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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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The post Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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An organ divided a synagogue. The fallout helped create Reform Judaism.
A new musical traces the origins of Reform Judaism to a question that, on paper, seems more likely to produce a subcommittee than a schism: Should a synagogue have an organ?
In 1840, a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, voted 46 to 40 to install a pipe organ in the sanctuary to accompany services.
The vote triggered a scandal: Organs were commonplace in American churches, but unheard of in synagogues, since rabbinic law traditionally holds that musical instruments should not be played on Shabbat.
The instrument caused such an uproar that those who opposed its installation started a breakaway congregation and fought for control of the synagogue in civil court. The case paved the way for a Reform Jewish movement that would embrace music as a key element of religious life.
Happyland, a musical based on those events, will debut Thursday at the same congregation where the real events took place, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim — today, still an operating Reform synagogue with an organ in its sanctuary. As the musical progresses, the organ becomes a vehicle for exploring broader questions of progress, including the uncomfortable reality that many Jews owned slaves in the antebellum South.
“It really embodies this tension in Reform Judaism, which is how much do you adapt to the wider culture around you, versus how much do you maintain your identity and your tradition?” said Elijah Siegler, co-producer of the show. “There’s no easy answer, and the organ is a perfect example of that.”
Charleston as happyland
The idea for Happyland came from an unusual pair in the theater world: a former synagogue president and a professor of religious studies.
Rob Turkewitz, a civil litigation attorney who had led Kahol Kadosh Beth Elohim, and Siegler, a synagogue member who teaches at the College of Charleston, thought that their congregation’s dramatic history had theatrical potential.
The duo set out to write historical rap songs emulating the Broadway show Hamilton. But they discovered they were out of their depth.
“We realized pretty quickly that we probably are not the right people to be writing a musical,” Turkewitz said. “Because we have no musical talent.”
Instead, they recruited Toby Singer, the congregation’s former music director and a Brooklyn-based composer, to write the script and songs.
The resulting show follows the arc of the real-life Kahol Kadosh Beth Elohim cantor, Gustavus Poznanski, who had been hired by the congregation in 1836 partly for his traditionalist bona fides.
But Poznanski ended up aligning with those who sought to modernize the synagogue. He supported the installation of the organ, conducted services in English rather than Hebrew, and advocated for observing just one Passover Seder instead of two.
Born in Poland and educated in Hamburg, Germany — where a Reform Jewish movement had already taken root — Poznanski saw the New World as a place where Jews could shape a distinctly American Jewish life.
That vision was captured in a famous speech Poznanski gave in 1841 — the inspiration for the title of the show. “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine,” he said, later adding, “America is our Zion and Washington our Jerusalem.”
But not everyone in Charleston shared his vision. Appalled by the reforms championed by Poznanski, a group of congregants took the dispute to state court.
A judge ruled in favor of the organ’s installation — not because he necessarily agreed with playing music on Shabbat, but because the synagogue had voted for it. According to Turkewitz, it was one of the first appellate rulings in American history that affirmed the separation of church and state.
“The court basically held that judges can’t determine for a religion how to practice,” Turkewitz said. “How could the judge tell the Jewish community how to practice their religion when the Jewish community doesn’t even agree?”
Reckoning with slavery
For Singer, the organ controversy was only part of the story. As congregants argued over what progress looked like inside the sanctuary, the nation outside was hurtling toward civil war.
“I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a story about religious freedom couched within a larger story about not freedom, because this was taking place in antebellum Charleston,” Singer said. “I needed to write a story that dealt with that and sat with the fact that the Jewish community of the South was complicit in the slave trade and was involved in it.”
Many of the founding members of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim came to Charleston to participate in the slave trade. And after the congregation’s first synagogue was destroyed in a fire, enslaved people built the replacement in 1840 — the grand Greek Revival structure that still stands today.
That history is woven throughout Happyland. In the musical, Poznanski grapples with the fact that his wife, Hetty, owns slaves. The second act takes place during a Passover Seder on the eve of the Civil War, as the characters confront the hypocrisy of celebrating Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt while slaves labor in their own home.
