My latest Moked comment -- Romania

My latest photo and comment on the Italian web site moked.it harks back to the Passover seder I spent in 1991 in Radauti, Romania, the town from which my grandparents emigrated to the USA.

Passover 1991, Radauti. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Il Seder di Pesach. Una cerimonia antica. Una cerimonia vissuta in famiglia o fra amici, raffigurata qui in una immagine che è abbastanza vecchia, ma, nel mio cuore e nella mia memoria, rimane senza tempo. E' Pesach del 1991, a Radauti, una cittadina nel nord della Romania da dove, un secolo fa, i miei nonni erano emigrati in America. Siamo una ventina di persone, quasi tutti anziani, seduti in una stanza della sinagoga. Fa freddo. Portiamo maglie e capotti. C'è un solo ragazzo, il figlio del presidente della piccolissima comunità, che ha cantato le quattro domande del Ma Nishtanà. Il Seder è finito. Abbiamo mangiato il kugel di matzot, uova sode, manzo stufato con patate. Abbiamo bevuto un vino dolce che viene da Israele. Le fiamme delle candele si spengono. L'uomo che ha condotto il Seder è stanco. Canta con una voce molto debole. E lui è unico fra i presenti che ricorda ancora della mia famiglia. Dopo la cena, cantiamo il tradizionale, Had Gadya. Conosco una melodia. Un amico venuto con me da Bucarest ne propone un'altra. E il vecchio intona, con un filo di voce, un' altra melodia, una melodia molto particolare, che non ho mai sentito. Canta, forse, nel modo in cui cantavano, anni e anni fa, i miei antenati.

Translation:
The Passover Seder. An ancient ceremony. A ceremony observed with family or friends, shown here in an image that is rather old, but, in my heart and memory, remains timeless. It is Pesach 1991, in Radauti, a small town in the north of Romania, from which, a century ago, my grandparents emigrated to America. We are about 20 people, almost all elderly, seated in a room of the synagogue. It is cold. We wear sweaters and coats. There is only one boy, the son of the president of the tiny Jewish community, who chanted the Four Questions. The Seder is over. We ate matzo kugel, hard-boiled eggs, stewed beef with potatoes. We drank sweet wine imported from Israel. The flames of the candles are sputtering out. The man who conducted the Seder is tired. He said with a very weak voice. And he is the only person here who still remembers my family. After the meal, we sing the traditional song, Had Gadya. I know one melody. A friend who came with me from Bucharest knows another. And the old man sings, with a quavering voice another melody, a very particular melody, one that I had never heard before. He sings, perhaps, the way that, years and years ago, my own ancestors sang.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Online Epitaph

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column describes the web site we have created to honor my mother, the artist Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, and in doing so post an online epitaph.

In the piazza, Morruzze.

April 17, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

ROME (JTA) -- One year ago I joined my father, my brothers and their families, as well as a few other friends and relatives, at my mother's grave in Santa Monica, Calif.

It was close to the first anniversary of Mom's death, and we gathered with a rabbi for a ceremony to unveil her headstone.

Mom is buried in a municipal cemetery shaded by palm trees. Like most of the other grave markers there, a simple, flat plaque rather than a standing tombstone denotes her resting place.

All that is written about her is her name and the years of her birth and death. And there's a menorah, following the tradition of marking Jewish women's graves with depictions of candlesticks.

But there is no epitaph. Nothing that tells about who she was, where she came from, how she lived or the way she was regarded.

The fifth commandment enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers.

This year, as the second anniversary of Mom's death approached, my brothers and I joined the growing ranks of children who now choose to honor their parents online, creating a Web site to celebrate our mother's life and commemorate her. Also, since my mother was an artist, we wanted to share images and information about her work.

Essentially what we did with the Web site was to etch an epitaph for Mom in cyberspace, picking up on an age-old tradition of personifying the deceased through words chiseled into solid stone.

My brothers and I all collected material and supplied content, but I was the one who designed the site, sticking to several basic priorities.

For one, the software had to be easy to use. We had to be able to post both text and photos. Since we wanted to encourage response and interaction, we also needed a format that combined a Web site with a blog.

The Web sites built by friends of mine for their parents run the gamut from simple memorials aimed primarily at family and close friends to elaborate multimedia constructions or sites aimed at placing a personal life story into the context of broader history.

