The epiphany struck Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir while she was sitting in a Paris theater listening to a friend sing Jewish songs. “It was a show called ‘Yiddish Café,’ and [my friend] was bringing up all the old songs from the Yiddish theater,” Rousso-Lenoir said in a phone interview from her studio in the French capital.
“It appeared to me suddenly, the link between the Yiddish theater and music and pop songs. It was so clear to me.”
The result: She wrote and directed an hourlong tribute to Jewish music, musicians and composers, “From Shtetl to Swing.” The show concentrates on the American immigrant experience and its musical aftermath. Narrated by Harvey Fierstein, it is part of PBS’s Great Performances series, and airs locally 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6, on KQED.
She calls it “a very happy film about successful integration, about love, about solidarity. It’s very joyful and should be seen by Jews and non-Jews, old and young. It buoys the spirit.”
That’s not exactly an unbiased opinion, but “From Shtetl to Swing” is uplifting, and a reminder of what many of our parents and grandparents went through after landing in America.
Not surprisingly, after prestigious amounts of research (more than 300 books coupled with visits to the Lower East Side), Rousso-Lenoir found that music specifically was very important to these immigrants. “As soon as they had two rooms, they bought a piano,” Fierstein says in the film. “Culture first. The kids have to play Liszt and Schubert. Jews flocked to the theater to see plays about people like themselves.”
But the next generation, Rousso-Lenoir posits, was less tradition-bound. They were anxious to flee the ghetto and become Americans. Young Israel Berlin, who came to the United States as a 5-year-old, became Irving Berlin and wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” at the age of 20. Just a few years later, a 24-year-old George Gershwin composed a jazz-classical fusion piece called “Rhapsody in Blue.”
With a shared history of slavery and diaspora, this generation of American Jews was attracted to black music. “Jazz became the prayer of now-secular Jews,” Fierstein says.
Sophie Tucker played what she called a “Yiddishe hunch” and recorded a song by African American songwriter Sheldon Brook. It became her biggest hit, “Some of These Days.”
Benny Goodman began what Rousso-Lenoir calls “the first integrated enterprise of any kind” when he signed Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band.
Artie Shaw’s all-white band toured with and played behind Billie Holiday.
The conventional wisdom is that jazz is a unique black American music, but that, she says, is “revisionist thinking. When you read that Willie [the Lion] Smith spoke Yiddish and that Louis Armstrong got his first trumpet from a Jewish family,” it becomes clear that Jews were at the very least midwives to the birth of the blues.
Back then, Rousso-Lenoir continues, it wasn’t about race, it was just about the music. “Harold Arlen said, ‘People who communicate through music don’t discuss or quarrel, they listen to each other.”
This is not Rousso-Lenoir’s first foray into documentary film. She made one about human-rights violations in Argentina, where she lived for several years and worked as a human-rights lawyer. But she is probably best known for “Zahor,” an award-winning film about the way Holocaust survivors passed along their memories.
For Rousso-Lenoir, 50, the memories came from her parents, who both fought in the French Resistance, but mostly from her mother. “My father couldn’t talk about it. It was too painful.” She lost both grandparents.
Economically, the family was upper-middle class. “My father had a”— and here she struggles for the proper English word — “shmata shop. My mother was a well-known journalist.
“My parents were assimilated people. We were not religious. I was not brought up in a religious family; I was brought up in an intellectual leftist family, social democrats.”
And though Rousso-Lenoir hasn’t returned to her roots, she did become more aware of them. “I wanted to know what it is to be a Jew. You can’t be a Jew without knowing. I wanted to know what it meant, aside from being murdered and persecuted. I went to study Torah and Bible 15 years ago, and still study.”
France, of late, has developed a reputation as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. That impression, she insists, is wrong. “There are some problems; it depends on what level of society. Anti-Semitism always exists in some people. But what I call anti-Semitism is from the state. And, on the contrary, Chirac is much more than Mitterrand a president who advocates against anti-Semitism.”
Meanwhile, Rousso-Lenoir may soon be back in the United States. She’s adapting “From Shtetl to Swing” for the Broadway stage, ironically just a few miles north of where the story began.