romania revealed: Music

Whenever the tuica was plentiful in our American home, my mother would try to convince her guests to dance the hora. The only other times I had the opportunity to dance the hora in the United States involved Eastern European Jewish friends. How is it that Eastern European Jews and Romanians share a national folk dance? Why did my strolls through the Jewish kletzmer festival in Cracow, Poland evoke an incredible, dolorous homesickness?

Kletzmer remains an enduring love for me-- it brings tears of joy to my eyes. Since there are few things in life powerful enough to elicit joy, that magnificent compost of sadness, awe, and elation, it was with great delight that I read Ben Cohen's essay on Jewish music in Romania.

Cohen's experise is personal-- he is a "bessarabisher yid". His grandparents were born in Bessarabia when it was part of Romania and lived in Chisinau until the time of the 1905 pogrom. Today, Bessarabia is the Republic of Moldova, and Cohen lives in Budapest. He notes:

"Although I live in Hungary, the majority of our music’s influences come from Romanian musicians. The reasons are simple. Romania was crucial to the development of klezmer dance repertoire. My ancestors came from Moldavia. I grew up eating mamaliga in New York City. My grandparents spoke Romanian Yiddish. And Romania is one of the few places in Europe today that can boast a rich and active traditional context for folk music."

After discussing the four categories of Jewish music repertoire as applied by Dr. Wallter Zev Feldmen, Cohen zeroes in on the city of Iasi.

When I began to record music in Romania in the late 1980s, many of the elder Gypsy musicians I approached in Transylvania enthusiastically played Jewish tunes for me, alongside the Romanian and Transylvanian Hungarian music I was asking after. I was intrigued. Where had they learned these tunes? From playing for Jewish weddings, they answered. And so I began to learn something of the styles and repertoire of Jewish music from the elder generation of Gypsy musicians such as Ferenc "Arus" and Bela Berki of Mera, Samuel "Cilika" Boross of Cluj, Bela Gaspar, Arpad Toni of Voivodeni, Vassile and Gheorghe Covaci in Maramures, and others. I made trips through Transylvania, Bukovina, Maramures, and Moldavia.

Eventually I had the great pleasure of meeting Prof. Itzik Shvartz and his wonderful wife Cili in Iasi in 1991. Prof. Shvartz, born in 1905, is a prolific writer, folklorist, linguist, and former director of the Iasi Yiddish theater who at this writing is still living in Iasi. He has known all of the 20th century’s important Romanian Jewish personalities as well as many of the Jewish musicians. His wife Cili was perhaps the best living Yiddish traditional singer in Europe until her death in 1998 (her kosher soda cookies were absolutely the best….).

From Itzik Shvartz I learned about the life of klezmer families in 20th century Iasi: the Bughici family, the Segal family, and the Weiss family. The Lemesh family were important musicians in the last century who also played in Avram Goldfaden’s original Yiddish Theater orchestra at the Pomul Verde wine cellar in Iasi, but that family no longer resides in Iasi – I have heard they moved to Philadelphia.

Abraham Goldfaden, considered by many to be the "father of Yiddish theater", founded his theater troupe in Iasi, then moved to Bucharest, and then took it to the road. Nahma Sandrow recounts her trip to Pomul Verde and the heady influence of sweet Romanian wines in her article for The New York Times. Joel Berkowitz's article on Goldfaden is the best I've read on Goldfaden so far. I return the microphone to Mr. Cohen:

The Bughici band was primarily violin-based. Many of the Bughici family were murdered in the 1941 Iasi pogrom, but several survived, including Avram, the violinist, and Dimitru, who became a renowned piano teacher and jazz composer in Bucharest and now resides in Israel. During the 1970s, Prof. Shvartz had made some cassettes of the playing of Avram Bughici and Gheorghe Bughici, both on violin. Avram Bughici sold a book of repertoire to Itzik for use in the theater. Although the manuscript may now be lost, Itzik did make a cassette recording around 1975 with the accompaniment of accordionist Izu Gott (son of Dorohoi klezmer clarinetist Berko Gott), sight-reading the pieces on accordion. (Izu, a classically trained bassist who lives part of each year in Israel, has since served as music director of the Romanian Federation of Jews, as well as its president.) From Avram Bughici’s book we can assume the nature of the family’s repertoire – lots of khosidls, to be sure, several freylachs, with some theater songs and doinas.

The Segal family were considered more accomplished musicians, however, and played in the Iasi Yiddish theater as well. Unfortunately, a manuscript of their music may have been lost – we are still looking for it – but hopefully in the future I will get the chance to meet one Segal still big in the Romanian entertainment business – Gheorghe Segal, known as TV personality Gheorghe Sava – and ask if he knows anything about this. Sava’s father’s gravestone in the Iasi cemetery features a carved stone harp, as testament to his prowess as a musician.

Elsewhere in Moldavia we know of other Jewish musicians. In Roman, before the Holocaust, there was Hayim "Hersko" Herskovits, a trumpeter, as well as fiddlers Moishe Musikant and Iancu Malai. The popular Romanian song composer Richard Stein was also from Roman. Jewish musicians in Roman often played alongside Gypsies, and a basic band was formed of a violin or trumpet, accordion, and drum – a very typical lineup for a modern Moldavian band even today.

