Chava Alberstein - Foreign Letters

[Jewish Music Distribution <jmduk...>]

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Chava Alberstein

"Foreign Letters" : Bridging Worlds




'How do you pronounce your name in your country?/ Can you write it down for 
me?. I love foreign letters/ They are like drawings/ They are like secret 
signs/ From Magic places/ From Different worlds'




Chava Alberstein has been travelling, to different worlds, magic places, and 
then returning home again. "The last three years I have been singing outside 
Israel a lot. I think I needed some fresh air. Israel is the source of my music 
and like most artists I have an endless dialogue with those sources and with 
what Israel is. The country's complexities and contradictions are part of me 
because it is my homeland, part of me since my beginnings when I arrived there 
as a baby. But it can be very intense at home and on occasion you can feel a 
little suffocated by that atmosphere. So I have been working with musicians 
around the world whose concerns are sometimes similar but also different as 
they come from other places with other cultural contexts. It has been good to 
get away and then come back home again." 


'Foreign Letters' maps Chava's larger reflections on the last three years, 
through songs like 'Bikoret Darkonim' (Passport Control), 'A Heym' (Back Home) 
and the song Foreign Letters itself. The album breaks new ground as for the 
first time song lyrics move between Hebrew and Yiddish, Israel's two languages, 
juxtaposing reflective moods with the upbeat, intermingling Chava's own songs 
with musical settings she has composed for Hebrew and Yiddish poems.


If there is one song on 'Foreign Letters' that captures its' spirit, it is 'Oyf 
A Barg A Hoykhen' (High Atop A Mountain). With assertively plucked guitar and 
accordion flourishes, Chava's voice offers a melody with the catchy charm of a 
folk dance, for a poem written maybe 40 or 50 years ago by Kadia Molodowsky. It 
tells the story of two birds in two green trees with spreading branches at the 
top of a mountain.' One sings out at sunrise/ The other when its gone'. It is 
one of Chava's favourite songs, "I am in love with both birds and their songs. 
I like the happy crazy fun songs, sung at sunrise, and the nostalgic sad ones, 
mourning the passing of the day at sunset. It expresses the atmosphere of the 
album and the fact that for the first time ever I am singing songs in both 
Hebrew and Yiddish. In Israel, Hebrew is the song of the modern world, the song 
of the new-day, while singing in Yiddish is singing about the past." 


This complex mix of old and new is intrinsic to the album as it is to today's 
Israel. It's a first for Chava and a first for Israel to have an artist sing in 
both languages on a disc. And if people speak of the music of Chava Alberstein 
as standing for Israeliness, then it is for the richness and varied roots of 
that culture and her own.


Her setting of Ziame Telesin's 'Bletterfal' (Leaves Fall) calls on 
Mediterranean sounds, its cosmopolitan mood acknowledging the huge influence of 
French and Belgian chanson, notably seminal songwriters Jacques Brel and George 
Brassens, "People talk of me as another Joan Baez but it is not something I 
would call myself. As a child my father listened to classical music, my brother 
to jazz, and there was lots of European music in our house as well as all the 
music you find in Israel which comes from so many places in the Middle East, 
North Africa, all parts of Europe, Spain, Greece, even South America. 

There are as many sources as you find in a country of so many immigrants. In my 
teens Pete Seeger inspired me. But before that exposure to North American 
culture there was always for me the European chanson of Brasssens and Brel. 
They are my two cultural heroes." 


In many ways the lyrics of 'Leaves Fall' mirror the situation of the Yiddish 
language, "it's about different kinds of leaves in winter: some fall quickly, 
others are stubborn and hang on to the tree to the last moment and sometimes a 
lone leaf survives the winter. It's a beautiful image of life, a metaphor for 
the human situation. Yiddish as a language was the language of merchants and it 
has absorbed words from many languages in it - German, Romanian, Polish, 
Russian and much more. Yiddish enabled people to communicate across Europe. It 
has that pan-European flavour and came to symbolise the diaspora. It was the 
language of the Jews exiled for 2000 years. And it has hung on like the leaf in 
modern Israel" 


Chava gives a lilting dance feel to the music for Mikhl Wirth's Mirele, "This 
is what I like to do, to write songs that echo somewhere inside people, with a 
music they catch onto and remember. If you put 'le' on the end of a girls' name 
it's like saying 'little love': it makes it friendly and intimate. I found 
these words in an anthology of poetry and I fell in love with music inside 
them. Mirele is a shopkeeper's daughter who all her life shuns men until she is 
old and grey and realises too late what she has given up. It is sad but I think 
there is something proud there." 


Both words and music for 'Adisha' (Indifferent) are written by Chava herself. 
Upbeat and fast the music almost belies the power of the lyrics. 

