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The Golem and the Mock Wedding


Azoy.

There used to be a thing in the Catskills, now mostly forgotten, like a lot of Catskills things. It was a mock wedding, which Phil Brown writes about in his book "Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area."

He called the mock wedding "curiously common in Catskills resorts, a burlesque form with switched sex roles and rabbis speaking Yiddish gibberish."

"Why was the mock wedding so popular?" he asks. "It enabled people to stage an event that reminded them of Lower East Side Jewish vaudeville houses, without having to possess either music or comic skills, and without having to hire any entertainers. As well, the mock marriage was an ethnic self-criticism of the tradition of arranged marriages; in the new world, without the customary arranged marriage, the very institution of marriage could be mocked."

Brown recalls one wedding in which was man was the bride, the groom was a woman, and the ring was made of raw potato. It's possible to see moments of a mock wedding in the 1982 documentary The Rise and Fall of the Borscht Belt, and the image is as garish as an underground cartoon, including a pipe-smoking hillbilly following the bride and groom with a shotgun.

For those who wish to experience the real thing, however, there will be a Catskills-style mock wedding March 23 in New York City with the band Golem.

This will be the second time they have thrown a mock wedding, but have not done so since 2005, so this is a rare event. I will be in New York that weekend, but stupidly reserved a flight for the following day, so I instead spoke to Annette Ezekiel Kogan, the band's founder, about the event.

"I feel like I'm planning a real wedding," she told me, sounding exhausted. She would not share a lot of the details, except that there would be a groom, a bride, a flower girl, a wedding cake, and a band member would be the rabbi. She also allowed that there would be cross-dressing, and that much of the performance would be the badeken, the ceremony in which the bride is veiled and marched to the huppa.

Afterwards, there will be a dance, the way there are at weddings, even mock ones. This is something Golem has a lot of experience with: It is still possible for bands to make a living on the events circuit in and around New York, playing bar mitzvas, weddings, anniversaries, and the like.

Golem does these sorts of events, which allows the 17-some-odd-year-old band to make music full-time; attendees at the mock wedding will be able to see the sort of mix of Golem playlist and party music that the band provides when working an event.

For those unfamiliar with the band, Golem started out as the result of Kogan's various interests and studies, which included Slavic languages, Yiddish, and Ukrainian dance. "I had no interest in doing original songs," she told me, but, after a while, a vision for the band coalesced -- a multilingual, modern, frequently raucous spin on traditional Jewish and European music. "I imagine of the Holocaust hadn't happened, this is the sort of music that might have happened," Kogan says.

As to the name of the band, Kogan explains that they started performing shortly after a trip to Prague, the home of the mythical Jewish monster. "It just seemed like it was all about golems," she says.

I remain a little surprised that every single klezmer band hasn't called itself Golem. "No, just us," Kogan says. "There is a German Death Metal Band called Golem, but we have very little to do with each other."

"I think they should just give us the name," Kogan says. "For reparations."

For more information about Golem or their March 23 mock wedding, visit their Website.

Yiddish Songs: Introduction


I've known since I started this blog that it would eventually have a musical component. Dress British Think Yiddish was conceived as an activist blog, in that it's goal was to encourage readers to likewise explore the world of Yiddish. One of the few great remaining strongholds of Yiddish is music, mostly klezmer, but you'll find classical musicians and folk musicians who also record Yiddish songs.

I have a long relationship with music, especially Jewish music. I was a songleader at Jewish summer camps for somewhere in the vicinity of five years, and since then I have had a small but not insubstantial career as a songwriter, especially in theater, where I often write songs to accompany plays that I have authored. I was a solo musician for a number of years, playing original material on ukulele at coffee shops. I have been a member of several bands, and written songs for those bands, and I have produced several of my own albums.

I've been thinking about how to approach Yiddish music since I started this blog. I've flirted with the genre before, and so know a half-dozen songs on ukulele. I considered buying a balalaika, which isn't really a traditional Jewish instrument, but is one that interests me, and starting my own little band, but passed on that idea. Having been a band member before, I know the amount of time and energy it requires. When you start or join a band, you're essentially starting a new, unpaid part-time job, and I'm not looking for that.

Instead, consistent with my activist approach to this blog, I wanted to start a project that would encourage others to participate in Yiddish song. There's a Brian Eno quote that has stuck with me for a long time, about the band The Velvet Underground: "Only about 1,000 people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band." In my own way, that's my goal with this project.

