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Listening To and From a Yiddish Soundworld
The remainder of much prewar Jewish life in Amsterdam can seem contained in specific secular spaces: Anne Frank Huis, the diamond factories, Waterlooplein, Sarphatistraat. In parts of town like Plantage or near the Nieuwmarkt one can cycle past old facades adorned with subtle bas-relief Hebraic inscriptions and stars of David, finding surprising traces of Jewish life in otherwise unassuming settings, sometimes hidden but in plain view. Post-World War Two memorial architecture has received a great deal of scholarly attention, and indeed it is through such conscious preservation strategies that cities often seek remediation, redemption, or simply articulation of their voided Jewish presence (Young 2000). But such buildings cannot be more than ‘silent witnesses’ of situated histories, attesting to Jewish presence and absence in only the starkest terms (Gruber 2002, 90). Sound, on the other hand, makes present what is not so easily seen; reverberant in the “echoic poetics” of the Dutch language, Mokum is manifest (Carter 2004).
Neither as ephemeral nor imperial as theorised by Modernists, sound is best conceptualised as opening an intersubjective space for ontological practice. It is through sound, and the synaesthetic sense of deep, ‘soulful’ touch it evokes, that we come to know each other and ourselves (Verrips 2006; Erlmann 2004). Speaking and listening, the aural practices of sounding, are ‘technologies’ of subjectivity, often intimately tied to political imperatives, the ethics of public discourse and interaction, and the forms of dialogue that are both imagined and allowed in a given society (cf. Hirschkind 2004, 132). Aural practices are active and social; rather than unilaterally assaulting the individual, as Modernists like Simmel and Benjamin believed, sound is processed through sets of ‘implicit organisational principles” that allow us to “make sense of what we are hearing and for which we are listening’ (Carter 2004, 60).
In studies of the sonic, sound is often cast in spatial metaphors, with the concept of ‘soundworld’ countering assumptions of sound’s ephemeral and purely temporal nature as well as suggesting how it can transform social boundaries. The ‘soundworld’ metaphor is particularly salient in research on Yiddish, a diasporic language whose homeland has either been destroyed or never really existed, in a unitary form, in the first place. ‘Yiddishland,’ as Shandler (2006) terms it, is the cultural space created through contemporary Yiddish practices, a ‘virtual locus’ that can be accessed from anywhere, but exists nowhere. These formulations seem apt for studies of American Yiddishism, where the language has come to stand for an acceptable Jewish alterity, and where English and Yiddish were (and are still) not ‘divergent streams’ but ‘layered one on top of the other’ (Kelman 2006, 129; also Kun 1999, 344). However, in the Netherlands, Dutch and Yiddish flow together like a rollicking confluence, begging a different conceptualisation of the space created by Yiddish sound.
First of all, the Koosjer Nederlands soundworld, which I here term ‘aural Mokum’, is not ‘a world apart’ from the physical environment of Amsterdam, but an intersubjective space folded into people’s everyday social lives. For those with the ‘sonic sensibility’ to ascertain its presence, it is a formative part of Amsterdam itself, helping to make the city what it is. Further, ‘aural Mokum’ is opened up through the Dutch language itself, and thus anyone who speaks the language has access to it potentially. It is akin to what Carter has called a ‘commonplace,’ a space arising between individuals in the echoes of their dialogue (Carter 2004, 43-47). This concept is based on the classic phenomenological quandary of never being able to know precisely another’s experience, holding that dialogists can never take each others’ words literally and thus are always anticipating and interpellating what the other could mean, ‘calculating the arc of their arrows.’ This in-between space is a commonplace of generative poiesis, where individuals work towards understanding by listening to what the other is saying and, through the ‘tumultuous incorporation of the other’s voice,’ strive for mutual recognition. Thinking of aurality this way allows us to move beyond ideas of speech as purely representative and straightforward, to realise the ‘cultural work’ involved in speaking and listening. Ambiguity and mishearing are integral to communication, Carter writes, driving the creation of new symbols and word senses and new social relationships of connection in the process. Heightened listening, like that found among Amsterdam’s contemporary Yiddishists, is usually precipitated in times of collective identity crisis – such as the 2010 national election with polarising candidates at the helm, the election campaign of which coincided with my research period – rendering (what becomes considered) echoic poetics both ‘tactical and profoundly political’. At these times, for these individuals in crisis, there is increased consciousness of this intersubjective space between people as it is reached through speech.
To ‘listen to Jewishness’ in Dutch speaks to the current debates around what constitutes Dutch identity, in the tension between secularism and multiculturalism. Some individuals feel compelled to express their longstanding connection to this city and its Jewish history through their everyday speech patterns and heightened communications like singing, in the process both illustrating and performing an example of how secularism and multiculturalism can coexist. ‘Listening to Jewishness’ here is in actuality, to this group, telling a story of successful minority integration, and an attempt to engage others in this commonplace of recognition, to alert them of what they are listening to and speaking of when they speak Dutch.[6] This should not be interpreted as an appropriation, minimisation, or annihilation of Jewish presence – as Birnbaum (2009, 297) has suggested in reference to German klezmer music – nor either as an uncritical act of reconciliation and unity between the Netherlands and its Jewish population. It is, rather, an expression of a relationship that constructs and recognises the mutual reliance of the majority and the minority, and places a high value on the interchange that results from this union. It is an affirmative voicing of the ‘typical Dutch’ values of tolerance and cohabitation, values which many perceive to be under assault by populist politicians, who are cutting off dialogue with Islamic communities in ways uncomfortably similar to the Nazi wartime occupation of the Netherlands (Burkhout and Pinedo 2010). Structured by an imagination of Dutch cultural openness and the deep multiculturalism of Bundism, aural Mokum is conceived as a space in which cultural coexistence is both remembered and enacted, where dialogue can happen between anyone already speaking (Koosjer) Nederlands or willing to learn how it can be listened to.