Amy Winehouse in West London, March 17, 2009.
Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

In many ways, this has been the season of the Good Jewish Girl. Next week, the proudly Jewish, defiantly curly-haired Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a woman “so, so excited to be Jewish”—will become the second woman to lead the Democratic National Committee. Two months ago, the elegant, shiny-haired, opportunely pregnant Natalie Portman ascended the podium at the Academy Awards to collect the Best Actress Oscar—a day before valiantly standing up to her sartorial patron in defense of her people. And Portman took this turn as our modern-day Esther shortly after 21-year-old Loren Galler Rabinowitz became the first Jew to compete for the Miss America title since Bess Myerson won in 1945. “A lot of my friends were taking a gap year in order to make money for school—taking jobs at banks and things,” Galler Rabinowitz said. “I wanted to spend a year doing public service, which I’ve always been extremely passionate about. And this year seemed like my last opportunity before jumping on the hamster wheel of med school.”

All of this earnest Jewish female goodness has been steadily contributing to a feeling in me, one I couldn’t put my finger on until recently.

Even before the Oscars, I stumbled across the celebrity-news report that a British survey had named Portman as the most desirable celebrity wife. The least desirable? Another Jewess, though bigger-haired and less refined: Amy Winehouse. Winehouse has otherwise fallen out of the news lately. According to most reports, she’s given up hard drugs. Without her daily trips to the store to buy cigarettes in dirty ballet slippers and spontaneous slap fests with concertgoers, Winehouse is now covered merely for wandering off stage during a concert in Dubai and forgetting the words to her own songs. Back in her Back to Black days, that would’ve been buried at the bottom of a Perez Hilton post, but when alcohol is her only remaining poison, this is perhaps as much as we can hope for. And yet, it is still more than we could get from Portman and that other paragon of femininity with Jewish lineage, Gwyneth Paltrow. Winehouse might throw a glass but never a dinner party.

I miss Amy Winehouse.

***

Just as Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus, Winehouse came to us from the beehives of the Ronettes, the paradigmatic 1960s girls’ group, with a hairdo that dwarfs theirs by at least a foot. The original bad girls of rock and roll, the Ronettes wore tight, dark skirts and heavy eyeliner—as Winehouse does. But she is by no means a carbon copy of the Phil Spector-produced group, which is best-known for the exuberant single “Be My Baby.” Though she cloaked herself in the style and sound of girl groups from 40 years ago, Winehouse brought a thoroughly modern—and Jewish—sensibility to her lyrics and performances. She spoke not of love and romance, as her predecessors did, but of addictions, sex, and every Jewish girl’s favorite emotion: guilt. In her famously adenoidal voice, she sings about the men she will cheat on, those she will use up, and the ones she intends to spit out. Her songs and tone drip with regret, but also the inevitability of her bad behavior. Any astute listener knows that she’s not going to change. In fact, we hope she doesn’t.

It’s this unrepentant behavior that signals Winehouse’s place in a very different line of Jewish women—not the “nice” ones who make you chicken soup when you’re sick or assure their sons that they’re the smartest boys in the world and any woman would be lucky to marry them. Winehouse’s ancestors are the biblical vixens: Dina, who slept with Shechem; Deborah, the biblical heroine; or, more recently, Monica Lewinsky, the “portly pepperpot” (as the New York Post dubbed her) who nearly ended Bill Clinton’s presidency. These women possessed sexuality so powerful and intoxicating that it influenced national and political outcomes. Still, on “You Know I’m No Good,” Winehouse is most emphatic about another characteristic: her guilt, her seeming regret for all of the things she’s done wrong. It’s as though she’s pounding her chest in synagogue on Yom Kippur, except instead of using the shofar, she confesses her sins above the horns, beats, and drums of Mark Ronson’s production:

And for the sin of cheating on my boyfriend.

And for the sin of thinking of you when I’m trying to please a new guy.

And for the sin of cheating. Yet again.

But she is less concerned in the song with the obvious victim of her infidelity—her guy—than with the other victim of her infidelity: Amy Winehouse. The chorus begins: “I cheated myself/ Like I knew I would.” By being unfaithful she’s lost a good man (who seems to have taken her back at least once). Furthermore, the song’s title shifts some of the blame onto her lover, who should’ve known better before tangling with her. In the last verse she asks, after her boyfriend discovers “little carpet burns” on her arms, “Who really stuck the knife in first?”

Though Winehouse seems to lack the necessary stability and mentality to be a mother, she wants desperately to be one. When asked what she envisions for the future, she insisted, “I’m gonna be looking after my husband and our seven kids.” She frequently dubs herself a “nice Jewish girl,” particularly when she is questioned about her out-of-control persona, as though by stating her desire to settle down and raise children, she can smooth out her dangerous edges. If we think that somewhere down the line, she’ll calm down, sort herself out, and assume a traditional female role, she seems to be suggesting we can let her sow her wild oats without judgment.

***

Winehouse wasn’t always the bad girl we see warbling, drunk and off key, during live performances. She was once a freshly scrubbed Jewish teen from Northeast London. Back when she recorded her first album, Frank, at 19, she was curvier and wore her long dark hair in loose waves instead of a mammoth beehive. On that album’s cover she is smiling with a full set of teeth, wearing a pink shirt that could’ve easily been pulled from the racks of Topshop. There’s nary a tattoo in sight. True, she had been kicked out of a prestigious stage school for getting her nose pierced, but that’s hardly scaling the mountain of teenage rebellion.

Winehouse’s musical tastes were informed by her family. Her parents and her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, who once dated the legendary musician Ronnie Scott, raised her on a steady diet of jazz greats and soul singers from Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald to Dinah Washington. She seems genuinely close with her father, Mitch Winehouse—the one man in Amy’s life who has lived up to the ideal man she sings about in “Stronger Than Me.” The elder Winehouse has stood by his daughter throughout ordeals with drugs and alcohol and ably manages her finances and career. He even tried to play the guilt card on her by faking a heart attack in order to force her to confront her drug-abuse problems. “I was at me wits end. I just didn’t know which way to turn. I’d tried everything,” he told the Daily Mirror. “Once I even started screaming said I was having a heart attack, but it didn’t work. Amy’s not stupid and she wanted to see my medical records proving I was actually ill.” Another Jewish father might boast about how his son got into Harvard; Mitch Winehouse talks about he couldn’t fool his addict daughter into believing he was having real chest pains. (Such nachas.)

Continue reading: “To Know Him Is To Love Him,” subservience, and: Who can handle her? Or view as a single page.

Sephardic Sounds

• “Blessed Bluegrass” by Jon Kalish, December 7, 2009. In this Vox Tablet podcast—one of those that won Tablet Magazine a National Magazine Award—Jon Kalish profiles Jerry Wicentowski, the Orthodox bluegrass player who won’t play on Shabbat.

• “Song Cycle” by Liel Leibovitz, May 10, 2010.. On another Vox Tablet, Leibovitz takes a look at the many versions and meanings of “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.”

• “It Oughta Be Kosher” by Marc Tracy, April 1, 2010.. A bonus! In our favorite Scroll post, Tracy considers whether cookie dough oughtn’t be considered pesadik.

Do you have other favorites? List ‘em in the comments …

• Move over Mamma Mia! A school for religious musicians will open in Israel and is already considering a “rock opera based on the life story of Rabbi Nachman from Breslev.” [Ynet]

• The South African Jewish Board of Deputies has announced that Richard Goldstone will be attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah after all, and “requests…that all parties immediately desist all public activities on this matter.” We certainly hope to. [SA Times]

• A reminder that Iran doesn’t have a monopoly on all the wingnuts when it comes to explaining natural phenomena: Back in 2008, an Israeli politician blamed gays for recent quakes. [Haaretz]

• Is NYC really not big enough for the Bravo’s two biggest Jewish drama queens? [AOL]

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired by Lehman’s book, produced by Hal Willner, and starring Rufus Wainwright and others—takes place tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

American Classics With a Yiddish Accent [Soundcheck]
A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

David Lehman’s Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne. “Listen to Sinatra’s version of this interestingly self-referential lyric.”

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard. “Michael Feinstein was my source on this one. And I’m surprised! The lyrics involve an impromptu wedding ceremony performed by a Parson Brown. The most interesting lyrical moment is the rhyme of ‘snow man’ and ‘no, man.’”

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer. “Very enjoyable song. The closest thing to a jazz song here. ‘Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney to me.’ It adapts the conventions of Christmas songs to become a kind of love and seduction song. Eartha Kitt sings a swell version.”

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. “Sometimes people encounter it as a musical backdrop. On a personal note, I remember flying between the U.S. and England in the 1970s, and at Heathrow or Gatwick or JFK, you would always hear that. I had never liked it particularly, but because of the association it is very dear to me. Parrish—born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania—wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous of all jazz standards, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’”

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent. “Like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Have Yourself,’ this song was popular during World War II, and it appeals to a certain nostalgia and homesickness, not only on the parts of the troops abroad, but the loved ones at home.”

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “This is a great song that is sometimes overlooked when people think of great Christmas songs, in part because of the other major Berlin effort in this category, and in part because it is one of the few songs on this list that can be done come snow or shine, year in and year out.”

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne. “This is my own favorite of the ‘Jingle Bells’-type Christmas song. I love the way it is used as the exit music in Die Hard.”

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. “These first two picks are traditional Christmas songs—they mention the holiday explicitly, are full of heartfelt sentiment, and may jerk a few tears.”

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “Bing Crosby’s version is the best-selling single ever.”

The Most Popular Ringtone in the West Bank: Allahu Akbar [Haaretz, in Hebrew]

DocRock [Healthrock.com]

“Sorry-Grateful,” by Stephen Sondheim: When it comes to relationships, Sondheim tells us, we’re always sorry-grateful and regretful-happy. “Why look for answers when none occur?” he asks. “You always are what you always were, which has nothing to do with, all to do with her.”

“Sorry Angel,” by Serge Gainsbourg: “It’s me who suicided you,” apologizes the French poet of the obscene. “Now you’re with the angels.” That’s Gainsbourg’s idea of a love song.

“Famous Blue Raincoat,” Leonard Cohen: “And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer, what can I possible say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad you stood in my way.” Apology accepted was never quite so poetic.

“Carbona Not Glue,” The Ramones: Some Jews just can’t get into the Yom Kippur vibe. Like Joey Ramone. “I’m not sorry for the things I do,” he yelped. In his defense, he did have a pretty good reason for his lack of repentance: “My brain is stuck from shooting glue.”

“Sorry,” Madonna: She’s not really Jewish. And she’s not really sorry. Yom Kippur or not, she asks her lover not to beg for her forgiveness. “I’ve seen it all before,” she states, “and I can’t take it anymore.” Maybe next Yom Kippur.

