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Learning how to Listen
As Carter reminds us, listening is engaged and intentional hearing (Carter 2004, 43). This is both a skill and a disposition, and is acquired over time through socialisation processes, rather than inherited. The Yiddish in Dutch is first heard in whispers – minute speech differences which, when listened to, take on qualities of the uncanny. A far cry from the imagined old-world shtetl, many of Amsterdam’s Yiddishists trace their contemporary Yiddish practice back to their youth, postwar 1950s and 1960s Netherlands where their young ears first heard such ‘strange words’ on the streets, in the markets, and in their homes. Boudewijn, now a leader of a Yiddish choir but living then in Amsterdam’s Rivierenbuurt, recalls the Jewish shops being open on Sunday, detecting a ‘little different way of pronouncing’ in their calls. ‘Hey, what do they say? I asked my father and: oh, that's Yiddish. Oh, okay. And then you go on.’ Joop, who has since become the lead singer of Dutch klezmer/Balkan music-theatre group Di Gojim, tells of his mother ‘[speaking] some hundred words of Yiddish,’ which he originally mistook for Frisian, ‘because it wasn’t Dutch.’ Recognition came much later, in ‘getting involved with Yiddish... toges [one’s bottom], pikken [to steal], majem [water or canal]... well, all those words, they were Yiddish.’
Despite this familiarity – or perhaps because of it – oftentimes the moments of initial encounter with Yiddish song are deeply emotional experiences, striking a chord of unanticipated depth in lives otherwise unmarked by Semitism. Shura vividly recalls performing in Yiddish in Paris in the 1970s, understanding little of its literal content, but hearing the audience sing along and feeling a ‘strange, un-understandable passion’ for it, beyond ‘any just artistic or linguistic passion’; Boudewijn still gets goose bumps thinking of some of his choir’s early performances. As most of the people I spoke with were either not Jewish or raised in a completely secularised, non-Yiddish domain, this powerful connection they felt (and continue to feel) to the language is a source of much mystery to them, and motivates their involvement in Yiddish music. Yiddish mediates and modulates a connection to a Jewish part of themselves, an often indeterminate and unsettled aspect of their identities as Dutch individuals, an ambiguous joodse achtergrond [Jewish background] that has little to do with blood quantum and much to do with cultural and historical overlap.
But for as much familiarity as there was, and is, with Yiddish, there is also a palpable sense that part of it remains obscure, and in need of ‘lifting up’ lest it be lost. The material record of Dutch-Jewish life is felt to be incomplete, even in ‘official’ memorial sites; Boudewijn questions the authority of these institutions like the Jewish History Museum, noting that:
I saw an exhibition with real big mistakes in the Jewish Museum; uh, not mistakes, but what they don't mention. There was a writer, and he was a big Yiddish writer. And they announce he is a Jewish writer and he did dit en dat [this and that], and they didn't announce... I see a picture of that person and I know, hey, this is a big Yiddish writer, and they don't write it down. And you're thinking, hey, maybe you don't know, but how do it come that I know and you don't know? It's a museum. So it must be educated people, what is going on? Each time you have to lift it up.
Boudewijn’s observation of the gaps in official memorialisations of Dutch-Jewish life is unsurprising, given the general lack of critical inquiry into the history of this relationship in the wartime and postwar periods. Bovenkerk (2000) notes that, although losing the greatest proportion of its Jewish population to the Holocaust compared with other Western European nations, little governmental or academic research has been conducted on how ‘this could happen’ in the Netherlands and what its effects have been.[7] The broad narrative of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands is one of Dutch victimhood and fierce resistance, and it remains a ‘little recognized fact that a substantial number of Dutch collaborated with the Germans’ in varying degrees of activity/passivity (p. 238).[8]
Deepening one’s involvement in Yiddish is, for many, an attempt to find and fill in these gaps in their knowledge of their own home. This process generally takes the form of a collective process of sharing knowledge and skills among a network of individuals, each with unique backgrounds, but unified in the endeavour of exploring the angles and expanding the edges of aural Mokum; to Johan, a participant in this network, together as a ‘Yiddishkayt’ they open up for each other ‘what are the possibilities’ of the language. Though much of this development is accomplished in interaction with the well-established transnational Yiddish knowledge network anchored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, it maintains and even strengthens the local character of Koosjer Nederlands, acknowledged as a fundamentally patchworked tradition typical of Holland’s longstanding ‘open cultural mind’, in Joop’s phrasing.
If Jewish Amsterdam is heard in the Yiddish-inflected diction and dialogue of its inhabitants, it is through song that these whispers are amplified and strung together into more coherent (and cohering) vehicles of experience. Speech and song both exist in the domain of the voice, and are two points on the same continuum of expressive culture (Van Leeuwen 1999). For Amsterdam’s conscious Koosjer Nederlands speakers, singing in Yiddish and speaking in Yiddish are deeply interrelated practices, and it is often through singing that the linguistic, affective, and sociohistorical boundaries of speech are extended. It is also a means of inviting others into interaction with Yiddish, bringing them into contact with the ‘commonplace’ of aural Mokum and thereby extending the opportunities for dialogue with all Amsterdammers and the performance of successful secular multiculturalism.