I'm not looking to encourage rock and roll bands, of course. I guess I'm looking to encourage songleaders. I'm very much a product of songwriter/songleader Debbie Friedman, a fellow Minnesotan who radically recreated Jewish music in the 60s and 70s. I never met her, but my start as a songleader came as the result of impersonating one of her students, MJ Gilbert, who in turn had borrowed a lot from Friedman, who Gilbert had known.

Friedman played a large 12-string guitar and benefited from two movements in the 1960s. Firstly, there was folk rock, and there is an unmistakable Peter, Paul and Mary influence on Friedman, especially in her use of driving melodies and soaring harmonies. Then there was the Civil Rights movement, and other activist movements of the 60s, that made songleading an effective tool of activism.

Now, I'm not Friedman, and while I would say this project is informed by Friedman, it's not looking to duplicate her work. From what I have read, she was a profoundly spiritual person, and sought to use music to encourage a communal spiritual experience. To that end, she often wrote her own melodies, based around existing texts that nonetheless communicated ideas she wanted to explore in the context of the synagogue -- with "Miriam's Song," as an example, she used the story of the prophetess Miriam as a way to explore a place women might have in modern Judaism (unsurprisingly, it's as a songleader.)

I have different goals. I'm looking to take existing songs and popularize them. I am a secular Jew, and so I'm not looking for songs that communicate a spiritual worldview or feeling, but instead represent a legacy of great Yiddish songwriting, as well as a cultural heritage that isn't widely taught anymore. I do hope to get these songs into the camps and the synagogues, but primarily because these are the places where Jewish songs are most often taught.

But I think there is a lot that I can borrow from Friedman. I have stumbled across dismissive responses to Friedman as being an author of "camp songs," but camp songs are just a variation of the great American tradition of the communal folk music sing-along, which is a demonstrably effective tool for both creating community and teaching songs. Sing-alongs create an environment where the audience is actively encouraged to participate in singing songs, and I'd like to note a few ways that Friedman, as well as other Jewish songleaders, matched their material to this goal:

1. They tend to use relatively short Hebrew phrases. Some Jewish sing-along songs are a single Hebrew sentence, repeated over and over.
2. They offer parallel lyrics that translated the Hebrew into English
3. They make extensive use of handclaps. call-and-response, rounds, and simple harmonies to generate musical excitement
4. They pick songs with strong choruses, so that, even if participants do not participate the entire song, they quickly become comfortable with the chorus and join in.

There is very little Yiddish music that already conforms to this. Yiddish songs were rarely written for communal singing, but instead for solo or theatrical performance. So part of the challenge of this project will to be to take existing Yiddish songs and create new arrangements with this in mind, which will often mean dramatically simplifying the songs, sometimes reducing them from epics with dozens of verses to just a single chorus or even a single lyric.

I know that there are people who will see this as doing great violence to the source material. It is, but I think with cause. The songs were written for a Yiddish-speaking audience, who could enjoy long songs with dozens of verses. I will be restructuring them for an English-speaking audience that typically has very little background in Yiddish. I'd like to argue that I'm trying to create a gateway drug, that if I am successful I hope to ignite interest in the original versions of the songs. This may happen, to an extent, but I don't think that's my primary goal. My primary goal is to create new versions of these songs that will have a life of their own, and a value of their own, whether or not the new audience and singers ever go on to learn anything else about Yiddish.

I think we have to assume that for most American Jews, Yiddish will never be anything more than a flavoring, rather than a meal. I think we have to be okay with that, and to make sure that, at the very least, they have access to the flavoring, to make sure that Yiddish remains in the metaphoric spice box of the American Jew. But I do think that there will be some who find the flavor intoxicating, if I can extend the metaphor, and want to taste more of it.

Modern music has given us some marvelous tools for taking a song and making it an earworm, which is my goal -- to recast these marvelous old Yiddish songs so that a modern Jew will hear it and find they can't forget it. I want people to find themselves humming melodies months and years after first hearing them, and I want 12-year-olds who have just bought their first guitar to think, I bet I could play that. To this end, I have made a list of rules that I will be following in the creation of new arrangements. They are as follows:

1. Focus on arrangements that make use of a few simple, open guitar chords
2. Make extensive use of simple, but memorable intro riffs and fills. Arrange songs around easily reproduced rhythm guitar sections.
3. The niggun, or wordless melody, is one of the superheroes of Jewish song; make frequent use of it
4. Simplify lyrics. Find the kernel of the song and highlight it. Offer parallel, translated lyrics when possible.
5. Look for strong, simple, memorable choruses.

