German address, Israeli passport:
By PAUL WIEDER

The klezmer revival is, by now, far enough along to consider this Eastern European music fully revived. But there has always been Jewish music from the other Europe, too, and its renaissance is just beginning.

Although Western European Jewry naturally shares much with its Eastern counterpart, including Yiddish, it is more of a citified culture. Thus, its music is influenced more by the cabaret, café, and Kurt Weill than is klezmer.

On the forefront of this newly resurgent coffeehouse style is singer and archivist Nizza Thobi. In her second release, Thobi sings the words of nine Yiddish poets, all born around 1900. The album’s title, geborjrn in a sajdn hemdl, means Born in a Silken Robe; the first song describes the Yiddish language itself as a silken robe/of my mother tongue which guards me day and night throughout life.

In truth, Yiddish has been with her since her childhood, even though Thobi was born in Israel; even after living in Munich for 25 years, she still holds only an Israeli passport. Thobi’s mother traces her line back to the Inquisition, and her father is from the Gulf of Aden area, so technically she is Sephardic. However, almost all my grade school teachers were European, she explains. We were informed about the Holocaust from the very beginning; parents of my school friends had numbers on their arms.

There are the expected songs of pastoral evenings, old age, and lost love, but the several poems on assimilation, antisemitism, and wrestling with angels speak directly from the eternal Jewish heart. Yet even this latter sentiment has its universality the collection’s best-known piece has been recorded by Paul Robeson, performed here as A lawsuit against G-d.

The album is made even more accessible by Thobi’s excellent liner notes. She translated each song from Yiddish to German and English, followed by an explanation of its context. The stories behind the songs are moving themselves—one song was smuggled in a suitcase’s handle, while its author was killed at Auschwitz; another song was performed as a Nazi protest, only to be mockingly included in a Nazi propaganda film. 

Today, Thobi performs before thousands; she debuted on German TV this September. She has an artistic family as well her husband is a movie costumer, her son runs a record label and her half-sister, the Yiddish actress, is also the widow of the late songwriter Mort (Save the Last Dance for Me) Shuman. 

Thobi describes her audiences as shocked when they realize that her Yiddish concert is not a klezmer one, but they stay sitting until the concert is finished. Some cry; some of them thank me for making them understand the relation between historical events.

To enforce that connection, Thobi concludes each concert with a reading from an unexpected source: We recognize that blindness covered our eyes and we do not recognize the features of our Firstborn Brother. We recognize that Cain’s sign is on our forehead. In the course of centuries, our brother Abel has lain in the blood we shed. Forgive us the curse we have affixed to the name of the Jews. It was written by Pope John XXIII in 1963. 

Asked why she feels compelled to perform this music, Thobi speaks first of Holocaust denial, but quickly adds, In Germany, we have a revival of neo-Nazis now.

They appear in groups and murder blacks and foreigners in the nighttime. Everybody has to do something against these young people. I do my very best Listening to geborjn in a sejdn hemdl is a profound experience. Like leafing through Roman Vishniac’s seminal photo essay A Vanished World, images of our forebears’ time arise before us. Through this music, our minds can picture the scenes in full color, motion, and sound. A rabbi approaches his burned synagogue; a woman cradles a stranger’s orphan; a wagoneer drinks away his profits. Ultimately, however, there is hope: The rabbi’s unshaken faith resolves to rebuild the ark; the child will be cared for; and even the drunkard has saved his last penny for Shabbat.

As rich an evocation of European Jewish life before and after the Holocaust as you’ll find, geborjn in a sejdn hemdl is not only a beautiful album, but an important one.

Nizza Thobi’s geborjn in a sejdn hemdl is not yet available in the U.S. Please contact Thobi’s Web site.

Paul Wieder is a public relations associate at the Jewish United Fund.
 

Related links...

http://www.nizza-thobi.com