The Power of Story

Last week was the beginning of the Yiddish Fest and I attended two very extraordinary events. The first was a talk by Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. I had the good fortune to have heard him at the genealogy conference I attended earlier this year in Boston and was struck by his energy, passion and humor. Even though he touched on many of the same stories, his enthusiasm brought a freshness to them.

If you have read his book Outwitting History, you know something about his story. As a graduate student he began collecting Yiddish books, often as Yiddish speaking elders or their children were disposing of their libraries. Many of his more colorful stories related to rescues that began with a middle of the night phone call on a rainy night alerting him to a dumpster filled with Yiddish books. Food also seemed to be a theme as each stop at a home entailed eating their way through offerings of Jewish delicacies before beginning their labor of book removal. As I listened to the reverence in which these books were held by the original owners, I thought of the groaning shelves of books that I grew up with. While not Yiddish books, I suspect they grew out of that same reverence, something deeply rooted in Jewish culture.

Lansky talked of their efforts to digitize the books to make them widely available. This effort was largely funded by Steven Spielberg consistent with his efforts to preserve both survivor stories and the stories of Jewish heritage. More recently they are working to apply optical character recognition (OCR) to be able to make them searchable. And of course this comes with a story. Lansky was contacted out of the blue by Assaf Urieli, a gentleman who lives in the French Pyrenees and created Yiddish OCR to aid in searching information on his ancestors. He offered this tool free of charge to the Center, a tool which can revolutionize Yiddish scholarship.

So that was amazing lecture number one. Amazing lecture number two occurred the following evening when I went to hear my friend Dora Eiger Zaidenweber together with her grandson Etan Newman launch her father's memoir of his 2 1/2 years in Auschwitz. A crowd of almost 200 people showed up to hear her speak. I've written previously more of this book, Sky Tinged Red, and the unusual story of its discovery. In brief, while it was written immediately after the war, the first portion was not discovered until her father's death in 1960. Dora translated this in the 1980s only to discover it ended in 1942. It was not until 2007 that she found the original handwritten manuscript in Yiddish which recounted the rest of the story. Even more amazing was the fact that Dora, now legally blind, translated it with the aid of a magnifying machine, one letter at a time. So we have a very unusual story of discovery and an unusual story of translation. The story itself is also unusual in that few people survived 2 1/2 years in Auschwitz, witnessing and participating in its creation, the bombing of the crematorium and ultimately liberation. Isaia Eiger was fluent in many languages and as a result was assigned the role of intake scribe.  Because of these responsibilities  he was in contact with many of the people who entered Auschwitz and writes of them, especially those from his town of Radom.

In addition to her father's tale Dora was asked about her own story. Dora was in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and has shared many of her stories with me in our conversations. We frequently debate the role of personal story. I believe it is the way that most people connect and hence very important. Dora has often opted for more universal themes. I was pleased when a student asked if there was something that stayed with her from her experience and Dora shared two of her most powerful stories. Now that 200 people heard them, I feel that I can share them here as well. Both involve her mother who accompanied Dora throughout the war and was in large part the reason Dora survived.

First Dora recounted her memory of standing naked before Dr Mengele as their fate rested in his hands. Other women had preceded them and the older women were usually sent to one side, to death, and their daughters to the other. The daughters who had escaped the gas chamber often sought to remain with their mother. As Dora and her mother approached Mengele, Dora was behind her mother. Suddenly her mother pushed her in front. Surprisingly both survived the selection even though her mother was in her 40s, an age considered old in that time and place. Afterwards Dora asked her mother why she did that and she replied, " I didn't want you to try to follow me."

The second story showed a similar level of forethought that I hadn't expected. Dora's mother had hollowed out the heels of her burgundy shoes and in each heel she had hidden a small diamond ring. On many occasions they debated if the time had come to trade one of those rings for a loaf of bread, always opting to hold it in reserve. In Bergen-Belsen, typhus was rampant. Dora had become ill and recovered, but was still very weak. One day she was unable to arise for roll call and was taken to the infirmary, a death sentence. Two people shared a bed, 30 inches in diameter, awaiting their place on the pile of bodies that accumulated each day. Dora's mother returned from work and discovered Dora was missing. She went to the infirmary, diamond ring in hand and offered it to the Polish woman in charge in exchange for her daughter.

As you can gather, both Dora and Aaron Lansky are powerful storytellers and I was privileged to witness the power of story in their hands.

