On the first yortsayt of Jewlia Eisenberg, a reflection on Sarajevo Blues

We’re coming up on the 30^thanniversary of the opening of the Bosnian war, which began, more or less, at the beginning of April 1992, and ended three years later, with heavy intervention from NATO forces.  

Despite an estimated 100,000 casualties (though that number could be much higher), the war seems to have faded from public memory. Last week, during a visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in London, Prince William appeared to give voice to this perception. During his public remarks at the event, the Duke of Cambridge observed that “it’s very alien to see this in Europe…”  The “this” presumably being war, now being waged with genocidal fervor by Vladimir Putin against the people of Ukraine. 

 

Prince William was ten years old --not to mention a European monarch in waiting-- when the Bosnian war began. That he apparently has no historical consciousness of what has been called “the most devastating conflict in Europe since the end of World War II," and which happened in his living memory, made him the rightful target of media criticism.

In addition to the human casualties, the Bosnian war was marked by systematic rape, ethnic cleansing, and the resulting displacement of 2.2 million people. And yet, as William’s remarks show, those of us not directly touched by it have mostly allowed it to slip from memory. Certainly, World War Two is far further from us in time, and yet remains much, much more present in public memory.

 

Today, accessibility of digital video and ubiquity of social media combine to make the war in Ukraine uniquely consumable in all its angles, across every platform. Even if there is (god willing) a quick and peaceful resolution, it’s unlikely that Putin’s war against Ukraine could be forgotten in the same way as the Bosnian war. Think about the little girl singing “Let it Go” from a bomb shelter or the plucky babushka downing a Russian drone with a jar of pickled tomatoes. They have both become characters in the global war discourse- images easily adaptable to hopeful Facebook posts and late-night comedy monologues; eagerly consumed by a pandemic-weary world looking for distraction.

 

And it’s true, the emergence of such wartime “characters” has been a powerful way to elicit material support for those under siege. But our attention comes at a steep cost: their human peril reframed as our entertainment. And as important as it is to rally global support for Ukraine’s government in its fight against Russian aggression, it feels almost impossible to do so without also turning the war into just another piece of content, a kind of spectator sport, with attention grabbing characters, and clearly delineated teams to cheer (or boo) from the safety of thousands of miles of distance. 

 

It seems to me that the ethical implications of our present-day war-media synergy have gone mostly uninterrogated. Perhaps it is too soon to reflect productively on events still unfolding. But that doesn’t mean no one is speaking to our current moment. Since the war began, my thoughts have turned again and again to my friend, the forever unclassifiable Jewlia Eisenberg. From the “forgotten” Bosnian war to Ukraine, her 2004 album Sarajevo Blues feels more relevant than ever.   

March 11 was Jewlia’s first yortsayt. You can read the tribute I wrote right after her passing last year. For a beautifully detailed examination of her multifarious oeuvre, especially her scholarship, you can read this recent piece, by her close collaborator, Jeremiah Lockwood. 

With her band Charming Hostess, Jewlia put out Sarajevo Blues in 2004, based on the book of the same name by Bosnian journalist-poet, Semezdin Mehmedinovic. The texts collected in Sarajevo Blues reflect his experience living through the years long siege of Sarajevo.  

Like all of Jewlia's work, her musical adaptation of Sarajevo Blues sits at the intersection of music and translation. With Sarajevo Blues, she adds another, very simple question to her musical methodology: what is my relationship to the news? In the liner notes to Sarajevo Blues she says: 

“We all know that simply watching news is not doing anything about what you see. We want to know what’s going on, but human experience in a place where “news” is happening is reduced to the most sensationalistic elements—pain, terror, despair. Watching or even reading the news, one can become complicit in a kind of war-profiteering—the experience of suffering people is appropriated and used to sell cars. Orphans and refugees become icons, divorced from the people they represent, metaphors for other things.”

 

Going further, she declares her intent to explore “other ways of being with the news, ways that focus on real human experience, on particularity and wholeness.”  