“Endlessly Jealous,” Lou Reed: Not usually one for heartfelt emotions, Lou Reed tries his best to repent. He’s sorry for what he said, sorry for what he did, sorry for beating up his lover. At least he’s apologetic.

Or on Highway 61. Or on Desolation Row.

Need Direction Home? Ask Bob Dylan [NYT]

Some critics aren’t sold. “The biggest hurdle for white, Western reggae singers to overcome is phoniness: How to make reggae without faking patois (which sounds silly and condescending), and how to embrace its themes without reducing a racially and politically charged genre to mere schtick?” notes a reviewer in Paste. “Matisyahu spectacularly fails to solve these predicaments, but the biggest problem with his reggae is simpler: He’s unequivocally terrible at it. Not only do we get fake patois, but also raging electric guitars and cluttered hip-hop production.”

Hasidic Star Matisyahu Mixes It Up on New Album [AP]
Lyin’ From Zion [Paste]
Previously: Melody Maker

Inspired by Israel, South African Globetrotter Launches Music Career [Haaretz]

Citing Cohen’s commitment to donate proceeds of his shows to victims of violence in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Noaz Bar Nir, the ministry’s director-general, called on Cohen to schedule a second gig in Israel and play Jesus’s hometown. Such a concert, he added, would “attract a large and varied audience from all the sectors of Israeli society, as well as tourists, who, together, can listen to moving music, enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds the amphitheater and can realize the concert slogan” of peace and reconciliation. To which we say: Hallelujah.

Tourism Ministry Chief Urges Leonard Cohen to Perform in Nazareth [JPost]

The problem that Seldes faces in writing about Bernstein, then, is not to prove that politics mattered to him. Clearly, as Seldes writes in his introduction, “to ignore the impact of political forces upon Bernstein is to miss out on much of what enlivened and motivated him.” What Seldes must prove, rather, is that Bernstein’s politics should matter to us. For if Bernstein was known as a famous liberal, he is also widely remembered as a fatuous one. That is due largely to a cruelly entertaining article by Tom Wolfe that appeared in New York magazine in 1970, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” Wolfe’s account of a fundraiser held by Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, for the Black Panthers coined a durable phrase to describe the shallow, trendy, self-abasing leftism of the 1960s, and it made Bernstein the living symbol of radical chic. Here is Bernstein talking to Don Cox, the Panthers’ “Field Marshal”:

“When you walk into this house, into this building”—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doorman downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front—“when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!”

Seldes is wholly admiring of Bernstein’s politics—indeed, he faults his subject only for not being more explicitly radical in his music—and so he is naturally resentful of Wolfe’s influential portrait. He writes, rather primly, that Wolfe’s “characterization was terribly insulting and inappropriate.” Yet if you read Wolfe’s whole piece, it is clear that it was much more than just an attack on Bernstein. It was, rather, an exploration of Jewish status anxiety, and Wolfe convincingly argues that it was Bernstein’s Jewishness, and that of so many of his rich guests, which led them to identify with the oppressed even after they were so evidently part of the elite:

Among the new socialites of the 1960s, especially those from the one-time “minorities,” this old social urge to do well by doing good, as it says in the song, has taken a more specific political direction. This has often been true of Jewish socialites and culturati, although it has by no means been confined to them. Politically, Jews have been unique among the groups that came to New York in the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many such groups, of course, were Left or liberal during the first generation, but as families began to achieve wealth, success, or, simply, security, they tended to grow more and more conservative in philosophy. The Irish are a case in point. But forced by 20th as well as 19th century history to remain on guard against right-wing movements, even wealthy and successful Jewish families have tended to remain faithful to their original liberal-left worldview.

The story that Seldes has to tell is basically the same. Bernstein’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, who settled in Lawrence, Massachusetts and made a good living in the beauty-supply business. Leonard, born in 1918, was drawn to the piano as a child and stuck to it despite his father’s opposition, attending Harvard as a music major. (I am not sure, however, that Seldes is right to say that “music making was a craft held in low esteem by Eastern European Orthodox Jews, whose religious tradition had no Bachs.” There was certainly a flourishing tradition of Jewish musical prodigies, and many a Jewish father—though apparently not Bernstein’s—hoped his son would turn out to be the next Heifetz.)

His first introduction to the wider musical world came in 1938, when the 19-year-old Bernstein found himself seated next to Aaron Copland at a concert in New York. They struck up a conversation, and Copland, already celebrated as an advanced American composer, invited Bernstein to a party where the guests included Virgil Thomson and Paul Bowles. Bernstein wowed them by playing Copland’s Piano Variations from memory, and his meteoric social rise began. Soon he was friendly with actors and directors like Harold Clurman, Clifford Odets, and Elia Kazan, the stars of the left-wing Group Theatre. This was the empyrean of Popular Front culture—politically radical, culturally populist, and largely Jewish—and it left a permanent impress on Bernstein’s idea of what music should be. Mark Blitzstein’s agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock, Seldes suggests, became a model for Bernstein’s ambition to compose a new kind of American opera.

Almost immediately, Bernstein began to show how easily he could cross the conventional boundaries between art music and popular music, conducting and composing, culture and politics. In the summer of 1943 he was named assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic; in January 1944 he debuted his Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah; in April came the premiere of Fancy Free, the ballet he wrote with Jerome Robbins. It would be hard to imagine a more spectacular entrance on the New York stage, and Seldes aptly quotes the novelist Dawn Powell’s wry observation of “Bernstein, the new wonder boy” basking in “the confidence, super cock-sureness of early success.”

The magic touch never seemed to leave Bernstein. Fancy Free was followed by On the Town and Wonderful Town and West Side Story, and in 1958 he was named music director of the New York Philharmonic. He shook hands with President Eisenhower at the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center, he was on the cover of Time, he performed and lectured on CBS and NBC. His eagle-like profile—the beaky nose and white cowl—became a kind of logo of American high culture.

All the while, Seldes shows, Bernstein kept up his commitment to liberal causes. Whenever there was a petition to sign, or a conference to attend, or a group asking for donations, Bernstein was there—even if the worthy cause was actually a Communist front. Bernstein does not seem to have been a Party member, but he was definitely an active fellow traveler, and his name surfaced in dozens of connections sure to draw the attention of HUAC, once the New Deal years gave way to the Red-baiting 1950s. As friends like Odets and Robbins named names, Bernstein was terrified that he was going to be called before the committee. “I suppose there is nothing to do when your life and career are attacked but strike back with the truth and go honestly to jail if you have to,” he wrote to his sister in 1951. “I hope I’m as brave as I sound from this distance when it catches up to me.”

In the end, Bernstein was never subpoenaed by HUAC. But in order to ensure the renewal of his passport, he did have to produce a cringe-inducing affidavit swearing to his loyalty and Americanism. Interestingly, Seldes notes, one of the bona fides Bernstein offered was his “allegiance to a politically orthodox religion—in his case, Judaism.” As a Jew, he argued, he was “necessarily … a foe of communism,” a historically specious argument but apparently an effective one. Even so, Bernstein was evidently blacklisted by CBS Radio and the New York Philharmonic for a few years in the early 1950s—though his ascent was at most slowed down, never really endangered.

To Seldes, all this is evidence of a political seriousness that can also be found in Bernstein’s music. When Bernstein told an interviewer, in 1948, “I am the logical man to write the Great American Opera,” Seldes sees his “operatic ambition” as “conjoined with his Progressive political aspirations,” in particular with his enthusiasm for the third-party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. And the major thesis of Seldes’ book is that Bernstein’s ultimate failure to produce a great opera or symphony—a failure that haunted his last years—can be attributed to the failure of progressive politics in America. It is in support of this argument that Seldes stirs great undigested chunks of political history into the book: “According to Reagan, government was the real domestic enemy, whereas liberals and progressives argued that his outlook was a cover for proposals to grant tax relief to those in the higher earning brackets and to cut social spending while increasing defense spending.”

Yet Seldes overreaches when he concludes that “Bernstein’s compositional frustration had its roots more in the evolving American social fabric … than in his supposedly limited talents, his idiosyncrasies, his habits, and his psychological dispositions.” This gets the relationship between the artist and society exactly backwards: a genuine artist does not expect society to conform to his preferences, but exposes himself to the confusions of the time in order to find expression for them. There is, in fact, something rather silly in Seldes’s suggestion that America let Bernstein down by voting for Ronald Reagan. If Mahler could draw inspiration from the social chaos of fin-de-siecle Vienna, and Stravinsky and Schoenberg could keep composing through two world wars, surely a composer of similar stature could find a way to flourish in the much less adverse conditions of late-20th-century America. It follows pretty clearly that Bernstein was not a composer of that stature, just as he was not a political thinker or activist of lasting interest. Somewhere between Wolfe’s mockery and Seldes’s reverence lies the affection that Bernstein’s achievement, and his memory, actually deserve.

Leonard Cohen To Perform for Peace [JPost]
On the Road, for Reasons Practical and Spiritual [NYT]

Berlin represents commerce in your play—the successful hitmaker—while Joplin represents art, hard at work on a ragtime opera he couldn’t get produced. Joplin goads Berlin into revealing that he has a secret, major work, a sort of a symphony telling his own American story. Was there a really such piece?

There was, but I couldn’t use it. It was also a ragtime opera, and it would just be too unbelievable that two of them would be writing two ragtime operas. So I turned it into more of an instrumental piece, but still a piece of serious music.

But then Berlin’s businessman instincts overtake his artistic aspirations, and that symphony instead becomes “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—and the Eastern European motifs, representing his Russian childhood in that symphony, turn into the opening chords of “Alexander’s.” Is there that influence in the real song?

Not specifically in “Alexander’s.” But, sure, in songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” What’s interesting, I think, is that in pre-World War I America it was fine to do blatantly Yiddish and Jewish-influenced popular songs, like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” And then something happened along the way and made it taboo. I don’t know why this happened, but in silent movies there are Jewish characters, and these songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale” are sheet music that everybody sings. But then there’s this exclusion, the feeling that sort of we have to hide ourselves. Maybe because a lot of these media companies, in music publishing or movies, were headed by Jews. It wasn’t till the 1950s that Jewish characters started appearing again in the movies. Irving Berlin was writing blatantly Jewish songs, and then he stopped, completely I think, for the rest of the career.

Was it the flip side of the same coin—that to deracinate, to not write things like “Yiddishe Nightingale,” allowed him to write things like “White Christmas”?

When you’re in pop culture, which is sales, there’s a sense, like in all marketers, of what the public is going to buy. Every writer wants a Christmas song; it comes around every year. It’s one of the pots of gold in the music business, and the biggest pot of gold has been “White Christmas,” which to me has a little Yiddish melody in it. You know the cantorials, those notes you had to learn for your bar mitzvah? Those notes are very close together—the distance between the notes are almost as close as you could sing. If you listen to “White Christmas”—put some Hebrew words to that, see if it’s your bar mitzvah chant.

