Welcome to the special episode of Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish contributors and
contributions to American popular culture. With Halloween upon us, we thought it would
be a good idea to discuss Yiddish horror, European Jewish stories steeped in lore
about demons, dibbicks, Golum's ghosts, spirits, suckuby and more. I'm
Jonathan Friedman and I'm Joey Angelfield producer engineer Mike Tomern is working somewhere behind the
scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of a Dot Javariem Congregation for Humanistic Judaism,
the Cools School, Jewish Cultural Community, and Atheist United Studios. Our
special guest today is Elizabeth Schwartz, an author, filmmaker, and segur who
has been called the Edith Poff of Yiddish. She's the vocals of the Klesmer
group Bielstrom and Atmastrami, and the subject of Romanian documentary films searching for Schwartz.
Elizabeth co created the award winning audio dramas The Witches of Loveland, and
Denson Canton contributed a chapter on pleasure of vocal technique to Spill the Art of
playing Klesmer and as recipes in a Wandering Feast, A Journey through the Jewish
culture of Eastern Europe, and other publications. Her first book of fiction,
The Sweet Fragrance of Life and Other Horror Stories, was released a short while
ago, just in time for Halloween. Elizabeth, Welcome to Amusing Jews.
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. The Sweet Fragrance
of Life collects three original horror stories set in the Old Country and written in
both Yiddish and English. What inspired you to take this bilingual approach. My
work is very steeped in Yiddish and Yiddish pie as a first or foremost a
klozmer musician. But when I'm not working, I'm a really avid reader,
like I think all writers. But this is a medium of writing that I
had never tried before. And I'll be honest, I was looking for this,
to read, this genre of feminist, dethal horror, and I couldn't
find it. I mean, there is, as you mentioned, there's a
wonderful tradition of Jewish horror, much of it written originally in Yiddish, but
not really told from a woman's point of view. Or in ways that I
think are things that women are thinking about or concerned about or grappling with,
and I couldn't find it, and that sort of got me interested in doing
it. Very cool and just for our viewers, the book is truly bilingual,
so if you look at it this way, it's going to be in
English. You flip it around, it's in Yiddish and they meet in the
middle, which is quite a beautiful thing. So without giving too much away,
we absolutely want our audience to buy the book, of course. Could
you tell us a little bit about the title, the Sweet Fragrance of Life,
which is also the title of the middle story. Is this sweetness of
the fragrance perhaps challenged or does it come into focus through the foregrounding of death
in your book and in the horror genre more broadly. It's actually not a
phrase that I wrote. It is from a song cycle written by Mahler called
Song of the Earth, and it's a lyric in the song cycle which struck
me because it sweet fragrance of life. What could be better than that?
It's so dark and it's really menacing, and I loved that juxtaposition. And
I didn't write the story because of it, but it really fits so perfectly
and neatly, particularly with the characters I don't want to say too much,
but with the characters who share it and sing it together and are both both
love Maller and think that they have so much in common, and of course
they don't. I was riffing on the idea of that lyric myself as I
read the Maler translation. And you know, the fragrance of life can be
a menacing thing in the sense that you know, that's what attracts predators,
right the blood perhaps that attracts the shark or the zombie or whatever. You
know, it's sort of like a dangerous thing to have. The fragrance of
life. It attracts death in a way is so good. I wish I
had thought about that when I was writing this story. That's a great that's
a great way to look at it. I want the title to make sense
after you read the story and then you think about everything that has inspired with
this, with these two characters in particular, and their relationship. And I
think I even in this story reference smells quite a bit of the different people,
which is something that I tend to do anyway. But I realized I
think all my stories have smells in them, and it's just to have a
very sensitive nose. So I guess it's I'm not a dog, but it's
one of my first things I think I encounter and that makes sense. You
know, the two strongest senses that we have are hearing and smell, and
you're a musician who talks about smell, so that makes a lot of sense
to me. So the stories in your book are fabinist as you as you
said, Yet the female protagonists don't have a lot of agency and are more
often victims to get the last laugh. Perhaps revenge was the best women could
hope for in those restricted times in places. What's the feminist takeaway? There's
no escaping that world, and it is the stories really are, including the
last one, which is certainly based on a historic event. Stories are really
very deeply rooted in actual Jewish history and culture, and little of that is
actually woman centric. Though in the first story, for example, I really
objectify the women to the point where they are just sort of tools for the
protagonist. What makes them feminist not that there is justice or egalitarianism, but
that the historic treatment of women in many cases is not does not go unnoticed
or treated casually, or god forbid, even rewarded in any way. Yeah.
