Cultural Life

Nizza Thobi MP3, 1:51 min.

Yiddish used to be known fondly to East European Jews as Mamaloshen: the "mother tongue". Nizza Thobi, a small, feisty woman with a wonderfully soft, husky voice, devotes her music to the memory of this mainstay of Jewish culture.

Born in 1947 in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family, Thobi came into contact with German and Yiddish culture at an early age. Many of her teachers were German Jewish émigrés steeped in the world of Heine and Goethe. Her neighbours and even her mother spoke Yiddish, a language she adored – even if she didn’t understand it. "The language is so luscious," says Thobi, "you feel you can sing it." She longed to find out more: about German-Jewish history and its brutal destruction, about the people who bore witness in Mamaloshen to the annihilating violence, but also articulated their dreams and hopes in the "mother tongue". So Nizza Thobi went a-travelling: from Jerusalem to Berlin, from there to Munich, which she would eventually call home. With her she bore her love of Yiddish and German, and the desire to share this ardour with others.

Ms Thobi, Your CD Gebojrn in a sajdn hemdl ["Born in a Silken Robe"] is an homage to the Yiddish language. More precisely, to Mamaloshen, the mother tongue. Ruth Klüger once wrote that she was driven out of her mother tongue – German – but could never cast off its spell, for it is the language of intimacy.

Yes, of course, one’s mother tongue is of vital importance to everyone, it sounds particularly familiar to us. Unfortunately, some great writers in the Yiddish culture who emigrated to Israel, like Itzik Manger from Chernivtsi , the great poet of Jewish ballads, couldn’t write any more. Manger’s art wouldn’t thrive any more in Israel. That was a terribly painful experience: he could only produce his art in his mother tongue.

We have to keep in mind that Yiddish was the native language of 12 million people, it was one of the important world languages. I can’t even separate Yiddish from German at all: to me they’re always tied together because Yiddish is 70 per cent German. Yiddish has its roots in Middle High German and is a treasure trove for German philologists. Unfortunately, many attempts nowadays to revive the language have a sort of folkloric touch. There’s no serious critical analysis whatsoever, I don’t like that.

But what fascinates me is that East European Jews sought refuge in art. Despite hunger and fear for their lives – they knew there was no way back – they kept on writing: on little slips and scraps of paper. This will to leave something behind in the hope that it wouldn’t be destroyed so that the remembrance would be preserved for posterity.

Maybe that’s one reason why a people that was so often without a homeland did not disappear: this close, quasi-religious relationship to its language. The letter is holy.

Many of the songs and poems you interpret were produced in the ghettos in the abyss of the Holocaust and as a result many are only extant in fragments. You have only traces to go on. How do you go about hunting for these traces?

Gebojrn in a sajdn hemdl MP3, 1:28 min.

This hunt quite enthrals me. Sometimes I find just a little note somewhere. And then I think: Oh, there’s a song there that no-one sings. I need a song that I don’t understand at all at the outset. If a song is very easy it doesn’t interest me. After all, a song or a poem isn’t just a text. I try to put myself in the author’s shoes: I translate the poem into Hebrew, into German, so as to understand it better. I try to find out as much as possible about the lives of the authors who have disappeared, who were murdered. I look for photographs and rummage through libraries. Sometimes it takes months or even years till you find anything. It’s a huge undertaking.

Your new CD is entitled Reise von Wilna nach Jerusalem ["Journey from Vilna to Jerusalem"]. You retrace the lives of German and East European Jewish artists. Theirs were often forced journeys that left deep scars. But your CD also gives the impression of a new departure.

I begin in Vilna – Vilna was very Jewish – and go from there to Jerusalem. Every Israeli has a connection to Vilna, whether or not they’re aware of it. This is where Eliezer Ben Jehuda came from, the great Hebraist who modernized the Hebrew language and put out the first Hebrew dictionaries. The first edition, by the way, was printed by Langenscheidt in Berlin. You can’t explain history without showing the way there.

I also make a little jaunt to America, but that’s really just a side trip. The departure was often forced, of course, and often the wound never heals at all. I try to tell of these scars that people have. That’s quite clear in the case of Jehuda Amichai. To me he’s the most important Israeli writer. Amichai was born in Würzburg and was able to emigrate in time with his parents, in 1935. He was 11 years old and had a childhood friend, Ruth, who couldn’t emigrate. It was at the age of 75 that he wrote a poem for Ruth and I set this poem to music. In it he describes his feelings of guilt about surviving. His own agonizing ambivalence between remembering and forgetting is very powerfully expressed in one line of this poem: "And there’s a suitcase that comes back and vanishes again and returns." This ache and ambivalence stayed with him till his death.

You say the suitcase figures prominently in the work of Jehuda Amichai. It’s a symbol of loss and exile, but also of preservation. Do you open this suitcase at your concerts and let the audience peek inside?

Yes, the suitcase is both. At any rate also a symbol of the preservation of a bit of identity. But I really must stress that it isn’t my suitcase. It’s people’s personal suitcase that I try to look inside. I figure I’m allowed to look inside to examine what’s left. For then these people live on when we talk about them. That’s what I try to do at my concerts. I comment on every song and portray the author so the audience knows what it’s about. This is a way to tell a story in concert, and the audience experiences a great deal more than it would from a book. Singing is far more emotional.