Arty Semite Blog: Traveling the Czechgrass Trail

This post appeared originally in the Arty Semite blog of the Jewish Daily Forward, July 25, 2011

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Photo Courtesy of Druha Trava

I’ve just spent two days in a Prague studio helping record the vocal tracks for a new CD by the Czech country/bluegrass/fusion group Druha Trava. Founded 20 years ago, DT has brought out more than a dozen albums, including several in English. The new CD is the first that will primarily feature English-language versions of singer-songwriter Robert Krestan’s distinctive original songs. I made the translations, and the studio session was the culmination of a collaborative project that had taken more than five years to come to fruition.

Most people know me for my writing and other work on Jewish issues, but for much of the past decade I’ve also been exploring Europe’s “imaginary Wild West,” spending time at Wild West theme parks, swinging door saloons, and American-style country music events.

I first heard Druha Trava — the name means “Second Grass” — back in 2004, when I was bouncing around the Czech Republic, following the summer bluegrass festival circuit. I don’t speak Czech, but the group has been my favorite band ever since.

The flourishing Czech bluegrass scene dates back decades and has its roots in the so-called Tramp Movement, a Czech outdoors and music subculture that originated after World War I and embraced American-style campfire singing and the romance of the West.

But Druha Trava uses American roots music as just a starting point for its own synthesis of bluegrass, rock, country music, folk and even classical motifs. American banjo great Tony Trischka, who has toured with DT, was one of the first to call the sound “Czechgrass.”

All the musicians are virtuosos. But it’s Krestan’s songs and raw, gritty vocals that make DT’s music particularly compelling. American reviewer David Royko once said his voice embodied the “power and beauty of a thick slice of unvarnished oak.”

Krestan is an iconic performance figure, famous among Czech fans for his poetic and often enigmatic lyrics. He has also rendered many English songs into Czech — DTs’s 2007 CD “Dylanovky” features Czech versions of Bob Dylan songs. Aside from music he is the Czech translator of books by Norman Mailer and other American writers.

I started translating Krestan’s songs into English in 2006. My first goal was basic: I loved the Czech originals, but I wanted to know what they meant. As I started working, though, it seemed much more logical — and in fact, even easier — to put them in a rhyming form that could be sung. The process was surprisingly straightforward.

A young student in Prague, David Kraus, supplied me with word-for-word equivalents. David’s father Tomas is an old friend, the secretary of the Federation of Czech Jewish Communities, but he also knows a lot about the Czech country music scene. In Communist times Tomas’s late brother produced, wrote and translated songs for several key Czech tramp and country-style groups.

I took the words that David gave me, compared them to the rhythm of the original Czech lyrics, and listened over and over to the original songs in order to capture their meaning and rhyme structure as well as to fit them to the melodies.

Czech is a more bristly language than English, with quite different sounds and cadences, and Krestan uses words for their tonality as well as meaning. But remarkably, my lyrics got to a point where they seemed to click into place. Later, Krestan and I spent a couple of sessions together tweaking the English to improve both nuance and “singability.”

In the studio, as Krestan sang into the microphone, I stood in the sound booth with DT’s banjo player Lubos Malina, who is co-producing the CD with Nashville-based Steve Walsh. Five years on, it was the first time I heard the songs sung in their final form. (Walsh oversaw the recording of the instrumentals in Nashville last spring.) They sounded, well, right. I focused on recording levels and intonation, but I couldn’t keep a goofy smile off my face. If all goes as planned the CD, called “Shuttle to Bethlehem” will be out in September. Druha Trava begins a tour of the US on October 13 in Park Rapids, Minnesota.


Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/140290/#ixzz1TEpoPmAv

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: That Certain Jewish Something

Does a 'certain Jewish something' really set Jews apart?

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

WEIMAR, Germany (JTA) – I learned a new word this summer – “allosemitism.”

Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar – the idea of Jews as the perpetual “other.”

Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews – everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, “from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred.”

At root is the idea that, good or bad, Jews are different from the non-Jewish mainstream and thus unable to be dealt with in the same way or measured by the same yardstick.

The word cropped up during a recent symposium on Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) cultures that I attended here as part of a project called, significantly, “The Other Europeans.”