One of the things about the Jewish songwriters—I think Cole Porter pointed this out—is that because of growing up with cantorials, those bar mitzvah chants, those close notes, they were comfortable writing that. It’s not standard to English-Irish music, where a lot of our music came from. But this Middle Eastern kind of sound, for the Jewish songwriters, that came very easily. It wasn’t strange, and it wasn’t exotic, and it’s very affecting—to the general public it kind of corkscrews into your heart.

So the reason so many Jews were Tin Pan Alley songwriters is because they learned to chant their bar mitzvah portions?

I think that’s part of it. But Tin Pan Alley wasn’t just composing. It was also coming up with a way of taking music and selling it. And I think a lot of the Jews coming into New York had to learn that peddler way of monitoring the customer, for survival—I know what he wants, and I know what he’ll pay. That idea of, take a piece of sheet music and sell it as if it was a tie or a new style of skirt, and have marketers around the country, and break it all at once, and get that product moving—Tin Pan Alley invented that.

And Irving Berlin, the play suggests, was all businessman. He turns that symphony into “Alexander’s” so he can sell it.

But he created a deathless piece of art. He may have created miniatures rather than murals, but I’ll take my Faberge egg. In fact it turns out that Joplin was kind of wrong about musical art in America in the 20th century. He thought American operas would be the great art. But there aren’t many American operas. Whereas I can hand you the great American songbook, and this is our art, this is the peak of our musical art.

You could argue there’s something specifically American about an art form that derives in part from commerce.

Could be. But, you know, Mozart had to fill his seats if he was going to write another opera.

In October, Nextbook Press will publish David Lehman’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. It’s available for purchase in advance from Amazon.

Silver Jew David Berman’s Book of Cartoons, Revealed [Pitchfork]
Book Review: David Berman’s “The Portable February”
[Magnet Magazine]
The Pure Products of America Go Crazy [Poetry Foundation]
Previously: Silver Lining [Tablet]

Matisyahu + Umphrey’s McGee at SummerStage [TONY]
Matisyahu Expands Sound, Vision on Light [Boston Music Spotlight]
One Day [Matisyahu’s MySpace]
Previously: Melody Maker [Tablet]

It’s quite the pitch, even before you try to imagine the Crossroads star in a lead role. But Tablet has gotten hold of a top-secret script treatment, direct from Hollywood. Here’s how the movie will go (or so we’d like to think):

Sophia’s time machine lands in the camp’s shower room. Water’s not coming out of those shower heads, of course, but because she’s in an air-tight vehicle, our heroine is safe. Her hair shaved off by a disturbingly sexy German soldier (negotiations are underway for Madonna to take the role), Sophia is interrogated under an austere hanging lightbulb. She defies the torture, crying out, “Hit me, baby! One more time!” Then, she faints from exhaustion. While passed out, Sophia dreams of her older sister, Lina LaMont, and, in her reverie, starts singing in the rain, splashing, and, yes, grinding in the muddy puddles of the camp while belting out an auto-tunes enhanced version of “Here Comes the Rain Again.”

Meantime, Eton (Adrien Brody is eager to play the part, we heard), cursed with a name that looks like that of a British prep school but is pronounced Eitan, knows he shouldn’t fall for Sophia, because she’s not from the old world. Eton’s father, a dairy farmer from Anatevka, mumbles something about tradition. Eton’s not hearing it. Sophia’s hawt! And she’s got a time machine! And maybe these crazy kids can get out alive! (Cue an above-middle-C piano version of “Stayin’ Alive”). Sadly for the doomed lovers, Nazis like time machines as much as anybody, and this particular group of villains really wants to check out the city of Porto, circa the Inquisition. They foil the lovers’ plans for escape (cleverly anchoring the time machine with chains), and kill the heroes. Sophia lets out a final farewell as she takes her last breath. “Auf wiedersehen, y’all.”

Fin.

Britney Spears—The Movie [National Ledger]

The biggest hit in children’s entertainment in the Arab world is less Jonas Brothers and more Jihad: the Birds of Paradise, a Jordanian-based production house for kids, is rapidly gaining popularity by churning out songs about martyrdom and violence against Israelis and Jews. “When we seek martyrdom, we go to heaven,” sings one little girl in “When We Seek Martyrdom,” the group’s latest blockbuster. “You tell us we’re small, but from this way of life we have become big. Without Palestine, what does childhood mean?” There’s also a music video, in which menacing-looking children sporting yarmulkes and toting semi-automatic weapons, intrude upon a garden where other children, beatific and wrapped in kaffiyehs, the traditional Arabic headdress, peacefully play.

Like other Birds of Paradise productions, the song has spawned dozens of YouTube fan tributes, and even captured the hearts of adult terrorists, who used the tune as the soundtrack for their menacing-looking videos. Their parents must be so proud.

“Mazel Tov, brother! That means I love you man, in Hebrew right? No?”

“Barry you’ve really given those of us who love you a lot of nachas. Though some of us aren’t completely sure what nachas is. I think I had nachas once but the doctor gave me some cream, knocked it right out … Maybe it was cream cheese.”

(Referencing special performer Jamie Foxx’s latest hit, after one of Timberlake’s first jokes) “Last I heard, I was told I could blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol.”

“After all, who am I? I’m just another schmendrick that used to be in a goy band! … I don’t know what the hell that means either.”

“What Jewish mother would not kvell about the her son, the visionary!”

Oy, goyisheh kep.

Kibitzing With Justin: Timberlake Shows ‘Nachas’ for UJA [WSJ/Speakeasy]

Adam Lambert in His Own Words: Sexuality, Kris Allen and Life After Idol [RS]
Adam Lambert: Jewish and Gay [LAJJ]

J. Edgar Klezmer will be performed in New York City on June 4th at the Manhattan JCC.

Then a Jewish lullaby collection—as well as Ezra’s front teeth—appeared on the scene, bringing with them a host of new questions about bedtime.

Paul and Ludwig Wittgenstein

It had not occurred to the Wittgensteins, erstwhile possessors of one of the largest fortunes in Europe, that anyone would try to persecute them, least of all for an identity they had long ago disclaimed. The latter third of Waugh’s book is taken up with an account of the bureaucratic and legal maneuvers by which the Wittgensteins sought to evade the fate of European Jewry by means of all the considerable resources at their disposal. Their legal hope, such as it was, rested on the claim that one of their grandparents had, in fact, been the bastard child of a gentile nobleman. In the end, they secured their freedom only by releasing the bulk of their fortune to the Nazi state. The story underscores the macabre fact that even the wealthiest, best-connected, and most patriotic Austrians—those who, like the Wittgensteins, had literally sacrificed both life and limb in the service of Austria—were not exempted from the cruel exactions of the Third Reich. It also underscores the equally macabre fact that, in the end, such people were usually able to buy their way out of persecution, at the cost of millions of pounds of gold.

The Nazi episode effected the final split between the surviving Wittgenstein siblings and scattered what remained of their vast fortune. It was a fortune that had taken a single lifetime to build. Waugh devotes a chapter to the rise of its progenitor, Karl Wittgenstein, who went from rebellious American barman to multimillionaire Austrian steel magnate” in 33 years. During that time Karl had risen from salaried engineer at an ironworks to the owner or principal shareholder in the Austro-Hungarian empire’s largest iron, steel, mining, munitions, and financial companies. In 1898, he retired at the age of 51 and turned to a life of cultivated leisure. He was the most successful of a family of 11 that included judges, soldiers, doctors, scientists, patrons of the arts and government administrators—all of them prominent.” He had fathered nine children of his own, some of whom were notable for their gifts, some of whom were notable for their beauty, and he amassed magnificent and valuable collections of furniture, art, porcelain, and autograph musical manuscripts.”

His happiness was at its height. But the Wittgenstein industrial fortune took a single lifetime to dissipate. Waugh devotes much of the book to the madness, waste, expropriation, and misfortune that afflicted Karl’s heirs. In 1902, his eldest son, Hans, disappeared in America, an apparent suicide. In 1904, his next eldest son, Rudy, emptied a vial of potassium cyanide into a glass and drank it. Karl forbade his family to mention the names of either of his lost sons, driven not by a lack of feeling on his part, but by a surfeit of it.” Waugh goes on to observe that “the effect of his censorship created an atmosphere of unbearable tension in the home, causing a split between the Wittgenstein children and their parents that time would never heal.”

None of his remaining three sons was equipped or inclined to take over the empire which he bequeathed at his death in 1913: Kurt was lightweight, Paul and Ludwig both worryingly neurotic and fundamentally uninterested in business. By the time of his dying, none of them was married.” They were made for other vocations. Kurt, the eldest survivor, followed his father into industry, leaving for America to expand the company’s interests there. He would eventually kill himself on the battlefield after spending much of the war struggling to evade an American prohibition preventing him from fighting in the war he so fervently wished to join. Paul launched on his promising career as a pianist. Ludwig left for Cambridge, where, by 1912, without having a single significant piece of written philosophical work and while still only in his mid-twenties, he was being hailed by many of the brightest minds of Cambridge University as a genius.”

Hermine, Helene, Margarete, (back) Paul and Ludwig (front)

Ludwig would go on to become, as Waugh puts it, an icon of the 20th century.” The visual metaphor is a deliberate one. Waugh is uninterested in Ludwig’s thought. Every story he tells reinforces the impression, unmistakably Waugh’s own, that the cult of Ludwig Wittgenstein is the product of eminent men like Bertrand Russell and George Moore who had fallen under the spell of Ludwig’s striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality,” and gone to find in his incomprehensible” writings an intellectual richness that may or may not have existed. This derisory attitude was shared by Ludwig’s family. Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England.” Ludwig renounced his share in the family fortune and went to work as a primary school teacher, eventually getting himself fired for brutalizing his students. He had first considered suicide at 11, and the thought never strayed very far from his consciousness.

At the center of the narrative Waugh casts Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his arm in the Great War and went on to become perhaps the greatest, certainly the most famous, one-handed pianist in history—far more famous than Ludwig in his own lifetime. Inspired by the example of the blind composer and family friend Josef Labor (a composer forgotten by posterity, but regarded by his Wittgenstein family patrons as among the greatest ever), Paul devised an extraordinary one-hand technique that permitted him to recreate the fullness generated by a two-handed pianist. Waugh gives lengthy and amusing accounts of Paul’s dealings with the composers whom he commissioned to write music for his one hand, including Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Sergei Prokoviev. (Performers must not be slaves!” Paul told Ravel during a dispute over a concerto he had commissioned; Performers are slaves!” Ravel shot back.) Waugh quotes many admiring accounts of Paul’s concerts by some of the leading music critics of his age, but the reader cannot help suspecting that Prokofiev had it right when he observed, It may be that his misfortune had turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists.”

