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The Bandurist

1/30/2014

I was planning to use this next post to ask the question: What is a tsimbalist anyway?

But last night, I attended a wonderful performance of kobzar music, and at the moment I'd like to talk about that instead. So let me start off by asking ... What's kobzar music anyway?

According to the excellent Internet Encyclopedia of the Ukraine, kobzari were "wandering folk bards who performed a large repertoire of epic-historical, religious, and folk songs while playing a kobza or bandura … In the late 18th century the occupation of kobzar became the almost exclusive province of the blind and crippled."

I'd been wanting to see and hear a bandura for a while because (as if the history of the kobzari weren't interesting enough) I'd come across one or two mentions of the instrument being played in klezmer groups, and wanted to fill in the mental picture sketchily created by that information. So when I saw that Julian Kytasty was performing at Symphony Space in Manhattan, in a concert co-sponsored by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and the World Music Institute, I eagerly headed on over.* I was very glad I went.

Kytasty is a Ukrainian-American singer and bandurist, originally from Detroit, who is recognized as "the instrument's leading North American exponent." (He also composes and plays the flute, among many other accomplishments.) His speaking voice and demeanor are gentle and intelligent, and with his long, gray hair and beard he has a slightly nineteenth-century appearance.

*Sharing the program, by the way, was a wonderful balladeer, Colleen Cleveland.

When he came on stage, Kytasty told us that, given what is happening in Kiev right now, it was difficult for him to contemplate giving a performance. I don't know whether he was thinking of those events as he played and sang, whether they lent further depth to his singing and playing. But what he gave us was really a kind of soul music.

As you may be able to see in the video here (and if not, look further down the page) the bandura is a plucked string instrument shaped something like a lute. Unlike the lute, it's unstopped, in the manner of a harp or zither. According to Kytasty, the bandura is laid out in a way that makes it easy for a blind player to negotiate.

Kytasty told us that the kobzar's repertoire consisted mainly of allegories, sung, as he put it, "for the 99%", aimed at those in power, and "saying what was really going on, without saying what was really going on." For example (from his last number of the evening, and as best I can recollect):

"Falsehood has taken to calling itself truth. Truth is trampled underfoot, while falsehood is wined and dined. Truth is cast into the dungeons, while falsehood sits in the halls of power. But he who honors truth shall receive great blessing from heaven."

The kobzari were strongly associated with Ukrainian nationalism. The Internet Encyclopedia of the Ukraine explains that "particularly from the 1870s, the kobzars, including the virtuosos Ostap Veresai and Hnat Honcharenko, were persecuted by the tsarist regime as the propagators of Ukrainophile sentiments and historical memory." And kobzar music was nearly stamped out entirely by the Soviets.

This leaves me a little confused as to the question of how banduras ended up in klezmer bands.** Relations between Ukrainians and Jews were not always exactly easy, or friendly (to say the least.) Ukrainians suffered under the thumb of Polish and then Russian rulers; often, they associated the Jews with those ruling classes, and the Jews then suffered for that.

Things were not always bad: Natan Meir, in his Kiev: Jewish Metropolis, tells us that "Nationalist Ukrainians hoped ... that the Jews would see themselves as an oppressed nation that might ally with the Ukrainians to throw off the tsarist yoke … the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), founded in 1900, condemned the persecution and official repression of Russian Jewry in strong terms … Liberal Jewish organizations in Kiev … collaborated with … Ukrainian organizations to mobilize the electorate in preparation for the Duma elections in 1906 … many peasants voted for M. R. Chervonenkis, one of the Jewish candidates … after the elections two of the non-Jewish deputies–one Ukrainian, the other Polish–pledged to fight for Jewish rights as well as for those of their own nationality."

Ostap Veresai

**Klezmer-related texts include at least two references to bands with banduras in them. Moshe Beregovski, the great Soviet-era ethnomusicologist and klezmer expert, mentions a group consisting of violin, clarinet, cymbalom, bandura, and drum. And the memorial book for the shtetl of Slutsk talks about an ensemble of violin, flute, and bass big bandura. This bass big bandura is possibly the larger, twentieth-century model, with more strings and greater chromatic possibilities, upon which Kytasty also played two numbers. See video below, where Kytasty is joined by klezmer master Michael Alpert.

It may be that (coincidentally or not) klezmer bands with banduras in them date from this same period. (Memorial books generally describe shtetlekh as they were in the early twentieth century, and Beregovski was writing in the 1930s and '40s.)

Or maybe, they existed for a long time. One constant in the history of folk music is cultural exchange, as Beregovski reminds us, speaking of melody:

"As opposed to ethnic distinctiveness, ethnic closed-mindness is absolutely foreign to folk art. A people always accepts new melodies embodying a familiar spirit, even if those melodies lack the typical qualities of that people’s music. Very often tunes become popular precisely because they offer the new resources of another people’s folk music. It is well known that very similar musical works are found in both Jewish and Ukrainian musical folklore, yet the Jewish tunes are typically Jewish and the Ukrainian typically Ukrainian …"

Besides that, there's this: musicians tend to get along with each other, even when the people around them don't.