One of the things I appreciate about the story too, is that you
take this formula that I've heard from R. L. Stein, and you
know, the great Jewish author himself and of course other Jewish contributors to science
fiction, horror, et cetera. This idea of like the beginning, the
middle, and the twist. I'm wondering if that's rooted in the Yiddish lore
from your experience, is that kind of an the essence as a way of
saying, of that of those kinds of stories most adult views of folklore not
things that are simplified or moralized for children. But you know, when you
think of ib Singer, for example, who wrote in Yiddish his this Ryhnus,
you know these things are I think, what make interesting reading or things
that you think about afterwards. I mean, it's certainly on him. If
you've read for example, Roald Dahl, I know anceled at the moment,
but his adult short stories they all have these kind of twists. My actual
inspiration was more like the author Angela Carter, who in the nineteen seventies it
was kind of mind blowing for me, as a child who read and adored
all of the Andrew Lang fairy books and devoured fairy tales, do as a
young woman read her stories, where she basically turned all of these fairy tales
on their head with I would go so far as to say, with a
feminist, female centric point of view, that changed your perceptions of these classic
stories, because she made us realize how easy that was to do if we
just changed our perspectives. So many I've observed that the horror genre in the
West is mostly dominated by Christian imagery and Christian ideas about morality and ethics.
Some horror stories and especially in film, can actually function as a kind of
Christian propaganda. In extreme case. In point, back in the early two
thousands, I played cello on the soundtrack of the terrible b movie called Exorcism,
not to be confused with The Exorcist, which turned out to be a
polemical evangelical Protestant attack on Catholicism. So I'm wondering if you see the Jewish
reclaiming of horror through your book and other recent books and comics and films,
including a movie by one of our past guests, Noah Sagan called Blood Relatives
as a corrective perhaps to the genre's Christian hegemony. Like the most iconic horror
story of all times, Frankenstein Mary Shelley, based out on the Golum though
they're really you know, there are some underpinnings of Jewish culture and his historical
context for these stories. What is kind of changed, of course, are
the circumstances of, you know, why somebody gets possessed or why this creature
starts wreaking havoc, you know, I mean, obviously Frankenstein doesn't deal with
the context of you know, anti Semitism in Prague and I think it was
the sixteenth century. There are only so many stories to go around, and
we're always looking for new ways to tell them. So what I appreciate a
lot is really just in the past decade, there has been so much interest
in Yiddish and Yiddish culture, and there have been some horror films that are
you know, Yiddish or based like in the Hasidic enclaves in Brooklyn, and
that's really heartening that people are starting to plumb that and interested in exploring those
worlds. Yeah, that's a great way of contextualizing it too. I was
in a Cousmer group in the early two thousands, affiliated with John Zorn's Sudik
Records and all that stuff, and that was very hot in that moment.
But I think you're right, that's sort of cooled in terms of like being
a cultural movement, and maybe this is the next phase of that energy,
maybe filtered more through literature, visual arts, that kind of thing. You
know, what's interesting to me is the phenomenon of dissel, which you know,
I mean, you don't need to promote Israeli culture. It's there.
I mean, it's a vibrant nation, but this Yiddish enclay and kind of
exploring that world, and you know, sort of our excitement at hearing characters
speaking Yiddish, you know, and then following up with the Shira Pasts film
Unorthodox, you know, I mean, it's really these are also obviously about
Hasidic culture, but that is really the community that is speaking Yiddish as a
living daily language, and it's just I'm enjoying seeing people starting to discover this.
So, yes, you're right. Unfortunately, those of us who continue
to play Klesmer and try and push the envelope and are committed to it are
still committed to the art form. We're just not kind of anti disestablishmentarian about
it. Right. Well, everything that begins is radical, if it lasts
becomes sort of part of the mainstream. So there's something positive about that too.
