It’s the other national anthem, saying,
If you want to hear -
It says, “Bullshit!”…
It says: Listen
To the tune that keeps sounding
In the distance, on the outside,
Coming through the ground…
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in
To the ball park.
(Assassins)

Sandy Wilson, composer and lyricist, famously declared that Stephen Sondheim “destroyed the American musical almost singlehandedly. He’s turned it into a semi-operatic disquisition rather than an entertainment.” A brief survey of Sondheim’s catalogue, from the first concept musical Company (1970) with its lean view of marriage and flattened chronology, to Assassins (1990), a prickly but sympathetic account of eight American hit men (and women), suggests the composer and lyricist has indeed enacted a radical break with the unabashed good cheer of Oklahoma!’s “O what a beautiful mornin’’. More serious still, to challenge the form of that most American of theatrical celebrations—the Broadway musical—is apparently to challenge America itself. Yet a closer look at the so-called 1940s Golden Age of the musical comedy reveals Broadway’s tangled relationship with the American dream and a complex project of Jewish assimilation through the on-stage depiction of ‘outsiders’. Sondheim has been reticent about his heritage in interviews and commentaries on his work, but has noted an affinity with the outsider, stating “it’s obviously something I feel, belonging to two minorities”(being Jewish and gay). While Sondheim’s works often depict fragmented worlds that seem a far cry from the American creed, peopled as they are by the incompatible, dispossessed or unruly, his musicals do not perhaps disconnect with the musical’s Golden Age as much as Wilson feared: the Broadway “disquisition”on the outsider has been around for longer than might be expected. Just as the American musical of the 1940s began to redraw the boundaries of social inclusion, so Sondheim scores an alternative national anthem, for “the ones that can’t get in to the ball park.”

Sondheim had a formidable training. Oscar Hammerstein II became part-mentor, part-father to the ten-year old Sondheim, steering his young charge through a lively apprenticeship in musical theatre and remaining a close associate throughout Sondheim’s career. On graduating, Sondheim pursued a more classical musical education , studying with the infamous Milton Babbitt, composer of rigorous and complex serial and electronic music but also, as Sondheim later declared, an unlikely but “frustrated show composer”. Together they unpicked the Broadway canon, often spending the first part of composition classes absorbed in structural analysis of a Jerome Kern song. When Sondheim asked for guidance in moving towards atonal music, Babbitt reportedly told his student “you haven’t exhausted tonal resources for yourself yet, so I’m not going to teach you atonal.” From here, Sondheim identifies that “I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery.”

Sondheim’s “popular art” has nonetheless challenged audiences and critics alike, and his works have tended to be chameleon and acidic in their theme and realisation. Cutting his teeth as a lyricist on Bernstein’s genre-bending West Side Story (1957), Sondheim went on to create the so-called “concept musical” in 1970 with Company, a new approach to musical theatre driven not by plot development, but by the exploration of theme. Company was followed by a string of acclaimed but provocative works exploring topics from America’s cultural incursion into East Asia (Pacific Overtures, 1976), to revenge tragedy (Sweeney Todd, 1979); pointillism and the artistic process (Sunday in the Park with George, 1984) to the deconstructed fairy tale (Into the Woods, 1987). His work repeatedly confronts the power of the institution— be it marriage, justice, government or the happy ending— examining its grip on those individuals who are excluded, by choice or circumstance. It is a stance that has seen the composer branded a Broadway revisionist, allied, by certain commentators, with an earlier European school of politicised musical satire. Sondheim however firmly disassociates himself from the link (and what might be considered a certain cachet in the alliance):

“I’m not a Brecht/Weill fan and that’s really all there is to it. I’m an apostate: I like Weill’s music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before…. when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway.”

Indeed, Sondheim’s readiness to explore social exclusion is something he traces back not to Weimar cabaret but to the Broadway canon. In an oft-cited New York Times interview, Sondheim recalls a first teenage encounter with Roger and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945): “I remember how everyone goes off to the clam bake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing.” Sondheim goes on to explain why Carousel remains his one of his favourite musicals, “because it’s about a loner [Billy Bigelow] who’s misunderstood”. With a customary lack of sentimentality, later in the interview Sondheim dismisses his own remarks as “psychobabble”, but they make a striking statement and address the central subtext of much of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s output. It is perhaps only by looking more closely at the social history of the earlier Broadway musical, notably its part in Jewish assimilation in mid-twentieth-century America, that Sondheim’s contested role as Broadway torch bearer or incendiary grows clearer.

The Broadway musical comedy of the 1920s-50s has long been recognised as a Jewish-American creation (the popular scholarly roll call citing Jewish composers and lyricists Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Hart and so on), yet the distinct part played by the Broadway musical in shaping American sensibilities amid the marginalisation of Jews has been less widely acknowledged. As musicologist Andrea Most summarises in her work on Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), the story of Jewish acculturation in America and the development of the American musical are inextricable. As such, Broadway musicals not only secured a new entry point for Jews into American cultural life, but effectively set about reconstituting America’s understanding of itself. Rather than an entirely passive and circumscribing form of assimilation which flattened difference, Most proposes instead that “the Hollywood studio and the Broadway theater became sets on which Jews described their own vision of an idealized America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the white American community.”

The first Rodgers and Hammerstein hit Oklahoma! (1943) is a primary example of this re-imagining of American communality (albeit within limited parameters). Amid the musical’s new emotional and dramatic punch, Most suggests Oklahoma! sought to redefine the myth of the American West as an inclusive and shared homeland, notably through the musical’s depiction of Persian merchant, Ali Hakim. Popular and playful Hakim is welcomed into the rural community while standing as a thinly-disguised analogue of a Jewish immigrant, allied to the writers themselves: indeed, on the invitation to a first-anniversary party for the show, Hammerstein billed himself as “Mister Ali Hakimstein”. Musicologist Raymond Knapp’s account of Oklahoma! focuses less on Jewish assimilation in favour of outsider acceptance more generally, suggesting that Rodgers and Hammerstein depict the villain of piece, Judd Fry, with unlikely compassion. Judd is shown to share the same needs and desires as the community: “he is frugal and a hard-worker; he feels entitled, like all aspiring Americans, to what he feels he has earned” (including a parodic but affecting heroic operatic solo number). For Most, however, the nominal “Jewish” acceptance of Hakim into the community is predicated on his very contrast to Judd. The show effects this through a dual definition of otherness, with one determined by a transient, manageable ethnicity and the other by a threatening and necessarily-excluded racial difference. Where Hakim’s ethnic otherness is painted as acceptable through the merchant’s peaceful commercial interests Judd is allied with the stereotype of a purportedly threatening African American, lurking predatorily at the smokehouse (whereby smoked skin translates to black skin). The anxiety of difference is absorbed by the ominous Judd, leaving Hakim as safely but distinctively other.

Broadway’s interest in outsiders and the subtext of Jewish assimilation, where Jews may still display distinct ethnic markers while gaining admittance to mainstream America, is still striking. Indeed, the deployment of the “colour line” as an enabler in the acceptance of Jewish otherness chimes with historian Eric Goldstein’s account of changing incarnations of American Jewish identity across the twentieth century. Amid a forced racial paradigm that allowed only for categories of white and black in the first part of the century, the American Jewish community faced a conundrum. Goldstein describes how white Americans “often tried to suppress the troubling image of the Jew as they suppressed the distinctiveness of other groups—either by comparing them to blacks or predicting their speedy assimilation into white society.” Yet Goldstein notes how outsider status came to stand as an intrinsic, triumphant element of being Jewish, noting that “Jews from [Central and Eastern Europe] had come to see ‘apartness’ as one of the most salient aspects of Jewish identity.” Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was a position that became more tenable. As economic recovery took shape during the 1940s, Jews began to dissolve as a symbol of social anxiety and were welcomed as distinct, productive members of an apparently inclusive nation, as mirrored (and prefigured) in the Broadway musical. In turn, the Jewish American community steadily grew empowered to voice protest at the treatment of African Americans.

The attention and sympathy Sondheim offers society’s outsiders in his works both draws on and disrupts the Broadway legacy. In contrast to the racial agenda of 1940s Broadway, Sondheim’s ‘outsider’ definition is resolutely inclusive, while the notion that musical theatre performance idea that musical theatre can project an utopian community is subverted, if not fully revoked. Sondheim’s works create new kinds of communities, comprised only of ‘outsiders’. In turn, these musicals conjure new possibilities of belonging, both among those characters portrayed and on occasion, for the audience itself. It is the thoroughly modern message of multicultural society: we are all outsiders now.

This idea underpins much of Sondheim’s work. Just as Marta’s ‘city of strangers’ in ‘Another hundred people’ (Company) explores the difficulty of connecting in urban life, where ‘they meet at parties through the friend of friends/Who they never know’—the number also presents the possibility that the lost may ‘find each other in the crowded streets/And the guarded parks… [and] walk together past the postered walls/With the crude remarks.’ It is a vulnerable form of coming together, taking place amid a hostile urban landscape and outside the easy but false communality of the cocktail party. In Sweeney Todd, the musical chorus is re-imagined not as a single voice of commentary on the action but as a group of isolated and fractious individuals, scored with separate characters, lines, and action, nonetheless fused in Fleet Street’s bloody drama. Sondheim’s deployment of musical form is particularly effective in conveying this shared isolation. The angular ‘Bobby’ motif—part doorbell, part alarm-call—that darts through the cast at the opening of Company suggests something jarring and off-centre, but its repetition marks the intersection of the show’s dysfunctional community and comes almost to bind them. The waltzes that thread through A little Night Music (1973) not only evoke a mixture of nostalgia and suffocating etiquette, but connect the show’s otherwise isolated inhabitants: each are excluded from the union they wish for and so trapped in a variation of the same dance. It is a process mirrored in the very idea of the concept musical.

Central to the development of the concept musical, and Sondheim’s rendering of distance and collectivity, is the manipulation of time. While Sondheim is rightly famed as a master of character development, a number of his musicals nonetheless disrupt the work’s internal flow of time as a means of exploring of its theme. For Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the tale of a pushy and once successful Hollywood songwriter and his corroding friendships, the narrative is relayed entirely in reverse, while Follies (1971) dramatises a reunion between two decaying married couples, each party consumed by the memory of their younger self, and the musical closes with an “out of time” vaudeville finale, each of the cast lost to a glittering but ghoulish vision of the past. Both works seek to expose the falsity of nostalgia and the dangers of being driven by past hopes (and the consequences of refusing to confront the choices of the present). The cruel disruption of time within these musicals has a powerful effect on audiences too: the promise of closure and the pleasure of the musical finale is subverted. Sondheim, these musicals affirm, rejects the happy ending, in life and theatre. Yet, amid this fractured flow of time in many of his works (or its notional absence in Company), the works often reinforce a sense of wholeness through other theatrical means. As Joanne Gordon notes, Sondheim “develops a new lyric, musical and theatrical language for each work” and in doing so, he draws together worlds of crumbling chronology into unified and immersive musical experiences.

The new musical languages that Gordon describes are often an exploration of existing musical styles. As far as conjuring an array of other voices can be termed a signature, the slick pastiche has become Sondheim’s hallmark, prompting questions about his own sense of musical identity. While confident to outline his stylistic approach to text (see Sondheim’s collection of lyrics in Finishing the Hat (2010) which includes bold commentary on his own work and an often acerbic account of others’), speaking in 1997 Sondheim hesitates to describe his musical voice:

“I don’t know how I would describe myself because I’m so eclectic. People say they hear my style… I’m not sure—musically. I know there are certain chords I use over and over and over again… I write in a lot of styles, because I’m often imitating a milieu or something like that. And yet, people I respect say they can tell something of mine; and people I don’t respect say it. But I’m not sure I would recognise it… I recognise when they’re doing a takeoff of my music by using lots of wrong notes, and thick chords, and that sort of thing—I recognise what they’re parodying. But I’m not sure that I would recognise a piece of mine that I hadn’t heard before.”

