Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Israeli Folk Music

Nationality: Israeli
Age: 56
Occupation: Dentist
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: April 9th, 2011
Primary Language: Hebrew
Language: English

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Shira Betzibur

/Shee ra Beh tzee boor/

Singing in Public

“In the past 6 years since I left my homeland Israel, I was asked more than a few times what is considered very “Israeli” by me. There are many answers to that question, but one of them, the “shira betzibur” is a bit different, as I truly used to believe that it exists in many other countries, and was surprised to discover that it is rather a unique Israeli folklore. Unlike the world-to-world translation to English, it is actually a getting together of a big group of friends in order to sing together familiar Israeli songs, mainly from the past, usually accompanied by one guitar player (or another musical instrument). Most of these singing events were performed by adults, and by youngsters that belonged to youth movement, and can be traced to the early 20th century. In recent years these singing events became much less common, thought they still exist, and are still very popular within Israeli communities abroad.

I was first introduced to this way of singing around the age of 9, when I joined a Youth Movement, and loved it, because I loved to sing and to spend time with my friends in this lovely atmosphere.

Looking back, it strikes me as a good way of keeping the Israeli songs going, especially now, when they are a tiny portion of the international music that is played by the Israeli media”

Unfortunately, though I spent 12 years in Israel, I rarely experienced these kinds of events in Israel, and I regret it, as it strikes me of one of the characteristics of the Israeli mentality. Without experiencing these I can only find meaning in what I think it symbolizes. I believe the significance is in the unity, something that is very cherished in Israel due to the size of the nation and the antagonistic feelings toward it. I also think it comes to show a culture of times past. This form of singing is not as common as it was during the past generation. I believe Israel used to be a larger cultural center than it is now, and it now tends towards a different form of music, which is more rap like, or just bringing American music to Israel. In this way it made Israel unique, and nowadays the tradition is mostly kept on during official ceremonies, or in small groups/clubs.

The most famous form of this singing is kept on going in Israel through the military bands, these are the bands that play in the formerly mentioned ceremonies. Attached is a video recording of one of my favorite examples of such songs, Choref 73 (winter 73, Winter of 1973), originally sang by one of these military bands named Lehakat Cheil HaChinuch (Education and Youth Corps band).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haSFFii7vj8

Most songs sang in this form speak of hope, unity, and looking towards the future. Some songs are slow, others tend to be upbeat. Those that are upbeat usually involve more crowd participation, perhaps a younger one. Those who are melancholy are there to invoke certain feelings in the public, to form a sense of community. And maybe, the Shira Betzibur was part of Israel as a country in formation, with pioneers full of ideals, part of which were symbolized by this form of singing. And now, as Israel has evolved and solidified, it is just natural for this idealistic folklore to slowly vanish, or to acquire other forms.

Family Story – Traveling

Nationality: American - Caucasian
Age: 67
Occupation: Caregiver
Residence: Whittier, CA
Performance Date: 22 April 2011
Primary Language: English

Informant: “They went on a motorcycle trip. Um, should I give names?”

Collector: “Yeah, sure.”

Informant: “Uh, Dan and David. Daniel and David. Um, and they were on a motorcycle that they got from a friend of theirs. He was a um, like an engineer. And it was a rare motocycle. It was a Zündapp made in Germany. It looked like a BMW. Um, but any rate, they planned and went on a trip. Actually they didn’t take the trip with a lot of money or a lot of forethought. Um, I’m not sure I had their parent’s permission – or I’m sure they did, but I’m not sure that my parents knew what they were getting themselves into by letting them go. But a’any rate they left Los Angeles and they drove up the coast to Washington and then onto Canada. And um, they were going to go to Alaska but I don’t think they made it. But on the way they had a lot of interesting experiences which included sleeping in um beside the road, sleeping in old farm houses. Ah, one story that I remember was that they were sleeping in a farm house and even then my brother, he was a gun collector. So he had a small caliber gun in his uh, uh his boot.”

Collector: “David did?”

Informant: “Uh, yeah, David did. And and so at any rate, uh, they were told be somebody who works at this ranch that they could actually stay in the farmhand house. So they did. But the owner come uh, comes in with a shotgun and um, and scares um. And my brother ah, um need to put his boot on but can’t because there’s a gun in his boot [laughing]. And so eh, uh s-s-someway he distracts him and pulls the gun out and puts it in his belt. I mean remember he’s got a shotgun in his uh, uh face you know. And so they gather their stuff and then they run out and jump on their motorcycle and jump off.”