I know that this is the opposite of the approach used by a lot of contemporary Yiddish performers, who either wish to celebrate Yiddish songs in its historical context or use it as a jumping off point for instrumental virtuosity. And I'm glad those performers exist, because I see the enormous value in what they do. But these musicians are not activists, they're not explicitly looking to democratize Yiddish, to provide forms of it that anybody can use as a participant, rather than an audience member.

I will say here what I find myself saying everywhere on this blog: Maybe I'm not the one to do this. I am not an enormously skilled guitar player, nor do I have an especially fine singing voice. I am not a very social person, nor do I enjoy being the center of attention, although I know how to fake both when I am performing. I am not a trained song arranger, and it is very possible I will not be popularizing Yiddish song, but producing weird, ruined versions of Yiddish songs. This is an experiment, but, if it is a failed experiment, I expect that Yiddish will be able to survive it.

In the meanwhile, I have a 12-string guitar in the mail. It should arrive tomorrow.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Surf Music, the Original Gypsy Punk


A quick note at the start of this: I have used the phrase "Gypsy Punk" in the title of this post, and it will occur again in this series, but I don't prefer it. Firstly, the word "Gypsy" is a complicated one, and there are many in the group it denotes, the Roma people, who consider it a slur. Roma people sometime use the term, and that is their prerogative -- many of the members of the Gipsy Kings are Roma, and so obviously I do not have an issue with their choice of band name. But there are a lot of performers in Gypsy punk bands who are not Roma, and even if they claim Roma influence in their band, it's not a term they are entitled to. Worse still, the music sometimes represents an idealized or exoticized version of Roma life, and some of it has no particular Roma influence, so the phrase can be misapplied at best, and an example of a crass sort of musical colonialism at worst.

That being said, I like a lot of the music, and wish there was a better term for it. Gogol Bordello has a song titled "Immigrant Punk" that I sometimes use as a substitution, but even that doesn't work especially well, as only a small percent of immigrants come from the Balkan and Slavic countries that primarily influence this music. One of the downsides of being a blogger in Omaha is that I don't get to name musical genres; however, an upside is that I still get to complain about it.

But my complaining is done. I'm not even going to begin with Gyspy punk, but with a precursor: surf music.

You'll note that the title of this blog post begins with "Jukebox at the Jewish Bar," and that's how I have conceived of this project. As you may recall from my previous post, in my weird little head I have conceived of a Jewish bar that serves the same function to American Jews as Irish bars serve for Irish-Americans, as a place where nostalgia meets contemporary ethnic culture meets food and drink. But it's not enough for me to imagine such a place existing -- the real fun comes from thinking about what drinks I would serve, and how I would decorate it, and what music I would put on the jukebox.

I'm starting with surf music, which may seem like an odd place to start. It is. I could have started with a sort-of "old folks night," where I play ancient Yiddish platters, or a lounge night, or a jazz night, where I play Jewish versions of those genres. All would be appropriate in a bar, and I will get to all of them.

I suppose I'm starting with surf because I feel like I'm the only one that thinks the genre is somehow Jewish. I should note that I define "Jewish" pretty broadly -- my Jewish bar wouldn't be limited to songs by Jews about Jewish topics, but would be expansive, including music that draws from the same well as Gypsy punk. I don't think it is possible to point at some music and say "that is Jewish" and other music and say "that is Russian" when Jews so frequently acted as the professional musicians of Eastern Europe, alongside Roma musicians. There was an album back in 1993 by the Hungarian folk band Muzsikás called "Máramaros: The Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania," consisting largely of music the band had learned from Roma performers, and that album sort of perfectly sums up the cultural cross-pollination that happened between Eastern Europe's gentiles, Jews, and Roma peoples.

