For Isabel Frey, it’s Yiddish for life
The epithet “a Yiddish Joan Baez” springs to my mind when listening to Isabel Frey do her musical bit. The Jewish Viennese singer-guitarist has no problems with being likened to the iconic folkie who made a highly successful enduring career out of performing protest songs.
No doubt some of the members of Frey’s audience, particularly those of a certain vintage, will get that when she appears at the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor district, on Saturday evening (7 p.m.). “Joan Baez is a big influence on me,” Frey freely admits, “just aesthetically and musically. I play, a lot, solo with guitar and voice. I think also in terms of the aesthetics of the time I am very influenced by her, this American folk music, the folk music revival,” including Baez and her ilk. “Yes, it’s the whole counterculture thing,” Frey continues. “The beatniks, Pete Seeger and all of that. And also politically.”
Frey is not only here to perform for a live audience, she is also taking an intensive Yiddish course at the University of Tel Aviv. Somewhat paradoxically, it was an earlier trip here which led her to the understanding that Israel was not the place for her on a permanent basis. “I distanced myself from the Zionist ideology I grew up with, because of the confrontation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and so on,” she explains. “But this was actually before that.” The light bulb moment regarding where her future lay occurred during an earlier, prolonged, sojourn. “I came here for a gap year, and I felt homesick. OK, it was my first time being far away from home, but I had this feeling of being foreign. There was the language barrier, although I learned a bit of Hebrew. But it was this experience of being a foreigner.”
While, at least with hindsight, Frey understands that a challenging transitional period is probably the lot of anyone who relocates to a different cultural milieu, back then her struggles with coping with the Israeli directness and the pace of life here convinced her she would return to Austria. “Though a meaningful experience, it made me realize that my Jewish identity was rooted in the Diaspora, not in Israel,” she writes on her website.
“I had grown up with this ideology that Israel is supposed to be my homeland. But, at the time, I realized my Jewishness was very much rooted in the city of Vienna, and the Jewish history of Vienna, which was more about the bourgeois modern coffee house society, [Jewish Austrian writer] Stefan Zweig
and [Zweig’s acclaimed book] The World of Yesterday. This is what I really identified with.”
THE CULTURAL dissonance Frey felt here was exacerbated by her locale. “The culture was [a] shock was because I was on a kibbutz in the south, in a very rural area. It was also an urban-rural [divide] shock,” she laughs. “There was also this feeling [that] there was no reason this should be connected to my Jewishness. I have family here, but it is just another country where Jews live.”
Being convinced that Israel was not home, naturally, necessarily meant she would return to Vienna and resume her Jewish Diaspora lifestyle. “It was a process of a couple of years, and it would take a few years before I discovered my love for Yiddish, but that was the beginning of questioning the fundamental assumption of Zionism, that Israel is the homeland of all Jews. That is why I got interested in the Diaspora also as a concept, as an identity-giving concept.”
Frey feels that approach has taken its fair share of bad press. “That concept has been historically devalued within [the] Zionism ideology.”
Despite her Viennese Jewish background, Frey did not imbibe Yiddish
culture in her early formative years and says she came from “Austro-Hungarian assimilated roots.”
The repertoire she will perform in Jerusalem came into her personal purview later on in life. “Yiddish, in my family, was very much frowned upon, the language of the Hassidim, the kind of very backward primitive culture of the shtetl. My grandfather had a strong aversion to it. My grandmother, to this day, has a strong aversion to it and it is very strange for her to hear me sing it.”
But, sing it Frey does and does her best to spread the word not of only Yiddish culture, but also as a language of rebellion and fiery sociopolitical activism. She not only dips into the historical treasure trove, but feeds off the work of contemporary artists of the genre, such as Detroit-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Daniel Kahn, who has been described as a “klezmer Yiddish punk rocker,” late New York-born klezmer singer Adrienne Cooper, and 70-year-old conductor, pianist, arranger, composer and Yiddish language authority, Zalmen Mlotek who also serves as the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York City.
For Frey, Yiddish is not just the language and culture of her Jewish forebears but also very much a means of conveying the here and now in no uncertain terms. “I discovered Yiddish, and the culture, more through my own past,” she explains. “I moved to Amsterdam and I became very politicized, and became a radical social justice activist, and an anarchist and socialist, and I became interested in Jewish radical history.”
The decision to move to the Netherlands was also prompted by her frustration with what she felt was a very conservative outlook on Judaism and Israel. She was at odds with what she calls the Viennese community’s “uncritical support of Israel.”
Getting into Yiddish revolutionary songs fit her bill, on a personal and professional level. “Discovering this tradition of Jewish radicalism, which has been a bit forgotten in Europe – that’s how I discovered Yiddish and my love for this language and culture as a whole.”
That emotional baggage will duly be delivered, in mama loshen, in Abu Tor on Saturday.
Entry to the concert is free.
For more information: (02) 673-2171 and www.willybrandtcenter.org