Uncategorized
Shaanan Streett of Israeli hip-hop band Hadag Nahash mixes music and activism
Shaanan Streett, one-sixth of the Israeli hip-hop/funk group Hadag Nahash, says that it’s all well and good for musicians to advocate for social-justice causes, but that doesn’t mean the music can’t also be fun. Streett seems to have accomplished both goals, as his band’s songs are featured in protests for various causes while remaining catchy and danceable. As long as you “keep it real,” Streett says, audiences will pick up on your authenticity.
In our interview, Streett talks about what music can do to bring people together and about his hometown of Jerusalem.
First, tell us where you grew up and how you came to the music world.
I was born in 1971 in Jerusalem. I still live on the outskirts of Jerusalem. After the army, I, like many Israelis, traveled the world. When I was in the US, I started hearing a lot of hip-hop, and like a true traveler, I had a pad and a pen, and I started writing down rhymes in Hebrew. And when I came back to Israel, I recorded one song. I handed it out in CD stores. And one of the employees at one of the CD stores turned out to be a guy with an instrumental funk band. And that’s how we started.
Before we go more into your music, tell me about Jerusalem. There’s the Jerusalem of everybody’s imagination around the world, and there’s the real Jerusalem in which real people live.
Yeah, nobody lives in the Jerusalem of the imagination, not a single person. But oddly enough, nobody lives in the Jerusalem of the real world, either. We all live somewhere in between. Doesn’t matter what religion you belong to, if any; if you’re in this city, you won’t only live on what’s happening on the floor, you’re going to live thousands of years of history, millions and millions of hopes and shattered hopes. It’s all circulating around you at any given moment. And, in that sense, it’s super artistic.
You’re involved in art, films, and music. What can these things do to foster Jewish pride or bring people together?
It’s really hard for me to put baggage on art. If it happens, it happens because the art did it, not the artist. It’s hard to explain. My only advice would be a classic hip-hop phrase: keep it real, do it as real as you can. Even when it seems like it’s the wrong thing to do, still speak your mind. And that’s the only way, at least for me and my band, to connect.
What, to you, is keeping it real? I know that you founded a number of community activities, including the One Shekel Festival, that help to strengthen marginalized communities. Is that an important part of what you do?
I think that involvement in social issues in Israel is kind of like a privilege or a benefit that artists can choose. Because people do want to hear what we have to say, and it’s up to us to decide if we want to say it or not. So yeah, when I was speaking earlier about keeping it real, it’s not to shy away from the issues, it’s to talk about the issues. And if people can act — perfect. If we can hold a festival in a place that never had one—amazing. If we can volunteer in a cancer ward — amazing. If we can perform in a forest that they want to tear down to turn into a neighborhood—even though all of the green movements think that it’s a disaster—we’ll do it. So, we try to stay close not only to the art but also to what’s happening. But that does get very, very tiring because we aren’t politicians, and we aren’t activists. We’re artists with our hearts in the right place.
Do you feel like you need to balance writing about social issues and just writing something that’s fun? Or can you accomplish both?
We demand the freedom to write whatever we want at any given time, and that can be about, for example, marijuana or just having a good time, as well as social injustice. It’s not one or the other. Our lives contain both. And when we want to keep it real, we have to speak about both. If I can give you an example from our latest album that we’re still recording, actually. But our first single that was released is a real good vibe, fun kind of tune with funny rhyming and funny references for Israelis. The single that we’re releasing tomorrow is called the “City of God,” and it’s about Jerusalem and what it does to its inhabitants over time. So, totally different topics, but music from the same band, and we’re always trying to keep it funky and fun. Having fun is super important to us. Because even if you’re saying important stuff, but it’s not fun, who wants to join? Right? There’s a saying that is something like, “If you can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”
Who are some of your hip-hop influences?
I just did my top-five artists on Spotify. The first one this year was Lil Wayne. And the second one was a female rapper here in Israel called Eden Dersso. Number three was Kendrick Lamar. Number four was Eminem. And then number five was an Israeli rapper called Peled. So, actually, the top five were all hip-hop. But I’m influenced by various things — anywhere from jazz to rock and roll, reggae, electronic music, funk, of course, and a bunch of hip-hop from all over the world.
One theme of the Z3 conference is achieving Jewish unity and pride. What kind of advice do you have for younger people who may be reluctant to show their Jewish pride?
I think the best method would be to find something on Judaism that you connect with. Find certain elements and be proud of that. Narrow it down. You’re not holding 5,000 years of Jewry on your shoulders. You don’t need to feel that way. Judaism, and for that matter, Diaspora Jews, have so much to be proud of. Diaspora Jews have achieved so much that there’s plenty to be proud of inside that enormous umbrella. So just find the things you connect with and be proud of that. I think that’s a good way to start.
—
The post Shaanan Streett of Israeli hip-hop band Hadag Nahash mixes music and activism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
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.
The post A conference in Warsaw focuses on Jewish languages appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
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.”
The post In David Baerwald’s epic tale of espionage and wartime horrors, family history is stranger than fiction appeared first on The Forward.