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Hoping for Surprises
David B. Green
 'A SPIRIT ENTERED ME': Chava Alberstein thought she'd finished with Yiddish, but then produced 'The Well' with the Klezmatics. This year also saw a topical new Hebrew disc, |
When Chava Alberstein appeared on the popular American radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," last December, host Garrison Keillor impressed her with the thoroughness of his research. Not only did Keillor pronounce her name correctly, but he reminded her of the musical debt that she owed to folk legend Pete Seeger.
Alberstein explains that long ago she had told an interviewer about seeing Seeger in Haifa in the early 60s, when she was a young teenager. "I went by myself, none of my girlfriends was interested," she recalled recently. "I was in shock when he came on stage, with his guitars and banjo. I�d been raised with symphony orchestras, jazz orchestras. And suddenly I see someone perform by himself. It was the most important thing I'd seen in my life, and it influenced me more than anything. And that's what I think I do best to this day."
Singing solo may be what comes most naturally to the 52-year-old chanteuse, but she's never been one to tread water, and so her appearance on the "Prairie Home Companion," like her latest round of concerts internationally, was with the New York-based Klezmatics, playing selections for the show�s 2 million listeners from their new joint album, "The Well" (Xenophile).
Explaining its selection of the record -- musical settings by Alberstein of 15 contemporary Yiddish poems -- as one of the 10 best pop albums for 1998, the LA Weekly referred to Alberstein's "universal voice," adding, "If there is any hope for humanity as we knew it, it�s here." Indeed, there is something comforting about Alberstein�s voice -- "smoky, world-weary, elegant," is how another U.S. critic put it -- and her selections are versatile and tasteful.
Anything but schmaltzy, "The Well" elicits a mixture of pleasure and joy, wistful longing, sadness and loss. In "Velkhes Meydl S�nemt a Bokher" (Any Girl Who Takes a Boyfriend), Alberstein�s affixed a frenetic melody to poet Zishe Landau�s advice to a girl to "have a pair of boys -- Fewer won't suffice/ One to go and fight the foe/On the field of war,/ One to stay and give away/ His life to her -- no more" (translation by Michael Wex). "Mayn Shvester Khaye," by Binem Heller (1906-1998), on the other hand, is a heartbreaking memorial to the poet�s sister, "who raised me/ In the house on Smotshe Street with tumble-down steps." Khaye, "with her eyes of green/ Was burnt by a German in Treblinka," whereas her brother is in Israel, and "It's for her that I write my poems in Yiddish."
Alberstein's singing career has been going on non-stop since she was 17 -- 35 years, 50 albums. Yet it was only in 1986 that she began to write her own songs, when the composers she had been working with no longer "delivered the goods." This year she�s also put out a new CD of original Hebrew songs, "Te-khef Ashuv" (I'll Be Right Back; NMC Records). It's a back-to-basics sort of record, with only Alberstein's voice and acoustic instruments, and a strong dose of social and political criticism, most notably in "Hakosem" (The Magician).
It may be Alberstein�s most politically charged number since her updated Chad Gadya, the children's Pesah song, released in 1989, at the height of the Intifada. That was a chilling song, in which Alberstein answered the traditional Pesah question "What has changed?" by admitting, "I used to be a kid and a peaceful sheep,/ Today I am a tiger and a ravenous wolf/ I used to be a dove/ And I used to be a deer/ Today I don't know who I am anymore."
Though Alberstein doesn�t name Benjamin Netanyahu in the song, it�s clear who she�s talking about in "The Magician": "He's a mix of hypnotic magician and sorcerer," she sings. "When the magic fails he chides the crowd/ And shouts, The air in the hall is poisoned... In the stunned audience they whisper to one another/ Let's hope tonight he doesn't try/ The most daring trick of all/ That's the one in which the crowd disappears ..."
So, does this unapologetic leftist feel joyous now that it is the "magician" himself who has disappeared? Not exactly: "Because it�s not just the man. Whether willingly or unwillingly, he opened up so many wounds here that had been closed for so long, and caused other people to speak in a manner that I would rather they not have spoken. Crudely. With a desire just to provoke or upset .... I feel I still have a bad hangover, an apprehensive feeling."