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Handsome Is As Handsome Does, Part 1: Slender and Pale?

1/28/2014

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In The Schmaltz Diet Part 1, I wrote that, by shtetl standards, my novel’s heroine is too thin. The good news for her is that her betrothed has the same problem--only in reverse. Towards the end of Chapter 1, when he walks onto the scene, we learn that "physically, he looked altogether too robust …"

Wait a minute. Too robust? If shtetl women are supposed to be robust, why not shtetl men?

Here's a short answer: in the words of Estelle Roith (in The Riddle of Freud: Jewish Influences On His Theory Of Female Sexuality),

"… the shtetl ideal of male beauty was one that emphasized ... physically passive preoccupations: pale complexion, weary half-closed eyes, long beard, and pale delicate hands."

… in other words, "You bring the groom, slender and pale."* Take it away Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava:

* Fiddler On The Roof gets a lot wrong, if you're interested in historical accuracy, but here Harnick, Bock and Stein are right on the money. In fact, Daniel Boyarin, in his Unheroic Conduct, has a section called "'Give Me A Bridegroom Slender and Pale': The 'Effeminate' Talmudist as Erotic Object for Women"

Now, here's a longer answer: It's actually way more complicated than that. They may have called it the Pale of Settlement, but the fact is, pale was already on its way out. At the end of the nineteenth century in Jewish society, there were several competing ideals of male beauty.

Without going into what they were yet, let's just agree, this was undoubtedly confusing for all concerned. But it's probably not a coincidence that the situation arose when it did. Let's scratch the surface of what was going on at the time. Leaving aside the shtetl world for a second, Russia in the 1860s, '70s, and '80s saw …

Dostoevsky

Kropotkin

Bakunin

S. Degayev, secret police

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky writing a half-dozen masterpieces (maybe not strictly relevant, but … how do you not mention it?)

Chekhov, Turgenev and Leskov close behind

The serfs liberated (good) and mired in poverty and alcoholism (bad), the merchant class rising up, and the noble class sliding downward

Anarchists and communists like Bakunin and Kropotkin and Alexander Herzen forming new political movements every other minute

A war with Turkey that left Russians feeling first triumphant, and then humiliated

Tolstoy

Chekhov

Herzen

Turgenev

Leskov

G. Sudeykin, secret police

Attempts on the life of the tsar (the last of them successful)

And the formation of a terrifying secret police corps (which, by the way, plays a role in The Tsimbalist.)

Tsar Alexander II. You might think he's only wearing a mustache. Evidence to the contrary comes from one of Youtube's most unusual offerings, a Circassian Chanted Curse called "Fork-bearded Tsar"

A smart aleck might be tempted to suggest that, amidst all this flux and ferment, there was only one force for stability and unity in the whole Russian empire, only one thing bringing all men together.

That's right. They all wore beards.

Sort of like in Brooklyn …

Joking aside … for the Jewish subset of beard-wearers, things were no less rich and chaotic than they were for other Russians:

There were reformers running rampant, some who wanted Jews to assimilate--maybe even wear shorter beards!

Yiddish literature, Hebrew literature, Yiddish Theater, with heavy doses of European influence, budded and blossomed.

A class of wealthy industrialists emerged.

There were pogroms.

Meanwhile, young Jews were hot for the same ideas that were lighting a fire under other young Russians. But that didn't keep some of them from subscribing to other new beliefs: that maybe Jews should defend themselves, that Russia's Jewry should abandon its centuries-old passivity, that Jews needed their own homeland.

Is it any surprise that all this had an effect on ideals of masculine identity?(And did I mention other considerations, like what role gay men may have played in shaping the male beauty ideal in the shtetl, or why there were so many stories about young shtetl women masquerading as boys?)

There's a lot to talk about there. In the next one or two or three installments of Handsome Is As Handsome Does, let's talk about it.

Changing beard styles: Israel Brodsky, famous Kiev millionaire, sugar king, and philanthropist ...

and his son Lev

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The Schmaltz Diet: Zaftig Up In 8 Weeks Or Your Money Back (Part 1)

1/24/2014

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My novel’s heroine has a problem. She’s too thin.

Not too thin for me, mind you--I like her just the way she is. She’s not abnormally thin. It’s just that, in the shtetl, they liked a little meat on a lady’s bones. Read for yourself:

"A woman, according to the shtetl inhabitants, should be zaftig and full-figured."
--Menachem Brayer, The Jewish Woman In Rabbinic Literature: A Psychohistorical Perspective

" ... the Yiddish word "Zaftig" was a complementary [sic] reference to a juicy, plumb, strong, vibrant, solid woman."
--Karen L. Smith. "Some Notes on Jewish Women and Eating Disorders"

"Hannah, Volodya’s wife, robust, summer-fresh, calm as a bright village morning in July, knew how to hold on to her husband with her body and with food."
--Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, in a typically vivid characterization from The Yeshiva.