These so-called “thick chords”—of layered sevenths, ninths and elevenths (“I like seventh chords. I live on seventh chords. Ravel gave us that gift”)—alongside chopped up, irregular rhythmic patterns and frequent hiccups in the pulse often mark Sondheim’s work as Sondheim. Yet for all the recognisably crowded harmonies of a work such as Passion (1994), there is Bounce (2003), governed by what Sondheim describes as simple, tonal key relationships and conventional 32- bar song structures. In this sense, Sondheim is a master of disguise, outside even his own tentative definitions of style. This rather ambiguous sense of musical belonging emerges later on as a source of tension. In Mark Horowitz’s 1997 interviews with the composer, Sondheim makes a surprisingly impassioned plea against the “anxiety of influence” and towards the recognition of his own musical voice:

“It was always very clear in [Leonard Bernstein’s] music where his influences are… You can hear the Copland. But you can hear Lenny! … I don’t care if you can hear strains of the other people. He has a voice. And that’s what you listen for in music, is a voice. Even if you hear where it is from. I’m eclectic the way Lenny was eclectic. But I’ve a voice. I’ve a voice.”

It is an odd assertion in the context of Sondheim’s diffidence. However, the composer is clear and confident on one element that makes his music tick: the notion of surprise, his principal advice for other music theatre composers being “don’t tell me something I already know. Let me hear a voice, and be surprised.” Indeed, Sondheim’s pastiche work is perhaps most distinctly Sondheim-like when it startles expectations, notably when it jolts the implied musical meaning of the source itself. His chameleon-like use of pastiche is largely ironic and subversive. He toys with the audience’s familiarity with an idiom by placing it alongside something jarring in character or theme: the music invites recognition which is then rapidly unsettled. The jolted audience is forced to grasp the new alignment and its often troubling message.

This shifting of signification happens throughout Sondheim’s work but perhaps nowhere more sharply than Assassins. The musical plays on a shared recognition of various American idioms—the cakewalk, hoedown, 1940s love ballad—and quotes canonic works of American patriotism, including the Presidential march “Hail to the Chief” and various Sousa marches. However, these triumphant musics become the medium to explore the motivations of America’s most notorious assassins. Following a vaudeville-like structure, the killers troop through American idioms in increasingly sinister settings: following his attempt on Roosevelt’s life, Giuseppe Zangara sings a Sousa-inspired number from the electric chair; while Charles G. Guiteau performs a cakewalk from the hangman’s scaffold (shortly after shooting President Garfield). Sondheim draws on the wholesome soundtrack of the American dream to speak up for the excluded, creating “another national anthem”, and implicates the audience in the action as he does so. As musicologist Jim Lovenheimer suggests in his study of Sondheim’s outsiders, the composer “leaves the audience with the act of assassination as a collective cultural memory that uncomfortably lingers.” In a final punch, the show’s finale sees the assassins turning their guns on the audience as a whole, completing the show’s ambiguous and disturbing attempt to create one community and alienate another. The preface to the show’s book includes an intriguing account of a couple leaving the original off-Broadway run: the man asked, “‘I liked it but who are you supposed to feel for?’ She replied, her eyes filled with tears, ‘Us. You’re supposed to feel for us.’”

Sondheim’s definition of “us” is some way from the cheerful collectivity of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s catalogue, where the chorus speaks as one and (almost) everyone is welcome. Sondheim’s work serves a new kind of agenda. It conveys an anti-assimilatory message but one that endorses the idea of community all the same. In a sense, Sondheim’s “us” is grounded in paradox, where the only true collectivity we can achieve in the modern world is predicated on a shared experience of being alone. It is a harsh message but ultimately affirming. Indeed, commenting on his lyrics for the finale of Company, Sondheim notes “what starts as a complaint becomes a prayer”: the show does not compromise its message that the human condition is a lonely one, but enables an alternative collectivity through this very acknowledgment: “I’ll always be there/As frightened as you/To help us survive/Being alive.”

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause.

In forming Tel Aviv’s first cabaret, Ha’Meiri and Koestler chose the name Ha’kumkum, from a Yiddish saying, ‘Don’t speak nonsense into the kettle.’ Ironically, the choice of name itself seems to indicate a permission to speak nonsense, and thus to disguise the Kumkum’s particular brand of aggression and judgment within humour and play.

The choice of Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem as the site of the Kumkum was an obvious one. Tel Aviv had already become a cultural centre, boasting Palestine’s first opera house, ballet and museum. The British presence was also much less obtrusive in the ‘first modern Hebrew city’. The British governmental offices were in Jerusalem and, though British soldiers could still be spotted walking the streets of Tel Aviv, they were usually there as tourists rather than as law enforcers. Cabarettists felt free to create biting political satire, without fearing undue disruption from the British censor. Moreover, the majority of Tel Aviv’simmigrant population were European and somewhat familiar with satiric cabaret. Tel Aviv’s cabarets, alongside a number of other performance genres, might never have succeeded without the 4th and 5th aliyahs, or mass immigrations to the Jewish settlement of Palestine; the 4th aliyah brought huge numbers of young eastern Europeans to Tel Aviv (such as Ha’Meiri), while the 5th brought German Jews to the city, together with their hard capital, affinity for Weimar cabaret and hunger for sophisticated nightlife.

Through its satiric cabarets, tel aviv offered the yishuv an outlet for its socially unacceptable emotions

In 1929, actors from Ha’Kumkum split from Ha’Meiri’s original troop and founded the Ha’metateh, which ran until 1952 and became the most popular ‘Teatron Ammami’ or folk theatre in Jewish Palestine. Usishkin, a highly respected Zionist leader, was said to have claimed,‘If I want to know what is going on in populist Israel, I simply go to the Metateh.’The songs of the Metateh were among the most well known of the period, and (after the founding of the first Israeli radio station, Kol Yisrael, in 1936) were played on the radio constantly. Many of them subsequently became part of the canon of Shirey EretzYisrael—the songs of the early State of Israel.

Subjects for satire included corruption in the munici- pality and tension between various ethnic groups in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine): for example the song Shir Hateymaniyot which Natan Alterman wrote in 1934 for the Metateh, based on a traditional Yemenite Shabbat song. In Alterman’s re-imagining of the song, a cleaner complains to the audience of her experiences scrubbing the floors of Tel Aviv’s municipality and interacting with the governmental officers who work there. At the opening of the song, she proclaims: ‘A fire burns in my eyes; in my body there’s a trembling. Don’t hate me because I am dark!’ with the Hebrew text echoing the Song of Songs.

Alterman’s cleaner goes on to sing about her scrubbing techniques and the constantly expanding city of Tel Aviv, all the time with a cleaning brush in her hand.While this caricature may have offended some, the female protagonist regales us with her attitudes in a loud, empowered, voice. Moreover, the song functioned as part of the larger cultural meeting taking place in theYishuv between various ethnic groups, a meeting in which the satiric songs of cabaret played an essential part.

Alterman was not the only cabaret writer who employed existent songs such as the Teymaniyot melody to new ends; composers such as Ha’meira, Wilensky, Ha’Roosi and others all did the same.This musical grafting technique is inherently satiric, creating a gap between the original song and the newly penned one, thus commenting on both the old version and the new. In the case of Shir Ha’teymaniyot, Alterman makes use of the traditionalYemenite melody to denote a new kind of Yemenite woman;she sings the same old religious melodies, but instead of singing them around the Shabbat table, she sings of Tel Aviv.

Songs targeting the British were encouraged—such as Tzik Tzik Boom/Zeh Lo Tov (It’s Not Good)—as well as songs which mocked the capitalist values of Tel Aviv. Titina, a 1932 satiric song by Chaim Chefer, is based on a Charlie Chaplin melody that the famous comedian performed in City Lights. In Chayim Chefer’s reimagining of the melody, a pioneer couple—Titina and Ephraim—are trying to find a home for themselves inside British Palestine. Ephraim is content to stay on the kibbutz, digging ditches and draining swamps, but Titina has other plans in mind. As a result of her constant nagging, the couple eventually set up shop in Tel Aviv, where they quickly make large amounts of money and surrender to a life of carefree, capitalist decadence. Of course, the Tel Aviv audience enjoying this mockery-in-song were, for the most part, people just like Titina and Ephraim. By laughing at these characters, they were also laughing at themselves.

Attending a cabaret became an ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire

Ha’kumkum and Ha’metateh’s satiric performances had clear boundaries in terms of subject matter. British censorship forbade the portrayal of Arab characters on stage and Jewish cultural constraints were equally strict; I challenge you to find a single cabaret song from 1930’s Tel Aviv which questions Zionism, or a song which upholds Yiddish or German as the real language of the Jewish state, or one which promotes life outside the Yishuv. I have also not encountered a single yearning or nostalgic song for a home left behind in Paris,Vilna, or Berlin. Such songs simply don’t exist in this repertoire, although they form an important part of the Yiddish Theater of the Lower East Side.

Moreover, the cabarets were limited by the injunction that they only perform in Hebrew. In some of the satiric songs and sketches there are snippets of Yiddish or German, as well as English—particularly when a British officer appears in a song. But aside from these interruptions, all sketch and song material was performed exclusively in Hebrew. Attending a cabaret became a kind of ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire.The challenge to write and perform exclusively in Hebrew tested the talents and ideological fervour of many a cabaret artist, most of whom arrived in the Yishuv with virtually no Hebrew. Even Ha’Meiri, who was well versed in Hebrew before arriving in Tel Aviv, could be found at times scribbling in Hungarian in the margins of a song or sketch. Sometimes he wrote new lines in his mother tongue, which would later be translated into Hebrew.

Though satiric cabaret material became hugely popular and much loved by the mid-thirties, it did have dissenters, particularly at the start. A 1976 article from the newspaper Al Ha’mishmar reflects back on the times, and writes: ‘Already in 1928 the Kumkum…was performing programs which angered critics and the establishment in general.’ By the heyday of the Metateh, however, the act of creating satire in the Yishuv had been assimilated into the mainstream, turning the act of satiric performance into an essential expression of Israeli identity. As Leah Goldberg reminds us: ‘This is the first time that the Jewish capacity for irony, which became a fixture of the exile, returns to its roots, healthy, deeply planted in the ground.’

Musing on the function of satire, scholar Friedrich Max writes:‘That satire is an attack is probably the least debatable claim that one can make about it. In such attacks we have on public display some of the least socially acceptable emotions: anger, indignation, frustration, right- eousness, hatred, and malice.’Through its satiric cabarets, Tel Aviv offered the Yishuv an outlet for its own socially unacceptable emotions: disillusionment, frustration, anxiety, and rage. Through the satiric expression of these emotions, presented on stage, Tel Aviv’s cabarets guided audiences, ultimately, towards a love of nation, language, and land.

Rebecca Joy Fletcher is New York City based playwright, actress, and cantor; she is also a scholar and perform of international Jewish cabaret. Recent achievements include: the hit one woman show Cities of Light, which has been touring cabaret venues and synagogues across the US, as well as venues in London, Paris, and Warsaw. Next fall the Piven Theatre in Chicago premiers the theatrical run of Cities. Rebecca guest lectures and teaches at universities around the world and serves as a Vice President of the Association for Jewish Theater. For the on-sight, archival research she’s done into Tel Aviv’s cabarets Rebecca is indebted to the assistance of the Confidence Foundation. www.RebeccaJoyFletcher.com

Sung by the Barry Sisters, and to audience guffaws at the mention of prostitution, ‘Ketzele Baroiges’ is a popular song from Eastern Europe. But I am English, a Yiddish folk singer recently turned London Yiddish song detective, and in scouring for Yiddish songs that make mention of London people, places and experiences, the subject of prostitution has come up repeatedly. Sometimes, as in ‘Ketzele Baroiges’, it is a comic aside but in other cases it describes a social reality, reflecting Jewish history in London.

