Sonic Bloom

Yiddish has historically stood in a vexed or even actively oppositional relationship to Zionism. Indeed, Ahad Ha’am, the founder of cultural Zionism, insisted that the language was “an alien tongue acquired in a strange land.” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, would later castigate Yiddish, his mother tongue, as “a foreign and grating language” and proclaim that “only through Hebrew can Jews understand the full meaning of Jewishness.” Even today, when the Yiddishist community is divided in its attachment to Israel and its willingness to criticize the state’s genocidal war, reclaiming this speech forged in exile is often understood as part of an insistence on the Jewish diaspora as a vital constellation in itself—not merely a waiting-for-nationhood.

Adentro mío estoy bailando takes up this longtime antagonism, exploring how Zionism’s renunciation of diasporic Jewishness contributed to the incontrovertible winnowing of not only the Yiddish language but Yiddish culture. As Leandro begins the research for his documentary project, he cites anthropologist Susana Skura quoting Joshua Fishman, a foundational scholar in sociolinguistics: “cultures and their accompanying languages never die naturally; they are killed.” In a film-spanning discussion, begun the morning after they first hook up at a club, Leandro and Paloma consider Israel’s role in the extinguishing of the post-Holocaust Yiddish world. Reading aloud to Leandro from some undisclosed text on her phone, Paloma airs the question, “What was it about this language, this culture, that made the founders of the new Jewish state feel so threatened?”

True to Adentro mío estoy bailando’s circuitous spirit, we don’t get a direct answer; Paloma is interrupted by a phone call from a friend. Instead, the film pursues this query through and beyond Leandro’s documentary project. A series of voice notes for and about the documentary, in-person exchanges, and voice-overs build on the sociopolitical preoccupations established in its epigraph, which comes from the great scholar of Yiddish Max Weinreich: “a language is a dialect with an army behind it.” At one point, Leandro reflects that even before Hebrew gained the backing of militarized Israel—as compared to unarmied Yiddish—Hebrew was considered masculine, the language of religion, of the chederim and yeshivas, whereas Yiddish was seen as the language of home, a feminine tongue. Elaborating on such insights, the film offers Yiddish as a language oppositional to state violence. In one voice note, Leandro reflects how the anti-Zionist, socialist Bund movement wanted no land, but rather saw “Yiddish as its territory.”

But the film operates less as a prosecuted argument than as a curious exploration, full of both gravity and mischief. Like the faux Yiddish fable, the main plot is set off by a lie about Jewish knowledge aimed at impressing a woman: When Leandro meets Paloma, he tells her that he is not actually a wedding videographer, but a documentarian making a film about klezmer. Despite an abiding disinterest in things Jewish—which Lukas, a former film school classmate, cheekily names his “antisemitism”—Leandro begins filming klezmer musicians in Argentina to show her and then, when she leaves for Europe on a grant, follows her there. Convincing Lukas, now a successful Austrian producer (played by the real film’s producer, Lukas Valenta Rinner), to support his documentary, Leandro travels across Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova in search of klezmer bands, all the while trying to catch up to Paloma. He finally rejoins her in Romania, where she is conducting research with Bob Cohen, a Budapest-based klezmer musician and ethnomusicologist who serves as their guide. But Lukas soon loses faith in the project, leaving Paloma and Leandro with a van and a camera. And when Paloma receives an opportunity to perform in Germany, she leaves Leandro in Moldova by himself. The fictional “Klezmer Project” fails, but not before Leandro’s lies give way to new truths: His fabrication that he was working on a documentary about klezmer has engendered an attempt to make just such a film. And Leandro himself emerges from the experience transformed: He has become a filmmaker.

In this role, Leandro takes on the task of working through the past in order to plot a new future for himself—and, by extension, for the viewer who might share his ambivalent interest in Yiddish culture. But this project is immediately complicated by the fact that the source of his familial history, his grandmother (played by Koch’s actual grandmother, Rebeca Yanover) is plagued by a failing memory and, the film suggests, failing health, a symptom of the deterioration of the culture as a whole. She does not lead him back to his origins, but rather reveals history’s uncertainty. When, in an early scene, he shows her a series of torn black-and-white photos, asking if they are of her family’s village in Bessarabia, she says that she has no idea. Later, he tenderly questions her about her wedding—he’s especially eager to know if klezmer might have been played there—but she confuses people, places, and dates until she asks, thoroughly adrift, “So where did you come from?”

This question—at once genealogical, geographic, and existential—haunts the film, as does another line spoken by Leandro’s grandmother, recorded to be the introductory voice-over for the sham documentary. Despite Leandro’s protests, she injects sensationalism and anti-Romani racism into the script, as well as a grim insistence on absence: “to find the last remains of this almost extinct culture, they’ll have to search among the possessed gypsies who lived with the Jews before the war.” As the story progresses, this idea of an “almost extinct culture” becomes harder to maintain, even as Leandro’s grandmother’s crude formulation turns out to be correct in that klezmer’s present-day practitioners are largely not Jews, but Roma. Throughout the Carpathian Mountains, Leandro and Paloma—to Lukas’s chagrin—do not find any big klezmer bands with wind or brass, but they do find Romani fiddlers playing old Jewish tunes. In Dragomirești, where they film their guide Bob Cohen playing a string duet with the regionally renowned Romani musician Viktor Covaci, Cohen remarks, with some sadness, that the search for “the last threads that tie to an identity, the Jewish musical identity” ends with the discovery of “this negative impression that used to be filled with Jewish culture.” With the same wistfulness, he proclaims the violinists of Romania “a link we have to the Jewish folk fiddle tradition.”