The Web site for Lore Rasmussen, who died in January, details her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who went on to become an American civil rights activist and educator. The site that artist Josh Gosfield put up to honor his father, Gene, includes animation and a jivey rap poem.

"In the two minutes that it takes from beginning to end, I recall his life -- that which I know only through stories, that which I experienced firsthand, and that which I imagined," Josh told me.

I considered various formats, but in the end I chose a simple wordpress.com blog template. It's not overly ambitious, but it's straightforward -- as was my mother -- and so far it seems to fit the bill.

People already have begun to find it.

"I was so happy to come across this website. Your parents were very important to me when I was a young child," reads our first post, a moving tribute from a woman who knew my folks 25 years ago.

"I am so glad that you started this website," she added, "if only for the opportunity that it gave me to reflect on what your mother and father meant to me."

In my work over the past two decades, I've visited hundreds of Jewish cemeteries where lives and life stories endure in sculpted form, sometimes for centuries.

Some epitaphs use stock phrases and pious platitudes. But some tombstones bear elaborate carvings, with symbols denoting the name, heritage, attributes or profession of the deceased. Others feature epitaphs that read like full-blown CVs -- birth place, death place, education, professional positions, honors, titles, family.

Sometimes I get a chill when I read these persisting evocations of rich and complex lives.

Because of the Holocaust, most of the the people buried in Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe have left no direct descendants. The cemeteries themselves often are overgrown and abandoned. Still, here are the declarations of love and bereavement, of honor and respect.

For example, I never knew my great-grandmother, Ettel Gruber. She was the mother of my father's father, and I was given my middle name in her honor. Ettel died in Romania, well up in her 90s, in 1947, having survived the Holocaust.

Prewar pictures show her with a stern-looking visage. But her epitaph calls her "a positive and dedicated woman, fair and kind in all her doing; (she) offered hospitality and charity to the poor and set a full table for the Tzaddikim."

Cyberspace is not stone, and I have no idea how long the online epitaphs we are creating with our Web sites will endure.

I do know, however, that if you Google my mother's name, you'll find her. And if you follow the link, you'll get to know something about who she was and why we still care so much about her.

The Web site for my mother, Shirley Moskowitz Gruber, is at shirleymoskowitz.wordpress.com.

(Ruth Ellen Gruber's books include "National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe," "Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere)," and "Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe." She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at jewish-heritage-travel.blogspot.com.)

My Article on European Bluegrass, in the IHT/New York Times

Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, CZ, 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's my article Bluegrass Thrives, Far from Home, which appeared in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune and the online edition of the New York Times.

By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER

Published: April 9, 2009

PRAGUE — A recent concert in Prague demonstrated the far-flung reach of an infectious musical genre that spells “Americana” from the first ringing twang of a finger-picked string.

It was a concert of bluegrass music — but the event was a far cry from the high lonesome hills of Appalachia.

Lilly of the West, a bluegrass band from Bulgaria, was joined by Czech musicians for a performance hosted by the Bulgarian Culture Institute at its premises in the heart of the capital.

“The music is very sincere, it’s about the lyrics, about the songs; every song tells a story,” said Lilly Drumeva, the singer who founded the band more than a dozen years ago. She had first heard bluegrass in Vienna, she said, when she studied there in the early 1990s.

Famed for its close harmony singing and lightning-fast fingerwork on the banjo, mandolin and fiddle, bluegrass music has an international following among a passionate niche of devotees.

In Europe, dozens of bluegrass concerts, festivals, workshops and jam sessions take place throughout the year. Homegrown bands take center stage, but American musicians also often tour. And local bluegrass associations, Web sites, blogs and publications promote the music and chronicle events. Scotland, the Czech Republic, Norway and other locations have even had bluegrass programs in public schools.

The scene is small but intensely active, said Dennis Schut, a Dutch musician who has been involved in bluegrass since the 1970s.

“I see it as a sort of religion or something,” he said. “You get addicted to bluegrass. The first time you hear it, you’re hooked.”

Mr. Schut’s 26-year-old son, Ralph, is a case in point. He moved to the Czech Republic — home to the liveliest bluegrass scene in Europe — for the music and now plays in a number of bands, including Roll’s Boys and G-runs ’n Roses.

Bluegrass in Czech lands grew out of a long, widespread acoustic music tradition. In 1964, concerts in Prague and Brno by Pete Seeger galvanized fans, who made their own five-string banjos based on photographs of Seeger performing.