After Tsar Nicholas II’s assassination in 1881, life for Jews in the Pale of Settlement became desperate. Terrorised by waves of pogroms and new legislation that prohibited them from living in the countryside, thousands left the shtetl for the city where they tried to find work. The only option was factory work, but Jews were largely unskilled in factory technologies, anti-Semitic factory owners were reluctant to employ them and many religious Jews could not combine factory hours with religious observance. Many chose to leave Eastern Europe and seek a better life in England and America.

On arrival in England, the majority of immigrants headed for the East End of London. There are no reliable figures, but at its peak in around 1915, this square mile housed up to 250,000 Jews. Not for nothing was it called the Jewish East End: whole streets were Jewish markets, there were Yiddish theatres and synagogues on every other street corner and an abundance of Yiddish newspapers and magazines. The existing Jewish community was concerned about the record influx of poor immigrants and how it would affect their standing in British society. The Rothschilds and other wealthy Jewish families built sanitary tenement blocks for hundreds of Jewish families, but many could not afford the high rents and were forced into renting only part of a room. Competition for jobs was tough and workers were poorly paid for long hours of hard, often dangerous work.

Morris Winchevsky’s song Di Dray Shvester is the story of three sisters who probably lived in the East End but worked in the West End, in Leicester Square:

Di yingster farkoyft dortn blumen

Di eltere, bendlekh tzi shikh

In speyt in der nakht tut zi kumen

Di drite vus handlt mit zikh

The youngest sold flowers, the next shoelaces and the eldest herself. The lyrics continue, ‘The younger sisters don’t hate the oldest sister, they hate di velt (the world) and di shtot, (the town) and di gas, (the street). Late at night when they come home, the shoelaces and flowers are mixed with their tears’.  Morris Winchevsky, a political activist was born in Lithuania in 1856. A socialist and atheist, he moved to Whitechapel where he lived for five years and co-founded the first Yiddish socialist newspaper, Dos Poylishe Yidl. According to Bill Fishman in East End Jewish Radicals:

Winchevsky’s distinctive style may be discerned throughout, with its regular alternating sweep from pathos to bitter irony in the traditional patois of the shtetl. He and his co-writers present the reader with a many-sided picture of immigrant life in the 1880s. Features included local, national and world news with political analysis and commentary; correspondence from the other great Jewish centre in Leeds and weekly dramatic criticism of the spiel at the Yiddish theatre. But above all was a didactic appraisal of the harsh conditions suffered by Jews, with practical suggestions for their amelioration.

The mass movement of Jews enabled Jewish criminals to take advantage of international links and develop, within an already established ‘white slave trade’, a trade in Jewish women. Conditions in Eastern Europe made this easy; waves of emigration had created a dearth of young men, leaving families open to seemingly suitable suitors.  Jewish traffickers would procure women under the pretext of marriage (often a secret stille khuppe that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law), offering girls greater economic ease and a better life in London (or the US, South America, and South Africa). Once there they would be sold to brothels or forced into prostitution, powerless to help themselves. They were easy victims: often from religious homes, they were innocent of worldly matters and unable to speak English.

The trafficking didn’t only take place abroad.  Fishman describes the men ready at the dockside to take advantage of unaccompanied young women:

…young men were employed to pick up lonely girls embarking at the dockside and inveigle them to a place of refuge, which soon revealed itself as a brothel …Virginity being regarded as sacrosanct before marriage, the fallen woman could find no redemption but to sink deeper into the morass of prostitution.

Jewish trafficking was an embarrassment to the Jewish community who wanted to keep it out of the media, particularly concerned it would be seized upon by anti-Semites (as indeed it was by journalist and agitator Arnold White, among others). The situation, however, was made public by organisations set up to protect and support the women such as The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). Set up in 1885 by women from leading London Jewish families, JAPGW set out to protect women and reduce the trade by publicising its existence and making communities aware of the dangers. Lloyd Gartner writes that as early as 1890 there were notices printed in Jewish newspapers on the continent ‘warning young girls from leaving their homes by the advice of strangers or under the care of strangers’. The JAPGW made their presence felt at the dockside, boarding ships to find women travelling alone or with male non-family members.  They would escort women to their addresses, and if these addresses were suspicious, they would offer protection. Criminologist Paul Knepper credits the JAPGW as ‘the most visible Jewish anti-crime organisation in Great Britain and the model for initiatives in Jewish communities across the world’.

Although the East End was London’s largest Jewish community, the sisters in Winchevsky’s song go to the West End to work. Soho, a notorious area for prostitution, was a wealthier area with businessmen and foreign visitors. Writer Bernard Kops, in his memoir The World is a Wedding, recalls the kindness of his neighbour in the 1930s:

A woman who lived nearby sometimes brought us in potatoes. She worked ‘Up West’ my mother told me —‘Up West’ was that fabulous world beyond, our Eldorado. It was only years later that I guessed what sort of work the woman did — for who in the buildings could afford to give their neighbours potatoes in those days?

I learned Dray Shvester at London Klezfest in 2006 from Karsten Troyke, a charismatic German Yiddish folk singer who found the song on a 1961 recording by the Buenos Aires Yiddish actress Cipe Lincovsky. I later learned from Cipe that Helene Weigel (widow of Bertolt Brecht and then director of his theatre) gave her the lyrics. According to Weigel, Brecht loved the song because the sisters do not judge their sister but blame society for forcing her into prostitution.

According to the elderly Jewish Londoners I interviewed, girls were vulnerable up until as late as the 1940s and warned not to enter the Jewish gown shops in Oxford Street, as they could ‘take you into the back room and sell you to the white slave trade.’ Not all Jewish East End prostitution was a result of white slave trafficking. There were times when wome became prostitutes of their own volition, supplementing their tiny incomes when necessary. Historian Lara Marks has recounted how frequently a Jewish woman would follow her husband to London only to find he had disappeared or started a new family, leaving her an agunah, a deserted wife, unable to get the divorce needed by Jewish law as it had to be given by the husband. The Jewish charities would pay to track down the husband, but not to support the wife. Whichever way Jewish women turned, they met with discrimination.  As they lacked charitable support and were faced with a menial existence in the labour market, prostitution could seem an attractive alternative. German Jewish feminist movement, the Judischer Frauenbund, in 1904, considered prostitution as a non-choice, akin to the ‘voluntary-ness’ of a young foreign legionnaire who had no idea what he was getting himself into. Pappenheim became an outspoken activist in the fight against the white slave trade. Historian Marion Kaplan describes the attitude of the Judischer Frauenbund to the enslaved women, whether enslaved by pimps or by poverty.

She writes:

It was not unusual for Jewish feminists to view prostitutes as white slaves even if no traffickers were implicated. One Judischer Frauenbund member pointed to inadequate housing or to poverty as ‘the real trafficker’.

But comic songwriters often bypassed reality, turning instead to escapism and humour. The song Victoria Park is set in a park just north of the East End dubbed the ‘lungs of London’ when it opened in 1850. In his famous novel ‘Children of the Ghetto’, Israel Zangwill describes it as ‘the park to the ghetto’ where Eastenders would flock on shabbes and holidays. The song portrays an assortment of curiouys characters hanging around the park. Yudke and Rachel, he with one shoe and she with one sock, immigrants looking for a job, a thick necked porter, red Benny and poxy Fanny. And amongst these characters we have a rousing chorus of:

Dort geyt Khay’ite a moyd fun Lite / Zi iz di drite, zi voynt in City.

There goes Khayite from Lithuania, she is the third, lives in the City.

This has double meanings similar to Kops’ ‘Up West’, and when Bertha Jackson sang this song, she interpreted this line as a euphemism for working as a prostitute. Jackson, who was born in Liverpool in 1888, learned the song at the age of eight from her uncle, a travelling salesman. Eighty-two years later, Derek Reid, poet and folklorist, recorded her singing the song, which must date back to some time before 1897. To underline this point, the melody of the chorus is is a famous square dance called Little Redwing, whose lyrics are coarse, graphic and misogynist.

An old ex-Eastender friend chanted to me, at full speed, as if he was davening, the words to the comic song, Sadie iz a Lady. It builds an idyllic picture of shtetl life and then relocates to East Stepney:

East Stepney, East Stepney, vu di libe iz tzebrent Un yeder Sadie iz a lady, un yeder Sam a gent East Stepney, East Stepney where love has burned, and every Sadie is a lady and every Sam a gent.

The line ‘Sadie is a lady and Sam a gent’, implies an upward mobility, but the rhyme coming after the first line exposes it as another coy allusion to prostitution, with the double entendre adding the comic twist. The rhyme ‘Sadie’ and ‘Lady’ was often used in songs such as Mayn Fair Sadie (a parody of ‘My Fair Lady’) and Johnny Bond’s 1961 country song, Sadie was the Lady. There is Barbara Streisand’s 1964 Sadie, Married Lady from the musical ‘Funny Girl’. John Farnham in 1967 sang Sadie Cleaning Lady (with dancing cleaning girls, rabbit tails and mini-aprons). But most important, with film versions in 1932 and 1953, is the 1930 Somerset Maugham story of a prostitute, Sadie Thompson.  The name Sadie, popular in the East End, sometimes a nickname for Sarah, had associations for Eastenders I interviewed, including a song sung to me by Ruth:

Sadie was a lady, and all the money was spent. She spent

it here, she spent it there…

A ‘Sadie’ was described as a ‘yachne’, a ‘busybody’, a ‘right Jewish girl’, an ‘outcast woman’, a ‘woman going off the rails’. Solly, a 95-year-old ex-tailor, explained that ‘Sadie’ was used as a nickname for a fellinghand, the lowest woman in the clothing industry who would sew buttonholes.  These songs reveal a hidden social history, one missing from the more formal accounts of East End Jewish life. Through their informal, often humourous, descriptions, these songs confer a lost dignity on their subjects while shining a light into the darker recesses of Jewish life in the East End. Yiddish songs and Jewish prostitution may seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet through their wry humour, intense sadness, and anger, these songs brought Jewish audiences face to face with their own hardship in a typically bittersweet celebration.

References:

Bristow, Edward . J. Prostitution and Prejudice: Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870 – 1939. (1982) Clarendon, Oxford Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals 1875 – 1914.  (1975) London: Duckworth.

Gartner, Lloyd P. Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914 in Association of Jewish Studies Review (1982), 7 : 129-178 Cambridge University Press Kaplan, Marion. Prostitution, Morality Crusades and Feminism:

German-Jewish Feminists and the Campaign Against White Slavery in Women’s Studies International Forum (1982)

Knepper, Paul. British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire in The British Journal of Criminology (2007), 47(1): 61-79.

Kops, Bernard. The World is a Wedding. From By the Waters of Whitechapel (2006)

Marks, Lara, ‘Race, Class and Gender: The Experience of Jewish Prostitutes and Other Jewish Women in the East End of London at the Turn of the Century’, in Women, Migration and Empire, ed. Joan Grant (1996) 31-50 Trentham books Zangwill, Israel. 1892 Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People.

Klezmer Klub’s CD ‘Whitechapel, mayn Vaytshepl – Yiddish songs of London’ www.klezmerklub.co.uk

Vivi Lachs is the singer with the band Klezmer Klub. She is researching Yiddish songs of London and the social histories they contain.  She gives illustrated talks, concerts and also leads Klezmer dancing at simchas. She studies Yiddish and Her real job is working in education in Hackney.