An Open Mike Afternoon

I spent this afternoon at an open mike event with people in their 80s and 90s singing old Yiddish tunes accompanied by two Klezmer musicians.  My projects take me to some interesting places.  When we had interviewed Rakhil and Liana, Rakhil had sung us many Yiddish songs.  My interview partner knew a klezmer musician, Judith Eisner, and suggested we connect her with Raychel to share their love of Yiddish song.  Soon after, I attended an event that Judith played at and asked her if she would be willing to play. She very graciously agreed. As Raychel lives at a facility with others who share her love of Yiddish music we decided to open it to them as well.

One by one, the bolder members of the audience rose to sing the songs they remembered from childhood.  Others chimed in on remembered melodies. Many did not speak English, but the universal language of music was spoken by all.    Even those whose memories had begun to lapse, recalled every word.  I am struck by how music links to memory, embedding treasured songs in our mental wiring.

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I’ve written of many of my interviews, but only recently have begun to add video to my website, excerpts from lengthier videos that I've edited.  If you go to the Identity/Legacy portion of my website, you will find yourself at the work from this series.  When you click on the thumbnails to enlarge you will find links to both blogs and video that accompany each painting.The video may give you some of the flavor of the interview on which the artwork was based.

A Stream of Yiddish Fish

I am involved in many pursuits and often have people ask how I can keep them all straight.  I am convinced they all inform each other and thus are part of a cohesive whole even if not readily apparent to the outside eye.  Lately I have been reading the book Imagine, How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer .  I am finding that it validates much of my own observations with information on the brain science behind creativity.  The fundamental premise is that creativity involves the combination of disparate information in new ways.  Our ability to hold disparate information in our working memory increases "intelligence" by increasing the ability to make these connections.  The author writes about the creative process often involving having to face a barrier.  Achieving a relaxed state of mind is important to allow our brain to find the less obvious connections.  If we try to use our analytic selves we bring too much focus to it and miss those connections.  When we retell the story of our creative insight we often omit the struggle that preceded it and in doing so leave out the germ of the creative process.

I think a lot about those different approaches because I am such a blend of analytic and creative.  In the studio I often have to trick myself into letting go of my more analytic active brain.  You know that brain, the one  that doesn't want to shut down at 3am.   When I am struggling with a painting, I often will take a brush and smear the paint or add a light coating of white or gold paint.  Sometimes I use reflected images as source material.  The common thread behind these approaches is that they force me to see in a different way. They take me away from the precision of my left brain into a more suggestive right brain.  Even when I start with an idea, I need to distort it to allow the free associating to kick in.

Let me give you an example. I am working on artwork that captures the stories collected in an oral history project from Jewish elders, now in their 90s.  One woman told me about "those damn fish" in her father's butcher shop that she was scared to pick up for customers when she was a child.  She also told me about how all the records were kept in Yiddish and she spoke Yiddish to all the customers.  I started with the idea of "those damn fish" and Yiddish.  My analytic side went out on the Internet and pulled pictures of Jewish shops.  I started with imagery from a fish market with a young woman behind tins of fish and a scale hanging on which to weigh the fish.   Over a portion of it, I wrote out several names in Yiddish.  Up until now my analytic side was in the driver's seat.

But  I didn't like the strict lines of the tins so my right brain said "move over" and took the wheel.  It covered much of the painting with white paint, but left the young woman and the suggestion of the writing.  Around the writing I drew a much larger fish and in the foreground I draped a fish over a much larger scale.  Originally I had included the top of the scale that identifies the weight, but decided it became too much of a focal point.  Exercising my right brain's artistic license,  I decided to omit it.

I had struggled for some time with a not bad, but not quite right painting.  Now that I had destroyed the original structure, free association began to work.  When I think of a butcher shop I think of butcher paper that they might use to wrap the fish.  I hadn't liked the rigidity of the tins, so what if I unroll a sheet of figurative butcher block paper.  I added a swath of white sweeping around the now enlarged scale on which a flopping fish resides and up above to cover the form that had been the top of the scale. Rigidity was exchanged for fluidity.   And how do I know this fish is flopping?  I added an echo in white of fish tails in movement with color framing the actual tail.   The young woman is now quite small relative to the fish which seemed somehow appropriate as seen through her child's eye.  The butcher block paper reminds me of a stream and a stream would have fish in it, but Yiddish fish.  The word for fish in Yiddish reminds me of fish scales so I fill the stream with Yiddish fish by writing the word over and over.  Across the central fish, I write an excerpt of her comment in English about "those damn fish".    Some paintings survive in their more analytic form, others get reworked by my free associating right brain.  I'm not sure if this is done yet, but I am much more pleased with its direction.

