Philosemitism: A Berlin Story

I was feeling suddenly notstalgiac. Must be the Berlin winter coming on. So....

Back when I was a poor graduate student, doing my dissertation research in Berlin, I tried to make some money on the side playing my guitar and singing in the subway. I figured Yiddish music was the way to go. Never mind that I don't really speak Yiddish, and that my repertoire was limited to about 8 songs I'd learned off a poorly recorded cassette tape given to me by an overly earnest Dutch engineering student in Ann Arbor who played the squeeze box. I had heard Germans loved this stuff, and with my big curly "Jew-fro" and my vaguely jiddische punim I'd be sure to seem authentic, and the coins would flow.

I advertised in the classifieds for a fiddler or an accordionist to accompany me. A Brazilian violinist called me -- I wasn't sure if it was a man or a woman -- who spoke such awful German that we were barely able to make an appointment, but we arranged to meet at a cafe in Prenzlauer Berg. What followed was like the old Saturday Night Live skits involving "Pat the hermaphrodite." The prospective fiddler was short and slim, with a shock of brown curly hair, a smooth attractive face, and beautiful blue eyes. He/She said his/her name, but I barely understood it, and not knowing Brazilian names I didn't recognize it as male or female. I began carefully listening for gender endings (was this person a "Geiger" or a "Geigerin"?) and even posed baiting questions, but it quickly became clear that whatever German-lessons he/she was getting, gender-endings were not a strong focus.

Well, anyway, Joao turned out to be a guy - happily married in fact to a lovely Portugese-speaking German woman -- and he was a pretty good fiddler too, though he didn't know anything about Yiddish music and was going to have to learn the songs from the same miserable tape that I had used.

We practiced the songs a bit. Joao kept doing these riffs that sounded like Jimi Hendrix crossed with Caetano Velosa: not exactly kosher, but very cool. I taught him a few Chicago blues songs, which seemed (to me at least) like a nice complement to the angst-ridden, yearning, and ironic yiddish folk tunes. Or maybe it's just that Chicago blues was otherwise about all I knew (I'm a pretty lousy guitarist actually.)

After two or three sessions, we headed off to play in the subway station in a transfer point between two lines. It felt pretty absurd. People walked by quickly, and usually barely looked our way. Ironically, about the only commuters who stopped to give us anything, so far as I could tell, were Americans, including a group of burly black guys from Baltimore who were visiting to play football. They gave us more than anyone that day and then danced raucously to "Die Grine Kusine" as they continued through the passage-way. I thought to myself "es lebe die jiddisch-Afrikanische Symbiose!" (Long live the 'Jewish-African symbiosis' - a favorite term of Nazi writers on American culture.)

After a couple more disappointing efforts to make money in the subways, I decided to advertise our services in the classifieds. I'd christianed us (so to speak) "Die Grine Ganoven" (the green thieves) , and I was careful to put my last name in the ad -- ROSENBLUM -- just to underscore that this was Echt.

To my surprise someone called almost right away. To my even greater suprise, he said he was organizing a birthday party for a 90 year old Jewish woman who would be visiting from Israel. He seemed very excited at having found Herr Rosenblum and Die Grine Ganoven and didn't ask me for a demotape or even for references. All he wanted to know was whether we could make it and what would be our fee.

I hadn't given any thought to a fee, and I was suddenly washed in guilt at the thought of charging money for some poor old refugee's birthday party. This woman would probably know all the songs! She was probably a native Yiddish speaker! Certainly she'd see right through us: A graduate student in German history from suburban Chicago with his hermaphrodite Brazilian fiddle player pretending to be klezmorim. Oy, Vey! And did I mention that I'm a horrible guitar player?

Certainly Joao, however, was entitled to make some money. I told the gentleman on the phone that 100 Deutsch Marks would be fine. We finished making plans, and I hung up. Five minutes later the phone rang again. "Herr Rosenblum?" It was the same man. "This is about the fee."

"Ok," I said, feeling guilty again and certain that he was now going to ask for a demo-tape.

"I have to insist that you take more. We'll pay you 200 Deutsch marks." We argued, but he wasn't budging. "Ok," I said finally, "let's see how it goes, and then you pay me what seems right."

Two weeks later, Joao and I showed up at the party site. It was a little convention center on the Wansee, and the party was in a meeting room overlooking the lake. As we entered, they were finishing dinner. A cheerful looking fat man ran up to me, shook our hands, and told me we should sit and have dessert. They were going to make some toasts, and then we would perform.

He pressed a wad of bills into my hand and led us to our seats.

The dessert was fantastic, but as I ate I snuck a peak at the bills. There were four 100-mark notes.

A young woman stood to give a toast. This 90-year old woman, it turned out, was a Berliner. In fact, Frau P. had been one of relatively few women to complete her legal studies in the Weimar Republic and had almost become a judge. It occured to me suddenly that having been an assimilated German Jew, she probably didn't speak a word of Yiddish and could probably care less about Yiddish music. (In fact, she wasn't even Jewish, she told me later. She had simply married a Jewish guy and spent a little time in Israel.)

When the speeches finished, we got up to play, and, sure enough, it immediately became clear that the guest of honor was utterly indifferent to the music, no matter how much angst, loss, yearning, etc. I poured into the Yiddish songs. I decided to make an unauthorized trip to another genre, and we did a version of "September Song" by Kurt Weil, which got a good response from everyone, especially the birthday lady. Then we played the only other song I knew that was remotely similar, Gershwin's "Summer Time" from Porgy and Bess. After that, we had nothing left but Chicago blues, so we played, I think, a Buddy Guy song and something by Muddy Waters, and Joao did his Jimi Hendrix on the fiddle routine, and I think it went over ok, though I remember the fat man giving me funny looks.

Long live the Jewish-African symbiosis.

And then that was it. We got ready to leave, and the organizer came running over to me, enthusiastic and cheerful again. "Herr Rosenblum, " he told me, "Frau Proskauer loved the music. Come, she'd like to speak with you."

I sat with the old lady, who was completely charming, and we talked about judges in the Weimar Republic and law and the Nazis, and then she told me how much she loved 'September Song,' and asked if I realized that it was by Kurt Weill, the German-Jewish composer who'd been a refugee in the U.S.

"Yes, of course," I said. In fact I'd just finished reading a memoir, by Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weil's widow.

"Well," she told me, "I was at the opening performance of Brecht and Weil's Mahagony in Berlin."

"Wow," I said. I was crazy about Brecht and Weil plays but had never had the chance to see Mahagony. I told her that Lotte Lenya wrote something funny: that if all the people who claim to have been at the opening night of the Three Penny Opera had really been there, they would have had to perform the play in a football stadium.

"That's what I meant," said Frau P.. "That's where I was: the opening night of The Three Penny Opera, not Mahagony."

She paused for a moment and then said sharply, "That's crap what Lenya wrote!" (Das ist ja Quatsch was die Lenya geschrieben hat!)

I decided I'd earned my 400 Deutsch Marks. We finished packing our instruments and headed home. I think I even grabbed another piece of cake on the way out.