Tag Archives: jewish

Fishman Family Seder Song

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/20/2015
Primary Language: English

Informant “J” is a 19 year male old college student at the University of Southern California, he is studying Neuroscience and is a Sophomore at the time of this interview. He was born in Danville, California to a Jewish father and as a result J has regular exposure to Jewish traditions and customs. Though he does involve himself with Jewish traditions, he does not practice Judaism and considers himself non-religious.

 

“J: One thing my family and I like to do during our Passover Seders is that we have this, at the end of the Seder, we have this dinner and we all like to sing our own song which is called “The Fishman Seder” song, I don’t know exactly how it goes, because we have always had the sheet but it started…

“Wouldn’t it be greater than to be at Fishman Seder, or a Fishman Seder on Meeesssaaa ” (audio attached)

J: And it’s really fun and we’d pound the table and everything and it’s just something that we’d do after every single Seder dinner, which we like to have a lot of our, a lot of our kind of traditions, based on a kind of Jewish Holidays. Granted we tend to go off of my Mom’s religion, we tend to go off Protestant, but a lot of the things we do as families we do during Hanukkah or Passover.

…

Me: Alright… um, the Fishman song, do your Grandparents, or do any other previous generations sing that, or did you guys originate that?

J: So I think it was actually my Grandparents who came up with it, beacuse the first time we sung it, it was with our Grandparents and they pulled out a piece of paper and they said “we came up with this new song”. They came up with it with my uncle and aunt as well. They all liked it so they were the first Fishman to sing the song.

Me: How long ago was that?

J: I don’t know, before I was born I know.

Me: Do you guys sing it when your Grandparents aren’t around?

J: No it’s sort of only when we’re all together, not unless they’re at Seder with us.”

 

Analysis:

Although “J” informs me that the tune is a familiar one and not a Fishman original, I am not sure of the origin of the song. I welcome anyone with any idea where the tune might be from (from the audio clip above) to comment on this posting. The Fishman Seder song seems to act as a celebration of the family as a whole, and acts as a way to celebrate being part of the Fishman family (“…be greater than to be at Fishman Seder”) as well as their coming together. The family working to build the tune together, as “J” mentions happened before he was born, as well as the families continued insistence to sing the song during Jewish Seder supports this conclusion. As Seder is a Jewish Passover tradition, and as the family is unified during this event, it can help to both reinforce their Jewish identity and its connection to their shared experience as a Family.

As the event is sung at the end of Seder, it may also act to transition from one Passover event to another, or to transition into the end of the evening. Either way the event seems to act to transition during a liminal period of the event while also reinforcing the sense of community the Seder dinner builds, as if to sort of epitomize the event they are concluding.

PASSOVER

Nationality: Half-Mexican-American, Half Jewish
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC, from Dallas, Texas
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English

Interviewee: So my family was never really Jewish. My grandfather was always like, “I’m Jew-ish.” Or maybe that’s what my aunt said about him. But he never really practiced. He only went to Temple on the high holy days, like Rosh Hashanah, and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. So we never really celebrated it in our house. But I always keenly aware of the fact that I was different from other kids. And probably that mostly stemmed from me being Hispanic.

Interviewer: It’s hard to celebrate Hispanic culture. Like there are no Hispanic mainstream holidays.

Interviewee: Yeah and like living in the whitest town in the country. I tried to make my family celebrate Hanukkah, and my mom was always open to it even though she was super Catholic. She just loves God, I don’t really get it. But it never really worked out because my Dad didn’t celebrate Hanukkah as a kid, he celebrated Christmas. So that didn’t really work out.

But then my best friend since basically birth, his Mom is Jewish and his grandmother wanted to start doing Passover with them. So they invited us over for Seder. And now it’s become this big thing where I always look forward to Passover, I looked forward to it all year.

So we would get together and the joke was that he is half-Jewish on his Mom’s side, I’m half-Jewish on my dad’s side, so together the family makes an entire Jewish family.

And the thing about this friend’s grandmother is that no one in her family really likes her, but in my family we view her as a god.

Interviewer: How many times a year do you see her?