It was gratifying to find a term that so aptly describes the ambivalent ways in which Jews are regarded. And it was amazing to me that I hadn’t come across it earlier, considering all my reading and writing on the subject, not to mention my experiences over the past decades as a Jew in Europe.

We all know about anti-Semitism and the historic demonization of Jews. But anti-Semitism can be counterbalanced by an idealization of Jews and Jewish culture that also can be divorced from reality.

“People who think Jews are smarter than everyone else don’t have Jewish relatives,” my brother Frank likes to quip.

The Other Europeans project examines some of these issues by focusing on the relationships between Jewish and Roma cultures, particularly in the realm of music.

The project statement doesn’t use the term “allosemitism.” Instead it describes Jews and Roma as having “transcultural” European identities “in both fact and imagination.”

This, it states, has led to the condemnation of both groups as “rootless,” “parasitic,” “degenerate” and worse, as well as to continuing anti-Semitic and anti-Roma outbursts. At the same time, it notes, “the same transcultural character of Yiddish and Roma music is romanticized and embraced by contemporary ‘world music’ pop culture, which frames it as subversive and transgressive and therefore ‘hip.’ ”

The Other Europeans project is the brainchild of the musician Alan Bern, an American who has been based in Berlin since the 1980s.

It is sponsored by three Jewish culture festivals – the Weimar Yiddish Summer Weeks, which Bern directs; the annual Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland, which this year marked its 20th anniversary; and the KlezMORE Jewish Music Festival in Vienna.

All three present and teach Jewish music and culture to a predominantly non-Jewish public.

Bern, a key figure in the klezmer music revival over the past two decades, is a thoughtful observer of the sometimes uneasy cultural dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.

“You define culture through interactions,” he told me during one of our many conversations. “What defines something is often the point of view from which you regard it.”

How to define what is “Jewish” provides endless fodder for debate in post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe. Jews are few here now; Jewish communal life, though reviving in some places, is in flux; and Jewish cultural expression is often embraced or even perpetrated by non-Jews.

Strict halachic definition may suffice for the religiously observant. But for Jews and non-Jews alike, that has always told only part of the story. And indeed, as experienced so drastically in the Shoah, definitions of what, or who, is Jewish often come from the outside.

Is there, as the concept of allosemitism implies, a “certain Jewish something” that does so set Jews apart?

The Jewish Museum in Munich has mounted an exhibit this summer actually called “That Certain Jewish Something.” It takes a creative and rather provocative approach to explore the intangibles that can imbue objects, situations and even individuals with a sense of Jewishness.

The museum called on the public to bring in an object the people felt had “a certain Jewish something” about it with a written statement about why they had chosen that item. More than 120 people, most of them non-Jewish or with only distant Jewish roots, answered the call. All the objects were delivered on one day, June 22, and then arranged in display cases with the stories behind them.

The resulting, wide-ranging collection, as the museum puts it, provides “a multifaceted view into a very personal and modern picture of Judaism.” Some of the objects are explicitly Jewish: menorahs, an old container for matzah, kitschy shtetl figurines, family silverware marked for meat and dairy, a Ten Commandments paperweight, a comic book called “Shaloman.”

But for many of the items – a flashlight, a rock, a tablecloth, a necklace, books, paintings, an ordinary pair of sneakers – “that certain Jewish something” is revealed only through their meaning to those who selected them.

A set of faded snapshots shows a smiling, bespectacled fellow attending a party in a Mexican costume. The man who brought them in had found the snaps when he moved into a new apartment, and they apparently showed the previous tenant, a Jewish man who had passed away.

An 11-year-old boy brought in a shirt from the Bayern-Munich football team because he had read that the team’s president before World War II had been a Jew.

The ordinary pair of sneakers belonged to a Jewish man. They in fact are a tangible symbol of the force of his faith: He wears them to the synagogue on Yom Kippur, he wrote, as they are made of cloth, not leather, which is prohibited on the holiday.

That allosemitic, “certain Jewish something” is in what they represent, or how they are represented, not in what they actually are.

Read full story on JTA site

Ruthless Cosmopolitan: From Klezmer to Country: Linking the Soundtracks

From Klezmer to Country: Linking the Soundtracks



RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Editor’s note: The following launches a new column, “Ruthless Cosmopolitan,” by JTA’s veteran European correspondent, Ruth Ellen Gruber.