So, as we know, Jews in Europe historically experienced all sorts of
real life horrors, from violent attacks to extreme poverty to devastating disease and infant
mortality. Was the invention of diviocs and demons, perhaps a way to make
sense of all this by giving a supernatural rationale to the siving randomness of actual
horrors. We you know, we are literary people. We have always been
literally the people and figuratively the people of the book. Though literacy has been
an aspect of Judaism in the modern age. But I do think that fictionalizing
the monsters that were other human beings and externalizing them and making them, you
know, something other, could be a way to explore it, explain it,
think about it without feeling personally threatened, or you know, give it
some perspective, move it away from your daily life. You know, don't
forget that the Goal was written as a character created to protect the Jews.
Yeah, and we saw how that worked out. So a Halloween specific question.
There are a lot of religious Jews who object to observing Halloween because of
its presumed pagan origins, Christian overlays, and so forth. Halloween has always
been a favorite holiday of mind, so I never really took those critiques very
seriously. But I'm wondering if maybe we can make the holiday a little more
Jewish by using it as an opportunity to celebrate and to remember our own horror
folklore, which, as you're saying, is rooted in stories from the Talmud
and the Hebrew Bible anyway, So I'm wondering what you think about that.
Oh, I have lots of thoughts about that. First of all, Halloween
is my favorite hug. I've always said I am a full sized candy bar
person, none of these fun size I have one of the good houses.
Separate from that, I understand that there may be some religious objections to it.
I'm not an Orthodox and I don't live in an Orthodox community. And
when I was growing up, the biggest objection about Halloween was we were back
East and you'd get this great costume, you'd have to put a parka over
it. So I you know, I know that the objection has not always
been you know, Jewish. I mean I think that it's considered a pagan
holiday, and that there were there were Christians who objected to it too.
I also happened to love paganism, and I consider myself a Yiddish pagan and
I see the antecedents of all of our faiths in this kind of early religious
world. So yeah, I have several sweet teeth. I don't have a
sweet tooth, So I'm with you on that. And also you're you're absolutely
right if we take the slippery slope into critiquing and discarding anything that has a
smell of paganism, we don't have any Judaism anymore because of the roots of
everything that we think of as Jewish or Christian culture. If you dig deep
enough, you find exactly what the objectors are objecting to. So I think
Halloween is beautiful. I wish I would see more kids dressing up like golams
and diviocks, but maybe that'll happen. The other thing I wanted to mention
is that you know, in the final story in the book, it's a
story about a girl who doesn't use her voice and that that is in really
in many cultures throughout the millennia, in many religions, a woman's voice has
been has had a lot of weight and associations attached to it, you know,
the whole ban on Kohli Shah in Jewish culture, and which I have
also had to deal with quite a lot as a vocalist. You know,
kind of like okay, here we go again. You know, there is
something about being robbed of your agency and not you your voice, which is
also I guess my response to my experience is kind of swimming in those waters
of an orthodox traditional world. As a non Orthodox woman singer, you're always
busy with different projects, what's new and upcoming and how can we find out
more? Well. I do try to keep up with my website, which
is www. Elizabeth dashboards dot com, and there's a lot of stuff on
there. It does seem like we're doing a lot of things all at once,
and that's really because you know, so much stuff was percolating and in
the works during the pandemic or immediately after the pandemic, so it seems like
it's like a crazy amount of activity, But really this was all this happening
slowly getting ready to come out. We just had our new album released on
the Naxos Arc Music label. This was a recording we made last year in
a former synagogue, well still a synagogue, it just doesn't have a Jewish
community or or or anything in Polish Tech Republic, and it's it's a beautifully
preserved synagogue that's noted because the rabbi who had been there, who is known
as the Shah and that's what they call that, which is an acronym of
his name, was a very important Torah commentator. So there are still pilgrimages
made every year do Holoshock to go to his grave and to see the synagogue,
which is now a museum. But we just recorded this album from live
in the synagogue as a way to kind of have oxygen and Jewish music and
flowing through it again and playing music that is the kind of music from communities
that would have come to Holoshov that the Jews of Holoshov might have gone to
and heard, including one song based on a poem that is written in a
dialect of Yiddish from Eastern Austria, from the Bergenland called Bergolondish Yiddish that's extinct.
There's no one who speaks that any longer. You know, I think
that there are artists who worked in a medium who say, Okay, I
finished this project, what's the next thing I'm going to write? But my
focus is really on this world and then I kind of explore it in as
many different media as I can. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining
us. It's been great to talk to you. I really appreciate it.
Guys, I wish you Halloween and to our audience, Now back to your
regularly scheduled lives. Amusing Jews is here to amuse you. If you like
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