Interviewee: I make it a point to go see her whenever she’s in town. She’s really funny; she acts just like my grandmother, but she has this thick New York Jewish accent. “JR come over here, let me get a good look at you. Do a turn for me.”

So no one really likes her in that family, but in my family she is the bomb, everyone wants to hang out with her. So we would come over for Passover, and immediately she and her daughter would start fighting. It just made for the most entertaining Seders. She would be reading all slow, and her daughter would be like, “Mom you gotta pick it up.” So she would read it faster, and then at the end, she would be like, “Oh, we didn’t really do Seder this year, did we? I guess you’re not into it; you read it so quickly.” So they would start yelling and bickering.

We had some traditions with Passover that grew. Like my friend’s dad would always have the Elijah Glass. And then there is always a fight because there is a part with four children and there was four of us, me, my brother, my friend, and his sister. And there was a part with like the simple child and the wicked child. So we always fought over who was the simple child and who got to be the wicked child. You wanted to be the wicked one.

There was always the hiding of the motzah. My friend’s grandmother would hide the motzah in the house and kids would team up together and tear through the house to see who could find it first.

His grandmother would cook a brisket. So good. Motzah ball soup. We could get real Jewish.

Interviewer: And you guys didn’t really have the opportunity to get to eat that type of food?

Interviewee: We would never have that growing up. It was always like, “Ooh it’s Passover, we get to eat Motzah Ball soup.” The Seders were always super quick and not really religious. It was just fun.

ANALYSIS:

This is clearly a story about struggling to find one’s identity, as he says above that he never felt like he fit in at his all white school because of his race. I think that by turning to Judaism he found something about his difference to celebrate. That his culture no longer ostracized him from everyone else, but rather included him into this two family Seder. It is clear that the religious aspects of the dinner were not really that important because that was never why anyone really wanted to do it in these families in the first place. It seems like it is so much more about understanding and celebrating ones identity and background. With Passover and my informant’s friends grandmother, my informant was able to experience and celebrate what it was like to be Jewish; what it was like to be different. The grandmother served as the guardian into that world for my informant’s family.

Yiddish Names

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 57
Occupation: Singer-songwriter
Residence: Lafayette, CA
Performance Date: April 26, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Yiddish

*Note: The informant, Laura, is my mother. She’s a Jewish woman who identifies with Yiddish aspects of Jewish culture.

 

INFORMANT: “A lot of the jokes were based on misunderstandings of Yiddish words, because there was a lot of that. There were a lot of things like… my great uncles were three brothers, and in Russia they were Levenbuch, and when they came through Elllis Island, they each went through separately, and the people at Ellis Island just wrote down what they thought they heard them saying, and so when they started their life in America, one was Levenbook, one was Levenbrook, and one was Levenburg. So there was a lot of that, but the story that they like to tell was about a nervous Jewish guy coming through Ellis Island, and he was so flustered when he got there that they asked him his name and he said in Yiddish: “Jin fergessen,” which means “I forget,” and they wrote down “Shane Ferguson.” Which couldn’t be any less of a Jewish name if you tried. There was a lot of that, making fun of the language, because Yiddish is not a written-down language, it’s a spoken language, so pretty much everything we did in terms of calling things … speaking in Yiddish, calling things Yiddish names and the Yiddish jokes were all based on this language that developed over time that wasn’t really a written language but it was more like a cultural language. so it’s very rich in, you know, this is the cultural part of Judaism that we’re imbued with.”

 

—

Yiddish is an interesting case of folklore because it’s a language that’s almost completely carried by oral tradition – Yiddish is not a written language like Hebrew, and it’s hard to peg down agreed-upon spellings for many Yiddish words. Yet, Yiddish is carried on by the Jewish people and even by non-Jews, because several Yiddish words have been adopted into the general English vocabulary. People use words like “shmutz,” “shmuck,” and “nosh” on a regular basis, without really even realizing they’re using Yiddish words!

These stories are also significant to folklore because they exemplify the hilarity resulting from cultural differences. Americans at Ellis Island couldn’t quite grasp the Jewish last names of the incoming immigrants, so Jewish people often lost their names to more Americanized surnames like “Ferguson” in the case of the Shane Ferguson joke. It’s a moment of cultural mixing.