Yet a link leads both back and forward. As Cohen himself has said in interviews over the years, “tradition is behind us and ahead of us.” In other words, the Romani fiddlers could also be described as representing a progression and even evolution of this region’s tradition of Jewish music-making. One powerful scene records a father and daughter, Vasile and Alina Rus, performing together in a neat visual metaphor for the culture’s ongoing transmission: She sits on a couch strumming a guitar while he stands nearby playing the violin, performing and passing down the Jewish music he learned from the great Romani musician Gheorghe Covaci, who, in turn, had learned these tunes from Jewish players before World War II. As Vasile reflects, this heritage is the result of “interferences,” overlapping cultures and geographies that constitute “a form of sensibility.” Only during the filming of such musical performances—which showcase how, in the words of a text Paloma quotes, “the memory of Jewish culture is kept alive by non-Jews”—does the film momentarily lower the irony it otherwise wields. While elsewhere, asynchronous sound casts doubt on the meaning of the images on the screen, in these moments sound and image align in long shots of deep focus to suggest a kind of unmediated access not only to the musicians’ evident skill but also to the world in which their art takes shape: their homes’ vibrant interiors, their wood-paneled front porches, their tree-shaded backyards.

Of course, the film is alive to the fact that this immediacy is also an illusion, an effect that it creates—in one case underscoring its awareness by cutting from such a scene of direct experience to another of the same footage being reviewed on Leandro’s MacBook Air. However, these moments of deep focus are no mere trick; the film is as sincerely interested in the music’s context as in the music itself. Klezmer is part of a distinctively Jewish cultural history, but it cannot be understood through Jewish history alone. As Koch and Schachmann have stated, “what we found out, in the end, was that klezmer music cannot be comprehended in isolation from the places where it was played, and that the way it developed has always been aligned to the cultures surrounding it.” In the film, they reveal how, before the Shoah, Romani and Jewish musicians shared music and melodies—often playing at one another’s weddings and other ceremonies and celebrations. To this day, many wedding marches performed in the Maramureş valley were originally part of Jewish musicians’ repertoire. Koch and Schachmann began looking for something old and forgotten, but they discovered something still resounding; what had been forgotten, it turns out, was not klezmer itself but rather the hybridity of both its origins and ongoing life.

Even as the film emphasizes the vitality of the musical worlds it discovers, it archly acknowledges the persistence of a certain disappointment—the reality that these findings are not what the film’s fictional documentary was searching for. The bluntest articulation comes from the producer, Lukas, who has been entrusted by the Austrian public broadcaster with making an accessible documentary. He complains to Leandro about how they have failed to find a single klezmer “group.” In the last scene before he packs up his crew, he goes through the script that he and Leandro wrote, pointing out example after example of scenes they did not film, of bands in town squares and at performers’ homes. “But we filmed fiddlers playing klezmer tunes that I think were never filmed,” Leandro replies. “We promised klezmer bands,” sighs Lukas, defeated. This is not the kind of klezmer music that he or the Austrian public expected. With this exchange, the filmmakers preempt the many critics who seem to believe the narrative conceit that their project was a failure. Journalists have repeatedly asked Koch and Schachmann variations of the question, “Did you ever manage to find an actual klezmer band?” In one interview, Schachmann made their view on the matter perfectly clear: “Everything in the film is klezmer.”

But if this is so, the claim upends the popular un-derstanding of what klezmer is. The klezmer that Leandro and company find is a klezmer primarily of strings and without clarinets (something that particularly disappointed a German lady seated in front of me at the Berlinale); it is a klezmer that is not always joyous; and it is, most notably, a klezmer without Jews. Indeed, it is a klezmer that stands in stark contrast to the kind familiar from a North American context, full of woodwinds and brass and 1970s folkways revitalization verve, so often employed as the soundtrack to what can be inward-looking affirmations of tribalism like Jewish weddings and b’nai mitzvot. While the hybridity of klezmer—the interaction across Jewish, Ukrainian, and Romani traditions that has shaped it—has been noted in scholarship on the genre for decades, in the situations where the music is most often encountered, these originating influences are generally overlooked. By challenging that lacuna, Adentro mío estoy bailando insists on the essential heterogeneity of cultural history and identity—a reality that so much contemporary discourse on Jewishness represses, out of a fear that recognizing the instability and contingency of identity is a step toward its dissolution.

On the contrary, the recognition that our sense of the world is never worked out in isolation is an opportunity for new modes of relation. The film’s commitment to hybridity ultimately grounds an opposition to nationalism that is more nuanced and substantive than the one contained in familiar articulations of the Yiddish versus Hebrew binary. In The Wandering Jews, a 1927 text in which the writer Joseph Roth chronicled the culture of Eastern European Jews, he declared the position of the Jewish musician, the klezmer, to be a “hereditary profession.” Adentro mío estoy bailando, by high­lighting how Romani have maintained traditions of Jewish music, expands the bounds of the family—and the idea of the nation enmeshed with it. A culture, the film suggests, is not merely dying out. It is also being reborn—reborn as a Jewish culture without Jews, a Jewish culture tended to by Romani musicians. Leandro’s grandmother might not be totally wrong to have called them “possessed gypsies”; they are possessed by the Jewish past, channeling it into the present, unsettling notions of culture and nation as set and singular. Rather than serve to stabilize Jewish identity, a pure transmission of the past, klezmer here becomes a shared project whose history and future entwine Jewish and Romani life together.