The artistic research pilot project Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype attempts to explore and deconstruct the ways that Jewishness is portrayed and embodied in the performance of Yiddish song through ethnographic research and musical performance. Sociologist Michal Y. Bodemann’s concept of the “Theater of Memory” (1996) articulates how Jewish participation in public life is co-opted into the German national narrative to affirm a post-Nazi multiculturalism*. This framework suggests that the diversity and complexity of Jewish life are often instrumentalized, serving merely as a backdrop in the German or Austrian national narratives.
As a result of these dynamics, Yiddish culture and music are frequently presented through nostalgic tropes, stereotypical representations and in conjunction with the massive loss of the Shoah. Such representations often bolster hegemonic narratives instead of empowering Jewish minorities. Consequently, Yiddish singers become instrumental in either reinforcing or contesting the theater of memory through their artistic choices and performances. Our central question as artist-researchers was:
How can we, artistically and through scholarly reflection, challenge and subvert the Theater of Memory as Yiddish performers?
In our project we use the frame of a lecture / concert to reflect on how we encounter the Theater of Memory in our artistic practice. Drawing from our experiences of past performances, theory from both performance and Jewish studies as well as ethnomusicology, we developed a performance which weaves together music, our own writings and visuals. We presented this lecture-concert in multiple settings and documented it through auto-ethnographic research methods and audio/visual recordings.
In this website we present some of the tensions that we draw on in our artistic research project.
Bodemann, Y. Michal. Gedächtnistheater: die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung. Hamburg: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1996.
Who is the Yiddish folk? During the late 19th and early 20th century, when there were millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews living in Eastern Europe in relatively autonomous communities, the answer was much more straightforward. But today vernacular Yiddish is almost exclusively an attribute of ultra-orthodox Chassidic Jewish communities, whose musical culture explicitly excludes secular folksongs written by non-religious Jews. At the same time, most secular Ashkenazi Jews, don’t grow up with Yiddish, and therefore also not with the oral tradition of Yiddish folksong.
Yiddish performance is often imbued with a mythic imagining of the shtetl, a nostalgic longing for its warmth, simplicity and its vanished authenticity. This nostalgia is, however, not a phenomena of post Shoah Jewish life, it is a phenomenon of modernity.
How do we encounter this nostalgia productively and critically? In The Future of Nostalgia, comparative literature scholar, Svetlana Boym offers a typology of nostalgia that may help to “illuminate some of nostalgia’s mechanisms of seduction and manipulation” (Boym 2002, xvii). She distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia:
Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming- wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt (ibid.).
We too, encounter much of this Yiddish material with nostalgia, with a nostalgia that we hope is reflective in its manifestations. With a longing for detail, for knowledge of a culture that we were not born into. A culture that was not monolithic, which was full of contradictions.
We choose not to encounter this material from a perspective of restorative nostalgia, from a teleology of nationalism. Instead, We strive to encounter this nostalgia reflectively, selecting the material that we like, that fits with what we want to do as artists, as researchers, as individuals.
Boym Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia, xviii. New York Plymouth: BasicBooks ; Plymbridge, 2002.
Project supported by the:
-Music and Minorities Research Center, Austrian Science Fund (FWF): Z 352-G26
-Artistic Research Pilot Grant (2022) university of music and performing arts vienna (mdw)
We have a body of Yiddish folksong, but no Yiddish folk - at least in its original sense - to maintain and transmit it. Instead we have a community of people who choose Yiddish.
As anthropologist Jeffrey Shandler writes,
“Singing, reciting, lecturing, or even conversing in Yiddish is no longer something one simply does (as presumably had once been the case). Rather, it is something one elects and arranges to do, one rehearses, studies, and appreciates; Yiddish speech has been professionalized, aestheticized, academized, and ritualized." (Shandler 153, 2006).
And as a result of this process there are university Yiddish programs, festivals of Yiddish culture, workshops of Yiddish culture, conferences and so forth. They form the basis of what Shandler calls “Yiddishland”, a Yiddish imagined community of people who choose to engage in Yiddish in a myriad of ways.
Where does a song like afn pripetshik live? One of several iconic Yiddish songs, composed in the late 19th century, which quickly became absorbed into the vernacular repertoire of Yiddish speakers.
A flame burns in the fireplace, the room warms up, as the teacher drills the children in the alef beyz, the Hebrew alphabet: “Remember dear children, what you are learning here. Repeat it again and again: komets-alef is pronounced o. When you are older you will understand that this alphabet contains the tears and the weeping of our people. When you grow weary and burdened with exile, you will find comfort and strength within this Jewish alphabet.”
The song sentimentalizes the kheyder education that young boys received, remembering the often squalor conditions with warmth. The reality of this education was often quite different; boys as young as 3 years old would begin by learning the Hebrew alphabet, then proceeding to the bible and Talmud. Children often of a wide range of age and ability would be in crowded conditions studying for many hours a day. Corporal punishment was not uncommon.
Can the sentimentality of this song be augmented by the historical realitities of studying in kheyder?
Jack M describes the rabbi’s two whips that were used to beat boys who misbehaved in kheyder.
Clip used with the permission of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University.