Transylvanian Souvenirs, and a Welcome Back to Conversations!
I am pleased to announce that I am returning to the Milken Center as a Research Fellow and am reviving my blog series, Conversations: Words and Music from the American Jewish Experience, for a second season. Over the course of the academic year, I will be posting short essays approximately twice a month. While I hesitate to predict exactly where my research will take me, I intend to travel along two main lines of inquiry that I hope to develop more or less in equal measure.
The first area of focus will be organized around the theme “Dispatches from Brooklyn,” a title that readers may recall from Season One of the Conversations blog. This part of the blog series will be made up of ethnographic episodes depicting new musical occurrences in the life of Jewish music. Seeking to capture the vitality and ceaseless change of the Jewish musical present, I will bring the reader testimony about the work of contemporary artists, their new projects, and the cultural currents that are brought to bear in the work of musicians and their reception. These miniature ethnographies will focus on the New York scene, by virtue of the fact that I reside in Brooklyn but will expand to a variety of other geographic points as my work brings me to different parts of the world.
The second stream of reportage will offer “Snapshots from the Archive.” My work as a researcher brings me into contact with materials that stimulate the imagination, dancing on the boundary between ephemera and treasure. In this section of the blog series, I will share with readers particularly intriguing stories, sounds and images that I encounter in my research on cantors and other figures in the Jewish musical ghost world.
****
For this first post, I will offer the reader some reflections on my recent trip to Romania, where I was traveling with my teenage son Jacob and with friends, klezmer musicians Jake Shulman-Ment and Francesca Ter-Berg, during the last week of August. My son enjoyed/endured a week of the embarrassment of their Rabelaisian klezmer banter as we drove up and down the two-lane highways of Transylvania, staying with friends, playing music in historic Jewish spaces and hearing local musicians play.
My grandmother Geta Konigsberg (1922-2017) was born in Mihalyfalva, a small town in Transylvania near the Hungarian border. I have made traveling in the region a part of my life in the past few years. While I do not have a definite goal in undertaking these trips, I feel that there is some unfolding story that I am taking part in by visiting the place where my family used to live. On previous trips I accompanied musician and folklorist Zoë Acqua on her field work with elder folk musicians in Transylvania. Zoë and I also played a concert together in the synagogue in Mihalyfalva in March of 2023. My most recent trip was focused on performance, with me and Jake and Francesca performing four concerts, most of them held in old synagogue spaces.
It is worth noting that almost all of the concerts I have played in Romania were well attended by primarily non-Jewish audiences, as is not unusual in Jewish cultural events in European countries. These concert goers, who hadn’t necessarily heard of me or my colleagues, are motivated to visit Jewish spaces and hear Jewish sounds. While there are few or no Jewish people left in many of these places that used to boast strong Jewish communities, the idea that Jews are an important part of the local history continues to animate self-conceptions about heritage for some people in Transylvania.
As in much of the Hungarian border region of Romania, my grandmother’s town was occupied by the Nazis late in the war, at a point when the mechanisms of liquidation were already developed to a point of precision. The Jews of Mihalyfalva were deported to concentration camps over the course of just a few months in 1944 and less than a quarter of the Jewish population of the town survived the war. Traveling to this part of the world today inevitably invokes the feeling of ghost presences and unlived possibilities erased by the course of history. Although I first visited the region out of a sense of some desire to see this site of loss, I have returned to it for reasons that are harder for me to pin down.
There is some feeling of kinship, entirely subjective and that I cannot expect to be reciprocated, that is sparked for me by coming in contact with the lives of the people here. The artefacts of culture, the flavors of the food and the sounds of the music, entice me into a feeling of memory. This sense of memory is rooted in the embodied experience of my years of growing up spending time in my grandmother’s home, eating her food and surrounded by the colors and textures of her richly decorated home. But my imagined sense of kinship also has to do with a response to the local culture of memory, which involves Jews as one part of a larger story of heritage maintenance. Some of the people of Transylvania, especially musicians, are actively engaged in struggle to reclaim meaning from their past. A pride in and active imaginative engagement with the region’s cultural history seems to color much of the public space and popular discourse about the region. The image of the past is maintained in the architecture and visual culture of the region, as well as in the folk music projects of a handful of important local musical activists and their students.
