A woman's world of sound: 'Memory Traces' touts Jewish women in Yemen of yore

Music is frequently cited as the ultimate vehicle for conveying emotion. Naama Perel-Tzadok exploits that to the full with her latest artistic enterprise, which will debut in this country at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem on December 24, followed by a show at the Inbal Theater in Tel Aviv on December 29 (both 8:30 p.m.).

But this is far from any old, entertaining musical outing. The project goes by the evocative name of Memory Traces, which, in addition to the striking musical main course, feeds off some weighty cultural, political, and personal baggage.

Memory Traces mines the rich, multi-layered, and largely hidden seams of songs chanted by Yemenite Jewish women across the generations, unbeknownst to their menfolk.

“It was a patriarchic society in Yemen,” notes composer Perel-Tzadok, currently on a two-week furlough in Israel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she has been ensconced with her husband and four children for the past two and a half years, aiming to complete a PhD there in inter-lingual acoustic elements in music.

“The men [in Yemen] were out and about, traveling, working as merchants and that sort of thing, and also as jewelry artisans, and the women filled the traditional role as homemakers,” she explains. That severely limited the womenfolk’s societal and logistical orbit. However, it also allowed them to share their joys and woes and sing songs together.

That feeds right through Memory Traces, both the new eponymous album and the forthcoming show. “The songs cover the complete cycle of life,” says Perel-Tzadok.

They certainly do. There is, for example, “Ya Walda,” which translates from the Yemenite Arabic as “The Woman in Labor.” The other end of the personal timeline is also in there with some hefty emotive and political undertones.

Retelling the history of of the Yemenite Children Affair 

“El Mazaya” (“The Professional Mourner”) not only references death; it is also a less than subtle accusatory finger pointed in the direction of the tragedy of the Yemenite Children Affair and the political furor that engulfed the country following the episode in which thousands of predominantly Yemenite Jewish babies and toddlers of new immigrants disappeared and were reported to have died between 1948 and 1954.

Several state commissions of inquiry were duly appointed and investigated the issue over the years but came to the official conclusion that none of the children had been kidnapped. The commission members ruled that the vast majority had indeed died, with only a small number left unaccounted for. To this day, it remains an open, festering wound for many Israeli families whose forebears came to the Jewish state from Yemen.

That includes Perel-Tzadok, whose grandparents on one side made aliyah from Yemen.

“In our community, you can’t get away from it. It is there all the time, and it is painful. My grandfather’s sister had two children who disappeared. There are almost no families with Yemenite roots who were left untouched by this.” Perel-Tzadok felt compelled to include that sorry chapter in Memory Traces.

“I couldn’t ignore it. There are all those who argue about it and all the deniers, but it did happen. Maybe it was the Mossad. We don’t know who did it. This a lament for the kidnapped children.”

The lyrics of “El Mazaya” spell out the unremitting angst of the families who were suddenly left bereft. Consider these lines: “I will lay my mourning in the crib. And I will return to it at any time, so it never withers. Oh, my child, may you never be buried or disappear. Your family needs you so much.”

If the words don’t move you sufficiently when singer Shani Oshri gets to grips with the texts, backed by a 12-piece ensemble playing Western and traditional Eastern instruments, the depth of the pain will surely hit home. And there is the considerable presence of venerated vocalist Gila Beshari in the guest artist spot to boot.

But there is much more to Memory Traces than that woeful passage of time and its continuing repercussions. Musically, this is an eclectic affair that roams across manifold tracts of stylistic and genre ground.

If we just hone in on the “El Mazaya” score, we can see and hear that a lot is going on between the various instrumentalists backing Oshri. The singer clearly packs a plentiful vocal punch. That comes from a potent fusion of her formal training and her latter-day return to her roots.

“Shani is half-Persian and half-Yemenite,” Perel-Tzadok observes. “She studied opera singing and, towards the end of her degree, she suddenly rediscovered Yemenite singing. She has an incredible voice. She is a fantastic opera singer, and she is amazing with Persian and Yemenite singing, too. She has such a broad range. That gives me a rich palette of colors to work with.”

The roots may be there for everyone concerned, but there is no getting away from the fact that Perel-Tzadok is a third-generation Israeli who has been exposed to all kinds of music during her four decades on terra firma to date.

“This album is a sort of statement from me about everything I grew up with. On the one hand, there is the music I heard at home, and there is the music I heard coming through the Israeli music education system, which is very European.”

The album was spawned by an academic exploration of how her roots music fared in the largely Westernized state of Israel. “This album is really an expression of all of that, and also, the music was written as part of the research I conducted into the place of Yemenite song in art music in Israel.”

The doctoral student provides impressive collateral for that notion. “Yemenite music had a strong presence here. Many composers, from the creation of the state, actually even before that, and up to the 1950s, used Yemenite music in their work; people like Mordechai Seter and Paul Ben-Haim, and even Yosef Tal had Yemenite music in some of his choral works.”

There were also some more commercially oriented sounds that permeated Perel-Tzadok’s youthful consciousness.

“Besides the Diwan singing that I learned from my grandfather, there were all the Yemenite songs that were put out on cassettes, singers like [85-year-old, Yemen-born] Aharon Amram and [80-year-old] Daklon with The Sounds of the Kerem, and [69 year old] Zion Golan, who is a friend of the family,” Perel-Tzadok chuckles. “There was a radio show with the music on Friday afternoons, and we danced to the music at weddings.”

With all those influences well and truly on board, Memory Traces was never going to be a strictly Yemenite undertaking, notwithstanding the intent to introduce us to almost buried and forgotten airs sung by Jewish women in her grandparents’ homeland.

“The music was not written down, so we don’t know exactly how it sounded,” Perel-Tzadok notes. In fact, several years ago, a researcher managed to get some older Yemenite-born Israelis to sing some of the songs they heard and sang themselves back in Yemen. However, the invaluable recordings have been lost.

“They were stolen. Who knows? Maybe they will turn up someday. That would be wonderful.”

For now, we can get some idea of the musical expressions of Jewish Yemenite women a century or so ago, with a production that deftly interweaves the Western classical sounds of the cello, violin, double bass, harp, and recorders with the Eastern textures of the oud and the beguiling percussive beats of the traditional tchachan tray.

For tickets and more information: www.nli.org.il/he/visit/events/yemenite-poetry