Chava Alberstein was born in Szczecin, a Polish port city, in 1947, and emigrated to Israel with her parents and older brother Alex four years later. Their first year here, the family lived in a transit camp in Kiryat Eliyahu, near Haifa, and then moved to successively larger immigrant apartments in the area. "It�s the same �journey� that many Oriental Jews took, and cry and talk about. And we, somehow, didn�t complain. They sprayed us with DDT too. And many of the people who went through the transit camp really suffered a trauma, because they had come from concentration camps, but they also came to terms with it." Alberstein's parents lost all their family in the Holocaust, but survived the Nazis by escaping to Russia.
Chava grew up surrounded by music: Her father was a music teacher, her mother a musical seamstress who called her sewing machine "my piano." Since most families in their area couldn�t afford pianos, Chava�s father learned the accordion. "I was his guinea pig. I would take the accordion to school on Friday and play for Kabbalat Shabbat. And everyone would ask, Who�s your teacher?"
Her father brought the classics into the home; her brother the jazz that he�d hear on the Voice of America; Chava brought home the folk music she loved. "There were terrible wars in the house about music, until slowly everyone started to give in, to listen to the others� music." And indeed, when the writer and popular radio host Dahn Ben-Amotz invited a 17-year-old Chava onto his show, for her first public appearance (she arrived at the Jaffa club where the show was recorded by bus), she sang a gospel number, a Spanish folk song, something by French pop composer Jacques Pr�vert, and a Yiddish song.
Within months she had signed a contract with CBS records [today NMC], though it was only in 1967, after her army service, that she released her first LP. Since then, she has become an institution of sorts, her classic recordings including Naomi Shemer�s "Lu Yehi"; "Like a Wildflower," "The Night Is Songs" and "London," with its ironic text by Hanoch Levin about leaving the country for a more civilized place.
Alberstein likes to quote a Chinese proverb that "the road is smarter than the one who's walking it." As she describes how she arrived at her two latest albums, her claim that "I really, really do not have a strategy; I always hope for surprises" is convincing. "The Well," for example, came out of a documentary film about Yiddish poets she and her husband, director Nadav Levitan, made three years ago. "Yiddish," she says, "is something that, all my life, I�m running away from, and returning to." When the film, "Too Early to Be Quiet, Too Late to Sing," was done, she continues, "I felt, okay, I�ve taken my leave of Yiddish."
That�s what she said. What she did was to begin writing songs based on Yiddish poems. "It was as if a spirit entered me, the opposite of what I was feeling, and it said, instead of parting, let�s do something new, completely new. So I sat by the piano with a poem by Anna Margolin. And it began to roll. One song, then another song, and another." (As for the making of "I�ll Be Right Back," Alberstein says that though she was happy for the escape "The Well" gave her from the troubling realities of day-to-day life in Israel, "I felt that I'd be betraying myself if I didn�t react in a personal way to things that bother me at home.")
It was essential to her that any recording of the songs not be kitschy. Having met the very hip Klezmatics at a number of music festivals, she was inspired to record the Yiddish songs with them. They in turn brought in a big-time producer, Ben Mink, who's worked with k.d. lang, and co-written many of her songs.
Mink, speaking to The Report by phone from Vancouver, says that when Alberstein�s at her best, "she�s as good as anyone I�ve worked with." When he played her for lang, she too "was knocked out." Mink also extols Alberstein's professionalism. "Usually a singer does 15 to 20 takes of a song," and he patches together the best words or phrases from each, in what is called a vocal comp. "With Chava I had to take out a cough from one song. That�s it. She�s like a diva, not in temperament, but in the way her voice reigns over a song."
For her efforts on behalf of Yiddish culture, Alberstein is one of this year�s four recipients of the Itsik Manger Award, named for the Czernowitz-born Yiddish poet and writer (1901-1969), one of the poets whose work appears on "The Well." Yiddish specialist Prof. Avraham Novershtern, director of Tel Aviv's Sholem Aleichem House, where the prize was to be presented June 10, explains that the prize was established in 1968 as a protest over the fact that neither the Israel Prize nor any other local honors recognized the contributions of people working in or with Yiddish. "It�s a prize for creativity," he says.
Chava Alberstein hasn�t won the Israel Prize either -- yet -- but that�s likely because there�s every reason to believe her best work is still ahead of her. But she says winning the Manger Prize means more to her than the Israel Prize ever could. "Yiddish," she says, "brings out other melodies in me. It takes me in directions I can�t get to with Hebrew."
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