Anyone knowing a Yiddish song about any aspect of London or England, however small, please email vivilachs@gmail.com

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

Dylan’s echoing of this encounter between G-d and Moses also references the ‘I-Thou’ theology of Martin Buber, to whose work Dylan was reportedly introduced years earlier by his manager, Albert Grossman. The song paints a bleak portrait of absolute alienation: the narrator is alone even when he’s with a sleeping lover (‘if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk/ I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was’); he goes out for a walk and concludes ‘Not much happenin’ here/ Nothin’ ever does’ and sees a train platform ‘with nobody in sight’; and he contemplates the end of the world (‘The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right’). Yet through all the emptiness he perseveres—‘I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part’—towards the world, holding on to Buber’s teaching, ‘One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.’

Consciously or not, Bob Dylan’s use of the modes of Jewish prophetic discourse as one of his primary means of communication, determine not just the content of his songs but also his style of delivery, which is closer to declaiming rather than melodic singing. The vocals on his live albums from the 1970s (Before the Flood, Hard Rain, and Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue) are positively stentorian, underscoring his relationship to his audience, whom he never wooed but chided and provoked: You who philosophise, disgrace, and criticise all fears Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears.  (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’)

‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,’ he sings in ‘Positively 4^th Street,’ addressed to the folk music traditionalists who first called him one of their own. Going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, playing commercial country music on Nashville Skyline and releasing a double album of cover songs mischievously titled Self Portrait are just a few examples of Dylan’s propensity to subvert his relationship with his fans in order to jar them from their complacency, like a Biblical prophet. Throughout his career, whether singing about racial injustice in ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Hurricane,’ Cold War anxieties in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Masters of War,’ the treatment of Vietnam War veterans in ‘Clean-Cut Kid,’ or corrupt politicians in ‘Political World’ and ‘The Disease of Conceit,’ Dylan has repeatedly returned to that same prophetic tradition to infuse his songs with a measure of impact and dignity that so obviously sets his work apart from other singer song writers of the rock era. Bono, the singer of the Irish rock band U2 and himself a strong believer in a type of Christianity with ancestral Jewish roots, understands this about Dylan. ‘[Dylan’s] was always a unique critique of modernity,’ he writes. ‘Because in fact Dylan comes from an ancient place, almost medieval… The anachronism, really, is the ’60s. For the rest of his life he’s been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not . . .’

One of the most rewarding ways of approaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics is to read them as the work of a poetic mind immersed in Jewish texts and engaged in the age-old process of midrash: a kind of formal or informal riffing on texts in order to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings. Perhaps the most famous of these riffs takes place in one of Dylan’s best-known songs, 1965’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ his whimsical retelling of the Akeidah, the story of the binding of Isaac, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters.

G-d said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’

Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’

G-d said ‘No.’

Abe said, ‘What?’

G-d said ‘You can do what you want, Abe But the next time you see me co min’ you better run Abe said, ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’ God said, ‘Out on Highway 61.’

U.S. Route 61, incidentally, is the main highway leading from New Orleans to Dylan’s birthplace of Duluth, Minnesota, where he was born to a man named Abram.

In 1982, Dylan’s son Samuel became bar mitzvah in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter, Dylan’s earnest prophetic style gave way to a hardline Zionism that suffused the 1983 album Infidels, with a sleeve featuring Dylan overlooking the Old City.  The song ‘Neighbourhood Bully’ defends Israeli aggression with little regard for the plight of the Palestinians :

Well, the neighbourhood bully, he’s just one man

His enemies say he’s on their land

They got him outnumbered about a million to one

He got no place to escape to, no place to run

He’s the neighbourhood bully

Coming as it did in the wake of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, this strongly nationalistic identification with Jewish peoplehood and land did not endear Dylan to those still on the Left. Neither did the song ‘Union Sundown’ on the same album, whose chorus appeared to be a critique of organised labour :

Well, it’s sundown on the union

And what’s made in the U.S.A.

Sure was a good idea

’Til greed got in the way.

A scathing review in New York City’s Village Voice, dubbed Dylan ‘the William F. Buckley of rock and roll,’ in reference to the founding editor of the conservative journal, the National Review. For many, it seemed, the one-time ‘voice of a generation’ had turned into a right-wing crank, a Bible-thumping, washed-up relic of the sixties. Dylan’s album sales plummeted to an all time low and where they remained for much of the 1980s, when he seemed, at best,irrelevant or, at worst, pathetic.  In the final year of the decade, however, Dylan returned with one of the strongest albums of his career. Oh Mercy reflects a mind steeped in a Jewish worldview and one whose creative vision prompted what became his Never Ending Tour. This tour has been going on for over two decades and, at nearly 70, Dylan continues to play around one hundred concerts each year. ‘Everything Is Broken’ portrays the Kabbalistic concept of a world in a state of disrepair, and ‘Political World’ includes a vivid description of Kiddush HaShem, the religiously inspired martyrdom of those who were dying in Auschwitz around the time Dylan was born.  When Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 1991, the focus of his acceptance speech was a passage that astute listeners recognised as a paraphrase of Psalm 27, the prayer based upon notions of repentance that lie at the heart of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. Dylan, it seemed, was transmitting a coded message to those who may have thought he had forsaken them. Why else accept a Grammy Award by paraphrasing a Jewish prayer written by Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, the spiritual leader of traditional German Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century?

Dylan has continued to find inspiration in Jewish scripture in recent years. His 1997 Grammy Award–winning album, Time Out of Mind, is a catalogue of regret and reflections on mortality (released shortly after his recovery from a near fatal heart infection); ‘I was born here and I’ll die here against my will,’ he sings in ‘Not Dark Yet’, paraphrasing Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnah 4:29): ‘Against your will you were born, against your will you die.’ The same album’s opening track, ‘Love Sick,’ borrows its unusual central complaint from King Solomon’s love poetry as expressed in Song of Songs 2:7:

‘[Bereft of your presence], I am sick with love’ or, to put it more succinctly, as does Dylan, ‘I’m sick of love… I’m love sick’, the cry of an aging lonely man who engages with other people only when he takes the stage for one of his concerts on the Never Ending Tour.

In recent years, Dylan has been spotted at Yom Kippur services, typically at whatever Chabad synagogue he finds himself near as he tours the world. The central imagery of the concluding Neilah service, that of a penitent standing at a gate, praying to be written into the Book of Life before the doors are shut, finds its way into Time Out of Mind’s ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’:

Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore I’ve been walking that lonesome valley Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

Knocking on heaven’s door may not be unique to Bob Dylan, but the Neilah reference undoubtedly is, and it frames his own late work within a Jewish context of sober reflection and repentance.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner), from which this essay has been adapted.

Please visit him on the web at www.dylanprophet.com

It peaked in particularly dramatic fashion just before the Russian Revolution. Less than 5 percent of the total Russian population at that time, Jews numbered over 50 percent of the students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, a demographic feat that produced its own commentary. Students joked that it was the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students. In Odessa the situation reached a point of absurdity. With over 80 percent of the student body Jewish, in 1916 the Conservatory officials reacted by launching a novel affirmative action scholarship program for ethnic Russians. Of course, Jewish visibility in a bitterly antisemitic regime had an obvious downside. Charges of Jewish opportunism were common, particularly since a conservatory degree provided a draft deferment and a legal pathway out of the Pale of Settlement. Professional antisemites, such as the music critic Emil Medtner, a leading member of the Russian symbolist movement, spoke darkly of a plague of ‘little Jew boys from Lodz’ ruining Russian and European music with their ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarous’ ways. Even well-meaning friends were liable to resort to specious racial explanations for the preponderance of Jewish musical talent. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once declared that without Jews, ‘music would die out.’ Yet, he went on to explain that this talent stemmed from the biologically feminine character of the Jewish race, which predisposed them to more sensitive, lyrical instruments: ‘For an orchestra to sound right,’ he confided to a colleague, ‘it must have no less than 15 percent Jews in the string and horn sections.’