And so we leap forward to surf music, which has these influences buried in it, and Dick Dale, who created the surf guitar sound. Dale is often credited as being Lebanese, he was also of Belorussian extraction and born and raised in Boston, and while he claimed blues artists and jazz drummer Gene Krupa as his primary influences, his music seemed as much borrowed from the sorts of songs you might hear at an ethnic wedding or Bar Mitvah. These include his legendary performance of "Miserlou," an ancient Turkish/Egyptian song that has long been a favorite among Klezmer bands; Dale had heard first the song played on a oud by his uncle.

 Dale also recorded a similar version of "Hava Nagila," filled with slashing power chords and a deep, heavily reverbed lead guitar, and this is the Dick Dale song I would include on my jukebox.

Every surf instrumental band since has owed a debt to Dale. Surf can claim a lot of influences, and it is easy to pick out Mexican sounds and Hawaiian sounds in the music, but there always seems to be those Eastern European/Near-Middle Eastern chords and scales lurking in the background.

Some bands have made this explicit, with songs that reference these influences directly. Here is a list of some of these, and all would be on my jukebox:

1. "Cossack" by The Barons. I know almost nothing about this band, except that they apparently hailed from the Dartford, Kent and released this in 1961, which, if true, is astonishing. The song sounds classically surf, but precedes Dick Dale's "Miserlou" by a year. Let's call it parallel evolution. I don't know why they chose to call this twangy, uptempo number "Cossack," but it has a minor-key quality to it, and it is possible to imagine Cossacks leaping about to it.

2. "Russian Roulette," The Nevegans. Obscuro surf rock from Las Vegas, they released this propulsive song sometime around 1963, and it's a delight: Russian music meets pipeline surf meets Tequila saxophone.

3. "Exodus," The Lively Ones. The Lively Ones were a superb 60s surf band, and produced an entire album of Latin-tinged songs called "Surfin' South of the Border" in 1964. For whatever reason, the included Ernest Gold's theme to the Zionist epic film "Exodus," and it was a masterstroke -- the band managed at once to make the melody a moody beach epic and something that sounds suspiciously like the theme to a western movie, including clopping horse hooves. The Jewish experience has never been this cowboy before.

4. "Ukranian Dance#13" by The Red Elvises: The Red Elvises, formed by Russian expats in Los Angeles, have perhaps done more to explore the link between surf and East European music than anyone else -- this song is off a 1997 release called "Surfing in Siberia." The song starts with a guitar riffing through a minor key scale while the singers wail like chanting pilgrims, and then settles into a Henry Mancini spy-movie groove which propulsively speeds up, interrupted by occasional shouts of "Hey!," as though a folk dance had broken out.

5. "The Cossack" by The Space Cossacks. This Washington DC surf band, formed in 1996, had one theme, but my God what a theme: Surf music inspired by the Cold War space race. They put out at least four albums of the stuff, with song titles like "Solaris Stomp" and "Cossack Rocket Patrol," and almost all of their songs would be just right on my imaginary jukebox. This 1998 release is frantic and swirling, and I suppose I was attracted to how delirious it seemed, but feel free to rifle through their material and find the song you like the most for your own bar.

6. "Skating Red Square" by Phantom Surfers. Surf bands all borrow from Dick Dale, as I said, but the Phantom Surfers went right to the source, recording an album with the legendary guitar player in 1996. They also have the delightful habit of performing in Zorro-style masks and had Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis illustrate the cover of their album "The Great Surf Crash of '97," so I am predisposed to liking this band. As it happens, they have also repeatedly returned to Dale's oud-style guitar scales, as on this song, from their 2000 compilation "A Decade Of Quality Control." The melody is deliberately a pastiche of Russian melodies, including the same sorts of cries of "Hey" that The Red Elvises favor.

7. "Bubamara" by Los Venturas. Apparently there is a surf scene in Belgium, which produced Los Venturas. "Bubamara" is, as near as I can tell, a surf version of Goran Bregović's song of the same name from the 1998 Serbian romantic comedy "Black Cat, White Cat" by Emir Kusturica. The film was originally intended to be a documentary about Roma music, and so this rollicking melody may be the song on this list that most directly lifts from Roma folk music.

"Avienu Malkainu," The MelTones. Montreal surf band The MelTones followed Dick Dale's lead in 2003, adapting a traditional Jewish song as a surf song as Dale had with "Hava Negila." The MeTones chose one of the moodiest songs from Jewish prayers, "Avinu Malkeinu" from the Jewish high holidays, and it works perfectly. Who wouldn't want to face down a tubed wave while begging musically for repentance?  