Collector: “So how old were they?”

Informant: “Uh, they were 13- and 15-years-old. [Laughing.] That’s, yes. Uh, they had um a flat tire. Um, a blown tire – which meant that they needed to replace the tire. So they found, uh a tire shop that had some used tires and they went through the tire and they actually found a used tire that the guy gave them. Finally the – my brother was able to take the old tire off, put the new tire on and so they, so they did that. And uh, like I said they did it with very little money – it was quite an adventure and a lot of it – they met a lot of people and uh, I think that the uh, th-th-th-the thing, the thing about the trip was that they were really quite young to do it. They have actually a photograph of um, standing near the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. I believe it was coming back on that motorcycle. So at any rate they had, uh ah a lot of nerve to do a, uh, trip like that and they did it. And they are uh, they’re alive today to tell the story.”

Collector: “Grandpa hitchhiked to Chicago when he was like…”

Informant: “Yes, he did, uh huh.”

Collector: “How old was he when he did that?”

Informant: “He was he was probably 15 or 16. So it was ah, they did it in a, in a, with a, with a good family history. I mean it was in the 50’s that they made that trip. And um, of course Grandpa did it when he was, in the 30’s. He went to the Chicago fair, the World Fair. And then the New York World Fair another year. Not the next year but – ah, he and a friend of his. And they, uh, they did it by hitchhiking cars but mainly they did it by hoping trains. Often times they would be in the tender which would be where the coal was so they would be ru-really dirty. And um, uh, uh there was a-a-a train detective – they called him a, a ‘dick’ –  but it uh, [Informant laughs] that meant detective that would look for people who would hop the train. But a’any rate they went all the way to New York and all the way back. So my brother, my two brothers, they were in good company. They did what their grandfather did uh, thirty years prior to that, or a 25 years prior to that.”

Collector: “Uh, their – what their Dad did?”

Informant: “Oh, uh,ouh, yeah, what their yeah that’s right what their Dad did. What your Grandfather did.”

The informant is a 67-year-old who works as a Substance Abuse Counselor and as caregiver to his aging parents. He has lived mainly in Iowa, Colorado, and California over his lifetime.

The informant seemed to want to frame the story as what his rebellious siblings did when they were teenagers and only made the connection between his father’s travels and brothers’ when I mentioned that there might be one. This tells me that he may have seen his brothers’ trip to Canada as teenagers doing crazy things rather than teenagers doing what their father had done a few decades before. The informant also seems to have seen this as a story that illustrated the difference between the 50’s and today – teenagers used to be able to travel on a motorcycle and sleep on the side of the road when they traveled. Even though the informant mentions that they were young, he doesn’t mention that them staying in barns or the like was unusual – while this today is something that would be considered very unsafe or simply not done.

I remember hearing this story, in a much shorter form, from my uncle David as well. In fact, I would probably consider it a fairly well known family story. When my uncle told me about the trip it was in an “I can’t believe I did that” vein similar to this rendition of my father. The craziness of it almost reaches to legendary heights in the retelling.

When considering these trips in conjunction with other stories of travel, a pattern begins to emerge: a tradition of males traveling as a way to go from this amorphous adolescent/emerging adulthood stage to actual adulthood. The two types of trips mentioned in the narrative are seen in various films that have come out recently. Train hopping is seen in both Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, based on the life of Bob Dylan and in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. Into the Wild is an interesting example because the main character, Chris Candless, appears to be trying to return to simpler times and takes up train hopping as a means of getting around. He ends up getting caught by a guard who threatens his life if he ever gets caught again. A fear of train detectives is expressed in the story about the informant’s father train hopping. The two are also in a similar time in their lives, though the informant’s father was maybe 8 years younger than Chris Candless in the film. And yet they are both young men at the age where they either would be entering society as contributing adults or would be soon. In fact, this is the case for the train-hopping in Into the Wild and at the start of I’m Not There as well as in a film about traveling by motorcycle in Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries. In all three of these films (all of which were based on true stories) in the trips each of these young men take the young men grow up in a sense – whether they connect with others that are important for their lives or they go out in search for something that they couldn’t find back home or they just want to see the world. In a society where traditional rites of passage are growing fewer and father between, this may be a sort of exploratory rite of passage for young men into adulthood.

