Vos Vet Blaybn - Reflections on Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman

(This is a guest post by Asya Fruman, in honor of the memory of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, z"l. Asya is a young translator from Kharkov, Ukraine. She's been studying Yiddish, and immersing herself in yiddishkayt, since she fell in love with klezmer music in 2009.)

VOS VET BLAYBN

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman.

Of course I had heard of her before and knew some of her songs, but only this year did I really start to listen to Beyle’s songs, not just hern but aynhern zikh. My past several months have been infused with her music, her poetry, her voice.

There’s a thing about old songs — especially folk ones — sung by elderly people. I usually come across it in field recordings. It’s something very subtle and, I think, irreproducible. They sing out every single word with — how should we call it — reverence, feeling of value? As if they were weaving tapestry, knowing how important every thread is.

This has nothing to do with pomposity. No, it’s rather deep awareness; not a single sound is optional. It’s kavone, yes, but a very gentle kind of kavone.

Here it is, I’ve found the word: they sing with care.

And there is something else: the performer might have a beautiful voice or no voice at all, but in any case the manner of performance is not so vocal as it is narrative. By that, I don’t mean that they talk instead of singing, not at all; again, I am speaking of awareness. Their singing is always storytelling, even if it’s a nign (song without words.)

All of the above absolutely applies to Beyle.

I love her intonation: calm and reserved, full of dignity. Lyrical without being sentimental. 

Hers is not a stage voice — and yet she is a great singer.

In mid-November, having failed to make out a few words in a song from the Bay mayn mames shtibele CD, I sent an email to Itzik Gottesman to ask for help — but also to tell how Beyle’s songs resound in me, how charmed and moved I am by her poetry, music and manner of singing.

He answered the very next day, explaining the words I didn’t understand, and told me that he had read the letter to Beyle and that she thanked me.

It was a miracle.

Internetized as I am, I still feel amazed about the fact that one can send a letter to a great person on the other side of the  Earth, and the addressee will receive it instantly, and read it, and answer.

And what is even more miraculous is the connection between countries and generations, the honor and joy to share this language, this culture, to sing Beyle’s songs — because I sing them almost every day, when doing the dishes, when walking up the stairs, they are a part of me now. 

The opportunity to thank the author.

We’ve had a similar happy opportunity when Arkady Gendler came to our  Kharkov Klezmer Teg festival in the beginning of November, and we talked in Yiddish and sang together. Priceless moments of connection, a goldene keyt.

***

I watched Beyle’s funeral online and sang with everybody, so in a way I was present at the ceremony.

It was so much unlike the funerals I had attended here in Kharkov: oppressing, gloomy rituals that had nothing to do with the person gone. They left an aftertaste of senselessness.

Beyle’s memorial was full of her, as if it were not a funeral but her own concert. It was all about continuity and life: life going on with Beyle, not without her. And the ceremony didn’t leave an awkward feeling, only warmth and gratitude. I’ve realized how vital yidishkayt has become for me, how I want to live within it and transmit it.

What kind of person one must be to make even one’s own funeral inspiring!..

To leave behind oneself not a gap but a garden and a wish to be a gardener.

This is what remains. "Iz dir nit genug?” 

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman koved ir ondenk

Thursday night we lost a treasure of the Yiddish world, poet, artist, songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. She was 93.

Beyle survived the war in the Czernowitz ghetto and, a few years later, moved to New York City with her family.

(from Wikipedia) After the war, Schaechter-Gottesman lived several years in Vienna, where her husband had a chief position ("Chefarzt") in the DP camps in the area. Their daughter Taube was born there in 1950; the family moved to New York in 1951, where the Gottesmans had two other children, Hyam and Itzik. In New York the Gottesmans took part in an experimental Yiddish community in the Bronx, centered around Bainbridge Avenue. There a half-dozen Yiddish-speaking families bought adjacent houses and reinvigorated the existing Sholem Aleichem Yiddish School. Schaechter-Gottesman became an important member of this community, writing classroom materials, plays and songs for the school as well as editing a magazine for children ("Kinderzhurnal") and a magazine of children’s writings ("Enge-benge").

In 2007 I wrote about Enge-benge for Jewish Currents:

Back in the 1960s, a few dedicated families of Yiddishist activists were trying to figure out where to live and faced similar issues. Three families, the Schaechters, the Gottesmans and the Fishmans, made a decision to move to Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. There was nothing particularly wonderful about Bainbridge Avenue; in fact, the families looked at other possible places for their Yiddishist colony, including Roosevelt, New Jersey. But on Bainbridge Avenue they could get spacious houses near parks and transportation, and the men could commute easily to their jobs in Manhattan.

These families made a conscious decision to provide a Yiddish infrastructure for their children. Producing the next generation of Yiddish speakers, in a country and a time where Yiddish was less than a minority language, would take planning, dedication, and the will to leave nothing to chance. Even if the parents spoke Yiddish at home, the children would need peers, activities, and a school — a Yiddish culture of their own.

Many Yiddish-speaking families from the surrounding neighborhood already sent their children to Shul 21 on Bainbridge Avenue, part of the Sholem Aleichem Folksinstitute (SAFI), one of the oldest Yiddish school systems and the one that was apolitical, focused on culture rather than on any particular ideology. But as a supplement to five days a week of Shul 21, poet and painter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman and her brother, Mordkhe Schaechter, a Yiddish linguist and scholar, decided to started a children’s svive -— an informal club that would give their kids more opportunities to speak Yiddish and do activities in Yiddish. The svive was called Enge Benge, after a counting rhyme made popular by Sholem Aleichem: Enge benge/stupe stenge/artse bartse/gele shvartse/eygele feygele khik. (The words are mostly nonsensical, to be used rythmically for choosing, like ‘eeny meeny miney moe.’)

Never more than a small, local playgroup for a handful of families (with names like Weinreich, Mlotek, Hoffman, Kramberg and others), Enge Benge was nevertheless politically and culturally influenced by the large, vibrant network of Yiddishist youth groups that flourished in interwar Poland. In the pages of the Enge Benge journal (1966-72), written by the kids and edited by Beyle Schaechter Gottesman, you can see traces of di bin (the Bee), a youth group founded in 1927 Vilna by Dr. Max Weinreich, the leader of Vilna’s YIVO. 

Though it seems like a quaint mimeographed relic, Enge-Benge represented a truly heroic task: the struggle for cultural continuity against the ravenous maw of American assimilation. 

With the loss of Chane Mlotek a few weeks ago, and now Beyle, the Yiddish world is that much poorer, that much further from the vibrant multi-lingual world of Jewish Eastern Europe. We are lucky, though, that both Chana and Beyle didn't just transmit that culture personally, but both worked to sustain the Yiddish institutional world in a multitude of ways. 

And as inadequate as I feel to carry on their work, I am inspired by my peers who have invested themselves in the project of Yiddish cultural continuity. They have worked closely with both Beyle and Chana and have taken inspiration, and spiritual nourishment, from both of them. I am hopeful that they can, and will, make Chana, and Beyle, and all our spiritual grandparents, proud.