 

Take the song “Death is a Job.” The lyrics describe the dark irony of life under siege, where a person can find themselves dodging both sniper bullets and war photographers. Jewlia puts the text to a disarmingly upbeat a capella setting, propelling us across that intersection, along with the narrator, who has come to see war photographers as just another enemy faction:   

 

They’re doing their job, in deep cover

If a bullet hit me they got a shot worth so much more than my life

That I’m not sure who to hate

The sniper or the monkey with a Nikon

…

For the chetniks, I’m just a simple target

But those others only confirm my utter helplessness

And even take advantage of it…  

 

War time journalism has the potential to bring our attention to the atrocious human cost of war. But as a practice, war journalism necessarily obscures its own complicity in the events which give it purpose.       

 

Here Jewlia raises the very questions which seem to me so urgent, and so unaskable, in these heated days of war. In the liner notes, she says that Sarajevo Blues was an extension of her previous work, now “morphed into questions about the possibility of encountering another person’s experience without trivialization or appropriation. What comes of delving into events characterized by vicious nationalism, opportunistic fascists, fleeing refugees, concentration camps, mass slaughter and do-nothing bystanders? … Is it possible, or even desirable, to create emotional connections to brutal events that most Americans (b’ezrat ha-Shem) will never experience?”

 

Sarajevo Blues doesn’t pretend to retrospectively educate Americans on the complex of identities which powered both the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. Nor does it prospectively presume to teach us any grand lesson about the meaning of war. Today, it speaks to us from a place of humanizing paradox. It is both an act of resistance against the historical erasure of a specific war, and at the same time, an assertion of the dignity of human frailty; a song sung against totalizing ideologies and political statements; a testimony to the capacity of music(s) to translate the human experience in ways so compelling that we cannot help but pay attention. In other words, it is alive with everything that made Jewlia the extraordinary artist she was, and always will be.

Jewlia Eisenberg and the Sphere of the Endless

 Jewish Currents, July-August 2006

The Sphere of the Endless

[New York City, summer 2006. In which your faithful columnist heads to Joe's Pub to hear the music of Jewlia Eisenberg]

...

Charming Hostess is a delightfully indescribable enterprise, more an ongoing project than a band. Though the members of the group haven’t changed much over the years, it is mainly the brainchild of Jewlia Eisenberg. Eisenberg takes unusual, provocative texts and sets them to her own eclectic brand of Jewish fusion music, mostly exploring different traditions of a cappellasinging. Imagine the love letters of Walter Benjamin set to transmogrified doo-wop. 

On her newest album, Sarajevo Blues, Eisenberg uses the translated poems of a contemporary Bosnian poet named Semezdin Mehmedinovic. The resulting piece is astonishing in its beauty and its relevance, especially in the way it humanizes the inhumanity of war. Our war in Iraq has been so tightly, criminally managed, leaving us shielded from the death that is being doled out in defense of “our freedom.” What is needed to mobilize opposition, even more than comprehensive, popular reporting about this war, is empathy. Poetry, at its best, can awaken that empathy in us. Sarajevo Blues moved me in a way that a week’s worth of New York Times editorials could not. 

When I listen to Jewlia Eisenberg, I am always struck by how she manages to take disparate texts, marry them to odd, haunting music, and express her humanity in an immediate way — and make it all work. She sings in many Jewish languages —Yiddish, Ladino, German, English, Hebrew —and references many musical traditions. Where I would normally pounce on such a khutspedik exemplar of cultural appropriation, I could only crane my neck around the amourous French throng and clap like mad. 

Ma nishtana . . . What makes her promiscuous appropriation different than others? Usually I hate performers paying tribute to “Our Jewish Heritage” with a song in Yiddish, a song in Ladino and maybe a Hava Nagila encore, doing justice to none and making kitsch out of all. Eisenberg, however, never tries to pass off her pieces as anything “authentic,” except authentically her own. 