“Some people in the audience are going to see their great, great, great grandparents depicted on stage, because we still have Charleston Jews who are descendants of those Jews of the 1840s,” Siegler said. “I think some Jews don’t necessarily want to watch a musical about their ancestors owning slaves.”
Poznanski eventually resigned from his position, unable to bridge the divide between the traditionalist and reformist factions of the synagogue. A century later, in the 1960s, Rabbi Burton Padoll was forced to resign from the congregation after members objected to his support for the Civil Rights movement.
Today, the synagogue has made efforts to acknowledge that painful past, erecting a monument outside the congregation commemorating the enslaved people who built it.
For Siegler, the conflicts over slavery and religious reform share a common thread: how communities respond when long-held practices are challenged.
“One is a public fight over the organ, and then the other is this kind of family argument at the Seder table about owning enslaved people,” he said. “They actually are narratively linked by this idea of, what do we do to feel safe and secure?”
The post An organ divided a synagogue. The fallout helped create Reform Judaism. appeared first on The Forward.
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A conference in Warsaw focuses on Jewish languages
דער ייִדישער מוזיי „פּולין“ אין וואַרשע האָט לעצטנס דורכגעפֿירט אַ קאָנפֿערענץ וועגן ייִדישע שפּראַכן, אין שײַכות מיט דער צײַטווײַליקער אויסשטעלונג אויף דער זעלביקער טעמע, „דער כּוח פֿון ווערטער“.
כאָטש די קאָנפֿערענץ, וואָס איז פֿאָרגעקומען פֿונעם ערשטן ביזן דריטן יוני, האָט אין פּרינציפּ באַהאַנדלט אַלע ייִדישע לשונות, האָט דער מוזיי אין וואַרשע — די אַמאָליקע הויפּטשטאָט פֿונעם אייראָפּעיִשן ייִדישלאַנד — באַשטימט, אַז די פֿאָרשערס זאָלן רעדן מערסטנס וועגן ייִדיש. 14 פֿון די 27 רעפֿעראַטן האָבן באַהאַנדלט די ייִדישע קולטור אויף ייִדיש; 3 וועגן העברעיִש; 2 וועגן לאַדינאָ; 2 וועגן פּויליש, און נאָר 1 וועגן אַנדערע שפּראַכן: דזשוהורי (די שפּראַך פֿון די באַרג־ייִדן אין די קאַווקאַזן), עספּעראַנטאָ, ייִדיש־אַראַביש אין מאָראָקאָ, דײַטש, רוסיש און סערבאָ־קראָאַטיש.
אַלע רעפֿעראַטן האָט מען געהאַלטן אויף ענגליש.
לויט מײַן מיינונג וואָלט געווען אינטערעסאַנטער צו הערן וועגן ייִדיש דווקא אין אַ ברייטערן קאָנטעקסט, ווען מע נעמט אויך אַרײַן אַנדערע ייִדישע און נישט־ייִדישע שפּראַכן און קולטורן. עס זענען פֿאַראַן אַ סך פּאַראַלעלן און קאָנטראַסטן, וואָס וואַרפֿן זיך אין די אויגן, ווען ייִדישיסטן קוקן אַרויס פֿון די אייגענע דלתּ אַמות.
די הויפּטרעדע האָט געהאַלטן חנה פּולין־גלאַי (אוניווערסיטעט פֿון אַמהערסט), וועגן דער טעמע פֿון איר נײַ בוך: חורבן־ייִדיש, ד״ה די נײַע ווערטער און אויסדרוקן וואָס זענען אויפֿגעקומען אין די געטאָס און לאַגערן. כאָטש די לעקציע איז געווען אינטערעסאַנט האָט זיך מיר געפֿילט אַ ביסל אומהיימלעך צו הערן וועגן די דאָזיקע ווערטער אין „פּולין“־מוזיי, וואָס געפֿינט זיך ממש אויפֿן שטח פֿון דער אַמאָליקער וואַרשעווער געטאָ.
עס איז נישטאָ קיין אָרט צו דערציילן וועגן אַלע רעפֿעראַטן, אָבער וועגן עטלעכע לוינט זיך אָפּצוגעבן אַ באַריכט.