There is something determinedly contrarian, even a bit perverse, about Waugh’s decision to write a biography diminishing the 20th century’s best-known philosopher at the expense of the one-handed pianist in his family.

There is something determinedly contrarian, even a bit perverse, about Waugh’s decision to write a biography diminishing the 20th century’s best known philosopher at the expense of the one-handed pianist in his family. The project feels, at times, like a deliberate thumb in the eye of, as Waugh puts it, a cult . . . whose membership includes many who have never opened his books or tried to understand a single line of his thought,” which is also the group from which Waugh’s readers will almost certainly be drawn. But even readers hostile to Waugh’s dismissal of Ludwig Wittgenstein will find something to admire in The House of Wittgenstein. Waugh has a gift for the historical set piece that makes his writing a continual pleasure—a cinematic rather than a novelistic pleasure, lingering on surfaces, eschewing depth. He writes with delight of the sumptuous interiors of the Wittgenstein palace, but also of the squalor of Russian POW camps during the Great War. And the story itself, coolly recited with poise and authority, has the advantage of arriving front-loaded with the pathos and dread of the 20th century.

In the end, the Wittgensteins succeeded in their bid to sunder their fate from that of the Jewish people, whom they had never regarded as their brethren, and with millions of dollars remaining. The ordeal left them permanently estranged. Paul Wittgenstein lived the rest of his life in Great Neck, Long Island, having made an honest woman of his mistress, whom he smuggled out of Germany and into the United States. He never returned to Vienna. One by one, cancer took each of the remaining siblings. The fabulous Wittgenstein palace, monument to one of Europe’s grandest fortunes, and incubator to one of its most gifted families, was razed for redevelopment.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.

It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

I forget to pray for the angels, and then the angels forget to pray for us.

I see the Ghost of Culture, with numbers on his wrist, salute some new conclusion which all of us have missed. I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch. He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

And if you call me brother now, forgive me if I inquire, “Just according to whose plan?” When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can. If it be your will, 
if there is a choice, let the rivers fill, let the hills rejoice. Let your mercy spill on all these burning hearts in hell, if it be your will to make us well.

I know the burden’s heavy, as you bear it through the night. Some people say it’s empty, but that doesn’t mean it’s light. You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception. And clenching your fist for the ones like us, who are oppressed by the figures of beauty, you fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music.”

Leonard Cohen

And I’ll dance with you in Vienna, I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
 my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there, and the moss, 
and I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross. And you’ll carry me down on your dancing,
to the pools that you lift on your wrist.
 Oh my love, oh my love, take this waltz, take this waltz. It’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for music, do you? So ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Everybody knows.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. 
Everybody knows that the captain lied. Everybody got this broken feeling, 
like their father or their dog just died. And everybody knows that it’s now or never, everybody knows that it’s me or you, and everybody knows that you live forever, ah, when you’ve done a line or two. Everybody knows the deal is rotten, Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton 
for your ribbons and bows, and everybody knows.

Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter, but of this you may be sure: The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor, and there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong. Well, my friends are gone, and my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play, and I’m crazy for love—but I’m not coming on.

You don’t know me from the wind. You never will, you never did: I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible.

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall, I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, 
but love’s the only engine of survival. Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, to say it cold: 
It’s over, it ain’t going 
any further. And now the wheels of heaven stop. You feel the devil’s riding crop.

Get ready for the future: it is murder.

For more of the priestly wisdom of the great Cohen, visit leonardcohen.com.

In Turkey and Greece, as far back as the 16th century, groups of cantors and religious figures used to gather in the early morning, before prayer services, to sing devotional poetry in Hebrew. This gave rise to a distinct and complex form of music called maftirim, which only the most talented men could master.

These small gatherings were part of a broader musical exchange under the Ottoman empire: Muslim Sufi mystics would come to synagogue on the Sabbath to listen to the maftirim. And the Jewish maftirim singers would visit Sufi lodges for musical inspiration.

Professor Edwin Seroussi, director of the Jewish Music Research Center at Hebrew University, is one of the key scholars involved in unearthing, and reviving, the forgotten musical tradition of maftirim. Daniel Estrin spoke with him in Jerusalem about his journey of discovery, which led him to record some of the last surviving maftirim singers.

Photo: yeni cami by zeynep’arkok / Zeynep Arkök; some rights reserved.

That changed last night when Clare Burson, a young Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, took the stage at Joe’s Pub, in lower Manhattan, to perform “Silver & Ash,” a song cycle about her grandmother, who at 19 years old fled Leipzig for Memphis, Tennessee, never seeing her parents again. It’s a meditation on memory and loss, family and dislocation, based on Burson’s travels to Eastern Europe to investigate her family history. (A Brown graduate and former Fulbright scholar, Burson was two years ago awarded a Six Points Fellowship, for young Jewish artists, which funded her travels. “I was interested in using my music to explore my Jewish identity in a way that still could resonate with and be relevant to people regardless of their faith and ethnicity,” she writes in an accompanying pamphlet.)

It’s a jarring experience at first, hearing stories of Kristallnacht, songs of lost family, memories of lost lives, while standing cheek-by-jowl at a packed bar, tumbler of Scotch in hand. And it’s unexpected to hear these things from a sultry-voiced indie-rock chick with guitar slung over her shoulder and backed by a quartet of guitarist, bassist, drummer, and electronic-gadget-player. But, soon enough, you realize that it works. The songs are lovely, and evocative, and you begin to think of Europe’s lost Jewry—of Burson’s grandmother’s lost childhood, and lost family—not as distant, sepia-toned artifacts but actual people, with immediate troubles.

Burson’s great-grandparents, planning to join their daughter in the United States, had packed up all their belongings to ship across the Atlantic as they themselves headed to Latvia, unable to get a visa. (The Wehrmacht, unfortunately, got to Latvia not too much later.) The boat containing their things, their lives and memories, was bombed before it left Europe. Near the end of her set, Burson sings of them: “Bluegreen and dappled spidery light/white wedding china/cut crystal glasses/a trunk of old linens/silver that’s tarnished/at home in the sea.” It’s a bracing new way of telling the stories we must continue to hear.

Within These Walls benefits exponentially from female guest vocalists: the startlingly intimate voice of Colombian singer Marta Gómez makes the songs “Todas Las Palabras” and “Cada Día” stand out; the former especially charms with its unusual rhythms and lilting melody. In “Mai Nahar,” the sound of flowing water blends with the unconventional phrasing and clear, innocent-sounding voice of fellow Israeli Anat Ben Hamo so well that it loses any residue of rain-stick tribal appropriation; and “Maisha” features the breathy, melancholy voice of East African singer Somi progressing further into a haunting repetitive wail.

Raichel is lauded for achieving the ever elusive goal of bringing together disparate cultures in Israel and thus uniting people, and his band’s massive popularity is testament to the market there for unpoliticized cross-cultural art of the soul-swelling variety. The Idan Raichel Project will be touring America this March.

After 42 years as a cult figure, the Godfather of Gloom has a hit single to promote. (Of course, there’s also the matter of Cohen recouping some of the $5 million his former manager and lover, Kelley Lynch, stole from him.) It all started when dreadlocked Jason Castro sang Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on American Idol last March. Simon Cowell was duly impressed, as were American audiences who promptly sent Jeff Buckley’s 1994 cover of the same song to the top of the iTunes charts.

In December, the “Hallelujah” hysteria spread to England where 20-year-old Alexandra Burke—the winner of Britain’s American Idol counterpart, X Factor—hit the top of the Christmas charts with her own cover of the song. Fans disgusted with Burke’s bombastic, gospelized take on the Cohen classic launched an Internet campaign dedicated to Buckley’s version, propelling it to No. 2. “Hallelujah”’s success marked the first time two versions of the same song took the top two spots in England in over 50 years. Not to be outdone, the Cohen original, from the 1984 album Various Positions, rode the Hallelujah choir all the way to no. 36, giving Cohen his first ever Top 40 hit.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Alexandra Burke

“Hallelujah”’s triple hit, beyond fattening Cohen’s wallet, also demonstrated the ferocious allegiance fans have toward one version of the song over the others. And there’s no shortage of competitors—Leonardcohenfiles.com lists nearly 200 recorded covers of the tune, from renditions by Michael McDonald, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, to an instrumental version by trumpet-player Chris Botti and one by a New York blues guitarist named Popa Chubby (born Ted Horowitz).

Unfortunately, unlike Cohen himself, the original “Hallelujah” has not aged well. As with much pop music from the 1980s, it’s marred by chintzy synths, plodding bass, and glossy, reverb-drenched production. Much of the song sounds like it’s been coated in gold laminate. What’s so powerful about the song, and what assured its cult status long before its recent popularity, are Cohen’s lyrics—their brilliant mix of Old Testament spirituality (“Hallelujah” is a Hebrew word meaning “praise God,” often used in liturgy) and real-world romantic desire. “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord,” Cohen begins, before conflating God with a tone-deaf lover, “but you don’t really care for music, do ya?” Then Cohen weaves effortlessly through the stories of David’s seduction of Bathseba and Delilah’s humbling of Samson to find something sexual, almost kinky:

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

It’s lines like these that have helped transform Cohen into one of the only true poets in popular music and something of a modern mystic—a prophet for a secular world.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

The recording that started the whole cover frenzy of the last 15 to 20 years is a version by John Cale (co-founder of the Velvet Underground) that appeared on a 1991 Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan. In it, Cale combined the two opening verses of the 1984 original—crucially lopping off Cohen’s redemptive ending—with a slew of new verses that Cohen had added during a 1988 live performance. (Cohen claims to have penned 80 verses for “Hallelujah” over the course of more than two years.) Cohen’s newer, darker lyrics focused almost exclusively on the doomed relationship and sexual longing that lay hidden just under the surface of the original. When Cale combined them with Cohen’s riffs on David and Delilah, he created a more perfect union out of Cohen’s unnerving marriage of the divine and the damaged. No less crucially, Cale set Cohen’s lyrics over nothing but stark piano arpeggios—an arrangement that perfectly suited the song’s tale of human frailty. The modestly triumphant “Hallelujah” of 1984 had become a “cold” and “broken Hallelujah” in Cale’s hands.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by John Cale

It’s this take that inspired Jeff Buckley three years later to record the song—which he described as an homage to the “hallelujah of the orgasm”—for his debut album Grace. Buckley’s may be the canonical “Hallelujah,” and it’s also the best, for two reasons: 1) It pushes the intimacy and pathos in Cale’s version to its very limits without descending into soap opera. And 2) Buckley makes use of his four-octave vocal range and virtuosic guitar-playing without ever distracting us from the magic of Cohen’s words. The song’s extended introduction and bridge—courtesy of Buckley’s gorgeous Telecaster—were new and welcome additions to the song’s legacy.