As if anybody needed proof of how things have changed since then, here's novelist Jennifer Weiner, in Good in Bed:

"She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft. As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat."

So when did things change? Perhaps, around the same time people stopped eating so much schmaltz:

"… to a certain generation of assimilation-minded, America-embracing Jews, schmaltz was shunned as a totem of their parents’ and grandparents’ unforgivingly ethnic poverty cuisine. At a low point in Jewish delicatessen culture, many cooks yielded to customer pressure, subbing flavor-deficient vegetable oil into their chopped liver and kishke." --Leah Koenig, writing in Tablet.

... and around the same time violinists stopped playing so schmaltzily:

So if de-schmaltzification is a result of assimilation and Americanization … is the same true for the lost appeal of zaftigkeit? Sarah Schulman thinks so, as she discusses classic Yiddish film Yidl Mitn Fidl in the online magazine Jump Cut:

"The detail I found most interesting in Yidl Mitn Fidl was the surprising information about Jewish aesthetic standards. We are told that the bride is ‘the most beautiful girl in the village.’ She is large-boned, plump, with big features and kinky hair. This is a pre-Americanization image of Jewish beauty. Today, an assimilated Jewish woman who looks like this would think of herself as unattractive.”

(Note that Molly Picon, holding the violin, is playing a woman pretending to be a man; the most beautiful girl in the village is the one on the left.)

Okay. If all that's the case … why didn’t I make my heroine a little more zaftig?

Well … writing a novel that takes place in another time and place requires a little flexibility. Sometimes you go for what seems historically accurate. Sometimes you favor what is historically plausible. And sometimes, you just have to do what feels right.

I guess this is a case of doing what feels right. What can I say, I'm a thoroughly American Jew.

I'm just sorry my heroine has to suffer for it.

***

By the way ... did you know that schmaltz is making a comeback?

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This Whole Jewish Names Business, My New Novel, And My New Blog

1/23/2014

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You may recently have seen Bennett Muraskin's article "Jewish Surnames Explained," which first appeared in Jewish Currents, and then on Slate. In fact, you may have seen it a lot. I certainly did. A link to the Slate version was forwarded to me, successively, by several relatives, and that was after I'd already seen it posted by a friend or two on Facebook. When I started reading the article (which, as the name promises, details the origins of many Eastern European Jewish names) I was intrigued. When I spotted some glaring inaccuracies among Muraskin's explanations, I was disappointed. Then, when the thing kept going viral, with all those errors, I got a little irritated.

Novelist Dara Horn seems to have had much the same experience. In an exasperated takedown, she details the article's "unsubstantiated nonsense" and speculates that "If you are an American Jew who uses the Internet, I suspect that you, too, have already seen this article … It was sent by your friend, or your mom, or your friend's mom …"
Her conclusion? "… the immense attention paid to this article reveals the degree to which many American Jews are still fascinated to learn where they came from. Unfortunately, it also reveals how the members of a group so highly educated in other respects know so little about their own history that they will swallow any 'fact' from the Jewish past that comes flitting across their screens."

I find this conclusion to be surprisingly exciting. Why? Because the fascination and the ignorance Horn describes have a lot to do with why I am starting this blog. First, the fascination: I just wrote a novel (so far unpublished) called The Tsimbalist. The Tsimbalist takes place in the same world Muraskin's Jewish surnames come from: specifically, an 1870s shtetl in the Ukraine. I wrote the novel because I'm fascinated by the world where it takes place. I'm fascinated by my own genealogy, by the music, which I play in my band, Big Galut(e), and by … what else?

It turns out, a lot. The world those surnames come from is really a whole world, with all the details that a whole world has. And when Dara Horn says American Jews know little about their own history, she's especially right when it comes to those details. My ignorance in this regard was staggering before I wrote The Tsimbalist. With every new page, I had the realization, "I don't know that! How do I find that out?" I went rushing to books, the internet, any place that could help me remove that particular layer of ignorance: memorial books from shtetls; the fiction of authors like Sholem Aleikhem, Isaac Babel, Chekhov, Gogol; academic studies on crime and debt and the liquor trade in Russia; the invaluable writings on Klezmer music by Moshe Beregovski, Yale Strom, Mark Slobin, Robert Rothstein; and … well, you get the idea.

Writing the novel provoked a lot of questions. Some of the answers surprised me. For me, the questions, the answers, and the process in between were, and remain, intriguing.

I'm hoping they may be intriguing to you too. If you think they might be, come here from time to time. One of the things I’ll be doing on this blog is detailing a few examples.

Till next time ...

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The Bandurist

Handsome Is As Handsome Does, Part 1: Slender and Pale?

The Schmaltz Diet: Zaftig Up In 8 Weeks Or Your Money Back (Part 1)

This Whole Jewish Names Business, My New Novel, And My New Blog

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