מאַטשעי ראַטאַיטשיק (פּויזנער אוניווערסיטעט) האָט גערעדט וועגן עטלעכע פּרוּוון במשך פֿון דער געשיכטע צו שרײַבן העברעיִש מיט לאַטײַנישע אותיות. איתּמר בן־אַבֿי (בן־ציון בן־יהודה), דער זון פֿונעם גרויסן באַנײַער פֿון העברעיִש, אליעזר בן־יהודה (אליעזר יצחק פּערלמאַן), איז געווען דער ערשטער געבוירענער רעדער פֿון העברעיִש אין דער מאָדערנער תּקופֿה. אין די 1920ער און 1930ער יאָרן האָט ער אַרויסגעגעבן עטלעכע ביכער און זשורנאַלן אויף טראַנסליטעראַציע, אַרײַנגערעכנט אַ באַנד זכרונות, „אַבֿי“ (ד״ה „מײַן טאַטע“; געשריבן „Avi“). זאבֿ זשאַבאָטינסקי, דער באַרימטער פֿירער פֿון די רעוויזיאָניסטן, האָט אין אַ געוויסער תּקופֿה געשטיצט די רעפֿאָרעם — אָבער צום סוף האָט זיך עס נישט אָנגענומען. העברעיִש איז געבליבן העברעיִש — מיטן ייִדישן אַלף־בית.
הילה שלם בהרד (תּל־אָבֿיבֿער אוניווערסיטעט) האָט דערציילט וועגן די שפּראַכן פֿון די „מעברות“ (די פּליטים־לאַגערן), וווּ עטלעכע הונדערט טויזנט נײַע עולים קיין ארץ־ישׂראל האָבן געוווינט, ווען זיי זענען ערשט אָנגעקומען אין לאַנד אין די יאָרן 1948־1951. אַזוי ווי די ייִדן זענען געקומען פֿון אַ סך פֿאַרשידענע לענדער, האָבן זיי אָפֿט נישט געהאַט קיין בשותּפֿותדיקע שפּראַך. אַ מאָל האָט איין געוויסע שפּראַך דאָמינירט; למשל, אין איין לאַגער איז די הויפּטשפּראַך געוואָרן בולגאַריש, דערפֿאַר ווײַל עס האָבן דאָרט צופֿעליק געוווינט אַ סך ייִדן פֿון בולגאַריע. אין אַנדערע לאַגערן האָט מען גערעדט אַ מין העברעיִש. אַ מאָל האָט זיך אַנטוויקלט אַ מין פּידזשין, אַ געמישטע שפּראַך, אָדער ייִדן האָבן גערעדט מיט די הענט.
חיה־רחל נאָווע, אַ לינגוויסטקע בײַם פֿאָרדהאַם־אוניווערסיטעט, האָט פֿאַרגליכן די עפֿנטלעכע שילדן אויף ייִדיש און לשון־קודש אין די חסידישע ייִשובֿים אין מאָנסי און קרית־יואל. קרית־יואל איז געשאַפֿן געוואָרן ווי אַן אָפֿיציעל חסידיש שטעטל און די עפֿנטלעכע שפּראַך און אַ סך שילדן זענען פֿון תּמיד אָן געווען אויף ייִדיש. מאָנסי, ווידער, איז אַ געמישטע שטאָט; פֿריִער האָבן דאָרט געוווינט אַ סך „מאָדערנע“ ייִדן, נישט קיין חרדים, זענען אַלע שילדן במילא געווען אויף ענגליש. צו ביסלעך איז די שטאָט געוואָרן וואָס מער חסידיש, און אין די לעצטע 10־20 יאָר האָט מען אָנגעהויבן הענגען שילדן אויף די געשעפֿטן און אויף די ווענט אין ייִדיש און לשון־קודש. דאָס איז אַ סימן פֿונעם נײַעם שטאָלץ פֿון די חסידים דאָרט, וואָס פֿילן, אַז זיי דאַרפֿן זיך מער נישט באַהאַלטן הינטער ענגלישע שילדן. די געגנט איז געוואָרן זייערע.