"'Indifferent' is a protest song in a way. And it is far from indifferent! Many 
things in today's world make me angry, especially the indifference people show 
to issues from injustice to ecology. The basic tension in this song comes from 
using Hebrew word play, rhyming the word for 'diapers' (baby's nappies) with 
that for 'torture', because in Hebrew the word for both is very similar. One is 
sweet, evoking the image of the newborn baby, while the other introduces the 
frightening question of torture and how far will people go to get information 
they think they need from people they construe as their enemy. The song is a 
mixture comments on the priorities of those only interested in knowing the 
value of the money markets. The music is designed to draw people in and make 
that message thought provoking, not condemning anyone but trying to get them to 
think."


So how important can a song be Chava - can it change the world? "I always say 
that a song changes me. It changes my life to write it. The song comes to you. 
And maybe you can give hope and inspiration. I believe good art makes you a 
better person. It is the most important thing in life for me. I believe in art. 
I live for it. It is my religion in a way. It is not just the lyrics and music 
but the images they give, the energy, the feelings. I think artists are 
inspired they can be are like messengers, staying honest and true."


"It is like me singing in Yiddish which I used to do only privately. People 
associate Yiddish with the holocaust, when as a language it was killed with the 
many millions of people. With Israel, a miracle happened when Hebrew, the 
language of scholars, which had not been spoken for 2000 years, was re-born and 
came alive again. But it has meant that some people see Yiddish as the language 
of the weak, those who lost. Hebrew is preferred as the modern language of 
strength. But like others I think that Yiddish is alive and should be so 
publicly. 

Knowing and speaking Yiddish makes me richer as a person. I value both 
languages and the history and values they hold within them. If we want to 
eclipse one with the other, then what does it tell us? If we cannot live in 
peace with both, how can we make peace with our neighbours?"


Chava has composed music for Hebrew poet Arik Rudich's 'Al Ta'amini' (Liar). 
Its searing violins evoke a Hungarian-Romanian feel, while it deals with her 
subject is the need of women not to be naïve, of the possible betrayal of women 
by men, "It's an issue for women everywhere, how to trust and know who to 
trust. I have empathy with that." 






'Soolam' (The Ladder), her own ballad with its beautiful guitar and accordion 
partnership, takes up the theme of searching for happiness and success, and the 
many ways people do it, pushing onwards and upwards, up and on, but 'It's not 
easy, wait and see for yourself.' She concludes that while everyone has to make 
their own way, it might be better to 'stay together.' Her setting of Rachel 
Shapira's Hebrew poem is lyrical and ethereal, "I love this song. It's about 
friendship and trust and is the most romantic on the album. It's a picture of 
two lovers and their secret world where their passion has even the most fiery 
of animals awed and eating out of their hands." Has she then just fallen in 
love again? "No I always feel like this, all the time. It is love to me!" 


The meditative 'Gebet Fun A Meidel' (A Maiden's Prayer) is like a rock-lullaby. 
"You put the text in front of your eyes and things start to happen. This is 
what came out. It's a mixture of the sad and the strong. The words are a little 
naïve but there is something there of faith and looking for protection and that 
vulnerability has depth for me"


A nostalgic accordion and klezmer-like violin playing a slow dance frames the 
moving 'A Heym' (Back Home), sliding into a drum heavy rhythm with Chava 
singing in a Marlene Dietrich voice reminiscent of a Berlin cabaret, "Sometimes 
I cry when I sing this because of the complex sentiments. Someone may want to 
begin life again, simply and humbly get in touch with the life of their 
grandparents but they may be fearful and so their words can be taken either 
ironically or sincerely."


If Chava sheds tears singing 'Back Home', her listeners may be moved by the 
yearning in her voice for Karmi's 'Dimui' (Image) with its chamber ensemble of 
piano, guitar, 'cello and bass. "A Brazilian feel came here somehow when I had 
that image of the fishermen and life and death."


Her poignant final song, 'Foreign Letter', composed in English, returns to the 
knotty problem of language and communication. This time not the eclipsing role 
of Hebrew over Yiddish, but her exchanges as a world traveller, "When I sing to 
audiences abroad I explain something about my songs to them and I hope they 
understand me. Abroad people also ask me questions, mostly the same simple yet 
powerful questions and when you hear them from people in different places they 
become like the lines of a poem even though they are very basic exchanges. And 
that was how that song was born. Thinking of all those I have met and the 
dialogues we have had, "How do you say "love"? / In your language?/ Can you 
write it down for me? Oh how beautiful/ Can you say it one more time?/ Can I 
try too?/ Oh, How do you say "thank you?"' This serene serenade to her travels 
which have inspired these songs will undoubtedly change us as they have changed 
her, for as Chava says, "A song changes me, it changes my life to write 
it."(Jan Fairley)


Yours

Noa Lachman
Jewish Music Distribution
e-mail: jmduk (at) hotmail(dot)com
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