8. "Kol Nidre," Meshugga Beach Party. A project of Mel Waldorf, who was the Mel in the MelTones, this Bay Area band takes the promise offered by the MelTones "Avienu Malkainu,"and turns it into pure novelty. The band dresses in black caftans, flowing beards, and sidelocks when they perform, and every single one of their songs comes from Jewish tradition. They also happen to be a first-rate surf band, as demonstrated in their 2003 version of the Kol Nidre, re-imagined as a sort of surf march, to the rattattat of marching drums, with whaling, psychedelic guitars in the background.

9. "На Молдаванке (On Moldavanka)," Gulag Tunes. Gulag Tunes seeks to re-imagine popular Russian songs in a variety of styles, and with this 2007 release they borrowed the melody of an older song -- I think it's "Smuglyanka," a song written in 1940 to celebrate female Bessarabian rebels. It's an effective surf song, but the folk melody comes across unusually strongly. Unlike other songs on the list, which lampoon cliches in Eastern European music, this one sounds genuinely Eastern European.

10. "Raskolnikov's Revenge," The Secret Samurai. A 2011 release from this San Diego band, named for the fictional antihero of "Crime and Punishment." The band describes themselves as follows, and somehow they manage to pack all of it into this one song: "Morricone-inspired solar apexed gunfight staredown hymns cross-pollinate with Kuraswawa battle drone. Czarist soundscape entanglements morph into snake charm surf rock silhouettes."

Audiobook: The Yiddish Radio Project


It's been a little while since NPR produced The Yiddish Radio Project -- 14 years precisely, as the show debuted in 2002. In that time, we've lost a few of the voices from the show. Clara Bagelman, better known as one of the Barry Sisters, passed away in 2014. Actor  Eli Wallach, who provided the English-language versions of some of the Yiddish excerpts, died the same year. Herta Freiberg, one of the interview subjects for the show, died in 2007. So I feel like I'm coming to the project a little late, although, thankfully, the program still has its website up. 

It was a project that seemed designed to produce satellite projects. I could listen to an entire show about Rabbi Rubin's Court of the Air, which sounds like a primitive version of Judge Judy with a slightly more reasonable judge (Rabbi Shmuel Aaron Rubin) and a considerably more emotional litigants. Instead of being a succession of court cases about unpaid cell phone bills, the disputes were rooted in the experience of being a collection of poor, recent residents of a new world, and the conflicts that develop with neighbors, friends, and especially family. The Yiddish Radio Project played an excerpt, and it was a decidedly farklemt fellow explaining that he wasn't supporting his mother financial because the woman was in a dispute with his wife. He had a thick New York accent and a strained quality, as though the whole experience had just left him frazzled, and Rabbi Rubin, chastising him in Yiddish, insisted he pay his mother, but also advised her to be nicer to her daughter-in-law.

 A lot of the shows sound like they were dramas of the everyday experience, amped up to somewhat hysterical levels, which is an experience many Jews will know all too well from their own domestic experiences growing up, where little nothings could quickly turn into screaming matches. There were the soap operas of Nahum Stutchkoff, which traded in shame, betrayal, and often seemed to end with people screaming and sobbing. There was C. Israel Lutsky, the Jewish Philosopher, who, at least in temperament, also calls to mind Judge Judy, as we would often respond to letters by angrily shouting at the letter-writer.

 I mean, I'd listen to more of this, if it had been made available. I suppose one day, when my Yiddish is better, I will have to camp out at the YIVO archives, or wherever there are stacks of transcription records from Yiddish radio, and just listen.

 What's available is a lot of fun, though, even if it is necessarily brief. The show is as obsessed with the novelty song "Joe and Paul" as I am, and offers a detailed breakdown of its origin, as well as translating the song's machine-gun Yinglish. They spend some time with the still-popular Barry Sisters, nee Bagelman, who were the longest-lasting and perhaps only legacy of the popularity of "Bei Mir Bistu Shein" when it was recorded as a swing version by the Andrews Sisters. The Barrys demonstrated just how easily traditional Yiddish music could be revised as tight-harmony popular jazz, and vice versa, and I imagine there were plenty of Barry Sister knockoffs, but have not found any. Here, too, I want more, and more is not forthcoming. 