To explain the special relationship between Russian Jews and music we must return to the man who invented the modern classical music profession in Russia: Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). Though his name is barely remembered today (and often confused with an equally great pianist of no relation: Artur Rubinstein), in the second half of the nineteenth-century Rubinstein stood virtually without equal as a pianist in Europe, considered by many as the sole successor to Franz Liszt. His colourful, titanic personality and prodigious musical feats inspired George Eliot to write him into Daniel Deronda, in thinly-veiled form, as Herr Klesmer, the symbolic centrepiece of the novel. Born in a shtetl near Berdichev and baptized as an infant, he grew up in Moscow and Berlin. The result was a quintessential European Jewish cosmopolitan, who summed up his own fate thus: ‘To the Jews I am a Christian. To the Christians, a Jew. To the Russians I am a German, and to the Germans, a Russian. For the classicists I am a musical innovator, and for the musical innovators I am an artistic reactionary and so on. The conclusion: I am neither fish nor fowl, in essence a pitiful creature.’
Rubinstein was not only prone to grand statements; he also sought grand solutions to his life’s dilemma. He dreamed up the Russian conservatory as an instrument of artistic emancipation for Jews and Russians alike. His quest to liberate classical music in Russia from its ancien regime legal shackles and Slavic provincialism took a decisive turn in 1862, when he opened the St. Petersburg Conservatory. From its founding, the school enjoyed a reputation as a particularly liberal and tolerant Russian educational institution. And it proved extremely popular with Jews. In the five decades before 1917, they flocked in increasingly large numbers to St. Petersburg and other music schools across the Russian Empire. To these thousands upon thousands of young Russian Jews, music beckoned as a path to European enlightenment and Russian citizenship, crucially one which didn’t demand an abandonment of their Jewishness. Music’s secular universalism required no grappling with dogmatic questions of belief. Nor did it insist on an existential choice about the proper language of expression, the recurring problem for Jewish writers. Besides this cultural neutrality, music’s appeal also stemmed from its continued accessibility as an educational option. When in the late 1880s the Tsarist authorities introduced quotas at universities and institutes to staunch the growing influx of Jews into Russian society, the St. Petersburg Conservatory—along with many of its sister schools around the empire—successfully staved off the new restrictive policy. Women were admitted in equal numbers as well, in stark contrast to almost every other university-level institution in Russia.
That this thin cordon of liberalism prevailed at all is remarkable given its cultural setting. For nineteenth-century Russian music was otherwise a seething cauldron of nationalist brio. However sentimentally we may like to remember the great Russian composers for their Romantic souls and rebellious spirits, many were also unabashed Slavic chauvinists and rabid antisemites, including the likes of Modest Mussorgsky and Mili Balakirev. Before the St. Petersburg Conservatory had barely opened, let alone admitted Jewish students in noticeable numbers, it was loudly attacked as a ‘synagogue’ run by one Rabbi ‘Rebenstein,’ a place where foreign ‘Yankels’ incapable of composing their own national art simply imitated and corrupted Russian music. Russian antisemites continued to voice this canard with increasing volume across the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. More striking, however, is the fact that after 1900 Jews also began to ask whether perhaps the antisemites were correct in their claims. The strange fact of the preponderance of Jewish musicians coupled with the ostensible dearth of Jewish classical music led even Jewish nationalists to lament that Jews had failed to grow their own musical garden. As one St. Petersburg critic wrote at the time, ‘They say that we Jews are the most musical nation, that the violin is our national instrument; we have given the world composers of genius; we have more professional musicians among us than any other people . . . . And at the same time, you will hardly find another nation whose national music has been so much neglected as ours.’
In 1908, a group of St. Petersburg Conservatory Jewish students took it upon themselves to rectify this problem. Their solution was to launch a new organisation known as the Society for Jewish Folk Music. The idealistic collective soon spawned a Jewish national musical movement that spread rapidly across Russia. Its leaders constituted the pride of Russia’s younger generation of composers:
Mikhail Gnesin, Moisei Milner, Joel Engel, and Alexander Krein. Disciples of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, friends and rivals of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, these young composers envisaged a modern Jewish music capable of standing alongside the grand national schools of Germany, Russia, Hungary, and Italy. Drawing on the rich folk sources of Ashkenazi Jewry—Hasidic nigunim, Yiddish songs, klezmer dance melodies, and the like—they forged a repertoire of Yiddish lieder, chamber works, choral arrangements, symphonies, and operas.
In the turbulent decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Jewish composers of Russia pursued their national mission. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, they formed nonprofit publishing concerns to disseminate their music virtually for free. They sponsored lectures, concert tours, and large-scale outdoor symphony performances, even as World War I raged on around them. And like all the great European Romantics before them, they worshipped at the altar of authentic folkpeople. Hauling primitive phonographs around the Pale, these Russified musicians raced to save the melodies and lyrics of Yiddish-speaking Jews as the world of the shtetl rapidly eroded. Their nostalgic devotion to folklore was matched, however, by a quintessentially modern impulse of reinvention. To save Jewish folk music meant uprooting it from its native cultural terrain. Once isolated, the ‘frozen folk songs’ could be freely recast along modern harmonic and rhythmic lines. More often than not, it was the stylistic conventions of Russian classical music—the late Romanticism of Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, and Taneev, the impressionistic modernism of Scriabin—that formed the template for this new genre of Jewish classical music. If Jewish music looked to Russian music for inspiration, the reverse also held true. For one of the most intriguing aspects of the Russian-Jewish musical encounter was the cultural infusion of Yiddishkayt into the heart of Russian classical music. There were, of course, the early flirtations with Jewish folk melodies on the part of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and even Glinka, part of their wider foray into Oriental exoticism. But ironically it was during the Soviet period that the sounds of Yiddish folk song and klezmer interpenetrated furthest into the aesthetic fabric of Soviet classical music. The trend began after 1917, as Krein, Gnesin and other Jewish compatriots initially received a surprising degree of recognition and support from the Bolshevik state for their Jewish symphonies, folk song collections, and related endeavours. The best example of this phenomenon is found in the famous friendship between the Soviet Union’s greatest composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), and his Jewish doppelganger, Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996). Their relationship reveals the depth of the Jewish imprint on the Russian musical imagination. Shostakovich’s biographers have all puzzled over why this ethnic Russian composer, so sensitive to the Bolshevik political winds, suddenly decided in the mid-1940s to start writing Jewishthemed music. The answer lies in the story of his wartime friendship with a younger Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland. During World War II, Weinberg, son of a Warsaw Yiddish theatre composer, sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The two men met in 1943, and from that point on were virtually inseparable. Weinberg came to Shostakovich as a young composer and quickly adopted some key features of Shostakovich’s musical style as his own, particularly the distinctive admixture of modernist textures and folk idioms. At the same time, Shostakovich found in Weinberg’s Jewish background a captivating source of inspiration. From the mid-1940s onward, he began to insert Yiddish melodic inflections, pulsating klezmer rhythms, and Jewish programmatic elements into his works. Over the next few years, both men produced a body of Jewish-themed music, including hauntingly similar settings of Yiddish poetry.
The relationship between Weinberg and Shostakovich was so close and continuous that scholars have often wondered who inspired whom. A case in point is their respective ‘Holocaust’ symphonies. Shostakovich’s 1962 Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled ‘Babi Yar,’ and Weinberg’s 1963 Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the ‘Jewish Violin’ represent two of the most searing musical memorials ever created. Remarkably similar in form and theme (both are five-movement choral symphonies in A minor, with the last three movements performed without interruption), they also constitute parallel portraits of the intertwined history of Russians and Jews. Taken together, the works reveal how resilient and entrenched Jewish musicality remained—as cultural symbol and social reality—in Soviet culture. Indeed, Shostakovich’s symphony, which commemorates the 1941 Nazi massacre of 33,000 Jews on Soviet soil, features one of the most provocative lines to emerge from the mouth of a modern Russian artist. At the end of the first movement, the narrator declares, ‘No Jewish blood runs through my veins, but I feel the corrosive hatred of the antisemites as if I were a Jew, and that is why I am a true Russian!’ Weinberg’s work repays the favour by combining Yiddish and Russian poetry to extol the universal, redemptive power of music, underscored by a dynamic third movement of surging rhythms and violin effects that summon up both the klezmer tradition and the somewhat similar scherzo movement in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. The Russian-Jewish musical encounter encapsulated in the friendship of Shostakovich and Weinberg is all the more compelling given the virulent antisemitism and Stalinist terror that overshadowed the middle decades of the twentiethcentury. From the outset, Soviet officials vacillated between the contradictory policies of promoting Jewish music and denying its existence. So too did the statistical predominance of Jews in Soviet classical music prove to be an embarrassment among Communist Party apparatchiks determined to put a proper ethnic Russian face on Soviet culture. The Stalinist anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the 1940s attempted to solve this problem once and for all. Bolshevik cultural officials produced detailed ‘exposeÅLs’ of the Jewish numbers in music, absurdly framed as a Zionist threat to Communist rule. Less laughable were the purges. Stalin’s ‘silent pogrom’ began in 1948 with the murder of actor Solomon Mikhoels, who happened to be Mieczysław Weinberg’s father-in-law and the person responsible for introducing him to Shostakovich. Soon other composers and musicians began to be rounded up. Weinberg’s turn came in February 1953, when he was arrested and accused of a secret CIA-funded plot to launch a breakaway Jewish Republic in the Crimea. Weinberg’s possession of a Jewish liturgical music anthology was taken as proof of his intent to launch the would-be Jewish Republic’s national conservatory along bourgeois, imperialist, and, of course, Zionist lines. Only Stalin’s death a month later ended the anti-Jewish campaign and spared Weinberg his life.
How far did Stalin intend to go in his repression of Soviet Jewry? Even with the benefit of hindsight and tantalising glimpses at formerly secret Soviet archives, it is difficult to say. One thing, however, is clear. In the case of Soviet music, he would have faced a formidable challenge in attempting to disentangle Russians and Jews. Stalin’s own favourite singer was Leonid Utesov, another native Jew of Odessa, who introduced jazz to the Soviet Union and klezmer to Russian popular song. His favourite pianist was Maria Yudina, whose recording of Mozart’s piano concerto (made in the middle of the night after Stalin heard a live radio broadcast and requested the disc be brought to him) was said to be spinning on his record player at the moment of his death. And the prestige of Soviet culture abroad depended in large part on the greatness of genius talents such as David Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan, and Emil Gilels. Year after year, these soloists were trotted out around the world to perform the Russian classics and burnish the Cold War reputation of Soviet culture as a repository of urbane European humanism.
Just as in the Tsarist era, individual Jewish fame did little to resolve later Soviet Jewish vulnerability. But it did suggest the fundamental embeddedness of Jews inside Russian culture. Political, religious, and ethnic outsiders, perennial scapegoats of the regime, Jews nevertheless emerged over time as remarkable cultural insiders and nowhere was this more obvious than in the musical realm. Music was not necessarily less political a cultural arena than literature or visual art in Tsarist and Soviet times. But its political import was not as immediately explicit, its ideological valences less transparent. Even at the most politically delicate moments therefore, the subject of Jewish musicians was somehow less fraught and more palatable to the authorities. Hence nineteenth-century Tsarist bureaucrats sometimes declined to enforce educational quotas on Jewish musicians by reference to the benign character of music (as opposed to commerce and law). Or the notoriously antisemitic, reactionary official who in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 legally approved the formation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, noting with fondness how he had once heard klezmer music at a Jewish wedding in Odessa.
In fact, all roads eventually led back to Odessa. It was there that the intertwined dreams of Jewish musical fame and Russian liberal cosmopolitanism were born. Even at the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR, when the political freedom of Soviet Jewry had become a subject of international controversy, the old Jewish musicians of Odessa still beckoned as a nostalgic symbol of the shared cultural past that linked East and West. Witness the famous quip of Russian-born violinist Isaac Stern, who summed up the entirety of Soviet-American cultural diplomacy in the simplest terms: ‘They send us their Jews from Odessa and we send them our Jews from Odessa.’ Isaac Babel could not have said it better.

Now an international phenomenon, the orchestra began life as a small-scale series of music workshops, put together in 1999 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. As part of Weimar’s programme of ‘Cultural Capital of Europe’ events, Barenboim was asked to establish a workshop to bring together young musicians from across the Middle East. With the support and interest of Said, Barenboim invited applications from players in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The response was overwhelming. Speaking at the 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim recounts:
‘We expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone.’ Twenty-five young musicians attended, alongside a number of established, high-profile performers including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The workshops comprised chamber music lessons and master classes, and an orchestra that performed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The name West-Eastern Divan was given, chosen after Goethe’s 1819 collection of poems (the Westöstlicher Diwan) inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz.
The Weimar ‘experiment’, as Said and Barenboim termed the first workshop in Parallels and Paradoxes, was expressly not designed as ‘an alternative way of making peace’. Rather, Said suggested, ‘the idea was to see what would happen if you brought these people together to play in an orchestra in Weimar, in the spirit of Goethe, who wrote a fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam.’ Said held that, just as Goethe’s poetry entered into an open dialogue with a cultural ‘other’, so such a workshop enabled participants to explore and traverse those boundaries engendered by difference in nationality, background and political stance: ‘no one felt under any pressure to hold things back. And since the groups were so miscellaneous, both animosity and cordiality were almost always in evidence.’ Barenboim likewise views the venture as creating a new channel of communication and cooperation between assumed antagonists. Speaking in his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim states categorically that ‘the orchestra cannot bring peace.’ However, he proposes it can ‘bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy.’ Music, and specifically the orchestral experience, is celebrated as the ideal vehicle for open interaction. On describing a young Syrian and young Israeli musician sharing a music stand, Barenboim suggests ‘they were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow. They were trying to do something together, something about which they both cared… Well, having achieved that one note, they can’t look at each other the same way, they have shared a common experience.’
The potency of this image and its accompanying rhetoric—young Arab and Israeli musicians working as one, letting music soar across political adversity—was not lost on the orchestra’s European hosts. What had been created as a one-off workshop was quickly established (and funded) as a touring orchestra, formed of up to 120 permanent players, drawn from across the Middle East—Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—and other Muslim countries including Egypt, Iran and Turkey. Since 2002, the regional government of Andalusia has sponsored the group and provides a fixed base for the orchestra in Seville, a development that has led to the inclusion of young Spanish musicians in the ensemble. The orchestra now meets each summer and rehearses in the city before launching an international tour, which often includes live television broadcasts, stadia appearances and recording deals. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s blend of musical excellence and apparently humanitarian vision has proved a heady mix for liberal European audiences, provoking intense, proselytising excitement among commentators. In response to the orchestra’s various BBC Proms appearances over the past seven years, UK critics have praised the group with a particularly emotive quality of endorsement. Reviews have applauded the orchestra as an ‘astonishingly moving act of creative coexistence’, claiming ‘there is an extra power of passion and motive, of music meaning something’ and that the orchestra’s ‘magic derives from the unique chemistry between its members, its charismatic creator, and the political tragedy to which it is a defiant response’.
Indeed, the idea that the orchestra is uniquely vibrant through a connection to ‘political tragedy’ has been a source of contention for more critical accounts of the orchestra. Some accounts have charged the orchestra with impeding Palestinian solidarity on the international stage through its normalisation of Palestinian-Israeli interaction. Other studies have examined the orchestra’s ideological position by exploring what the ensemble actually offers its players. Various scholars working alongside the orchestra have concluded from their fieldwork that the ensemble seems driven more by young musicians hungry for an opportunity to play professionally (and under the gleaming baton of Barenboim) than by any will to build bridges through music or explore the ‘other’. Indeed, the composer and political activist Raymond Dean has drawn attention to the published collection of West-Eastern Divan player testimonies, An Orchestra Without Borders, noting that the orchestra appears to have done little to enhance the Israeli musicians’ insight into the political realities surrounding them. He suggests, ‘the impression ultimately gleaned from Arabs and Israelis alike is that the real glue binding these young people together is ambition… In itself, of course, there is nothing reprehensible about this—but it is a far cry from stylising the orchestra as an exemplary space of reconciliation and understanding.’

