Tkhines on Record: Women’s Prayers and Men’s Voices
In a nod to the season of the year and the month of the Elul (that is fast slipping away!), I would like to draw your attention to an unusual recording of tkhines I found in the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings. Tkhines are women’s prayers, typically said in Yiddish, that were a part of the spiritual practices of Jewish women in Eastern Europe prior to the Second World War, and to a more limited extent, into the immigrant context in the United States. Saying tkhines was a part of the daily ritual life for many Jewish women but was especially associated with the graveyard and the month of Elul preceding the new year, when many Jewish people performed the ritual of kever oves, pilgrimage to the graves of one’s ancestors.
The practice of saying tkhines as a distinctive women’s prayer practice has largely disappeared over the course of the last century, in part due to the advances made in women’s education in formerly all-male areas of Jewish sacred text study. This form of ritual that is specific to women’s experience has been the subject of reexamination in recent decades. In 1998, Chava Weissler’s influential book Voices of the Matriarchs brought tkhines into the public discourse, alongside the work of other scholars and Jewish feminist activists. In the current moment, a movement to reinvigorate the practice of tkhines is associated with the work of Rabbi Noam Lerner, and scholar Annabel Gottfried Cohen, who has made major strides in discovering and translating Yiddish language ethnographic descriptions of women spiritual workers in Eastern Europe, culled from newly digitized archives. Resources in Yiddish and English that provide the texts of old women’s prayers and descriptions of ritual practices are available in significant number, and Rabbi Lerner is actively educating Jewish Americans towards the goal of new composition of tkhines as a ritual practice.
While interest in tkhines is on the ascent in some communities and practices of saying tkhines are being actively revived, knowledge about what tkhines sounded like as a form of music or ritualized speech is absent. But as with many problematic lacunae in our knowledge about the past, clues are lying in plain sight, tucked into corners in the newly digitized archives that have so vastly enriched the field of Jewish music research in recent years. On three 78 rpm records that are available through the online Mayrent Archive, can be heard performances that purport to represent tkhines recorded by Julius Guttman and Max Wilner, male Yiddish theater actors both playing the role of an elder Jewish woman. These recordings are rare documents of the sound of tkhines from before the Second World War.
All three record can be accessed online here.
https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AZROIBYED7LO5M8M
Tchines leinen, Julius Guttman (Germany: Polydor H70190, 1927)
https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AIMVHQGS2VQ5TM9C/AIQEOEOX2QE7RM8X
Tchino leinen, Max Wilner (New York: Brunswick 67043, 1927)
https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/A4ZO4J7XIUO3OB8G/A6CN553WWHWJMN8E
Baba’s gebeit, Max Wilner (New York: Banner Records, c. 1946)
Reversal of gender roles in the performance of Jewish liturgical music is a well-documented phenomenon. Starting in the 1910s, women performers of khazones (cantorial art music), commonly referred to as khazntes, began to appear with some regularity on the Jewish concert circuit in New York. The best known of these early women cantors, Madame Sophie Kurtzer, made records and appeared for large audiences in concert halls, sometimes sharing the stage with male cantors. Women performing pants roles, such as Pepi Littman and Fraydele Oysher, were also familiar stars of the Yiddish stage. While the khazntes represent women’s power in claiming religious authority through performance of ritual in media settings, the recordings of male Yiddish theater actors performing tkhines offers a twist on the story of sacred gender reversal.
The position of the male actor performing a female role is not foreign to the context of Yiddish theater. In the early years of Yiddish theater, all male casts included men playing women’s roles, although by the 1920s when these records were made, mixed gender performance had been the norm for some time. Practices of male performance in female roles has been sustained to some extent into the present day in the Purim shpil, a form of folk theater retelling the story of the Biblical Queen Esther as part of the paraliturgical observance of the Purim holiday.
These records of tkhines, made in Germany and New York, are examples of “dialect records,” humorous commercial recordings that mimic and mock a type of personhood through a stylized performance of vocal affect, language and speech patterns. Unlike some other records of dialect humor, which represent racialized or ethnic collectivities for the amusement of others, Yiddish language dialect records inherently address an all-Jewish Yiddish speaking audience. The reason these records exist was to represent Jewishness to Jews themselves. The records are satiric, but also offer a mirror of the community that plays on cultural memories and intra-communal aesthetics. They are both mocking and, perhaps, an act of self-reflection.