The countless “Hallelujah”s that have emerged since fall into three basic categories: those that honor the Cale/Buckley legacy, those that don’t, and those that are just plain silly. In the first category, renditions by Rufus Wainwright, Damien Rice, and the Canadian singer Allison Crowe are all decent examples, though the most effective may be k.d. lang’s from her 2004 album Hymns of the 29th Parallel. Lang’s “Hallelujah” retains Cale’s verse structure (as do most successful versions of the song) as well as his stately piano and funereal tempo, while her velvety alto adds a touch of seduction to the gloom. By focusing on simple piano or guitar-based arrangements, these tunes get at the tragedy and loneliness in Cohen’s song, and behind his statement that, as he recently told Australia’s Sunday Age, “although we don’t often know what to do with it, love is the only redeeming possibility for human beings.”

Listen to “Hallelujah” by k.d. lang

That’s what the heretics who fail to honor Buckley’s legacy forget—they puff their chests out and belt “Hallelujah”s as if they were a celebration instead of a capitulation. Opera singer Katherine Jenkins and the Spanish-language group Il Divo both missed the point when they re-imagined “Hallelujah” as big, pompous arias. And at the risk of offending the more than 570,000 Brits that bought the single over the holidays, Alexandra Burke is most definitely guilty of similar trespasses. There is, of course, the haughty choir and vaulted string arrangements, but then Burke also murders Cale’s verse structure—cutting out half of Cohen’s lyrics, including his most potent mix of religious and sexual imagery:

And remember when I moved in you,
And the holy dove was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

Of the silly variety, there are predictably many, including a version sung entirely in Welsh entitled “Haleliwia,” and a few parodies: “My Halloumia,” an homage to Cypriot cheese, and “Lamb Bhuna,” a lament for a misplaced Indian entree by British DJ Chris Moyles. And then there’s Bono and his unlistenable spoken-word rendition, released on the 1995 tribute album Tower of Song. Over a muffled drum machine and jazzy horns, Bono sings—or rather reads—Cohen’s lyrics as if it was beat-poetry night down at the Village Vanguard.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Bono

It is to Cohen’s credit that his song can stand up to such abuse. “Hallelujah” is eternally open to interpretation—no musician can pin it down. While Cale and Buckley seem to have discovered the best combination of lyrics and arrangement to give voice to Cohen’s wine-soaked existential malaise, “Hallelujah” will remain an irresistable temptation for artists around the world”whether we like it or not.

The compositions of Felix Mendelssohn, a grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, were performed more than those of any other composer in Central Europe in the mid-19th century. But within a few years of his death in 1847, his works were hardly played at all. Largely to blame was fellow composer Richard Wagner, who used Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage to discredit him.

Wagner’s effort fell short, as evidenced by Stephen Somary, the founder of the Mendelssohn Project. The Project is devoted to tracking down and recording lost works by Felix Mendelssohn and his sister, Fanny. Somary spoke to Nextbook about the unlikely places (a farm in Japan, for instance) where pages of Mendelssohn’s manuscripts wound up; the extent of Wagner’s anti-Mendelssohn campaign; and why Mendelssohn’s critics are wrong.

Listeners in New York can hear some of Somary’s discoveries live on Wednesday, January 28, when the Mendelssohn Project presents 13 world premieres of recovered music at a concert in New York City.

Listen to the revised second movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony #4 (“Italian”), conducted by Stephen Somary. Music courtesy of The Mendelssohn Project.

Imagine hearing a concert of Gregorian chant at your local synagogue, or traditional Judeo-Iraqi liturgical songs performed at a church.

Recently, South Florida audiences had the chance to have both experiences, when these musical forms were combined in concerts held at two local synagogues and a church. The experiment was the brainchild of Patrick Dupre Quigley, artistic director of the Coral Gables chamber choir Seraphic Fire, in collaboration with cantor George Mordecai of Temple Emanu-El, in Miami Beach. The result was perhaps more radical than either man had imagined, and also quite mesmerizing, as Alicia Zuckerman reports.

Photo © iStockphoto.com/Bridgewood Design

Illustration by Aaron Artessa

Every Hanukkah, the choir at my Jewish day school performed twice: once at the school’s annual Hanukkah Celebration, and then the next day at the neighborhood’s local public school, to bring a little Hanukkah spirit to “lost” Jewish kids who were inundated with Christmas marketing and knew nothing about the miracle of Hanukkah but were more than happy to tolerate our singing if it meant missing some class. Our choir was composed of about thirty girls and twelve boys from the sixth through eighth grades.

Fact: Most kids possessed of a functioning set of testicles did not join the choir.

But I did, for the same reason that boys and men have always done stupid things: because of a girl. There were eleven other boys in the choir, and while I never confirmed it, it’s a safe bet that they were all similarly motivated. Except for this kid named Aaron Berkowitz, who could sing in a high, prepubescent mezzo-soprano that brought tears to the eyes of anyone over sixty, and whom we made fun of mercilessly because, as a general rule, mezzo-sopranos fight like girls. Also my friend Joey Weitz, who years later, to no one’s great surprise, would be the first member of our grade to officially come out. Joey’s voice had already begun to change; it squeaked like Peter Brady when he sang, and he knew it. He had joined to be ironic. But I have to believe that the rest of the boys, like me, were in it for the girls. Where else but at choir practice could an acutely shy, libidinous kid like me stand shoulder to shoulder, swaying as one, with thirty of the better-looking girls in the school, joined with them, into a single musical orifice, united under our common objective of singing complicated Israeli songs in three-part harmony and not sucking? It was the closest I would come to sex for quite some time.

The girl was Tara Wahlberg. She was a year older, already in eighth grade, but she had a learning disability that put her in some of my seventh-grade classes. I thought it was cool that she had a learning disability, a sexy bit of damage, like a butterfly tattoo. When a woman is out of your league, she has to be damaged in some way for there to be any hope. Tara had short, messy blond hair that she was growing out from last year’s ill-advised pixie cut, intense brown eyes, and full, frowning lips that parted provocatively when she sang. Her voice was nothing special, was actually a little shrill, but she could carry a tune and she sang with no fear, and thus was awarded solos regularly. When she sang, I would watch the rushed expansions of her back ribs through her polo shirt as she took her breaths, and the soft, liquid flex of the calf muscles under her skin as she rocked ever so slightly from side to side. When you’re twelve years old, that’s really all it takes, some small, unarticulated aspect of beauty you can excavate like a secret and call your own. Tara had smooth, well-formed calves and those full, creased lips, and I was in love, and you don’t need any better proof than the fact that I was willing to stay after school every Tuesday to be subjected to the steady abuse of our fat, sweaty choir director, simply to be in the same room as Tara.

Our choir director was a fearsome Israeli of accomplished girth whose name I don’t dare write even today, but suffice it to say that it lent itself quite handily to the nickname “Cock-man,” which all the boys called him behind his sweat-stained back. His temperamental outbursts were rendered more sinister by his thick Sabra accent, and the sweaty patches of scalp seen through his thinning curly hair gleamed like polished marble under the stage lights. But there was no denying Cock-man’s talent, his ability to simultaneously sing all three parts of the harmony while banging on the piano keys and shouting at us that we were idiots (pronounced eed-yots). The guy could multitask. He smelled of sour chickpeas and body odor and was known, from time to time when he was particularly irked, to violently hurl the red banquet chairs we sat on across the room. These outbursts seemed to be reserved exclusively for the boys in the choir, and we were all a little terrified of Cock-man, but love made us bold and so we soldiered on.

Whenever the choir was slated to perform, we would be excused from classes for extra rehearsals. So Hanukkah, with two major performances, was a bonanza, two entire afternoons spent out of class, in the close confines of the music theater””just Tara, me, and forty other kids. And as we practiced the various numbers relating to the miracle of Hanukkah, I fantasized about my own miracle, a carefully crafted sequence of events that culminated in Tara’s kissing me with those soft, frowning lips for a very long time. Usually this involved terrorists of unknown origin and purpose taking over the school and me utilizing my advanced-green-belt karate skills to save her, resulting in said kiss. Other times it was as simple as finding her crying in the dark hall that, for reasons I’ve never understood, ran between the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms behind the stage. That was the make-out spot of choice in our school, or so I’d heard, and in my fantasy I found her there alone, crying about her broken family and her learning disability. I would comfort her, and she would put her head on my shoulder, and then she would turn her face up to mine and, sensing my hesitation, which would be cute and appealing to her, she would put her hands on the sides of my face and guide me in to her moist, parted lips for a prolonged kiss.

Fact: It takes some doing to hide an erection while standing upright in the bass section during choir practice.

It probably doesn’t speak well for my self-esteem that, even in my fantasies, I could only ever envision someone wanting to kiss me under extreme emotional duress, but I should tell you that there had been some precedent. We had performed at the school’s annual scholarship dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria a month earlier, and since we had a few hours to kill in an empty banquet room before we went on, the school had arranged for a projector and a screening of Superman: The Movie. Through a series of carefully executed maneuvers, I ended up sitting Indian style on the floor next to Tara, and when she shifted position her bare right knee rested easily in the crook of my thigh, just below the hip. We fit together perfectly, and even when my leg fell asleep I didn’t dare move, for fear that our contact would be lost, like a distant radio signal. And then, when Margot Kidder fell out of the helicopter, Tara gasped, and when she gasped, she grabbed my arm and squeezed it. Like it was hers to grab. Like she could grab it anytime she wanted because we were tight like that.

So you see, headway had, in fact, been made.

This year we would be singing two songs new to our repertoire. A mid-tempo, modern rendition of the traditional Hanukkah song “Maoz Tzur” (Rock of Ages), and a complex Hebrew song extracted from the liturgy called “Al Ha-Nissim (On the Miracles). The “Maoz Tzur” arrangement called for a duet with a male and female singer, and when Cock-man asked for a girl, about twenty hands flew up. After a few quick tryouts, Tara landed the job, and stepped confidently into the bend of the grand piano, the accepted spot for rehearsing soloists. Then Cock-man asked for a male soloist. The only volunteers were Aaron Berkowitz, who already had three solos in the performance, and Joey Weitz, whose eyes twinkled with glee at the thought of mangling the song in front of a full auditorium. Cock-man frowned at the room, clearly displeased with his choices, and I knew this was my chance. If I raised my hand, I was a shoe-in to sing with Tara. It would mean staying late for private rehearsals, and we would be linked, however briefly, as singing partners. But even though I secretly thought I was a pretty decent singer, the prospect of singing alone had always terrified me. Only after Joey Weitz had taken his place next to Tara by the piano did I feel my hand slowly, inconspicuously rise to shoulder height and then quickly fall, the ghost of a braver version of myself who would show up from time to time but never seemed inclined to stick around.