As described in the book, I had to achieve a relaxed state of mind where I stopped forcing it.  For me, the swath of white paint frees me from the structure I had imposed.   Choosing fluidity over rigid lines allowed me to free associate from butcher block paper to a stream filled with Yiddish fish.  And by changing the proportions, I changed the emphasis to "those damn fish".  Now my right brain hands the wheel back to its more analytical brethren who makes sense of it all to explain it to you.

Of Yiddish and Song

Yesterday we saw a film called Mame Loshn-Kinder-Loshn (Mother Tongue-Children’s Tongue) about Yiddish. It was produced by one of our classmates and was quite extraordinary. The documentary addressed the varying reactions to the use of Yiddish over time and was comprised of interviews with many Israeli Yiddish speaking citizens.

At the end of the 19th century there were 12 million Yiddish speakers. Today there are about 1 million. The language developed over 1000 years ago when Jews settled in Germany and integrated German with Semitic language. Later it absorbed elements of Slavic languages. In 1939 90% of Jews spoke Yiddish. It explains how my Polish grandfather was able to connect with my Russian grandmother through a common language. Similarly Fran’s Polish father communicated with her French mother through Yiddish.

With the establishment of the state of Israel, the use of Yiddish was quite controversial. One of the quotes in the film was “with Yiddish we went to Treblinka, with Hebrew we went to the Negev.”Yiddish was viewed as the ghetto language. Ben Gurion said “the language grates on my ears.”  Even before WWII, Yiddish was increasingly viewed as old world. The early language policy in Israel was to unify the country with the common Hebrew language. To this end, Israel actually forbid staging Yiddish plays in the 1950s and impeded the publishing of Yiddish newspapers.

There has been a resurgence of Yiddish theater in Israel, albeit with subtitles for the non-Yiddish speaking audience. As time has passed there is a nostalgic look at the important role Yiddish has played in the history of Jewish people. The popularity of the Yiddish theater has been enhanced by Russian immigrants. Yiddish classes are also experiencing a come-back.

In one portion of the film they talked about Yiddish as a language for humor. One of my favorite lines was “a Yiddish joke is juicy, zaftig (fleshy, spilling over)." One Yiddish actor said if Hamlet was done in Yiddish, instead of “to be, or not to be” someone from the audience would respond, “So be already, or not be! What’s the deal?”

There was a sadness to the film in that the rich history of literature and songs has largely come to an end. With the exception of Hasidic Jews, Yiddish is no longer a primary language. In our classes we find ourselves resonating with certain Yiddish words because they have associations with family. That experience has largely been extinguished for future generations.

At lunch today one of my classmates asked me why I wanted to learn Yiddish. I explained that it is useful in my genealogy research and as an artist I want to incorporate it into artwork around family history. There is yet another reason. Last year I went to Bad Arolsen, Germany to the International Tracing Service Holocaust records. In the records I found survivors in my family who now live in Paris and Israel. I connected with them and began communicating by e-mail with the daughter of the Paris survivor who is in his late 80s. She told me that her father asked if I spoke Yiddish. I regretfully replied no and it closed off a line of communication. I decided then that I needed to learn the language. While it is unlikely that I will be proficient enough to have a conversation with him, I believe culture is embedded in language and if I want to understand the culture it is important to understand the language. Each path I take leads to other unanticipated paths and I believe this too will take me in new directions. And so I plod through my homework hoping it will magically coalesce in my brain.

Later in the day we attended a musical performance by Efim Chorny and Suzan Gergus. Chorny leads the Jewish Song Theatre in Kishinev. The performance was at the Jewish Community Center which previously housed a Hebrew gymnasium (a high school). As I walked up the worn steps I imagined the young students who once inhabited these hallways. Again we feel the presence of ghosts. Many of our classmates report similar impressions.