Transylvania is the site of fantasies about the ancestral past and heritage for many people, not only Jews. It is a borderland territory that was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries and was characterized by the multiple ethnic and linguistic groups that shared places of residence. Because of its economic underdevelopment and strong identification with peasant culture, Transylvania has been looked to by folklorists as a site of contact with an imagined past for over a century. Bela Bartok, working shortly after the turn of the 20th century on his ethnographic folk music collecting expeditions, considered this region to be of particular significance in its representation of a strand of Hungarian culture that he believed was uncorrupted by urbanization and transnationalism.
While the story of the Jews of Transylvania is marked by the particular brutality of the Holocaust, other ethnic groups were also erased from the region. The region’s multiple ethnicities included Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Roma and Jews. In the 1970s and 80s the repressive Ceausescu regime, in a desperate cash grab, sold visas for ethnic Germans to the West German government, and for the remaining Jews of Romania to Israel. These grotesque policies of a failed government literally selling a segment of their population brought Romania closer to the “ethnic purity” that was considered the ideal in the conception of the nation state that has characterized nationalist movements since the 19th century. While diversity still exists in the region, far less Hungarian is spoken in the region than even a generation ago. My grandmother’s town, for example, was primarily Hungarian-speaking when her family live there. Today, Romanian is the dominant language.
While on the trip, I met Ioan Pop, a brilliant Romanian singer and musician and folklorist who specializes in preserving and performing folk culture of the Maramures hill country region. Ioan has been working as a musical activist for many decades, preserving local musical repertoires and traveling internationally, representing Transylvanian musical heritage at festivals including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. His band, Grupul IZA, performs in a local vernacular song style associated with Frații Petreuș (the Petreuș brothers), innovative folk song performers whose work has become synonymous with Maramures musical tradition since they debuted in the 1960s.
Ioan Pop lives in a house that has an unusual story.
An elderly Jewish man who was born in Maramures, survived the Holocaust and later moved to Brazil, was returning to Romania for the first time since he was a youth, when he was deported from his home to a concentration camp. Pop, who has made Marmures heritage the focus of his life’s work, was helping the elderly Jewish man travel in the region. They came to the man’s village and found his family’s abandoned home. Across the road, there was another elderly man sitting in front of his own house. The two old men recognized each other, after over forty year.
Their miraculous reunion, accompanied by tears and embracing, made a deep impression on Ioan Pop. He decided to take the long-abandoned house of the Jewish family and transport it to his village, deconstructed and then put back together piece by piece. Ioan and his wife have lived in this beautiful and haunting structure for decades since then, making the house into a hub for local musical culture.
Jake has known Ioan Pop and his family for years. Thanks to Jake, we were fortunate to stay in the Pop guest house. Ioan was extremely busy while we were visiting because August is the wedding season in Transylvania. As Pop explained, weddings used to be held in the Winter (as was also the case for Jewish weddings in Eastern Europe) but today because so many Romanians are migrant workers living in Western Europe, the wedding season is held to coincide with their vacations when they can come home to visit.
Ioan had a job playing a wedding almost every night that month. But he made time one morning to show us around the main house on his property, the one with the mythological origin story. He showed us the special back door of the house that had a split opening so that the top of the door could open forming a countertop where customers could be served. The Jewish family that had lived in the house before the war had operated a dry goods shop from out of the back room.