And so we all sat quietly while Joey and Tara learned their solos, Tara staring into space as she sang, Joey belting out his squeaky rasps on key with a comic earnestness no teacher would dare call him out on, and me hating myself for being a coward in matters of the heart.

On the first day of Hanukkah, all the members of the choir came to school wearing blue and white, the national colors of Israel and the standard uniform of every Jewish day school choir under the sun. White polo shirts and navy slacks for the boys, navy or denim skirts for the girls. Tara surprised me by wearing a formal white blouse, opened at the neck to showcase a wide expanse of porcelain skin and sheer enough that, in the right light, you could make out the tantalizing outline of her bra and the twin bulbs of her emerging breasts. That shirt was a revolution, was its own little Hanukkah miracle.

That day we performed before five hundred students and teachers during the school’s afternoon Hanukkah assembly, and halfway through Joey and Tara’s solo, Joey forgot the words. Rather than fall silent, he began to sing “La la la” along with the melody, grinning as the guffaws spread like a wave across the auditorium. Anyone else would have been embarrassed, but Joey just cranked up his faux earnestness a few notches, really projecting his scratchy, pubescent La’s to the cheap seats. Not so Tara, who was clearly mortified. Her body tensed up and her voice suddenly wavered as she turned a pleading eye toward Cock-man, who looked ready to stand up and hurl his grand piano at Joey.

The moment the curtain came down, Tara fled backstage to the girls’ bathroom, face red, eyes wet. I felt bad for her, but also undeniably aroused. In my dreams, those were the tears that led to our kiss. Tara Wahlberg crying in the girls’ bathroom was nothing less than foreplay. So as Cock-man stormed the stage like it was the beach at Normandy, screaming accented bloody murder at Joey Weitz, I slipped off the stage, and then into that inexplicable dark hallway that ran behind the auditorium connecting the two bathrooms.

And there she was, my lovely, damaged Tara in her miraculous shirt, standing against the wall, weeping. But what I had failed to account for in my fantasy is the way in which eighth-grade girls are drawn like moths to melodrama. There had to be at least five other girls standing in a circle around her, rubbing her back, handing her tissues, whispering irately to one another, or just kind of looking on, waiting for some unknowable feminine call to action. When I stepped into the hall from the boys’ bathroom, they all turned as one to look at me, and it felt like one of those movies where the white guy wanders into the black bar and the band stops playing and everyone just looks at him, wondering what fart in the cosmos has brought him to this unlikely place. These were eighth-grade girls and I was a seventh-grade boy, which made me something other than a legitimate human, so I wilted under their stares and crumbled into an insubstantial pile of sawdust.

Back on the stage, Cock-man was still screaming at Joey while the rest of the choir stood by, gleefully stupefied. “You don’t deserve solo you eed-yot! You don’t even deserve this choir!” Cock-man shouted at him.

“It was a mistake,” Joey said, admirably keeping his cool in the face of Cock-man’s whirling, sweat-soaked rage.

“I make a mistake and kick your head!” This was 1981, when a teacher could say something like that without making the evening news.

“I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“Get off my choir!” Cock-man screamed, the vein in his forehead writhing like a serpent.

“I’m not standing on it!”

“You get out, now!”

And thus was Joey Weitz kicked off the choir. Cock-man sat down on his sagging piano bench and pulled out the crumpled, yellowed handkerchief he’d been using for the last decade or so to wipe his prodigiously sweating brow. “Now,” he said, rubbing his temples with thick, sausage fingers, “who will sing with Tara?”

And only after I noticed everybody looking at me kind of funny did I fully understand that I had raised my hand, which just goes to show you what the right shirt on a woman will do.

Thus, my twelfth Hanukkah brought me a twofold miracle: my singing debut and proximity to Tara Wahlberg. Because, you see, I really did think I could sing. I sang in the shower, I sang in my bed, I sang pretty much anywhere I knew no one could hear me. I sang Billy Joel, Elton John, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen. I knew, with the unshakable conviction of a twelve-year-old, that, in a pinch, I could step in to front the Electric Light Orchestra or play Danny Zuko in Grease. I was destined to be a star. All I needed was the right venue to unleash my talent on the world.

Fact: Many contemporary male novelists really wanted to be rock stars. You will find that we are suspiciously well versed when it comes to rock music. We can rattle off detailed histories of our favorite bands and singers, quote an insane amount of lyrics by heart, discuss the chord structures, list the many times we’ve seen them in concert, and scribble a list of their essential albums with no forethought at all. Many of us play instruments. Read McInerney, read Ellis, read Hornby, read King, read Rushdie and countless others, and you’ll find enough failed rock stars to people a thousand reality shows. We spent a good deal of our childhoods picturing ourselves onstage in a sold-out arena, singing our heart out for twenty-five thousand screaming fans, or sitting for an interview dressed in funky, rock-star clothes, or going to bed every night in hotel suites with sexy, scantily clad groupies who were more than happy to give it up in the name of rock and roll.

Fact: Most of us turned out not to be any good, which is why I was invited to write this story and not to do some blow off Kate Moss’s naked ass.

Cock-man kept the choir through all of our afternoon classes to rehearse, and spent a good deal of time on the “Maoz Tzur,” so that Tara and I could work it out. It shouldn’t have been difficult for me, since my part was the same melody line I’d been singing with the group, but now, no longer able to disappear into the collective voice of the choir, my voice sounded thin and shaky to me, and singing out loud felt like the dream where you show up to school without your pants. Also, Tara’s part was in a minor key a few steps higher, and when she sang I was at risk of falling off the precarious perch of my own key. Standing there beside Tara, I was overwhelmed by a potent combination of stage fright and lust, and my chest quivered every time I opened my mouth.

When Cock-man dismissed the choir, he asked if Tara and I would stay behind to practice a little more. He was concerned with our timing, with the blending of our voices. He was concerned that I might suck.

“I can stay,” Tara said, looking hopefully at me. She didn’t know me well, probably didn’t know much more than my name and that I was a seventh grader who lived about a mile away from her, where the houses got bigger, but when she turned those big eyes on me, I would have sworn she knew everything there was to know about me. It was December, when night falls shortly after lunchtime, and staying late would mean walking the six long, uphill blocks to the city bus stop with Tara, alone in the dark, just the two of us, basking in the green-and-amber glow of the Christmas lights wrapped around trees and lining the roofs of houses throughout the neighborhood. We would no doubt get to talking, and she would see that I was a good guy, funny and sincere, quietly cool. Maybe our elbows would bump lightly as we walked, and we would shiver instinctively against each other for warmth. Maybe she would talk about how mortified she’d been when Joey ruined their solo, maybe even crying again at the recollection, and I would pull my glove off to tenderly brush away her tears with my fingers before they froze on her pale, freckled skin. After that, I’d never again be the insignificant seventh grader, just a part of the random human clutter of her day school experience. I’d be the guy she sang a solo with, who wiped her tears away and made her laugh on a cold December evening.

“I can stay,” I said.

Tara smiled, and inside me cymbals clashed as the marching band strutted triumphantly down Main Street.

And so we stayed, for an extra hour, and in the privacy of the empty stage my confidence grew. I sang along with more authority, easily staying on key, and every time Tara smiled her approval, I felt a warm tremor in my loins. During a break, when Cock-man left to make a call, I sat down at the piano and absently started to play “Heart and Soul,” and after a minute she sat down beside me to play the high part, doing a bluesy little improvisation on the black keys.

“You’re good,” she said, giggling as I changed tempo.

“So are you,” I said.

“I’m doing the easy part.”

Her thigh was pressed against mine on the piano bench, our shoulders brushing lightly as we played, and I could smell her scents, lavender, coconut, and wild cherry Bubble Yum. I kept waiting for her to get bored and stop, but she kept right on playing, matching my tempo changes, leaning against me when she giggled. When I jokingly started playing too fast for her, she grabbed my hands with her own and held them prisoner for a second or two, and our heads bumped lightly. I know now that that was the moment I should have kissed her, that that was my window, and it closed as quickly as it had opened, like so many more windows would open and close with other girls in the coming years. But back then, all I knew was that I didn’t want the moment to end, and for the twenty minutes or so that we were alone at that piano, Tara Wahlberg was mine, and mine alone. Then Cock-man came back to take us through it one more time, and we stopped abruptly, right in the middle, because everyone knows how to play “Heart and Soul,’ but no one really knows how to end it.

When we stepped outside it had started to snow, like in a Christmas movie, which meant our walk up to the bus stop would be slower and even more romantic, but then Cock-man pulled up in his battered, puke-green Nova and told us he would drive us home. The car stank of Cock-man’s imported body odor. Tara sat up front with him, and when he dropped her off, she called over her shoulder to me, “See you tomorrow,” and disappeared into the gathering snow, leaving me desolate and deflated in the back of the reeking Nova. Adding insult to injury, Cock-man made me sing my part for the duration of the drive.

The next afternoon, right after lunch, we boarded the school bus that would take us to P.S. 141. I thought that maybe I’d save a seat for Tara, but by the time I got on she was already sitting in the back with a group of eighth-grade girls, and even though I looked back there repeatedly on the short ride, we never made eye contact.

The auditorium at P.S. 141 was the real deal. It was at least three times the size of the one at our school, which was really just a gym with a stage when you got right down to it, and it had theater seats on an incline and a professional sound system. By the time we arrived, the place was already filled to noisy capacity with an endless array of long-haired kids in jeans and T-shirts, two wardrobe items expressly forbidden in our school’s dress code. Girls were sitting on boys’ laps, kids were chewing gum and being rowdy and running down the aisles, and up on that giant stage, in our blue-and-white outfits and with our private school sensibilities, it felt no different to us than playing a gig at Folsom Prison. I was instantly self-conscious about my blue day school yarmulke, my parochial education, and my pleated navy pants.

When the time came for me to step forward and join Tara at the solo mikes, about halfway through the show, I was on the verge of a minor nervous breakdown. As I looked out at the crowd, I could feel my left thigh shaking uncontrollably, the small network of muscles in my cheeks twitching nervously, and I imagined that every soul in that cavernous room could see it too. And then the choir fell silent and next to me Tara took a deep breath and opened her mouth.

I don’t remember very much after that. I don’t exactly recall singing, but I remember hearing my voice floating back across the auditorium at me from the overhead speaker, thin and hollow and much too flat, not at all how I heard it in my head. I wondered if something might be wrong with the sound system. Tara swayed delicately beside me, staring heavenward as she sang, and I remember feeling intimately connected to her. And the last thing I remember, after our solo was over, was watching Tara slip back into the alto section with nary a look back at me, to be swallowed up into the blue-and-white tapestry of the choir.