Haynes, Todd, Dir. I’m Not There. Weinstein Company: 2007, DVD.

Penn, Sean, Dir. Into the Wild. Paramont: 2007, Film.

Salles, Walter, Dir. Motorcycle Diaries. Focus Features: 2004, DVD.

Israeli 70’s Slang

Nationality: Israeli
Age: 56
Occupation: Dentist
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: December 15th 2010
Primary Language: Hebrew
Language: English

Old and New Versions of Street Signs

Lehizdangef- ???????

/Leh HEE zdaan gef/

To Dizengoff oneself- to stroll down Dizengoff street

My mother, Aviva, told me about this slang, in one of our visits to our home country, Israel.

Aviva was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and is the 7th generation Israeli from her mother’s side. My mother grew up in Israel and had immigrated to America in the last couple of years.

As any other Israeli girl, who lived in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv, and born in the city itself, I was very familiar with Dizengoff Street, a major street in the central part of Tel-Aviv, named after the first mayor. I used to spend time in the mall that is located there, looking at the new Israeli designers’ boutiques that seem to multiply towards the northern part of the street, and eating Cholent on Shabbat in “Batia” (/But yah/), the best cholent restaurant in town.  The street is old, never had it occurred to me that it is more than just an old street in the old part of the city.

This changed when we paid the desired visit to “Batia” restaurant while visiting Israel this past year. After we were done with the heavy dish, my mother told us, in Hebrew –“Bo Nelech Lehizdangef” (Let’s go Lehizdangef). As a girl born in the 90s, I started laughing and complimented my mother for her lingual creativity, only to learn that this was definitely not the case. And this is what my mother told me:

“When I was a teenager, most of the social life of my age group was about spending time together, either at someone’s house or strolling together. The most exciting street to walk was Dizengoff Street in Tel-Aviv, which was back then considered the Champs-Elysees of Tel-Aviv. It was a long, quite wide street, with many shops, boutiques, and popular restaurants and coffee shops, and also close enough to the beach. Everyone strolled down this street; hence it was the “right” place to be seen in, and a good one to meet new people. It actually became an “institution” and so popular it was that strolling down Dizengoff Street created a verb in the spoken Hebrew- Lehizdangef. The street was so popular, that in 1979, a movie called “Dizengoff 99” was created, which described life around this famous street. During the years, starting at the 70s, the street gradually lost its popularity to the modern parts that started developing in Tel-Aviv, but the verb still exists, and is also used to describe strolling down the streets in Tel-Aviv, mainly for window shopping and coffee drinking.“

The story fascinated me, as I love to hear tales about the way Israel was in the past, as a new developing country. It seems to me that this period, when people really spent time together not via facebook, and enjoyed a more genuine way of social life, was a much happier one.

Indian Festival

Nationality: Indian
Age: 18
Occupation: Student at Johns Hopkins University
Residence: Nashville, Tennessee
Performance Date: March 15th, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic, B?ngl?, Hindi, Spanish

“Most people don’t know the mythological reasons of why Holi is celebrated, and only know that it’s the “Festival of Spring.” It’s a holiday in India that takes place usually around April. And basically everyone comes out in the streets to celebrate by wearing white and then throwing colored powder/ colored water on each other, some even bring water guns, to celebrate the arrival of spring. I’ve basically been celebrating it all my life. Personally it has no religious significance. It’s like Halloween, not that religious and mostly just for fun… I don’t know if that analogy makes sense. I guess I do connect it to my childhood, but other than that it has no great significance (nothing like Christmas or Easter, or other major Indian holidays like Diwali). It’s just ridiculously fun. You guys should celebrate it at USC.”