Then he showed us his music room, a reliquary of beautiful old Transylvanian five string guitars and other instruments used in historic folk music styles of the region. He sat and played music with us for an hour so. One of the highlights of the session was Ioan’s performance of the local Jewish instrumental repertoire that has been preserved from the region. One local Roma musician clan, the Covaci family, have played an outsized role in remembering and teaching melodies that were played by klezmorim, Jewish wedding musicians, in the Maramures region before the Second World War.
For American Jewish musicians such as Jake Shulman-Ment and Zoë Aqua, who are deeply invested in the klezmer tradition, these musical connections are a touchstone of trusted pedagogical testimony that helps build and sustain a conception of what Jewish instrumental folk music is supposed to sound like.
These songs, like the house we were sitting in, are a form of presence of the Jewish population of the region that continues to help sustain the local living community. Jewish people in the past had played a variety of supportive roles for their neighbors, working as wedding performers and shop keepers, for example, among many other occupations. Jewish cultural work continues now in the absence of living Jews, in the form of memory and, to some extent, through the actual physical structures of Jewish life that are now mostly abandoned, such as synagogues that are used for concerts and cultural events. These traces of Jewish presence give substance to claims by local activists like Pop to be sustaining a link to the past. Even in the absence of a physical living presence, the idea of the Jew continues to do some work for the people in this place, acting as cultural connectors. Whereas Jews in the past were signifiers of transnational networks of knowledge, commerce and culture, today the Jews, in the form of ghostly memories and abandoned physical spaces, act as conduits to a conception of the past that can be put to use by the descendants of their former neighbors to support new cultural work.
As an outsider visiting my own homeland (so to speak), I am pleased to be included in the local dialogue as a performer of a missing part of the ethnic tapestry. At the same time, I am unnerved by the “usefulness” of Jews to their former co-territorial people. I deeply admire Ioan Pop and his culture-making project, but he is not the only person making use of Jewish heritage in Transylvania and across Eastern Europe. As is well-known, Jews are frequently used as a trope in the language of political demagogues of various stripes, including resurgent forms of Evangelical Christianity that imagine Jews playing a role in a violent eschatology. Separating the productive cultural work of memory from the destructive power of nostalgia-based politics is one of the challenges that arises when thinking about the meaning of Jews in contemporary Europe. Over the years ahead, I hope to delve more deeply into this story. In the meanwhile, I am grateful for the infusion of creative energy that my “reunion” has brought into my life and am slowly developing an idea of how to use this gift productively in my work as a musician and scholar.
FOR EDUCATORS – discussion prompts
Thinking about Jewish heritage sites in Europe, such as those I visited in Transylvania, comparisons to other political realities in your own life may come to mind. In the North American context, memory and nostalgia are key themes of political discourse. Are comparisons between different socio-historical situations productive, or do they distract from the specificity of the Jewish experience in Europe? Hold these themes in mind as you consider the following questions:
- What is heritage? What is nostalgia? Are they the same? Is heritage something that can be touched and seen? Who decides what cultural sites, sounds and practices mean, especially when their original context has changed radically?
- What ethical obligations do the current inhabitants of a territory have to previous populations after they have been displaced by histories of state violence?
- Is memory an ethical act (can it be good or bad, or actively harm or heal)? What political meaning does nostalgia have? How is it possible for the act of remembering to have such widely differing political meanings?
Works Cited/Further Reading
Zoë Aqua, “Zoë’s Fulbright Blog,” Blog. https://www.zoeaqua.com/blog
Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds. Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)
Bob Cohen, “Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere.” Blog. https://horinca.blogspot.com/
Alan Dundes, ed. International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999
Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: UC Press, 2002)
Daniel Lowy, History of the Former Jewish Community of Ermihalyfalva and the Little Ghetto of Nagyvarad (Washington DC: self-published, 2014
András Papp-Zakor, “Klezmer kavalkád Tranzit Ház-módra,” Kolozsvari Radio Romania, August 26, 2024. https://www.kolozsvariradio.ro/2024/08/26/klezmer-kavalkad-tranzit-haz-modra/