In modern Moldavian folk music we still find traces of Jewish repertoire in the music of the fanfara brass bands. The elder generation of Romanian and Gypsy folk fiddlers often have pieces of klezmer origin in their repertoires, although this is becoming rarer these days. Dances such as "Jidancuta", "Jidoveasca", and melodies commonly recorded by early klezmer musicians are still current among many village repertoires.

Cohen provides a lot of detail and wonderful photographs about his experiences with Jewish music in Romania on Mark Rubin's blog. I encourage peeking.

On Jewish music in Transylvania, Cohen writes:

In Transylvania we find fewer traces of Jewish musicians. One reason is the different social development of Transylvania’s Jews under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In this region, as in Hungary (after 1825), it was mostly Gypsy musicians who provided instrumental music for Jews. Transylvania was a part of Hungary previous to 1920. As "Hungarian" Jews, Transylvanian Jews were enfranchised as citizens in 1867, and even before that date were accepting social assimilation to a "Hungarian" national identity, after the German Jewish model. In 1867 Hungary’s Jewish communities split into Neolog (sort of "Reform") and Orthodox, with certain communities remaining as "Status Quo Ante". Thus, communities in Cluj (Kolozsvar in Hungarian), Arad, Sibiu, and Timisoara (Temesvar in Hungarian) were predominantly Neolog, and adopted Hungarian language in place of Yiddish.

Alongside many other Hungarian customs they adopted, Jews were great patrons of Hungarian popular music, or Magyar notak, and a Neolog wedding allowed for mixed-sex dancing. Gypsy musicians were hired for Jewish weddings, and played a few Jewish songs (usually "Belz" alongside various Yiddish theater songs and a few Sabbath zmiros) while providing csardas music for dancing. In Fizesul Gherleii (Ordongosfuzes in Hungarian) as well as Sarmas, local Gypsy village bands also played sets of "Jewish Dances". Zoltan Blum, a Jew from Fizesul Gherleii, remembers Jews dancing in a circle to this music before WWII. He also says that Jews in the village lived harmoniously with their neighbors, except for three things which they would never do with non-Jews: eat with them, bathe with them, or dance with them.

So much for the Austro-Hunagrian enlightened ideal. Clearly, Jewish music differs from Romanian folk music in some important ways. Seth Rogovoy distinguishes Romanian folk music from Jewish music in its connection to the Yiddish language and ornamentation:

Yet for all the “borrowings” of klezmer, for all the Romanian dance rhythms and the haunting melodies that some attribute to the music’s Gypsy flavorings, there is something essentially Jewish that separates klezmer from Gypsy or Romanian music. This is partly due to its close connection to the Yiddish language, spoken by Jews. It is also demonstrably a technical question of phrasing or ornamentation – those krekhts, or achy moans that are characteristic of klezmer violinists and clarinetists, along with the tshoks, or laugh-like sounds, and kneytshn, the sob-like “catch,” which are all directly borrowed from the characteristic vocal ornamentation of the khazones, the prayer melodies of the synagogue cantors. But even more than any of these specific cultural influences, there is something more intangibly Jewish that gives klezmer its distinctive flavor, that makes it different from other closely-related Balkan folk musics.

Romanian film director Radu Gabrea has produced several films on Jewish music in Romania. If you are interested in learning more about Romanian Jewish music, I suggest reading a little about the cimbalom and exploring the following links:

Photos from the Jewish Music Research Center.
Lost Trails' "The Lost Jewish Music of Moldavia", with violinist Constanin Lupu.
"Jewish Musicians in Moldova" by Itsik Shvarts. Translated by Bob Cohen.
View the Goldfaden Centennial Exhibit Online.
The Yizkor Book Project's tour of Jewish heritage in Iasi.
Explore Romanian folk music with the BBC Radio 3's guide.
Video of John Belushi doing the classic Yiddish folk tune, "Romania, Romania" for SNL at Teruah.
National Geographic offers a few Romanian folk tunes for sample in addition to a detailed look at gypsy folk traditions.
For information about Belf's Romanian Orchestra, visit the Kletzmershack and scroll down.
To find Jewish music online, use this wonderful Guide from The Jewish Theological Seminary.
Dumneazu gets personal about Ukranian influences in Jewish folk music and also mentions Muzsikas, which produced a recording of Maramures Jewish music learned from Gheorghe Covaci. (I posted his photo of the band above.)
Sephardic Jewish Community of Romania.
For a list of names to google on this topic, see the line-up for The International Workshop on Yiddish Theatre, Dance, and Performance.
Explore Jewish culture in Iasi with Haskedim.
The hora from Moistworks.

romania revealed

2011.08.08

Beautiful Maria Tanase.

2009.06.01

John Vanderslice's "Romanian Names".

2009.03.05

The first anti-communist DJ: Cornel Chiriac.

2009.02.19

Jewish music in Romania, a post inspired by Ben Cohen.

2009.02.08

A few tunes by Maria Tanase.