 The closest we have is Seymour Rexite, who performed rather stripped-down, pleasingly crooned versions of popular standards, translated into Yiddish, and there were apparently thousands of his songs recorded -- in his house, and he'd play them for you if you went by. Rexrite also died, in 2002, and what happened to those recordings? He even released albums, but they have not, as far as I can tell, been digitized. You can hear some snippets of him singing on the Yiddish Radio Project's website, but, as far as I can tell, that's it, but for some things on YouTube. Here's his version of Misirlou, and it's just marvelous.

 I know where this is leading, but I'm not ready to go down that path yet. I can't expect others to do the work for me. If I want to listen to Yiddish-inflected jazz, I am going to have to start to scour record stores and eBay for records, and they I am going to have to digitize them myself. Whatever my curiosity about Yiddish, if I continue down this path, it's going to turn me into an archivist and documentarian, because if not me, who?

 But I've been at this three months. I can barely string a sentence together in Yiddish. It's a little early to ask me to commit my life to rounding up party records by Jewish comics, novelty records by Yiddish bands, and swing albums by Yiddish singers.

 But the demand is there. It isn't overt, but it's there nonetheless. It's implicit, and it is implicitly saying: You like this? Go find some more of it.

 All right, all right, stop bullying. I give. Sheesh.

Week 7: Joe and Paul


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 51 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 20 hours
I have reviewed 639 individual flashcards

Had I studied nothing but the original 625 words I started with, I would be done with all 625 right now. Instead, I got bored and plugged in a few phrases, a few words I particularly like, and some song lyrics, and so here I am -- I'm at the letter X, and will probably be done tonight, a day later. It's not as tidy as I would like, but this is what happens when you get bored.

In fact, I am feeling the lack of tidiness. I have an additional 250 flashcards I have created, and they're all mishmash. I know a lot of words, but I have no real clue as to how I might turn them into a sentence. I need grammar, and I need it badly.

Additionally, I'm starting to see the value in these words lists, which I will detail in a moment. It's like the Yiddish world is a blur, but it is coming into focus. This will happen a lot faster if I focus on the most frequently used words, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm adding words in almost at random, and I don't intend to stop completely, but I am desperate to start really understanding the language.

So I downloaded a Yiddish grammar book called "Grammar of the Yiddish Language" by Dovid Katz (available here) and found a list of the most frequent 1,000 words in Yiddish (available here). These will be my primary study tools, although I intend to keep adding phrases from my Berlitz book as well.

Let me tell you, I was suspicious of the whole "learn 1,000 words" thing, because, for a long time, I was accumulating vocabulary but couldn't understand anything. Now I've past the 500-word mark, and I'm getting tantalizing glimmers of comprehension. I listen to a lot of Yiddish music, which, for a long time, has been a series of "buh buh yai di dais" and little else, and now words are popping out all over. While I do not understand individual sentences, the shape of the songs are starting to form, as well as their subjects. I'll listen to a song and suddenly realize the singer is singing of fish in the sea, or of various rabbis doing the twist, or of millionaires on Delancey Street.

There is a song I have gotten obsessed with. It's called "Joe and Paul" and was by Borscht Belt comedians The Barton Brothers, although apparently it was originated by Red Buttons. The song is a parody of an actual Yiddish radio commercial by Brooklyn clothing store magnate Paul Kofsky (there was no Joe; he made his partner up). The song is a relentless Yinglish melange, a machine gun blast of slangy Yiddish and English pronounced like Yiddish, and it seems like it's the summit of Yiddish study for me.

If ever there was a piece of comedy stripped of context, it is this one. There is no Joe and Paul any more, no Yiddish radio, no commercials, no Borscht Belt, and few Yinglish speakers. Worse still, the song is done in a Poylish accent, so I couldn't understand it even if I understood it.

Except I do. I'm not sure when it happened, but it all sort of clicked last week. There are stretches I don't understand, admittedly, but more that I do. Maybe if you were raised with Jewish humor, as I was, this sort of thing works on an intuitive level, because I seem to be following the song about the twisting rebbes pretty well too. (It's a real song, by the way: "Der Chassidcher Twist" by Mike Burstyn, which will probably be the subject of a future post.)

Whatever is going on, it's hard not to want more.
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