The “Jüdischer Jargon” record (as the Yiddish language is referred to on the label of Julius Guttman’s 1927 Polydor record) represents experiences and forms of speech that were recognizable to a Yiddish-speaking public. These records extend and transform the lineage of maskilic literature. The maskilim, adherents of the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, counted among their ranks a cohort of pioneering Yiddish authors of the 19th century. Maskilic Yiddish writers such as Yisroel Aksenfeld and Ayzik Dik, created works that were written with the didactic purpose of highlighting the “primitiveness” of traditional Jewish lifeways, seeking to “convert” the Yiddish speaking masses to a modern sensibility. In the process of authoring these works of literature, they preserved ethnographic details of the heterogeneity and creativity of non-elite culture in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe.
Julius Guttman (1878-1942), who also went by the name Yidl, was a veteran actor of the Jewish Theater in Lemberg. He had been trained as an accountant and was the son of an elite family. His brother Shmuel Guttman was the Chief Rabbi of the Temple Synagogue of Lemberg. Guttman came to the theater as an adult but spent over two decades working as a script writer and performer. He made his first records in 1906 and continued to record over the following decade, appearing on dozens of sides for the Gramophone, recording first in Lemberg and later on trips to Vienna and London. It is unclear from the available discographic information, whether Guttman’s “Tchines leinen,” issued on a German imprint in 1927, is a reissue of an earlier recording made in his active recording year. Among his recordings are other theatrical representations of Jewish life, including a recreation of a wedding ritual “Chuson Kale besingen, Szene,” ini which Guttman plays the role of a badkhn, the traditional wedding poet-entertainer whose performance typically included the recitation of rhymed verses that were meant to elicit weeping from the bride and other wedding guests. Another record is “Hakufes Feiertagsszene,” a sonic recreation of the festive carnivalesque dancing and singing on the Simkhes Toyre holiday, typified by the auctioning of the honor of carrying the Torah to raise money for the community.
On “Tchines leinen,” Guttman plays the role of a grandmother praying. The records begins with another actor, ambiguously gendered, asking their grandmother to pray for them in a time of need. The grandmother begins to pray, “Listen my child: in the Tsene Rene we read thus…” The Tsene Rene is the Yiddish language translation and adaptation of the Bible that is firmly associated with women’s religious lives in literary representations of Jewish domestic life. The printed tkhines literature, which was a substantial genre in early Yiddish publishing, includes many works of prayer, often written by male authors, meant to represent women’s practical and spiritual needs. The Tsene Rene is the best-known example. Tkhines encompass both written texts read by women and spontaneous prayers, improvised using formulaic constructions but suited to particular needs of the person praying or the people the praying woman was interceding on behalf of.
Guttman’s performance on this record employs a highly specific speech chant style that is reminiscent of the sound of bal tefiles, non-professional synagogue prayer leaders. His chanting is highly specific and repetitious in its stereotyped musical patterns, indicating that the performance references a familiar sound. It is a sound that Guttman presumably heard from elder women in his own family and could assume would be familiar to his listeners. The record is predicated on the idea that this exaggerated and stylized version of tkhines would land as a recognizable parody of a well-known cultural form. The praying woman is portrayed as old. The age of the subject of the record tracks with the association of tkhines with elderly women and with the prayer style as belonging to the Jewish past. In contrast, Guttman’s portrayals of cantors and badkhns on his other dialect records are not presented as having a specific age. Perhaps the specificity of the tkhine singer’s age has to do with Guttman’s gendered perception of women’s piety. The trope of the grandmother’s prayer is familiar in Yiddish popular song, for example, in “Bobenyu,” Sholom Secunda’s well known nostalgic portrayal of Jewish childhood
Max Wilner’s record with the same title “Tchino leinen,” released (and perhaps recorded) the same year as Guttman’s record, covers the same thematic territory and similarly features a male actor playing the role of an elder female. Wilner’s record gives more context for the tkhine, with a female actress portraying a nervous expectant bride asking her grandmother to pray for her before her wedding. Like on Guttman’s record, Wilner uses a stylized set of recitation patterns. The record ends with a medley of songs with instrumental accompaniment, imitative of the music of klezmorim, Jewish wedding musicians. Wilner’s 1946 record “Baba’s gebeit” covers similar thematic terrain, but without the wedding pretext. The instrumental song at the end is more “Americanized,” with the familiar clarinet-driven sound of New York klezmer.