I never sang another solo after that. And I never again spent any time with Tara. The social currents of junior high school swept us out to sea on our separate, preordained tides, and while I always kept an eye out for her, and she always said hi to me at choir practice, that was pretty much it. She graduated at the end of the year, and I never saw her again. In the words of the immortal Bruce Springsteen: Love’s like that, sure it is.

Every year now, I still light the candles on Hanukkah, which makes me, if nothing else, a Jewish day school success story. And when I light them, I can’t help but think of Tara Wahlberg. I wonder what became of her, if she still lights Hanukkah candles wherever she is, and if, maybe, she remembers me when she does. The miracle of Hanukkah was that a paltry amount of oil in a darkened temple burned in the menorah for eight days. For me, twenty minutes of a winter night in an empty room of a darkened school, sharing a piano bench with a pretty girl, has lasted twenty-five years. There are miracles and there are miracles. Love’s like that, sure it is.

I still play a pretty mean “Heart and Soul,” by the way. And I still have yet to figure out how it ends.

This essay originally appeared in the anthology How to Spell Chanukah, edited by Emily Franklin and published by Algonquin Books.

Jonathan Tropper is the author of the novels How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B.

When, in 2004, musician-composer John Zorn approached Dan Kaufman to write something for his Tzadik label, the two quickly discovered their shared admiration for the work of Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan. Three years later comes Force of Light, Kaufman’s eight-song homage to the poet.

Celan’s quiet, sometimes bleak poetry has been set to music before, but never like this; the pieces on Force of Light are played by Kaufman’s band, Barbez, which features the usual rock instruments along with lap steel guitar, clarinet, vibes, marimba, and theremin. On some tracks, poems (or poem fragments) are read by Scottish poet Fiona Templeton, but the compositions, which are mostly instrumental, stray far from any line-by-line interpretation.

Kaufman talks to Nextbook about Celan’s work and his take on it, and introduces a few of his favorite tracks.

Golijov explains the shofar in Krakow

What about Federico García Lorca inspired you to write an opera?

It was Lorca who said that the greatest tragedy in the history of Spain was the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews. That made Spain from a great civilization into a petty and chauvinistic little provincial thing.

The image that I had when I started composing the opera was of a floating pomegranate, bleeding melodies of the three civilizations that were in Spain—Jewish, Muslim, Catholic. The Arabs were translating the Greeks, and Maimonides was in touch with Averroes, and all of that. People were having a dialogue. It’s not like it was all rosy, but there was creative tension.

As opposed to a more violent kind of tension today?

Violence and fear, mutual fear.

Also, Ainadamar was so beautiful in the Golden Era. It was a place people went to be in harmony with the world, and the same place, nine centuries later, becomes the witness of a horrible murder. Lorca was assassinated there. It’s about how things don’t necessarily get better.

The idea is that there are rhythms and melodies that come from the soil of Spain. What I did was mostly take them and bend them in a way, to express the history of that place—the pain, the war, and the beauty.

Do you see any of this as a lesson for today?

Wishful thinking. [Laughs] In the opera, Lorca, through one of the characters, says “You love freedom, but I am freedom.” And that to me is the main point. That people who love freedom feel entitled to kill others for that love, but those people who are freedom are actually killed. Like Lorca, just by being freedom, they scare the others. It would be beautiful to arrive at the place where we all are freedom, and do not just love freedom.

How did your grandparents end up in Argentina?

Argentina, believe it or not, was as good as America in terms of promise then. There is still a pretty sizable Jewish population there, but it’s much smaller than when I was growing up. In the 1960s, there were two Yiddish newspapers, a lot of theater in Yiddish. In most homes Yiddish was spoken. When I was younger—well, I forgot everything now, but I was fluent. But with the dictatorship and anti-Semitism, people emigrated, many to Israel. Many assimilated, and several hundred were killed.

You left for Israel. How old were you then?

Twenty-two. I had a very happy childhood in Argentina, but then it got much more difficult with all the violence and I got fed up. And musically, I was not growing. Plus there was always the desire to know Israel, to know Jerusalem.

By the time you got to Israel, you already knew a lot of Jewish music.

Yeah, but I didn’t know all the Sephardic music. It was just incredible to walk down the streets and hear—there are so many little synagogues. And people sing all the time, like the plumber would come to fix something and see the piano and start singing. He didn’t fix the problem, the leak got bigger. But I got a couple of songs out of him, so it was okay.

Do you come from a musical family?

My mom was a very good pianist. My dad was a doctor, an orthopedist. Because of my mother, I studied piano. I loved Bach and still love it, and Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and all of that. But because we were in a relatively small town, there were no amazing performers coming. The orchestra in my town was pretty bad. My knowledge was mostly from playing scores or listening to records.
So when I was, like, 10, and my mom took me to see Astor Piazzolla, it was a shattering moment in my life because—here is a real, living person, not someone born 200 years ago in Vienna, who integrates all that I loved, from Bach to Bartok. Piazzolla sublimated the sound of the streets of Argentina into music. The way people talk—you know, people who talk to you from the side of their mouth just to show how macho they are? That’s the way the phrasing was. I could hear everything at the same time, Bach and the streets. And that’s something that I still remember with goose bumps.

Is that when you knew you wanted to write your own music?

Oh, that definitely did it. I was already writing little ditties by then.

Since your mother introduced you to music, that must have made her very happy.

Not really. She was scared. I could be anything I wanted, but not a musician. The whole prospect of a starving artist was not very exciting for her. Once it was inevitable and she couldn’t fight my decision anymore, she was incredibly supportive, and she totally believed in me. She always said, “Keep dreaming.” Many times I felt like giving up—when you slowly let go of your wildest dreams—and she was the one who always kept pushing me.

You write a lot for Dawn Upshaw, who is known as a champion of new music. How did you meet her?

She got my name from the Kronos Quartet. She called to ask for a song, seven years ago. Now, I’m a little used to big people calling, but at that moment only AT&T called me to remind me to pay the phone bill. She was given some money to commission a piece, and she decided that rather than call a well-known composer, she wanted somebody she didn’t know. In Dawn, I was able to find somebody with that affective power, that deep truth of expression, but also the possibility of whatever I want because she’s such a huge musician.

There are moments on Ayre when she doesn’t even sound like a soprano—sometimes she even sounds throaty.

Exactly. In Ayre, she’s like seven different voices. [Laughs] I told her: after this record, either they will change the definition of soprano or of Dawn Upshaw.

Does your recent success, especially now with Lincoln Center devoting a month to your music, feel a little strange?

When you are born in La Plata, Argentina, you never lose that wide-eyed feeling, which I think is actually a good thing. It means a lot, but it could also be a freak thing. Obviously I try to do my best all the time, but I don’t have that supreme confidence that I think Mozart or Strauss had.

Mozart was very poor when he died.

Yeah, but he had confidence. He knew he was Mozart. I still don’t know who I am. I think that what I do is truthful, but I also feel that I’m pretty minor. But I’m opening a door. I think I’m John the Baptist, except I never want to end up with my head on a platter. But I am kind of announcing a new era in music, an era in which boundaries will disappear. But I think a much greater composer than me will come soon.

It wasn’t a wholly comfortable couch. The raised stitches of cushion covers and armrests made it look hand-knit, but they left lines on bare flesh and also offered a series of irregularly placed knots which I used to pick at with ferocity whenever bored or anxious during our weekend lessons: English first, then French, then—beginning when I was about seven years old and ending not long after—modern Hebrew. I had other strategies for distraction, too. Leaning back, I’d run an imaginary rat through the maze of interconnected honeycomb moldings on the ceiling. Staring down, I’d idly trace the arabesques of the Persian rug with my toe. My childhood was filled with these endlessly repeating patterns. When my wandering attention finally convinced my father that lessons had to stop, I could entertain myself for hours by skipping across the dining room along the carpet’s red rhombus medallions, then jumping from peacock to antelope along the hallway’s animal carpet until I reached the open arch leading to the enormous rectangle known as “the living room.” My parents really used it as a music room. It was barely furnished: a small seating area with a glass coffee table at one end and the piano and stereo system at the other. Large enough to seat 30 people for the chamber music concerts my parents hosted two or three times a year, the room also served as a rehearsal space for what seemed an endless stream of visiting musicians, including a brass quintet my father had found busking outside Lincoln Center.

To enter into the living room meant swimming across an expanse of open floor until I’d reached a small kilim at the center. I pursued these games with an obsessive fervor, making myself go back to the beginning again if I missed a step. In some moods, I would lie on the rug reading D’Aulaire’s Greek and Norse myths or even, shockingly—obscenely, it seems now—the Signet Classics Shakespeare plays my father gave me after he’d taken me to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V at the Thalia movie theater. I remember liking the battle scenes, the knights hoisted onto their horses by cranes, the flight of English arrows, and not much else. I cannot now tell what possible good it did me to lie there, warmed by the sun as it came through the six high windows that gave out onto Central Park West, reading Shakespeare uncomprehendingly, making sure to ignore the notes. I lingered over the mysterious list called “Dramatis Personae.” When I got further, I read mostly for the plot. I remember an odd sympathy for Richard III. I was about eight or nine.

At other times, the living room floor became a hockey rink as I skated in my socks, ignoring my mother’s warnings of splinters and heedless of my father’s half-annoyed shouts of “Vildechayah.” I’d lie underneath my mother’s Steinway B, already, even then, nostalgic for some sensation of peaceful infancy. If my mother came in to play a Scarlatti sonata, for instance, or the accompaniment for a Schubert song, I’d listen while feeling the vibrations of chords and the thump of pedals push through me. Cadences and phrases flowed and mingled somehow with the patterns of the carpets. My father had brought most of them back from Iran and Lebanon when he’d traveled there in the early 1960s, but, as with nearly all the furniture of my childhood, I ignored their provenance. They were as eternal as meadows and they were my meadows. There was one underneath the piano, too, so the sound wouldn’t disturb the neighbors. Peacefully, I’d continue to trace and draw out in the weavings what I was sure must be the music I couldn’t yet read, according to some secret law of association now beyond recall.

My father might wander through and sit on a sofa at the opposite end of the room underneath a giant oak-framed mirror that doubled the space. I’d watch him and my mother’s reflection as she managed her small hands and petite frame around the widest intervals with barely a flaw. “She plays beautifully, your mother,” he’d say to me, rarely complimenting her directly. This way of mediating kindness through me confirmed my sense that I was the center of our family life, although, as with so much else, I would later come to resent these remarks, as though my father was again recruiting me to his tastes, assuming that we would both love and cherish my mother for the same reasons. Of course he could simply have been performing an object lesson in kindness, telling me how much my mother needed to be praised. She deserved to be praised—she played beautifully, mostly in private. She’d been kept from a career by the crippling nerves she’d passed on to me in full, along with a smaller portion of her talent and will.