I had the pleasure of hearing of such festivities from Rohini when she came to visit one of my close friends here, who is also Indian, during Spring Break. Though Rohini lives in Tennessee, and goes to college in Maryland, she does not neglect these Indian traditions. Since Rohini did not know the real significance or any history of the festival I went and searched for information about it online, where I came across the holifestival.org site. This site was made in order to educate people about Holi festivals as well as other traditions that follow with the Holi festival such as recipes and other festivals. The fact that there exists an online website for the festival, along with Rohini’s explanation that it is celebrated for enjoyment mostly and that teens do not really know the background of it, makes me think that this festival has become very popular around the world and perhaps much more commercialized than originally intended. According to the website the Holi Festival was originally named Holika and has a religious aspect to it. The site supports my first impression that said the festival has changed in meaning over the years and apparently in the early years it was “special rite performed by married women for the happiness and well-being of their families and the full moon (Raka) was worshiped.” To add to this folk festival, there are several folk legends as to why this festival is celebrated, the official site speaks of one legend in particular, the legend of Hiranyakashyap; “Hiranyakashyap wanted everybody in his kingdom to worship only him but to his great disappointment, his son, Prahlad became an ardent devotee of Lord Naarayana. Hiaranyakashyap commanded his sister, Holika to enter a blazing fire with Prahlad in her lap. Holika had a boon whereby she could enter fire without any damage on herself. However, she was not aware that the boon worked only when she enters the fire alone. As a result she paid a price for her sinister desires, while Prahlad was saved by the grace of the god for his extreme devotion. The festival, therefore, celebrates the victory of good over evil and also the triumph of devotion.”

Although the site does present this historical and mythological context, it also shows the modernization by not only using the internet as a tool of education, but also due to the links found on the page that include “Holi SMS” and “Holi Gifts”, that latter one also suggesting the commercialization of the festival nowadays.

Holi Festivals are extremely known and popular and can be found all around the world, in Bangladesh, Guyana, Mauritius, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Surinam, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK and of course in the USA.[1]

[1] Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India. “Holi Around the World,Holi Celebrations Around the World.” Holi – Holi Day,Holi 2012,Holi Festival India. Web. 23 Apr. 2011. <http://www.holifestival.org/holi-around-the-world.html>

Russian Folkbelief/superstition

Nationality: Lithuanian
Age: 54
Occupation: Dentist
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: April 5th, 2011
Primary Language: Russian
Language: English, Italian, Hebrew

“Russian tradition is one full of superstitions. Because I grew up in Lithuania, to Russian parents, some of these are ingrained in me to these days. Until we left Lithuania, when I was 16 years old, we didn’t do a lot of traveling, but we did some, and there was a certain routine that accompanied every trip, a little ceremony that my family and I performed before every long trip. This short and simple ceremony consisted of the traveler and those who accompany him- seeing him off, sitting quietly for a moment before leaving their house. I don’t remember the first time I did it, but I’m sure that I was born into it, and have always performed this sitting ceremony before a long trip. I am 54 now, and have been traveling a lot, mostly by planes, and I still to this day sit down before I leave home for a flight. Surprisingly, my wife and my daughters got used to my ritual and have started doing so themselves…

I never questioned my parents about this custom, and I knew for sure that the same thing was going on in each of my friends’ families, so I guess I saw it as a given way to act. Only lately, after being questioned by my daughters, did I try to look for an explanation for the sitting, and so I found 2 main ones:

1. A time to rethink whether something was forgotten.

2. A time for a short prayer for a safe trip and return.

As a child, I loved this ritual as it was part of the traveling adventure. Nowadays I perform it almost automatically, but still feel good about it, since it has a way to make me feel more secure about the trip. One more reason is the fact that it makes me feel good for continuing a tradition, although it is a one based on superstition.”

Like my father, I was born into this habit, although I’m an Israeli girl. Like him, it was part of my travelling adventures, but not always did it make me happy, since we did a lot of travelling, sometimes to my dismay. Today it gives me a warm feeling of togetherness and of security, and also of one more way to show my father how much I love him.

Looking into this superstition, it is hard for me to explain the logic behind it, as well as behind most other superstition. I tend to suspect that the logical explanations are a way of rationalizing an existing ritual, rather than being the original reasons.

Although the reasons my father has mentioned in the interview above make sense, I sometimes tend to believe that we sit before leaving in order to mark to whoever it is that decides our faith that we intend on coming back to that same spot, safe and sound. That is why I would say this is more of folk belief for me, rather than superstition, though the boundaries are still unclear so it may as well be regarded as both.