שפּעטער האָט נאָווע באַמערקט, אַז אין דער ייִדישער געגנט אין אַנטווערפּן, למשל, זענען כּמעט נישטאָ קיין שילדן אויף ייִדיש אָדער לשון־קודש. דאָס ווײַזט מסתּמא אַרויס די אומזיכערקייט פֿון די אַנטווערפּענער חסידים, וואָס ווילן זיך נישט וואַרפֿן אין די אויגן.
שירה פֿריד, וואָס האָט נאָר וואָס פֿאַרענדיקט אַ דאָקטאָראַט בײַם העברעיִשן אוניווערסטטעט, האָט געלייענט אַ רעפֿעראַט וועגן די „בית־יעקבֿ“־שולן פֿאַר פֿרומע מיידלעך, וואָס שׂרה שנירער האָט אָנגעהויבן שאַפֿן אין קראָקע אין 1917. שנירער האָט איבערגערעדט די גרויסע רבנים פֿון איר תּקופֿה, די פֿירערס פֿון דער „אַגודה“, די נײַע אָרטאָדאָקסישע פּאָליטישע פּאַרטיי, און זיי האָבן באַשלאָסן צו שטיצן „בית־יעקבֿ“. שנירער און די לערערינס אין די שולן האָבן די גאַנצע צײַט באַקעמפֿט די לינגוויסטישע אַסימילאַציע, ווײַל אַ סך פֿרומע מיידלעך האָבן דעמאָלטס שוין גערעדט צווישן זיך אויף פּויליש. אין זייער קאַמף פֿאַר ייִדיש האָבן זיי אַדאָפּטירט דעם „אָרטאָדאָקסישן אויסלייג“ פֿון שלמה בירנבוים, דעם באַקאַנטן בעל־תּשובֿה און ייִדיש־פֿאָרשער פֿון ווין, וואָס איז געוואָרן דער ערשטער ייִדיש־פּראָפֿעסאָר אין האַמבורג אין 1922.
קלמן ווײַזער, אַ היסטאָריקער און ייִדישיסט בײַ יאָרק־אוניווערסיטעט אין טאָראָנטאָ, האָט ווײַטער גערעדט וועגן בירנבוים און וועגן זײַן אויסלייג. נאָך דער מלחמה, איז בירנבוים געוואָרן אַ ביסל אָפּגעפֿרעמדט פֿון זײַנע אַמאָליקע פֿרײַנד אין דער אַגודה און „בית־יעקבֿ“. די אַגודה האָט געפֿירט אַ מער פּראַגמאַטישע פּאָליטיק לגבי מדינת־ישׂראל און עבֿרית. די אַגודיסטן זענען געווען צופֿרידן זיך צו באַטייליקן אין דער ישׂראל־רעגירונג און צו נעמען די מלוכישע געלטער פֿאַר זייערע אינסטיטוציעס. דערפֿאַר האָט ייִדיש גיך פֿאַרלוירן זײַן חשיבֿות בײַ זיי און דער יונגער דור איז גיך אַריבער אויף דער לאַנדשפּראַך: עבֿרית אין ישׂראל, און ענגליש אין אַמעריקע. בירנבוים, ווידער, איז געבליבן אַ שאַרפֿער קעגנער פֿונעם ציוניזם און פֿון עבֿרית. אָבער צוליב עפּעס אַ סיבה האָט ער נישט געזוכט קיין קאָנטאַקטן מיט די אונגערישע חסידים (למשל, סאַטמאַר), וואָס האָבן געהאַט אַן ענלעכע שטעלונג און וואָס האָבן ווײַטער גערעדט ייִדיש.
הגם די רעפֿעראַטן זענען געווען אויף אַקאַדעמיש ענגליש, נישט אויף קיין ייִדישער שפּראַך, האָט מען די שמועסן אין די קאַווע־הפֿסקות געפֿירט אויך אויף עבֿרית, פּויליש און אַוודאי — ייִדיש. שלמה בירנבוים וואָלט געווען שטאָלץ.