These weekend mornings of lessons, play, and undifferentiated family absorption remain among my most blissful memories. We were each of us alone together, without rivalry or loneliness, restlessness or fear. The apartment became sanctified: a magnificent, pre-war, two-story temple to neo-classicism, the spirit of old Penn Station and the Metropolitan Museum of Art scaled down for domestic life. Its architects had balanced openness and views over the park with cloistered spaces like my parents’ bedroom, upstairs, and the kitchen, far to the rear, down another long corridor off the dining room. Once reserved for servants, the kitchen was about the size of the one-bedroom apartment where I’m writing now. The three of us clustered to eat at one end of a thick-grained table meant for eight. The heavy mahogany furniture seemed at home under the high ceilings. I could lose myself in the forest of coats we kept in the hallway closet; the books that covered the walls of the dining room both beckoned and frightened. Some of them, like the German three-volume illustrated history of the Second World War, were forbidden at first, and placed high up. An illustrated devil dangling in a thicket of thorns made John Gardner’s Freddy’s Book an object of superstitious dread. There seemed no reason ever to leave a place of such endless mysteries, and yet of course I did, daily, and until I was about nine or ten didn’t much mind. Later, I’d avoid the place as much as possible.

My parents bought the apartment in the 88 Central Park West co-op in 1969 for $135,000. The upper West Side then was an up-and-coming neighborhood, still considered edgy and even derelict in places. Lincoln Center had recently been completed. Along 69th street, musicians and teachers in cheap tenement brownstone apartments shared stoops with working-class Irish and Puerto Ricans who had fled Hell’s Kitchen. For the first few years, my parents’ fellow board members included a painter, a well-known poet and professor, a theater actress, a few doctors and lawyers, and several elderly and well-off Jewish refugees who had managed to escape Europe in the 1930s.

Perhaps it was the early bourgeois bohemian character of the building or the fact that my father had spent most of the money he’d inherited from his mother to buy the apartment—for some reason, he insisted that we were “middle class.” This phrase echoed through my childhood. It explained why we did not own a country house like my friends, or even like my father’s sister, a writer married to a psychiatrist. It explained why my parents voted Democrat, why my father drove four-door compact cars and why, instead of shopping for his suits at Saks or having them custom-made, he bought them, ill-fitting as they were, at Syms. It explained many things and also nothing at all, although it crucially shaped my first political impulses. If “middle class” meant large apartments on Central Park West, then there was no reason why such dignified housing shouldn’t be available to most of us in a truly egalitarian society. It was only logical.

For my father, the phrase invoked an acceptance of one’s limitations as much as anything else. In 7th grade, when I fell suddenly from the ranks of the top math students in my class and was ultimately demoted from my school’s advanced math section, my father delivered a homily on the virtues of being average in most things: We were, according to him, a family of average height, average means, average talents distributed evenly, and average ambition. Yet, I heard a false note in this determined paean to mediocrity, and perhaps that was what he wanted. Listening to his sermon, at age 12, I immediately determined to be either terrifically bad or terrifically good. This meant that I immediately stopped working at math altogether, convinced that I would no longer distinguish myself in it. Even so, I couldn’t be sure that my father wasn’t serious. I began to be haunted by a feeling that he was preparing me to be a minor character in my own life, that he wished to spare me disappointment by leaving me with little to hope for. Failures always hit my parents harder than successes cheered them. They attached more meaning to them, or so it seemed to me, as though one’s life could be known only through a process of elimination.

Much later, I figured out that my father’s belief in middle-class values was actually a determined repudiation of his own family. They were hardly middle class, and neither, really, were we. My father’s career was, in many ways, like the careers of the younger sons of 19th-century German and French mercantile and banking families. As the youngest children of the youngest daughter of the founder of the Philips Van Heusen shirt company, he and his sister received, in stocks and bonds, the smallest share of the family wealth. His decision to become a doctor and a scientist was one of the more respectful ways he rejected a family that he felt had never accepted him. Theirs had been the usual immigrant success story: My great-great-grandfather had gone from schmatte salesman to company founder; his sons expanded the business and did well enough to rise to Park Avenue and private schools, houses in the Hamptons and vacations in Maine. The older daughters were married off, in dynastic manner, to men with fortunes of their own. Only my father’s mother was left and she had the bad luck to fall in love with a less honest—though no less ambitious—immigrant, Eugene Frederick Roth, a young lawyer who married her to get into the business. A letter from one of my father’s cousins refers to him as “that scheming Galizianer bastard,” that is, a Jew from Galicia in Western Poland, a group notorious, among Jews, for their dishonesty and love of money.

My father’s middle-class shtick was also part of his way of keeping my mother and me outside of the sordid family history—the power struggles, inheritance battles, and affairs, the loneliness and lovelessness of his childhood that had led him, at 13, to reinvent himself as a kind of changeling child. He did this first through religion, plunging into his bar mitzvah studies and even briefly becoming Orthodox. He also began to learn Yiddish. In 1952, his family had left behind both Yiddish and sincere religious observance as remnants of the old country, reminders of the poverty and oppression they had escaped as though fleeing Egypt. By rebelling through a resuscitation of history and discarded traditions, rather than by embracing the emerging counterculture of drugs and jazz—perhaps because this rebellion happened so early in his youth, before he had the freedom of the streets—my father also, unintentionally, brought himself into conflict with what would become the dominant trends of American culture.

I understood nothing of this growing up. Although his parents were far too assimilated for the Catskills, my father entertained us with borscht belt humor. He’d put on a Yiddish accent, which he’d picked up from Milt Gross’ “Nize Baby” and Leo Rosten, while he mocked Hasids with a zeal which only now seems suspicious, as though he were punishing them for his own messianic impulses and stubborn refusal to abandon a lost culture. He also made fun of hippie Jews, Jews—like his sister—who celebrated Christmas, Jews who threw extravagant bar mitzvahs for their children, Jews who went to Reform synagogues and sang in appalling, American-accented Hebrew, Jews who bought expensive tickets to Conservative synagogues only for the high holidays. No one, really, was safe, not even the Israelis, whom he criticized for boorishness and militarism, much as he made fun of me when I made the middle-school baseball team and proudly brought home my first uniform. By this point, he’d given up on God, too.

Although I’ve now forgotten them all, I once knew my father’s jokes and repeated them to the amusement of our concert guests. I also mimed his contempt and carried it with me to school. I became an absurd young Matthew Arnold among my peers, telling my third-grade classmates to read Shakespeare instead of watching the Smurfs. This was, even then, deeply embarrassing, but at the progressive school I attended—the Fleming School, founded as an alternative to the official French New York lycée—it wasn’t fatal. I was well-liked enough there, and, anyway, French kept me and my classmates together in a shared private language. We were allowed to be eccentric amongst ourselves, in such a way that the eccentricities of home and school flowed into each other.

Later, when I was nine years old, after my father had come down with hepatitis, the first shadow of his illness, and the Fleming School went through its first financial crisis, my parents switched me to the less experimental, more monied, Riverdale School in the Bronx. There I learned, the hard way, that most of what I knew from home—the concerts, the weekend lessons, the Persian carpets, Shakespeare—had to be kept to myself. After two years of utter misery, during which my father came home each night to find me in tears or sullenly withdrawn, he asked me, at last, what was wrong. When I tried to tell him, he decided the time had come for me to sit on our couch and read Tonio Kröger.

Doc Pomus and Joe Turner

Doc Pomus is little known today, except among those who regularly mine liner notes for songwriter credits, but from the late 1950s through the 80s, he brought a certain dark pathos to popular music, writing iconic songs such as “Teenager in Love” for Dion, “Suspicion” for Elvis Presley, and hits for Big Joe Turner, the Drifters, the Beach Boys, and countless others.

Confined to crutches and later a wheelchair by a childhood bout of polio, Doc Pomus began life as Jerome Felder, son of a Brooklyn lawyer. His parents pushed him to become an accountant, but he had other ideas. In Lonely Avenue, a new biography, writer Alex Halberstadt traces Doc’s unlikely rise to fame as a blues singer and influential songwriter.

Nextbook talks to Halberstadt about this man’s remarkable life and work.

Excerpt from Doc Pomus’s uncompleted memoir, February 21, 1984:

I was never one of those happy cripples who stumbled around smiling and shiny-eyed, trying to get the world to cluck its tongue and shake its head sadly in my direction. They’d never look at me and say, “What a wonderful, courageous fellow.”

I was always too fucking mad and didn’t have a chip, but a great big log on my shoulder, daring the world to get in my way or mess with me. I walked slow and straight and never swung my legs fast and awkwardly like the rest of the gimps who got around with braces and crutches. My main thing was to act and look cool—angry, and cool and sharp. I talked the hip talk of the jazzmen and dressed like Bed-Stuy and Harlem. I was gonna be the first heavy-weight boxing champion on crutches—a one punch knockout killer. Or maybe the first major league pitcher on crutches—firing endless, unhittable strikes. Or maybe I’d be the first famous bandleader waving his baton with one hand and leaning on his crutch with the other. And I was gonna make love to the most beautiful exciting women in the world, and they would all love me passionately and forever. I was going to be the most extraordinary and talented and virile man that ever lived.

And underneath I was a frightened little kid—afraid that my limited physical equipment was not enough to get me any kind of piece of the action out there. I would end up a street beggar hustling quarters, or be just another bed in a cold state institution, or live in a welfare hotel sharing a toilet with some diseased junkie or hooker. Most of the time I shut this out with the help of booze, pot, insanity or blindness; or a combination of any or all of it. But once in a while I would lay in a sleazy hotel room with the soiled bedcovers over my head—too scared to move, sometimes for days and nights—sleepless and trembling. And when it got like that I never knew when it would end, or how it would end, or if it would ever end, but it always did. Now, thirty or forty years later, it happens less and less, and I’ve found corners of myself and the world that I own more than once in a while. And some mornings when I wake up and look around, I even smile deep and feel like it’s good to be here and to be me. But it sure took a long fucking time.

Photos courtesy of Da Capo Press

Growing up in the Bosnian village of Vlasenica, Flory Jagoda spent her afternoons and evenings singing with her family—everyone sang, her grandmother, her aunts, uncles and cousins. Though they’d lived in the Balkans for centuries, their songs were in Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, passed down from the time of her ancestors’ expulsion from Spain.

World War II nearly obliterated the Sephardic community of Sarajevo and its surroundings. At 82, Flory Jagoda is one of the few people who remembers the musical traditions of that community. As the matriarch of a large clan—and as a teacher, composer, and performer—she is passing that tradition on. For her efforts, in 2002 she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. These are her songs and stories, as told to us from her home in Virginia.

Flory Jagoda’s songs have been collected on four CDs, available here.

Photo courtesy of Altaras Recordings.