Her exploration of Jewish music, themes and texts is always specific, and motivated, dare I say, by a solid grasp of her own rootlessness. She sees herself in these disparate forms because she appreciates the disparate elements in herself. As she wrote in her liner notes for Sarajevo Blues: 

“As described by Sem [the Bosnian poet], Sarajevo sounds very cool; a pluralistic place [that] included not just the South Slavic ethnic and language groups, but also Sufis, Sephardic Jews and Franciscans. For many years, Sarajevo successfully rejected the limits of nationalism and militarism, and instead embraced connectedness.” 

She goes on to observe that out of this connectedness came a wartime, urban culture of magazines, poetry and films that served not merely to inform the outside world about what was going on, but to nourish the people of Sarajevo by reaffirming their community and connectedness in the face of nationalism. 

The tension between nationalism and connectedness can also be expressed as the tension between what Shimon Rawidowicz (1897-1957) called the “spheres of the end and the endless.” The sphere of the end, as he described it, is the world of the immediate: of results, solutions and exclusions. The sphere of the endless is the world of the spirit: of the expansion of possibilities, of learning and creativity. 

Nationalism belongs to the sphere of the end, and by its nature excludes — usually violently — other possibilities of connection to others. As Rawidowicz (author of Israel, the Ever-Dying People and Other Essays and a long-time philosopher at Brandeis University) explained it, the meaning of Jewish redemption changed from the time of the Prophets to the time of the Second Temple’s destruction, after which:

“the heavy yoke of galut [exile] made the dream of redemption on the one hand more urgent and burning than in the days of the Prophets, and on the other, more radical, theoretical and utopian. . . . For various social and political reasons, the vision of redemption became more national than before, narrower and more restricted, but also more concrete and bloodier, because redemption [goel], by its very nature, is blood-drenched. The root gimel-aleph-lamedis related to blood . . . Redemption, then, is initially linked with blood, the blood of the individual, of the family, and of the tribe. Later, an abstract, spiritual meaning developed from the word or concept goel: geulah, redemption as national liberation, redemption of the people. But ultimately, redemption is bloody, it costs blood.”

Nationalism comes at a great price. Despite this price, however, the “sphere of the end,” as Rawidowicz points out, is seductive to all peoples, and especially to Jews. It’s not surprising that with the suffering of millennia upon us, Jews long for an end, either through self-redemption or self-annihilation (assimilation). But Rawidowicz warns against blind faith in the redemptive power of force: “Man does not live by force alone, and certainly not a nation. Isaiah’s prophecy that ‘Zion shall be redeemed by justice’ was not just a catch phrase . . . Justice is, on a deeper level, one of the symbols of the endless, the infinite.” 

Two weeks after being charmed by Charming Hostess and their Francophile audience, I stood on the sidelines of the “Salute to Israel Day” parade and thought about the collision of Rawidowicz’s spheres in Jewish life. Also on the sidelines were anti-occupation protesters (and a few anti-anti-occupation protesters) and the laughable Neturei Karta waving their Palestinian flags. Suddenly I was seized with the desire to lead my own Salute to Golus Day parade all the way back uptown— away from the sphere of flag-waving sameness to the sphere of the endless in my surprisingly diverse Jewish neighborhood. 

Judaism and the Jewish people are often criticized for tribalism, and for focusing on law over spirit. Yet Jews have always roamed widely, both geographically and spiritually-intellectually. One of the keys to our survival has been our unique status as an international nation, a scattered people that embraced many kinds of Jewishness, many languages, many nationalities, many traditions. And the truth is that we still do. But no one’s going to organize a parade to celebrate that. 

“The people of the endless in its true depth,” wrote Rawidowicz, “are essentially the backbone of the Jewish people . . . they are often the great hidden ones of the generation who protect the house of Israel from external and internal fires. They are the personification of stiffneckedness; in them, it reaches its fullest and highest expression; even if they are not the wings of Israel, they are its head and its heart, its hands and its feet.” 

Jewlia Eisenberg’s creative, integrative, connected music was, for me, a small taste of the endless that sustains us. And in these times, with the demands of multiple nationalisms upon us, we need her, and people like her, more than ever.