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In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction
“When I started out writing this book, my model wasn’t James Clavell,” David Baerwald said with a laugh, as he paused for a smoke break at a waterfront picnic table in his current hometown of Kingston, New York. “It was more like Bernard Malamud, or something; it was this kind of interior, depressing thing about a family coming to grips with its crimes — the hazards of epigenetic traumatic memory in a family, and what it does to people. It was a much more personal tale, you know? I wasn’t really thinking of this huge, swashbuckling thing.”
The Fire Agent, Baerwald’s debut novel, is indeed a huge, swashbuckling affair, an epic, massively entertaining and often gut-punchingly horrifying tale of international espionage spanning four continents, two world wars and countless collisions between heartfelt idealism and the harsh realities of human behavior over its 600 pages. Though some of its characters and most of its conversations are fictional, The Fire Agent is firmly grounded in actual historical events and figures both well-known and obscure — some of which are truly stranger than fiction.
“I would not have dared to make up most of this,” Baerwald said with a shrug. “Some of the characters are so over-the-top, they’re like super-villains from a Bruce Lee movie or Get Smart. The Black Dragon Society? Treasure hoards of Chinese gold? That all sounds ridiculous, like something out of Terry and the Pirates, or fucking Indiana Jones. But it all happened! I really wanted to provide people with clues, so that they could look into the actual history, because I found it so interesting.”
Much of The Fire Agent’s plot is based around the life and career of Ernst Baerwald, the author’s actual grandfather, a German Jew who spent several decades in Japan — ostensibly working as a liaison for the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben, though the position served as cover for his extensive and deeply impactful espionage activities on behalf of the German (and later the United States) government. Long dead by the time his grandson was born in 1960, Ernst rarely came up in family conversation. “He went largely unrecognized in his lifetime,” said Baerwald. “Nobody ever really talked about him, and from what people would tell me about my grandfather, I had the impression that he was this kind of bum that sold ink on the streets in Tokyo. I had no idea that he’d led this crazy life!”
It wasn’t until about eight years ago, when Baerwald was cleaning out his parents’ wildfire-threatened West Los Angeles home, that he got an initial glimpse at Ernst’s actual occupation. “There were two boxes with a bunch of his papers that were in his office when he died,” Baerwald said. “They’d just been packed up and put away and buried under, like, 1960s-era skis and gardening equipment. In fact, I was gonna throw them away without looking at them; I was like, ‘Well, I’ve lived long enough without them.’ But this woman that was working with me, archiving the things in the house, she was like, ‘Well, let’s have a look.’”
Along with Ernst’s diaries and letters, Baerwald found maps and photographs of Japan, a Samurai sword and a miniature spy camera from the 1930s, and a speech that his grandfather had given to a U.S. government-run spy school in San Francisco in 1943. “I realized that there was, in fact, a huge story here that I needed to uncover,” Baerwald recalled. “That speech to the spy school was really the map to a huge portion of what I was soon to be researching. I didn’t know where it would take me, I didn’t know what it was for; I just knew that that was what I had to do, and suddenly that became my only thing in life.”
Baerwald is singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and film and TV composer best-known for Boomtown, his platinum-selling 1986 album by David & David, his duo with musician and producer David Ricketts, as well as his Golden Globe-nominated song “Come What May” from the Moulin Rouge! Soundtrack. His songs have been recorded by such disparate luminaries as Waylon Jennings, Sheryl Crow, Susanna Hoffs, Fishbone and Olivia Newton-John, but Baerwald said that writing a novel felt surprisingly natural for him.
“My first role was research, not writing,” he said. “But I did write some scenes just to see if I could do it, to see if I could actually write longform without meter or rhyme schemes, and it was like stepping into a warm, welcoming seat. You can get to feeling pretty claustrophobic as a songwriter; I’d accumulated a lot of rules for myself over God knows how many decades of doing that, just to survive — practices that I had acquired, mindsets — and I was happy to let them go, frankly. And I realized that there were a lot of things that I learned from not just lyric writing, but composition, that applied to writing a novel. When you’re composing for monophonic instruments like flutes or strings, they play the chords together as a group, but they’re each playing individual lines; and when you’re structuring complicated human interactions, that kind of muscle memory is really handy.
