Full Description
It takes a global village to preserve the musical traditions of Jewish shtetl life. The collective effort of an entire continent is the subject of this new two-part concert film and documentary by Turi Finocchiaro and Nathalie Rossetti. Nearly decimated under the Nazis and shunned in Israel at the state’s inception, Yiddish and its art forms still struggle to survive. Enter the fans, scholars and stars of Europe’s recent Yiddish and klezmer music revival, a diverse and intergenerational assortment of music lovers. Hailing from points throughout the continent, these gifted musicians (many of whom are not Jewish themselves) share a passion for the world of storytelling and song rescued from the brink of extinction. The Yiddish genre paints a nuanced portrait of daily life in all its piety, melancholy, pining and hilarity.
In the concert portion of the film, lovers of klezmer and Yiddish music are treated to performances by vocalists Chava Alberstein, Myriam Fuks, Shura Lipovsky, Karsten Troyke, the KlezRoym ensemble and a host of talented accompanists. Playing to a packed house in Brussels in 2005, their mournful and ecstatic tunes continue to evoke a rich tapestry of European Jewish life from the Middle Ages through the Second World War. Dance-happy rabbis, starry-eyed lovers and the longing for distant homelands are but a sampling of themes within the expansive canon. The jubilance and suffering the songs express attest to the history of the Yiddish language as the mouthpiece for European Jewry on topics as diverse as religion, politics and love and move us with their celebrations of life in the face of unimaginable hardship.
