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Harmonising Sores and Sjalsjelles in Song
In the organic outgrowth of the local Yiddishkayt, and especially through the evolution of Mira Rafelowicz’s 1989 Yiddish Festival into today’s annual International Jewish Music Festival, Amsterdam has become an established site for Jewish music. At least six joodse koren [Jewish choirs] practice regularly around the city, often in small group settings with audiences of other singers of Jewish music, but also at festivals and other large venues. Klezmer bands of all stripes play to all audiences, performing at the market, the squat, the club, the Concertgebouw. It is through these meetings and events that the Koosjer Nederlands speech community recognises itself in the most pragmatic sense: they arrive as individuals, each with inchoate connections to Yiddish and the cultural practices of Jewishness it encodes, but together pursue these connections and in the process become a community of practice.
As few in Amsterdam’s Yiddish circles (and even fewer of the general public) possess the Yiddish literacy skills to completely understand what is being sung, the musical qualities of Yiddish songs become important resources for expressing and understanding the story that lies ‘beneath’. While most individuals have their own specific reasons for making this music, and accordingly their own aesthetic intentions and expectations, all recognise the deep emotive power of Yiddish music, which can range from instrumental klezmer, to choral verse, to nigunim, wordless vocal tunes. It is difficult to articulate the affective power of any music, especially one that has been so popularised and essentialised in the last twenty years as the klezmer[9] genre; respondents often struggle to get past the genre’s ‘sorrow and joy’, an affective paradox verging on cliché. But this explanatory lacuna is precisely the point of such songs, as they catalyse an emotive engagement that cannot be articulated in pure language alone.
Agamben (1999) writes about the nature of testimony in relation to the Shoah and the continuous history of Jewish suffering, arguing for its impossibility. Not that it is unsayable, for to designate it as such would be akin to euphemism, silent adoration, but because of the inevitable disjunct between living the Holocaust (or its repercussions for social relations) and expressing its experience meaningfully through language. ‘Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony,’ he claims; ‘on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem’ (p. 36). Johan, a prisoner at Westerbork as a child, recalls the song he is compelled to play in all of his performances with the klezmer trio Sjalsjelles (‘Connections’), which is
really a Dutch text with one Yiddish word in it, hasjeweine,[10] and it was a little song that embodied for me, and still embodies, the longing in the camp and during the war, and maybe still the longing for home, and longing for freedom, and longing for the lost world, longing for my lost mother, etcetera etcetera… That’s one of the songs I love to perform whenever I have the opportunity… And one of the other reasons that I still like to sing it is because you keep hoping that you will meet someone, someday, who knows it [he laughs]; but until now, not.
Johan’s example poignantly illustrates the way Yiddish songs act as affective vehicles not only for coming to terms with one’s own memories and relationships, but also for opening up and accessing a space in which to circulate these connections and articulate commonality amongst those who share them. These may be direct memories – as is the case with Johan – or associative memories, passed through ties of kin and kith. Shura, still herself feeling the weight of her parents’ suffering before, during and after the Second World War, argues that many of this generation still carry the volle sores [heavy troubles] of their forebears’ burden – but that this anguish is often unacknowledged by contemporary Jewish communities. As the observant Jewish communities in Amsterdam (in my informants’ opinions) can be quite insular and exclusionary to non-Jews, Yiddish expressive culture is felt, by its participants, to be an inclusive and intersubjective space where anyone with a personal connection to Jewishness – understood as anyone touched by the Semitically-tinged culture of Amsterdam – can find a means of cultivating it further.
Despite these claims to inclusivity, however, the Mokum speech community is aware that not everyone shares their sonic sensibility. They acknowledge this disjuncture in oblique ways, as in the offhand stories of the Moroccan youth who use the term gabber, [11] ‘friend’, without realizing its Yiddish roots, and in informal and implicit binarisations of Islam and Judaism. Speaking and singing in Koosjer Nederlands is a celebration of the enduring imbrication of Jews and non-Jews in Amsterdam; it is a story of multiculturalism that many Dutch people now take pride in. And as much as it flows out of the turbulence of World War Two, it is forcefully pulled by the tides of contemporary European politics, dragged along by the undertow of integration debates that place not Judaism but Islam at the fore.