At the forefront of recent critiques is British musicologist Rachel Beckles Willson, who, in a particularly pertinent article, examines not just the orchestra’s players and founders but its administration, patrons and audiences, considering the orchestra as an example of ‘utopian entertainment’. She draws on the film theorist Richard Dyer’s work on musicals and variety shows, which explores how certain musical genres allow audiences an escape from the difficulties encountered in real life: ‘Instead of scarcity these entertainments present abundance, and counteracting exhaustion they express energy; they replace dreariness with intensity, manipulation with transparency, and social fragmentation with community.’ Beckles Wilson proposes that it is on this final reality/fantasy exchange that the orchestra, as constructed by Said and Barenboim, claims to deliver. Through the commonality of musical experience, political foes are supposed to transform into ‘an interactive and productive sociality, in contrast to the destructive conflict that the majority are understood as living out in real life.’ Dyer’s analysis of utopian entertainments goes on to explore how the types of suffering available for transformation tend to be carefully prescribed. Beckles Willson notes that the specific type of suffering defined (and so remedied) by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—feeling misunderstood by ‘the other’—overlooks the reality of economic and political hardship afflicting many in the Middle East. This recognition only of particular, manageable types of suffering leads to a circularity in problem and resolution: the suffering outlined by Said and Barenboim is that which the orchestra can most aptly relieve.
The question is how far does either this problem or solution relate to the complex issues faced the orchestra’s members and their wider communities? Drawing on Barenboim’s premise that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a ‘utopian republic’, Beckles Willson suggests the orchestra‘projects a utopia in Europe and for European audiences, while this is not necessarily one that people in the Middle East seek’. And this projection of utopia is by no means stable or unified. Beckles Willson considers the various and often contradictory utopian visions of the orchestra that she encountered at work among the group’s audiences, patrons, players and administrators. One striking example was a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Madrid, which took place during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. The Madrid concert became a fertile ground for the allocation of meaning, sustaining a number of competing visions as to what the performance was for. Among other claims, the concert was variously appropriated as an expression of broad anti-war sentiment linked to Spain’s recently-ended involvement in Iraq; a platform for Palestinian and Lebanese demonstrators; a site of professional, apolitical music making; and finally, a means of reinvigorating nostalgia in a post-Franco landscape for Spain’s glory days of medieval religious tolerance. The coexistence of these competing agendas goes some way to illustrate how slippery the business of attaching meaning to a musical event can become. Barenboim and Said have made numerous statements about the project’s aims and their wider philosophies of music-making, including many that cite their shared belief in music as a powerful engine of transformation. A closer look at their intellectual positions in relation to music is revealing, and begins to suggest why the orchestra’s performances might present such a fertile site in which to plant a flag.
An outspoken critic of Israeli settlements and military strategy since Rabin, Barenboim’s musical approach has been similarly provocative. He has roundly rejected the ‘historically-informed performance’ movement (where musicians attempt to recreate the performance style of works as they would have been played at the time of composition). Indeed, Barenboim has argued that the tempo of a piece should be chosen not from the composer’s original markings, but from listening and responding only to ‘the content’ Barenboim has rejected the idea of a straightforward fidelity to what a score indicates and instead called for ‘a constant state of interdependency… that you cannot separate, because the speed is related to the content, to the volume etc.’ According to Barenboim, it is only through respect for this interdependency (and the rather mysterious valency of ‘content’) that music finds purpose and expression, a process which Barenboim links explicitly to political activity. He states:
No matter what you think of the Oslo Accord—in other words, it had a chance or it didn’t have a chance—it lost all chance of succeeding when the tempo, the speed at which it was proceeding, became too slow. The music dissipates when it’s so slow, and the process also, because there’s no separation between the different elements… The content requires a given speed and if you play it at the wrong speed… the whole thing falls part. This is what happened to the Oslo Accord.
For Barenboim, music (and music as a ‘magic mirror’ of human action) only bears fruit through a respectful interdependency among parts. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was created as an embodiment of this vision of music and human action; participating in musical performance requires musicians both to express themselves as individuals and to give themselves to a total and boundless integration. To perform demands the breakdown of ‘separation’ between all musical (and socio-political) parameters. It is an appealing premise. Yet this perspective leads Barenboim to define music in a peculiarly constrained and bombastic way. Speaking at his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim stated:
in the West-Eastern Divan the universal metaphysical language of music becomes the link, it is the language of the continuous dialogue that these young people have with each other. Music is the common framework, their abstract language of harmony.
Barenboim draws on the old adage of music as a universal language, accessible but abstract. He claims that by performing classical music as a collective of individuals, Arab and Israeli musicians may share their ‘narratives’, freed from the clutter of political complication by the ‘abstract language of harmony’. Yet to define music thus is sharply essentialist: music is rendered at once all powerful yet curiously blank, defined as connection, but stripped of context. While, for Barenboim, this notion frees music from the politically specific, such an understanding also presents music as an inviting site on which to pin alternative messages and meanings (as found in the various slogans attending the orchestra’s Madrid concert). Yet far from existing in some utopian vacuum of musical communality, Barenboim’s declaration of a ‘universal metaphysical language’ invokes a specific nineteenth-century absolutist account of music. Indeed, the ‘common framework’ of music to which Barenboim refers when discussing his orchestra is very specifically the Western classical canon. While he has been a notable exponent of contemporary music throughout his career, it is striking that the orchestra has made its name principally through interpretations of Beethoven, the poster boy for the German nationalist Romantics. For Barenboim to champion these works may not be problematic in itself, but by framing their performance with the rather shadowy ideology of German universalism, the conductor appears to undercut his own mission. How can open dialogue take place in this culturally constrained setting? If Barenboim wishes parties from complexly different backgrounds to engage with one another’s ‘narrative’ through shared musical participation under his baton, surely the experience is circumscribed by his limited, hegemonic account of what ‘music’ is? However, as a critic for the The Times discovered when reviewing the orchestra’s performance of Fidelio at the 2009 Proms (‘the symbolic integrity of this orchestra and Beethoven’s message of universal freedom overrode any passing vocal flaws’), invoking the universal is a useful way to paper over the cracks.
One might suppose Edward Said—famed for his rigorous scholarship demanding the sociopolitical contextualisation of literary texts—would be a spectacular foil for these types of claim. Said made his name with Orientalism in 1978, which examined how a long history of Western writing has constructed an ‘other’ out of the Orient based on imaginary and amplified characteristics, subsequently used to control that defined as different. According to Said, only by contextualising these statements and locating the power structures that sit within can we begin to unpick their construction and so challenge their dominance. Said’s work has focused on identifying those Orientalist perceptions which are assumed neutral or self-evident, sending up flares to highlight their pernicious and consuming influence. Yet Said made an unlikely exception of music among his scholarly targets, despite being an accomplished pianist. Far from challenging Barenboim’s statements on the function of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Western music’s universally transformative properties, Said has supported this view. Although he spent his life engaged with the concrete political implications of artistic production, Said’s account of music is oddly decontextualized.
Said believed, as does Barenboim, that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra could effect positive change by enabling contact and breaking down ignorance between parties. He suggested that music offers an ‘alternative model for the conflict of identities’ and upheld the benefits of participating in another musical culture (here, Western classical music), lamenting the ‘concentration today on the affirmation of identity, on the need for roots… It’s become quite rare to project one’s self outward, to have a broader perspective.’ Musical experience is transgressive: it enables us to flit across boundaries. While Said’s controversial idea of the humanistic mission was to ‘accept responsibility for maintaining rather than resolving the tension between the aesthetic and the national, using the former to challenge, re-examine and resist the latter’, through music his insistence on nationality as a site of contest curiously dissolves. Rather, Said describes a ‘transformation’ in those playing under Barenboim at the 1999 workshops:
‘what you saw had no political overtones at all.’ Said here seems less preoccupied with challenging or resisting nationalist concerns than with praising music’s mystical transcendence.
Indeed, Said has described music as a ‘uniquely endowed site’ with ‘separate status and space’ and commentators have noted Said’s personal, quasi-sacred reverence for Western classical music (Said has himself noted that his conception is ‘romantic’). Rather than the orchestra standing as a ‘contrapuntal’ act, as Said has discussed postcolonial literature and the native appropriation of literary forms, classical music is granted exclusive, apolitical rights that appear to forbid such a cultural dialogue. Indeed, Said and Barenboim have made much of (classical) music’s ineffable, abstract power to foreclose the debate.
While recognising the sincerity of Said and Barenboim’s personal endeavour, I suggest the orchestra functions more as Euro-American fantasy of cooperation and a vehicle for individual musical ambition, than a positive contribution to Middle Eastern social dynamics. The question is what, if any, musical model would better serve this aim? For one, there is the objection to Palestinian-Israeli normalisation, a charge powerfully raised by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (to the vocal consternation of Said’s widow, Mariam). But notwithstanding the issues of Palestinian-Israeli cultural contact, as a starting point I suggest it is an intriguing omission that an ensemble based on Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan—a work devoted to the exploration of Middle Eastern culture—makes no connection to any kind of Middle Eastern music. Said has written persuasively on the ‘false authenticity’ of cementing cultural forms to nation or land, and it does indeed seem crass to suggest musicians ought more usefully to perform music ‘indigenous’ to their region. Yet, it is perplexing that this venture would so resolutely ignore musical forms outside the Western canon.
Various other musical initiatives in the region have explored a wider musical territory. These tend to fall under the radar of international media interest and do not operate across communities. The Israeli Andalusian Orchestra (now disbanded following protracted labour disputes) comprised Russian emigrant musicians and Sephardim who had emigrated from Morocco and performed music from the Sephardi Jewish tradition. Meanwhile, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music offers instruction in both Western classical and Arabic music to young Palestinians, as well as running the Palestine Youth Orchestra. Following clashes with Barenboim over what the conservatory perceived to be his incendiary comments on Palestinian affairs, the ESNCM has refused funding from the wealthy, Andalusian-associated Barenboim-Said Foundation and operates instead with limited external support (and media interest). While the organisation struggles fi nancially, its local scope and politicised standpoint appears to focus the group’s work more squarely on its community’s own needs and terms. Some of Said’s experiences do highlight the positive impact of exploring a broader range of music. One of the most fascinating anecdotes he recounted from the 1999 West-Eastern Divan workshops concerned an impromptu discussion between some of the Arabic and Israeli musicians, following a clash over who had been allowed to participate in an informal Arabic music improvisation the previous evening. Rather than the depiction of silence and rapture that apparently overtook the musicians during Barenboim’s orchestral rehearsals, it appears this musical interaction, created by the players themselves, led to a heated discussion that stirred up challenging questions on ownership and cultural authenticity for all sides ‘on who could play Arabic music and who couldn’t’. As Said admitted, ‘it was an extraordinary moment.’
Any claim that a musical ensemble can bring meaningful relief to the Israel-Palestine confl ict is clearly a false promise, potentially obscuring the day-to-day material hardships faced by so many in the region. However, the 1999 workshop incident may demonstrate the possibility of more fruitful musical engagement: one generated by those who both participate in the music-making and inhabit the political terrain; one that remains unavailable for international public consumption; and one that seeks to provoke words rather than silence them.

