oud, that evocative Arabic lute. With my first tentative arpeggios I felt I was strolling the cobblestone shuk of Jerusalem's Old City. On the main stage, I caught Jewish hip-hop artist So Called (real name Josh Dolgin), a brilliant musician who transforms traditional niggun and folksongs into ultracool digital soundscapes (one of his raps includes the line: "I wanna be your Holy Boy/Will you be my Holy Toy?") In another workshop, rappers Jonathan Gutstadt and Judah Ritterman of HipHop Shabbat led a room full of kids in creating a hip-hop version of the Passover song "Echad Mi Yodea." Within 20 minutes even the moms were getting their groove on like Jay-Z in a pimped-out ride. But for me, the highlight of the day was a workshop on Yiddish children's music led by Itzik Gottesman and his mother, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, the renowned Yiddish poet, singer and songwriter. Beyle is a national treasure, and was recognized as such with her NEA National Heritage fellowship last year. She looks a lot like my grandma and probably yours, too. Itzik happens to be the associate editor of the Forward's Yiddish edition, so his Yiddish credentials are impeccable. About 20 people crowded into the tiny classroom to hear Itzik and Beyle serve up a half lecture, half sing-along of endearing songs and nursery rhymes, some written by Beyle, others no doubt shtetl-born. Now I remember watching Billy Crystal on a PBS special say that Yiddish is a language of "coughing and spitting." Funny line, but not nice and not true. On the contrary, Yiddish is, to quote author Leo Rosten, "a language of exceptional charm ... steeped in sentiment, sluiced in sarcasm." Novelist I.B. Singer once said Yiddish is perhaps "the only language on earth never spoken by men in power." When I was a kid, Yiddish was the sprach my mother spoke with her mother. It didn't fully dawn on me then that my mom — so hip, so Californian — was a real live Yiddish speaker and, being so, still had a toehold in the shtetl (which meant I had a toenail-hold). I never did pick up the language, but the sound of it bore deep into me. So when I heard people in Itzik's classroom speaking the Mamaloshen, I was transported not only back through Jewish history, but my own as well. Two women sitting next to me chatted away in elegant Yiddish and chanted Itzik's nursery rhymes. One of those women looked to be in her 80s and knew many of the rhymes by heart. She probably hadn't heard them in 70 years: "Rigele, rigele, roygez/Zenen mir geven broygez/rigele, rigele, rik -- zenen mir khaver tsurik." There we were, a gray-haired kindergarten, speaking aloud the language of our great-grandmothers to express the incipient musings of a child. When I stepped back out into the JCC courtyard, I had returned to the 21st century. Kids were running about, their parents chowing down on pita and stuffed grape leaves. I could hear the rumble of traffic on Walnut Street and I caught the reflected sunlight off the bay on this rare dry day in a season of endless rains. But in my mind I heard the echoes of Yiddish; not the actual words — I don't know them — but the music of it, the phonemes and inflections, the lilt and tilt of it. And for just a moment, I was back in that old-age home on a Friday night, my little brother and I watching "The Wild Wild West" while my mother and grandmother sat on the bed in quiet conversation. I didn't know their language, but I understood. Dan Pinedan@jweekly.com</a>"><a href="mailto:dan@jweekly.com">dan@jweekly.com</a></a>.

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