Today, devotees claim that there are more bluegrass bands per capita in the Czech Republic than in any other country in the world.

By now, the music practically forms a local idiom — so much so that it was the country’s premier bluegrass band, Druha Trava, that was chosen to perform at Prague Castle before U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech there last Sunday.

Hard-core bluegrass fans, said Dennis Schut, do “everything they can to get people to play, hear and enjoy the music.”

In February, these aims underscored a meeting in Germany sponsored by the European Bluegrass Music Association, a coordinating group founded in 2001 and modeled on the Nashville-based International Bluegrass Music Association.

Billed as the first European Bluegrass Summit, it grouped about 30 people from a dozen countries, including concert and festival organizers, representatives of national bluegrass associations, music writers and even a few musicians.

“To present music, to make it grow, to further musical structures there has to be an organization of some sort,” said Olaf Glaesman, one of the participants, who organizes a bluegrass festival in Germany.

One major annual initiative comes each May — the whole month is designated by the Nashville association as Worldwide Bluegrass Music Month, and this year more than 145 events, ranging from big festivals to one-off concerts, are planned in Europe. (See the full schedule at www.ebma.org/101.0.html)

The highlight is the annual European World of Bluegrass Festival in Voorthuizen in the Netherlands. It will take place this year from May 21 to 23, and combines concerts with workshops, a band competition and a trade show with instrument makers, artists and others. This year’s line-up features more than three dozen bands.

Other major festivals during May include:

May 1-2. The Bluegrass Festival in Bühl, Germany. The lineup includes the American bluegrass artists Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen, Wayne Henderson and Helen White, plus the Austrian group Nugget, among other bands from the United States and Germany.

May 9. The Spring Bluegrass Festival in Willisau, Switzerland. In addition to Bulgaria’s Lilly of the West and bands from Northern Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, the lineup features American groups including Randy Waller and the Country Gentlemen.

May 29-30. The Strakonice Jamboree, Strakonice, Czech Republic. The festival highlights more than two dozen top Czech groups as well as acts from Sweden and Austria.

May 30-31. The GrevenGrass Festival in Greven, Germany. Concerts and jam sessions feature groups from the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain and the United States.

Bluegrass Month in May, however, only begins the summer season of bluegrass festivals and tours. Top dates include:

June 19-20. Banjo Jamboree, Caslav, Czech Republic. Founded in 1973, the Banjo Jamboree is the oldest bluegrass festival in Europe. It features mainly Czech artists — but Czech bands rank among the top bluegrass performers in Europe. Most fans camp out, and there are jam sessions round the clock.

July 29-Aug. 2. La Roche International Bluegrass Festival, La Roche-sur-Foron, France (near Geneva). Entrance is free to this five-day festival of non-stop music by some 30 bands. The biggest bluegrass event in France, last year’s edition drew 12,000 fans.

Sept. 4-6. Didmarton Bluegrass Festival, Kemble Air Field, Gloucestershire, England. One of the biggest festivals, Didmarton features international bands, jam sessions and more.

My latest Moked.it comment (in Italian) from LA

My latest photo/comment on moked.it is from Los Angeles, where I spent Passover last year and went shopping with my father and my brother Frank in the kosher stores on Pico near Robertson:

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Benvenuti all'Elat Market, una specie di "hard discount" kasher a Los Angeles, dove con mio padre e mio fratello ci siamo trovati fra la gente - molti di loro dalla comunità persiana - che freneticamente acquistava una galassia dei prodotti rigorosamente Kasher per Pesach. Lì e in altri negozi della zona abbiamo comprato anche noi matzot, cetriolini, rafano, un pollo per la minestra, e pesce macinato (per il babbo, cui piace preparare un gefillte fish vero e proprio). Mia nonna, la mamma del babbo, che era nata vicino Cernowitz, nel vecchio impero dell'Austria Ungheria, era immigrata in America da bambina, prima della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Aveva vissuto a lungo prima della sua morte a Los Angeles, e adesso diversi altri miei parenti vivono attorno alla metropoli californiana. Ogni volta che ci vado, mi rendo conto - con un po' di stupore - che nell'area di Los Angeles si trovano più ebrei di quelli che si trovano in tutta la Francia. Più o meno venti volte il numero degli ebrei che vivono oggi in Italia.