The songs were in Yiddish with Klezmer rhythms and were definitely high energy. Chorny is working with the more musical among us to prepare a performance for later in the week. I sat in for the first hour today where we were challenged to learn the Yiddish words and sing them at an extremely rapid tempo. Lacking musical ability I decided to be an appreciative fan of the Friday performance. You can hear his music at http://www.klezmeralliance.com/

Learning Yiddish and Spinning my Reels

Today we began our Yiddish classes with a very colorful teacher, Dov Ber. Dov Ber has a full beard and curly dark hair with a perpetual twinkle in his eyes. Dov began by asking us our names and where we were from and then proceeded to write our replies phonetically in Yiddish. The program stresses the importance of getting comfortable with cursive Yiddish and this proved to be good practice in doing so. It also allowed us to add a few more nationalities to the group, Italian, Lithuanian, Finnish and Russian. The Russian language which I’ve studied proved to be a good preparatory experience. Because neither Russian nor Yiddish consists of a Latin alphabet, it forces an extra step in the learning process. First one must transliterate the alphabet, recognizing both its look and sound. After this becomes familiar you realize that you are no longer transliterating it on a conscious level, but seeing it and hearing its sound simultaneously. Had I not gone through that learning process with Russian, I think I might find this more intimidating. Not to say that it is simple, but I realized that I already know more than I had acknowledged and I need to trust the learning process.

We met for an hour and a half with Dov Ber and then had a half hour coffee break. Regrouping, we then spent another hour and half with another professor, Anna, a striking Estonian linguist. Anna drilled us still further in the cursive alphabet. Having three hours of classes each day is a new rhythm to which it will take a while to adjust. In the afternoon there was a lecture in Yiddish about the fate of books during WWII. Fran decided to attend even though she would understand little if any of it. She hoped that hearing the language would enter her brain by osmosis. Another student who understood some Yiddish described the talk as depressing as it described the systematic destruction by the Germans of Yiddish and Hebrew books. I departed to head to the archives and see what I might learn.

The archives are on the other side of town and there was no easy way to get to them. The directions by trolley bus were quite complex so I decided to take a cab on this first day. The cab was costly from the old town and dropped me in front of a rather neglected building in an uninviting area of the town. I entered the archives and asked for Galina, the one English speaking archivist. They directed me to her office at the end of the hall. I began to knock on the door only to realize that it was padded. Knocking apparently is not encouraged. Instead I tried her door only to find it locked. She opened the door shortly after this attempt and I introduced myself. Galina escorted me down the hall where I was given a locker in which to put my coat as well as deposit any carry case big enough to walk out with documents. She then directed me to the reading room. There, people sat at small tables where they reviewed documents. She indicated that they had the original of one of the documents I requested, the 1875 census from Glebokie, but the rest of the documents were on microfilm. Before providing me with the documents they filled out an information card on me.

The 1875 census was quite crumbly with sections cut from it. I’m not sure why that was and Galina was no longer there to ask. It was in columnar format and the Russian script was better than some with which I’ve worked. As a result I was able to recognize a number of first names. I had written out the surnames I was researching in handwritten Cyrillic so I could look for names that might resemble them. Both names were short, Sher and Gold, so I thought they would be easier to locate. When I found names that resembled their initial letters I took a photograph as I wasn’t sure if there might be an ending added to the name which could lengthen it.

Having exhausted the census with some remote possibilities, but no Eureka moment, I then found my way to the microfilm room down the hall. They brought out a tray of microfilm, but only one was on a reel. Apparently those without reels had to be wound by hand. They set me up on a machine that didn’t seem to allow for enlargement of the image. Each time one rotated the reel it blurred for a minute until it came into sharper focus. That made for a slow and unwieldy process. The document was the census from 1834 and unlike the columnar form I had reviewed for 1875, it appeared to contain paragraphs, a format I would not have expected for a census. After winding through one of the reels, I concluded with disappointment that I’d be spinning my wheels and reels to continue down this path.

The archives closed at 4:30 so I decided to find a way to take a trolley car back to the center of town. I soon realized that the stop named for the street which housed the archives wasn’t the correct one as each trolley car passed me by. The Savanoriu stop listed the buses going to Pylimo, a stop from which I could find my way home. As I was dropped across from a large park, I pulled out my map and traced my path through streets that changed names frequently until I found Fran and one of our classmates at a nearby café. They had been hard at work on our homework which I now need to catch up on.

I have concluded that unless I can identify someone with more Russian skills to assist me in my research, I will abandon my attempt at archive research. The archivists are no longer available to assist in research and the difficulties in communication proved somewhat daunting. I plan to e-mail a researcher who I had contacted originally and ask at the University if someone might be available to assist me. Otherwise I will have to rely upon our Belarus visit to learn more about that segment of the family.