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Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong. By Ruth Rubin. Foreword by Mark Slobin. Reprint edition (first ed. 1974). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. 558. Index, song index, bibliography, appendices, illustrations. $23.95 paper. Voices of a People is, at heart, an extensive anthology of Eastern-European Jewish song texts and related material. The songs are secular, religious, sarcastic, plaintive, and they stem from multifarious themes. Genocide, migration, waiting for the Messiah, enlightenment---these are just a few examples. As the subtitle indicates, the book is also something of a "story," as the author presents the material in the framework of social history and everyday life, employing an engaging (at times fanciful) narrative style. Rubin contextualizes her collection of evocative poetry by introducing key events and religious movements in Jewish history and illustrating them with individual texts. She foregrounds social and economic divisions among Jews, the interactions between these different Jewish groups, and she examines gender roles at various points throughout the book. The most interesting moments occur when Rubin juxtaposes song texts to create dramatic effect, setting up oppositions between divergent beliefs and ways of life in the political, religious, and family spheres. The work is largely a descriptive tribute to Jewish creativity and tradition, but it also includes critical analyses of Jewish folklore and history. The texts and accompanying commentary are organized by topic (e.g., customs, love), use (e.g., counting-out rhymes, weddings), and origin (e.g., Chassidic, literary). The categories, of course, overlap (of note are the mixed-language songs), but Rubin successfully ties each category to particular ethnographic concerns, which often become re-articulated in the context of another section. For example, the importance of talmudic learning is featured in the chapter on cradle songs (mothers try to sing their sons into becoming scholars) and returns in the discussion of courtship and marriage. Rubin also traces certain text motifs through different compositions as a means of expanding on specific historical issues. The final chapter (pp. 462-84) synthesizes the parallels between some of the Yiddish material and songs from other cultures, paying particular attention to "universal" text forms such as cumulative songs. The texts contained therein are themselves of value as sources for comparative study. The author consistently treats folklore as a necessary asset to historiography and sees it as indicative of past and present "attitudes toward specific social phenomena and events" (p. 199). This process is well-integrated throughout the book. She interrupts her account of song development to posit that while Jewish folklore in its forms and basic appearances hardly seems different from the folklore of "other peoples," it is distinguished by its reliance on the "motifs and moods of the Bible and Talmud." She echoes S. Anski's (S. Z. Rappoport's) view that written literature and the emphasis on study, rather than nature themes and "primitive naiveté" (some of her turns of phrase in general betray the book's age), have informed Jewish folk creativity since Biblical times (pp. 128-30). In the prologue, she suggests that the Jewish musical "instinct" survived religious repression of the arts and led to the composition of songs "in a folk manner" (pp. 17-18), but she does not elucidate this concept with examples or relate it to her general theory of Jewish folklore. The book gives minimal consideration to musicological matters---this is mainly limited to characterizing melodies as "slow" or "syncopated" on a few occasions; there are also brief notes on the ways in which certain musical currents influenced others, as well as some specifics on types of musicians, dances, and text delivery (e.g., chanting). Few concrete examples accompany these statements, and no correlation is made within the body of the book between the song texts and the 54 notated melodies in Appendix II (though the appended transcriptions do refer back to the corresponding pages of the text). One third of the songs note an exact field source. Neither melodies nor texts are couched within an overarching analytical framework, but (especially in retrospect) Rubin does not pretend to advance any pathbreaking theories. With its fluid textual interpretations and comprehensive introductory information, Voices of a People is primarily of interest as a very readable guide to an impressive body of song texts. Petra Safarova |