Kate Wakeling is a musicologist and writer. She studied music at
Cambridge University and holds a PhD in Balinese music from the
School of Oriental and African Studies. She is currently a visiting
lecturer in ethnomusicology at Cambridge University.

So wrote the Geneva-born composer, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) about his Jewish Cycle in 1917. Within two years, he had moved from a Jewish aesthetic to a Far Eastern aesthetic, as seen in his  Viola Suite, composed in New York in 1919:

My Suite does not belong to my so-called ‘Jewish works’ — though, perhaps, in spite of myself, one may perceive in a very few places a certain Jewish inspiration. It is rather a vision of the Far East … that inspired me … Java, Sumatra, Borneo, those wonderful countries I dreamed of so often though I was never fortunate enough to visit them myself in any other way than in my imagination.

What had transformed the Jew who wrote Jewish music, because this was the only way he could achieve vitality and significance, into a visionary South East Asian pentatonicist?
The surname Bloch originally indicated a ‘foreigner from the West’. When the Jews of Alsace moved to Germany in the Middle Ages, they were given the name Welsch. This became transformed, in the 13th and 14th centuries, into Wallach, Wallack, Wloch, Vlach, Block, and Bloch, as persecutions drove the Jews back and forth between Eastern and Western Europe. Though there are earlier references, the first direct ancestor of Ernest Bloch so far discovered was cited in a document found in Stühlingen in South West Germany in 1732: this was Abraham, Ernest’s great-great-great-grandfather. What seems significant here is that, although Bloch’s music has often been considered exotic and oriental, his maternal and paternal forbears were Western Ashkenazim over many generations.
In the mid-19th century, Bloch’s grandfather Isaak Josef was a celebrated ba‘al tefillah (lay-cantor) in the synagogue in the North Swiss village of Lengnau and President of its Jewish community. Bloch’s father Meier (also known as Moritz and, later, Maurice) had been a chorister in the Lengnau Synagogue and, at one time, considered entering the Rabbinate; but he went into business instead. Originally pious, he became outspokenly agnostic, but practised traditional rituals and took his family to the Geneva Synagogue, especially during the High Holidays. Ernest often wrote and spoke affectionately of his memories of Friday evenings  and Seder services at home, but indignantly of synagogal and communal behaviour: men reading the newspapers in shul on Yom Kippur, and the contemptuous treatment some members of the community meted out to poor Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe. Bloch learned Hebrew and cantillation for his Bar Mitzvah in 1893, but lost all visible contact with Judaism for a considerable period thereafter. He had very few Jewish friends; and his student years in Geneva (1894-6), Brussels (1896-9),  Frankfurt (1899-1901),  Munich (1901-3), and Paris (1903-4) were spent far away from any Jewish milieu. In 1904, he married Margarethe (later Marguerite) Schneider, a fellow student from Frankfurt days, daughter of prosperous German-Lutheran parents who lived in Hamburg.
The year 1906 saw the surfacing of one of many apparently contradictory dualities in Bloch’s life. On the one hand, his then mentor and confidant, the well known French critic Robert Godet, persuaded him to buy a life-size Crucifix (which Bloch kept all his life). In the same year, only two years after his marriage to Marguerite, Bloch wrote to his close friend and librettist, the great Parisian author and playwright, Edmond Fleg:

My dear friend … I have read the Bible — I have read fragments about Moses. And an immense sense of pride has been surging within me! My entire being reverberated. It is a revelation … I could not continue reading, for I was afraid. Yes, Fleg, I was afraid of discovering too much of myself, of feeling everything which had gradually accumulated, glued to me, fall away in one sudden blow; of finding myself naked … within this entire past which lives inside me, of standing erect as a Jew, proudly Jewish … We must see to it that everything which has a Jewish soul is conscious of the grandeur and destiny of this race…  While reading certain passages, I almost regretted having only music to speak with; but Jews do listen to music. Yes, Fleg, this idea must enlighten us both; it is perhaps for this reason that we met.

How are we to reconcile this vigorously expressed awakening of Jewish identity with the purchase of a Crucifix? Bloch explained that, though he admired the teachings of Jesus, he regarded Christianity as a ‘failure’, and interpreted Jesus on the Cross as the figure of a ‘betrayed Jew’, a metaphor with which he was personally to identify, not least as a result of his experience with Robert Godet, which he described as ‘the greatest tragedy  . . .  in my life’, and of whom he wrote:

It was Godet who attracted my attention to the unconscious Jewishness in my music. He was the greatest anti-Semite, who translated [Houston Stuart Chamberlain’s     Foundations of the 19th Century], the book that made Hitler … and was my best and deepest friend for ten years…

Although Bloch wrote letters to numerous relatives and friends about the potential for expressing a Jewish ethos in his music during his mid-late 20s and early 30s, only two out of a total of over a hundred formal lectures on music, given by Bloch at the Geneva Conservatoire and elsewhere, prior to his settling in America, were devoted to Jewish music per se. Neither lecture has ever been published. The first is a meditation on the problem of the Jewish arts in general, as experienced through his work with Fleg, with few allusions to music. The second is a commentary on a slim volume by Emil Breslaur, the German-Jewish scholar and choirmaster, entitled Can the Synagogue and Folk Melodies of the Jews be Proved to be Historically Authentic? This book, according to Bloch’s elder daughter, Suzanne, was the only publication on Jewish music that Bloch read prior to his departure for the USA. Both lectures are vague in terms of definition. We may summarise their joint contents as follows: Bloch says that he listens to an inner voice; he eschews ‘nationalism’ and what he calls ‘deformed’ folk themes. He denies the authenticity of Jewish melos as it exists in his own time, because of the absorption of foreign elements from host nations; and it is Gregorian Chant that he sees as a direct descendant of Temple Chant. There are references to Jews in music such as Dukas, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, and Mahler. Why he adds Bruch, Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Wagner to his list is not made clear. What is apparent from these lectures, however, is an emerging pattern of ambivalence to the society around him, the pain of alienation and antisemitism, tensions between the internal world of spirituality and the external world of identity, and vacillations between confidence and insecurity.
But if his lectures contain no precise definitions of Jewish music, he defines himself unambiguously as a Jewish composer in the seven works of the Jewish Cycle (1911-16), six of which were later published by G. Schirmer: Trois Poèmes Juifs (composed in 1913); Deux Psaumes 137 et 114, Précédés d’un Prélude Orchestral (1912-14); Psaume 22 (1914); Israel Symphony (1912-16);  Schelomo – Rapsodie Hébraïque (1916); and the String Quartet No.1 (1916 — sometimes referred to as the ‘Hebrew Quartet’). All are highly charged epics, either in terms of length (the string quartet lasts 50 minutes), or in terms of the vast orchestral forces required. There are solo roles in Psalms 137 and 114 for soprano, and in Psalm 22 for baritone; two sopranos, two altos, and one bass in Israel; and cello in Schelomo. In addition, there is an unfinished and unpublished biblical opera entitled Jézabel, which occupied Bloch for over twenty years (c.1904 to the mid-1920s) and which, in a sense, generated all the published works of the Cycle.
In my doctoral research, I have scrutinised the six published works of the Cycle for traditional Jewish elements (ta’amei hammiqra — accents of biblical recitation, nusach — cantorial modality, shofar calls, etc.) as set down in eighteen carefully selected written sources of liturgical music. Bloch admitted to utilising only one traditional tune in his entire Cycle, namely, what I discovered to be the South West German High Holiday chant for the text Uvechen ten pachdecha (variants having been notated by Abraham Baer, Samuel Naumbourg, and Salomon Sulzer, in their respective anthologies), which appears at the beginning of the middle section of Schelomo.
But there are also hundreds of more subtly and unconsciously incorporated motifs and their metamorphoses which Bloch may have absorbed from his father’s singing and from the music of the Geneva Synagogue which he attended as a child: not only the melodic and rhythmic contours themselves, but also the distinctive, deep formal structures of cantillation and cantorial recitatives.
Bloch claimed he was composing Jewish music out of himself: ‘It is not my purpose, not my desire, to attempt a “reconstitution” of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic,’ he wrote in 1917, the year of many such pronouncements. He continued: ‘I am not an archaeologist … It is the Jewish soul that interests me, the complex, glowing, agitated soul, that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible.’
Extraordinary it is, then, to discover that, in the very same year, he had already started to conduct research in the New York Public Library and, within a short time, had sifted through all the volumes of the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, writing down almost all of Rev. Francis L. Cohen’s transcriptions of traditional tunes in an unpublished manuscript book which bears the title: Chants Juifs. This paradox gives rise to many questions: Is the volume of Chants Juifs surely not ‘archaeology’? Why this volte-face, which contradicted Bloch’s otherwise passionately held principles? Was his inward search for Jewish inspiration losing momentum? Had it, by 1918, been largely abandoned? Was all this a response to what he perceived to be the philosemitic atmosphere of New York, which he had encountered for the first time in 1916, and then again when he brought his family with him to settle in the following year? Was it because, now having achieved success and celebrity status in New York, he had no further use for a label that he had needed in the Old World in his struggle for survival and recognition as a composer, conductor, and educator?
The Jewish Cycle received its final coup-de-grâce in April 1918 as a result of what Bloch described, in his letters to his mother Sophie and to Fleg, as ‘perhaps the strangest experience in my life.’ He had been invited to an unspecified Hasidic community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a Sabbath morning service at the end of Passover. He paints a vivid picture of the bare room, the 50-60 male congregants of all ages from Poland and Galicia, their poverty, their genuine piety, and how moved he is when the Rabbi bestows upon him the Priestly Blessing. ‘And what music’, he exclaims:

Neither organ, nor instruments, nor choir. Everyone his own orchestra. . . Everything was vibrant, living, creating an extraordinary atmosphere. I dissolved with emotion…I assure you that my music seems to me a very poor little thing beside that which I heard. You will understand everything that this experience means for me. It’s a great joy. It’s also extreme sorrow; for my life has been split in two. I would have been able, as a single man, to plunge myself into this Truth, even at my age, letting it live anew in me, and creating a formidable work, linking this granite past to the present, to the future … Alas, alas, I can’t … Everything separates me from it, my wife, my children… and my whole life. It’s a great tragedy. . . All that will remain is the shadow of what I could have been.

The crunch had come: the trauma of the two Blochs — the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ — finally confronting each other. The one yearned for the intensely observant Jewish life that he had never truly experienced; the other lived and participated in the wider world. Since he could not attain the ‘ideal’, he would have to settle, reluctantly, for the ‘real’; but this produced an inner conflict that was never fully resolved.
Bloch, one could argue, ceased to be a ‘Jewish Composer’ at the very moment he became an ‘archaeologist’. Many of his subsequent Jewish works involved the conscious use of ethnic materials. Two will suffice to exemplify this: Abodah (God’s Worship): a Yom Kippur melody for violin and piano (1929) is an almost note-for-note transcription of the Vehakkohanim chant from the Jewish Encyclopedia; and Suite Hébraïque for violin (or viola) and piano (or orchestra) (1951) contains five traditional tunes from the same source, according to a sheet in Bloch’s own handwriting. Bloch had now become a ‘composer of Jewish music’ alongside other musics. Indeed, the non-Jewish works that he wrote after the Cycle saw the lively incorporation of Gregorian Chant; Swiss, American, and Far-Eastern folk melodies and styles; Renaissance, Neoclassical, Neoromantic, and, very occasionally, Serial idioms. Despite all these complexities and contradictions, the ethos and essences of the Cycle were the abiding qualities that permeated Bloch’s later works, and represent his unique and significant contribution to twentieth-century music.

Michael Haas is also Director of the JMI International Centre for Suppressed Music (ICSM) President Sir Simon Rattle.