NASHVILLE (JTA) – An international conference on country music may seem an unlikely place to find someone like me. For nearly two decades, I’ve been known for my writing on Jewish issues. But here I was recently in Music City USA taking part in a gathering of academics and other experts, presenting a paper called “Sturm, Twang and Sauerkraut Cowboys: Country Music and Wild Western Spaces in Europe.”

My paper examined the way American-style country music forms the soundtrack for a colorful and multifaceted “Imaginary Wild West” in Europe. It had nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. Still, the trajectory I took to get here was in fact deeply rooted in my work on Jewish culture, heritage and identity.

How’s that? I’ve been exploring this Imaginary Wild West for several years now, spending time all over Europe at Wild West theme parks, rodeos, saloons, ranches, country music festivals and other events and venues.

I have seen how these places – and the states of mind that go with them – form “Wild Western spaces” inhabited by thousands of Europeans who feel perfectly at home amid the star-spangled Americana. I have seen people in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Poland and other countries dressed like cowboys, trappers or even Native Americans. And I have seen how local European artists singing and writing in their own languages take American country music, transform it and make it their own.

One catalyst for this project was my post-Sept. 11, 2001 desire to explore how Europeans view the United States. But in many ways, my interest grew directly out of the years I’ve spent investigating and interpreting how non-Jews in Europe relate to Jewish culture in countries where, more than half a century after the Holocaust, few Jews live today.

I coined the term “virtually Jewish” to describe how non-Jews adopt, enact and transform elements of Jewish culture and how they use “things Jewish” to create, mold or find their own identities. How they, in fact, help fill what has been described as a “Jewish space” that endures in Europe, even in the absence of actual Jews.

Klezmer music – not country and western – forms the soundtrack to this process, and indeed, klezmer musicians on the Continent today are often non-Jews playing to non-Jewish audiences.

Major differences exist, of course, between the “virtually Jewish” phenomenon and Europe’s Imaginary Wild West. One has to do with a real, traumatic issue: coming to terms with the Holocaust and its still potent and painful legacy. The other is the embrace and elaboration of a collective fantasy and its translation into personal experience.

[photo Gruberheadshot708 align=right max-width=120]

But both phenomena have to do with identity and the ways people embrace or use other cultures to shape their own sense of themselves. Stereotypes and preconceptions play prominent roles in both, too. What is meant or signified by “Jewish” or “Western” or “Native American” or “frontier” can be paramount: concepts or dreams rather than living, breathing realities.

There are few Jews in country music. The best known is Kinky Friedman, the satiric singer/songwriter who led an iconoclastic group called the Texas Jewboys and became famous for his ironic one-liners and flamboyant quest for the Texas governorship.

Given my own interests, I found it fitting that a paper at the Nashville country music conference was dedicated to his work. It aptly described Friedman as a satirist who at the same time was a romantic idealist. Dressed in black cowboy clothes and chomping a stogie, Friedman creates his own virtual world where cliche is often king.

In his best work, though, he cuts through myth, playing with stereotypes in a subversive, sometimes outrageous manner that dangles and discards preconceptions about cowboys, the Wild West, country music – and Jews.

My favorite Friedman song is the extraordinary “Ride’em Jewboy.” The lyrics are exquisite. Friedman uses the familiar, even hackneyed imagery of a Wild West cattle drive – a corral, wild ponies, a campfire, a roundup – to create a elegiac evocation of the Holocaust and the Jewish Diaspora. In effect, he uses collective fantasy to confront real trauma.

“Ride, ride, ride, ride ‘em Jewboy,
Ride ‘em all around the old corral.
I’m with you, I’m with you boy
If I’ve got to ride six million miles.”

Willie Nelson, the western icon whose “heroes have always been cowboys,” recorded a deceptively simple cover version of this song. Sung in Nelson’s unmistakable raspy twang and backed by a harmonica and clip-clopping hoofbeats, it perfectly captures the interplay of history, emotion and dreams.

“I’ve seen five people cry listening to Willie sing ‘Ride ‘Em Jewboy,’ all of them non-Jews,” Friedman once told an interviewer. “He sings it like a cowboy song, with no ax to grind, no agenda.”

Ruth Ellen Gruber’s books include “National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe,” “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe” and “Letters from Europe (and Elsewhere).” A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and many other publications.

Read article at JTA site