Both Wilner and Guttman’s chanting style are similar to the patterns notated by Romanian ethnomusicologist Ghisela Suliteanu in her 1972 study, “The Traditional System of Melopeic Prose of the Funeral Songs Recited by the Jewish Women of the Socialist Republic of Romania,” perhaps the lone ethnomusicological study of tkhines in their European context. Suliteanu’s beautiful and detailed musical transcriptions are accompanied by an analysis that connects Jewish women’s recitation of tkhines to the Biblical tradition of mourning women’s performance. The insistence on continuity with antiquity, inspired by the ideologically tinged historical musicology of A.Z. Idelsohn, deters Suliteanu from a situated cultural analysis of the evidence from her ethnography which would have been invaluable. Nevertheless, Suliteanu offers a tantalizing sense of the lived tradition of tkhines that she herself had witnessed growing up in a Jewish family in Romania. She writes, almost as an aside in her lengthy essay, “in our mind there still persist the voices of our mothers, of our aunt and of other women we heard during our childhood, praying at home or at the cemetery. They all had the same style of execution, with the intonation which may be termed unitary. And all, moved by the contents of these ceremonial songs with individual and special character, recited them crying.”
An excerpt from Suliteanu’s trasncription of a tkhine.
These records of men performing a stylized version of women’s ritual offer a counterpoint to the work of the khazntes. While Madame Sophie Kurtzer and her musical heirs achieved authority in the public sphere through performance in a masculine coded art form, Wilner and Guttman display a domestic intimacy. Beyond its surface level reading as commodity, a marketing of stereotypes to a Jewish audience, meaning can be reclaimed from these records by reading them as an act of memorialization. The records (perhaps) offer tribute to a form of women’s spirituality that was ignored by the revolutionary mediatization of Jewish heritage achieved through the popular music market for khazones and Yiddish theater. Like the khazntes, these male singers cross the boundary of gender to acquire a kind of sacred power—not through the canonical genres of synagogue music that were typical of male performance, but instead through claiming a different kind of authority, centered in the emotional economy of women’s experiences that were marginalized by the recorded music industry and other institutions. Above all, the value of these records lies in their rare documentation of a Yiddish women’s performance genre. They are singular artefacts and serve as an enticement to a deeper engagement with the sounds and sentiments of Jewish life.
FOR EDUCATORS – discussion prompts
Guttman and Wilner’s recordings of tkhines raise questions about what constitutes a reliable source of testimony about the sounds of the past. Contemporary issues in the American context around gender, ethnic identity and cultural authority may come to mind while learning about this material. Bear these different contexts in mind as you consider the following questions:
- What does singing in the voice of someone with a different identity than the one you were assigned by birth and cultural position afford a singer? What are the dangers of these kinds of cultural crossings? What are the productive possibilities?
- What can we learn about a culture from its humor? Is a mocking impersonation a reliable source of testimony about the past?
- In Jewish traditional society, seemingly impenetrable boundaries existed between male and female spheres of culture, with men occupying the synagogue and women’s piety existing in domestic and other public, rabbinically unregulated spaces. What do these records tell us about these boundaries of gender?
Bibliography/Further Reading
Annie Cohen, “Pulling at threads,” [website] https://pullingatthreads18.wordpress.com/
Rabbi Tracy Guren Klirs, The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992)
Noam Lerman, “Der Tkhines Proyekt,” [website] https://www.spontaneousprayer.com/writings
“The Open Siddur Project: tkhines” [website], https://opensiddur.org/tagged/tkhines/
Ghisela Suliteanu, “The Traditional System of Melopeic Prose of the Funeral Songs Recited by the Jewish Women of the Socialist Republic of Romania,” Folklore Research Studies Vol. III, Issachar Ben-Ami, ed. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1972).
Rivka Zakutinsky, Techinas: A Voice from the Heart “As Only A Woman Can Pray” (Aura Press, 1992)
Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998)