On the night of 15 October, 1958, a vintage Bentley was pulled over by the Delaware State Police. Suspicions had been raised by the sight of a white woman driving with two black male passengers, one of whom had danced his way into a motel along the road in search of a glass of water. This man was Thelonious Monk and the other man was Charlie Rouse. Monk refused the officers’ request to leave the car and they beat his fingers with blackjacks. When the driver screamed that Monk was a pianist, they beat him harder. Minutes later, the officers found marijuana in a suitcase which the driver, Nica, claimed was hers. Had Monk been busted he’d have lost his cabaret card and the right to perform in New York for up to seven years. Pannonica de Koenigswarter, or Nica, was a Rothschild by birth. Born in 1913 at Tring, a Rothschild house in Hertfordshire, Nica enjoyed a luxurious and cosseted upbringing. According to her sister Miriam, the internationally renowned naturalist, the only expectation upon Charles and Rozsika Rothschild’s daughters was to marry and breed and, although their brother Victor was sent to school and university, Nica and Miriam received little formal education.

Though music didn’t play a significant part in her upbringing, Nica claimed her first love was swing and she preferred bandleaders such as Jack Harris, a violinist who played at ‘coming out’ parties in the 1930s to traditional debs’ delights. Her unconventional taste in music was an early indication of a life to come of total nonconformity. For a time, however, it seemed as if she might settle down; she married Jules de Koenigswarter, an older, sophisticated, French baron who lived life to a strict schedule, unlike his wife who had a total disregard for timekeeping. They lived at a chateau outside Paris where two of their five children were born.

The Second World War changed everything. Nica’s brother Victor worked in bomb disposal (he was later awarded the George Medal) and her sister Miriam was a decoder at Bletchley. Keen to do her bit, Nica settled her children safely in New York and followed Jules to Africa to join the Free French working as an ambulance driver. She even made her way to Berlin and caught the last of the fighting. Like many women, Nica was emancipated by the war and emboldened by a real sense of achievement. Settling back into domestic routine was tough and it was even harder to slip back into the male shadow after years of war-time equality. Robert Kraft, a musician and friend of Nica’s, points to a similar sense of outrage felt by the black GIs returning to America from Europe to find that nothing had changed: they were still expected to use service entrances and, in many states, obey segregation laws. This discontent was echoed in a new style of jazz called bebop: music you couldn’t dance or sing to, a music that heralded a new individualism. It was no coincidence that Nica embraced bebop wholeheartedly and pursued every opportunity to hear it played live or on records.

Nica chafed under the strict formality of life as an ambassador’s wife. Increasingly mesmerised by the jazz scene, Nica found more excuses to extend their regular trips to New York until, one day in 1951 she decided to stay.

Following the war, Jules was decorated for bravery and rewarded with a high-status position within the diplomatic service. The couple was stationed in Norway and then Mexico, but Nica chafed under the strict formality of life as an ambassador’s wife. Increasingly mesmerised by the jazz scene, Nica found more excuses to extend their regular trips to New York until, one day in 1951 she decided to stay. She told Stanley Crouch, the music critic, that this momentous decision was inspired by Thelonious Monk’s record Round Midnight, which cast a spell on her and inspired the start of a new life.

New York in the 1950s was the crucible of new music, thinking, writing, art and politics. Jazz, the fusion of indigenous and immigrant rhythms, was now an explosive scene, evolving with every new arrival: Charlie Parker from Kansas, Monk from North Carolina, Dizzy Gillespie from South Carolina and Miles Davis from Illinois, who met and played on 52nd Street and other clubs in the Village.

The life of a musician was cruel: erratic hours, limited opportunities for work, long spells on the road and the absence of a welfare system made it hard to support a family, let alone maintain a home. Many turned to drugs which were available at jazz clubs where money laundering and drug dealing were rife.

Having witnessed the Second World War, lost friends and family in the concentration camps and experienced anti-Semitism first hand, Nica refused to stand by and watch her new friends suffer because they were black. ‘I don’t see myself as a freedom fighter,’ she told Nat Hentoff in an interview with Esquire, ‘but I do see that a lot of help is needed.’

‘Parker was lucky that Nica was prepared to open her door. There was no one left in New York who’d do that’

In March 1955, Nica was living at the Stanhope Hotel, a grand establishment on Park Avenue with a policy of segregation. Late one night, Charlie Parker called by unexpectedly. Parker was at a low ebb following the sudden death of his daughter and had recently attempted suicide by drinking iodine. A known drug addict, ‘Parker was lucky that Nica was prepared to open her door. There was no one left in New York who’d do that,’ commented Toot Monk. Nica told her version of that night’s events, how Parker collapsed and died while watching television, to two people. The first was Clint Eastwood, who told her story in his feature film Bird. The second was Robert Reisner, who was writing a book, The Legend of Charlie Parker. In 1950s New York, for a white woman to be alone with a black man in a hotel suite was cause enough for scandal. For a white, Jewish Baroness to be alone with the famous black drug addict musician on the night of his death sent society into an orgy of speculation. ‘Nica paid a high price for her kindness. After that she was harassed by the press and police,’ says Toot.

She took food and medicine to saxophonist Coleman Hawkins who was dying of malnutrition and a broken heart; she recovered Sonny Clark’s body from the morgue and paid for it to be flown home to his family

Tabloid newspapers and society gossip did not succeed in driving Nica back home or halt her numerous acts of kindness. The Jewish tradition of tzedakah had always been an important Rothschild principle: she took food and medicine to saxophonist Coleman Hawkins who was dying of malnutrition and a broken heart; she recovered Sonny Clark’s body from the morgue and paid for it to be flown home to his family. Perhaps her greatest gesture to the musicians she knew was to treat them with respect, a rare experience for African-Americans at that time. ‘She made us feel like someone just by being with us,’ said Roy Haynes, who was hired by Nica to play with Monk at a stint at the Five Spot in 1957.

In other cases she acted as manager, arranging gigs and transporting musicians in her vintage car. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t get a kick out of going in a Bentley?’ says her friend Phoebe Jacobs, who remembers seeing the car full of musicians with a double bass strapped to the roof careering up Park Avenue. Nica fought to scrap the cabaret card, required by artists to play in licensed clubs but regarded by many as a police tool to control black musicians. In some cases she provided money to the very hard up, in others medical or legal assistance and basic necessities.

But how did this life connect with a family from a Frankfurt ghetto whose five sons went to five different capitals of Europe to create five banks that would became powerful enough to help fund Wellington’s armies, the Gold Rush, the Suez Canal, the arrival of the railways and the quest for oil? Why had Balfour written to Nica’s uncle Walter Rothschild, acknowledging that the British Government favoured the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people (later Israel), and why did Queen Victoria turn down recommendations for Lionel de Rothschild, the first Jewish MP’s ennoblement with the words, ‘To make a Jew a peer is a step she could not consent to’? Could Nica’s life have any connection with all these disparate elements?

Over many years Thelonious and Nellie Monk, and their children Toot and Boo Boo, became part of Nica’s extended family. To this day, Toot Monk regards Nica’s children as brothers and sisters. Nica’s photographs, exhibited last summer at Arles and published in Les Musiciens de jazz et leurs trois vœux (  Jazz Musicians and Their Three Wishes), edited by her granddaughter Nadine and published in France, capture the atmosphere of her house in Weehawken. In Nica’s photographs of ping-pong games and musicians jamming nearly all are laughing. Her daughter Janka and her grandson Steven lived with her for many years and her other children Patrick, Berit, Sean and Kari were always close by. ‘The Cathouse’, as Nica called it, was as far removed from the grandeur and formality of Rothschild houses as one could imagine. However, like her father, uncle and sister, Nica liked to be surrounded by animals. The older generation liked exotic species including cassowaries, emus and wallabies, but Nica preferred cats. ‘I remember one time I counted 305, no, 306 cats,’ says Toot Monk. ‘There were cats everywhere, cats on the bed, cats on the fridge, cats in the cupboards.’

When, in the early 1970s, Thelonious Monk’s mental health deteriorated, Nica offered him a permanent place at her home. From then until his death, Monk rarely got out of bed, preferring to view the world through a sea of books, magazines and records spread out around him. Occasionally he’d play the piano or a game of ping-pong, but when asked why he refused to perform he replied, ‘I’m just tired of playing.’ He died in 1982 and at his funeral Nellie and Nica sat side by side.

Nica was my great-aunt and I had never met her. In 1984, aged 22, I made my first trip to New York and phoned her. ‘Would you like to meet up?’ I asked nervously. ‘Wild,’ she answered. ‘Come to the club downtown after midnight.’ This area had yet to be gentrified and was known for its crack dens, curfews and muggings. ‘How will I find it?’ I asked. Nica laughed, ‘Look out for the car’ and hung up.

The car was impossible to miss. The vintage Bentley was badly parked and inside it, two drunks lolled around on the leather seats. ‘It’s good they’re in there — it means no one will steal it,’ she explained. Set back from the street was a small door leading down to a basement. Nica sat at the table nearest the stage. She had long straight hair and a thin face etched with age and experience. Smoking a cigarette in a black filter, she dispensed with normal pleasantries and, picking up a flask from the table, poured something into two chipped china cups. We toasted each other silently and I drained the cup. Whisky cut into the back of my throat. My eyes watered. She threw back her head and laughed. She was seventy-one at the time.

It was the start of an unconventional friendship with a most exceptional woman. When it was cut short by her sudden death I took some time to realise that a relationship doesn’t have to end with death, particularly when a person’s friends are so very keen to tell her story. My profession is documentary film-making and I have spent my adult life making portraits of artists, both living and dead, capturing their spirit and times through interview, archive and their work. Some, like R. B. Kitaj and Frank Auerbach, were there to be interviewed. Others, like Picasso, Sickert and Eisenstein had died, but I believe there’s authenticity and value in any seriously attempted portrait. At the moment I’m shaping 115 hours of footage, including sixty-seven interviews, into a documentary feature for BBC Arena called The Jazz Baroness, a film of Nica’s extraordinary life. It is like a kaleidoscope made up of different patterns of seemingly unconnected parts, which together create an ever-changing picture. I learned that as a child, Einstein taught her magic tricks, and she played with gold bars in the vaults of the Bank of England; her beloved aunt was clubbed to death with meat hooks by SS officers outside Buchenwald; she lived in Josef von Sternberg’s house with many cats, several children and one grandchild. Again and again one thing was emphasised: she was a great patron, part Medici, part Guggenheim operating in the world of jazz.

‘The Royal Family came to your family crying the blues and they laid the bread on him to beat Napoleon — I tell everyone who you are, I’m proud of you — she’s a Rothschild’

There’s a scene in the 1988 documentary Straight No Chaser set in the backroom of a New York club where Thelonious Monk boasts about Nica’s family saying, ‘The Royal Family came to your family crying the blues and they laid the bread on him to beat Napoleon — I tell everyone who you are, I’m proud of you — she’s a Rothschild.’ History has a delicious way of evolving: here was a world-class American musician born in dire straits whose life and career benefited from a fortune made generations before by an unconnected European family who also suffered from the obstacles presented by prejudice. Clearly Mayer Amschel Rothschild, when preparing his five sons to develop their business across Europe, never imagined that the fruits of their labour would be used to offer protection and patronage to a generation of brilliant but often destitute jazz musicians. ‘She was like Joan of Arc and Mother Teresa rolled into one,’ said Monk’s son Toot. ‘She was our light and our joy,’ commented trombonist Curtis Fuller. Her story lives on in some wonderful jazz standards like Pannonica by Thelonious Monk, Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver and Art Blakey, Blues for Nica by Kenny Drew and Tonica by Kenny Dorham. Athough legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins rarely grants interviews, he made an exception for my documentary, saying, ‘Nica’s story needs to be told. It’s our story too.’

The Baroness is published by Virago