For queer listeners, most love songs become acts of translation. The matter of my creating a less alienated expression for this Yiddish song of love and yearning involved simply switching syllables. While Yiddish as a language of desire might be foreign to most audiences, making the object of a woman’s desire female was part of my embrace of this piece as a living expression. “Farlangen” (Longing) originally appeared in a short, intimate scene in the landmark 1937 Polish Yiddish film Der Dybuk (The Dybbuk). Composed by Henokh Kon, it features the female lead singing of a girl’s deep yearning for someone who has gone away forever. The singer is at a sewing table with two other young women who listen knowingly and glance fleetingly at each other near the song’s conclusion; she is also overheard by the young man for whom she pines. My adaptation was released in 1997 on Metropolitan Klezmer’s debut recording, Yiddish For Travelers, and is sung by Deborah Karpel. Our adaptation is accomplished by using ‘di’ (female personal pronoun) instead of ‘der’ (masculine personal pronoun) in the final stanza.
For inspiration in transforming a tune into a representation truer to my own experience, I was certainly influenced by feminist forebears. For example, I adore Peggy Lee’s steamy classic “Fever,” but Linda Tillery’s exuberant lesbian cover of this tune holds an extra thrill of identification, with its hilarious defiance of taboo. This queered version of the song has its special way with words in verse after sultry verse, where lyrics are changed to project no innocence, and in cunning tongue-in-cheek girl-on-girl, woman-to-woman revisions of herstory: “Pocahontas loved Sacagawea / They had a very mad affair…” In the end of Tillery’s rendition, translation and desire burn together: “Women are gonna give you fever / Be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade,” a boldly coy reference to different possible strokes for folks, with temperature scales as another form of relative expression.
In this spirit, I welcomed the chance to bring another dimension into a plaintive Yiddish song, reflecting my own preferences as well of that of most of the women musicians in my bands, Metropolitan Klezmer and Isle of Klezbos. Our liner notes include translation and transliteration from Yiddish language and alphabet (though in our native English the distinction is blurred since literal translation of this pivotal little term would grammatically be rendered, “The one who…,” rather than “he” or “she”). This particular transformation seems all the more apt since several years earlier, in the course of researching my Yiddish Celluloid Closet project, I had learned from film historian J. Hoberman of his discovery that the wunderkind film director of The Dybbuk, Michal Waszynski, was himself quite flamingly gay (“flamboyant” was the term Hoberman chose to use in his book, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds). Perhaps the mise-en-scene gives even more context for a Sapphic-friendly version, describing the all-too-universal human condition of bereftitude after a lover leaves.
There is quite a vibrant, active queer component to the Yiddishist cultural movement, including many of our fans; yet this particular little same-gender gesture has remained almost a private matter. Other bolder demonstrations, such as naming our all-women’s sextet “Isle of Klezbos,” or the Klezmatics entitling their first CD Shvaygn iz Toyt (Silence = Death, a multi-level play on political words), have gained much broader public recognition. And certain of my discoveries of queerness embedded in existing Yiddishkayt have gotten around. People are tremendously interested in Molly Picon’s cross-dressing, and one drag picture I found in curating the YIVO film & photo archives has become iconic. Lilith Magazine ran some of my film research as a cover story using this image. I am equally fascinated by one of Molly’s own lyrics found in Picon’s papers at the YIVO Institute. Her own typescript English translation of “Busy, Busy” (a.k.a. Heaven Help The Woiking Goil [sic]) contains a rhyming verse about going out to a Greenwich Village bar on a date: “Come let’s go down to the village for a dance no I ain’t tired. / Isn’t this the queerest place? Let’s have a drink, I feel inspired.” Since both my bands play arrangements of some of Molly’s better-known songs in Yiddish swing and tango arrangements, I have many chances to mention her full artistic and sartorial range.
It’s also a joy to share the highly-defined coming out aspect of a musical number we call the Muzikalisher Tango from the 1940 Yiddish film Americaner Shadkhn (American Matchmaker). And after creating a Balkan brass-styled version of Fagin’s “Pick a Pocket or Two” from Oliver!, imagine my delight at revelations of Lionel Bart’s double not-so-secret identities (Jewish, born Lionel Begleiter; and gay, pivotally influential in London’s Swinging Sixties). These higher-energy tunes with all their revealed subtexts have made arcane splashes through our shows, concert programs and CD booklets. While I can’t say how widely listeners understand the new meaning being created in adapting the brief, grieving chamber intensity of “Farlangen,” that one altered sound satisfies my ear, heart and soul.