“To me, plots are like chord changes,” he continued. “They’re signifiers for change, but the real change is happening within the chord. It’s actually like a thousand minnows swimming in vaguely the same direction, rather than these monolithic events that proceed one after the other; there’s always a certain individuality in their movement. So if you think about characters like, ‘Here’s the cello section, and here’s the percussion,’ or whatever, it enables you to structure these sort of complicated scenes where everybody’s got some agenda, and everybody’s got their own melody that they’re singing.”
And as Ernst’s improbably cinematic life gradually unfolded for Baerwald through the diaries and correspondence of his grandfather and other family members (including Baerwald’s father Hans, who taught political science and Japanese studies at UCLA for 30 years), the plot of The Fire Agent fell into place. “I didn’t really need to outline the plot, because I already had the outline. It was his life — and it was like, ‘Wherever he goes, I go,’” he said with a laugh. “I just did research along the way to find out what he was doing and what was happening around him. Whether there’s a huge earthquake or whether there’s a plague or whether there’s a war, it kind of gives you the plot point, right there.”
Far more challenging for Baerwald was dealing with the “emotional rollercoaster” of researching the many soul-crushing horrors that his grandfather witnessed (and, in some cases, was directly involved in) as a soldier, citizen and spy. “I would find myself just weeping more than once,” he said. “You just find yourself coming across these artifacts that really take you into the historical moment, and it’s really powerful. I remember I was in the rare books library at Columbia, looking at my uncle’s papers, and there was a letter from one of the soon-to-be-dead fighters during the Lublin Massacre, and it’s 28 pages of just savagery. So I’m sitting there, reading the details of this doomed-yet-heroic effort, and I feel this little tap on my shoulder, and this girl says, “Excuse me, Sir, I’m sorry — there’s no crying on the manuscripts.’”
Indeed, one of the major themes running through The Fire Agent is mankind’s innate ability to solve a major problem while creating even worse ones with the solution. Early on in the story, Ernst is present at the unveiling of the Haber-Bosch process, the revolutionary industrial development which enabled man to produce synthetic ammonia on a grand scale — a discovery which then allowed the industrial synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers, which were desperately needed by farmers across the globe at the beginning of the 20th century. Unfortunately, while this discovery saved humanity from worldwide famine, the industrial-scale production of ammonia and ammonium nitrate also resulted in tremendous carnage on the battlefield and elsewhere.
“I knew that there was going to have to be some reference in the book to the transformation from life-giving fertilizers to life-taking gunpowder and phosgene gas,” said Baerwald. “The Haber-Bosch process has made the lives of the probably 7 billion people alive today possible, but it’s bleached the coral in the ocean, and the high-pressure tests that emerged from it ultimately fueled the Nazi air force and tanks and trucks…
“There are a lot of scientists in my family,” he said, “and one of them said something to me once that I put in Albert Einstein’s mouth in the book: ‘Look at us — we’re in the dreamiest of sciences, astrophysics, and what are we doing? We’re making missile trajectories and warheads.’ And that’s been a kind of a refrain in my family for my whole life, this awful feeling of being trapped in a sociopathic system that takes everything beautiful and turns it into a weapon somehow, that takes brotherhood and camaraderie and turns it into teams and armies, and takes love and turns it into prostitution.
“One of the reasons I chose the music business was that I didn’t want to be part of all that. I thought, ‘Even at its very worst, at least I’m not making weapons!’” Baerwald said. “But apparently, I am! Ultimately, the record companies started merging with multinational corporations who made fucking nuclear weapons, and now Spotify has gobbled up all my friends’ livelihoods and is investing in AI weapons. You can’t get away from this shit!”
Though he’s currently busy promoting The Fire Agent, Baerwald says that a sequel is already in the works, one which will include material cut from the first novel. “I’ve been like a guy chasing a piece of paper across a windy field for like seven years,” he said. “The full story was always just slightly out of reach — for the 600 pages that I ended up with, I wrote probably 1400. I wanted to take The Fire Agent up to 1980, but I realized that there was no way I’d physically able to do it; I honestly thought I was going blind by the end of it. But now I’m really looking forward to working on the next one.”
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