Namesake: The Londoner

Nationality: American
Age: 30
Occupation: Executive Director of Hillel at USC – Nonprofit position in higher education
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 24, 2014
Primary Language: English

So my name is Bailey London, and I come from a family that has been multi-generational Angelenos. I’ve lived in LA for a long time, and my great-great-grandfather was born in Latvia and was in the trade industry, and he did a lot of business in the city of London. And they – his friends in Latvia had nicknamed him “The Londoner” because he was going back and forth so much, and he decided to move his family to the United States and they took a little stop in New York, and then made their way out to Los Angeles to start little Jewish businesses that were very typical. And he raised two sons in Los Angeles. Samuel, who’s my great-grandfather, and Milton, who’s my great-uncle. And Milton – Zevudnik – decided that he wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor in Los Angeles. And Milton Zevudnik applied for admission to the University of Southern California. And at the time there were quotas – how many Jewish students were accepted every year. And Milton Zevudnik was not accepted. To the USC. So he came home and he was really upset, and he thought, “Y’know, I’m really qualified. I know I’m more qualified than other people who got in to school.” And he decided that everyone had always called his father “The Londoner” and he was going to go to city hall and change his name to Milton London. So he went to city hall, changed his name to Milton London, and then he was a little bit concerned that the university would do some snooping into the rest of the family. And he convinced his brother to change his last name to Samuel London. And so everyone became the Londons instead of the Zevudniks. And Milton applied to med school at USC as Milton London and got in. And became a very successful doctor and was really instrumental in the formation of Cedar Sinai Medical Center and he had his academic success and growth at USC, which originally did not want him to come to school here based on the fact that he was Jewish. And I love that many people in my family have now gone to school and graduated from USC, myself included, and now I find my career at USC. and I’m very appreciative that my name is Bailey LONDON, and not Bailey Zevudnik, although I do keep this story very dear to my heart. I really connect to this story because I think it shows a lot about the community in Los Angeles and the community at USC, and the way a family that didn’t get into school here is now a part of the professional team.

Who told you this story?

It’s been passed down – for YEARS I heard about how, “Don’t go to USC. They didn’t let Uncle Milty in” and that my grandfather – so, the son of Sam is my grandfather – isn’t that a movie? – so he’s my grandfather – he went to UCLA. So even more reason that they didn’t want me to go to USC, but my grandmother on the other side went to USC. And when I got in it was a big deal –  “YOU KNOW, THEY DIDN’T LET MILTY IN at first” and it was a big thing in our family. I always knew this story – and I actually told this story at my job interview because another thing about my name is people always assume I’m not Jewish. Because Bailey London does not sound very Jewish. Which I hate when people say. And they asked me in my interview – which I actually thought was inappropriate – and I told this story. And I made a joke that they owed me the job now. Because of what they did to my family. Clearly it worked.

—

I have heard many stories among Jewish families about how their name came to be the way it is – I’m accustomed to Ellis Island/arrival stories, since there’s one like it in my family. It is not uncommon for Jewish immigrants to have had their names changed to “sound less Jewish.”

Thoughts on a Bar Mitzvah

Nationality: American – "Very American?"
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 28, 2014
Primary Language: English

The informant is a student at USC and housemate of the collector. They are a screenwriting major, and a person who considers themselves a floater among social groups – “sometimes hangs out with musicians, sometimes with theatre kids.” They come from a family where the mother was Jewish but the father wasn’t, and although the informant is not very religious, they consider Judaism as something core to their identity. 

—

Are there any traditions that you’ve taken part in or hold of importance?

Yeah, I mean I had a bar mitzvah. That’s definitely a tradition I partook in. I partook in Chanukah, the presents ans the lighting the candles and the different prayers.

It’s interesting. My maternal grandfather – not actually my grandfather, my grandmother remarried – they were very liberal, y’know, for their time. He was my first Hebrew teacher and my first piano teacher. And um – he was fantastic at both – he was a very patient, kind guy and I never really appreciated that, and I should have – it’s not something I’m particularly proud of. He was a really great guy. And I remember – it was something –  this is so small, it’s such a tiny detail. There’s two different ways to speak Hebrew. There is the traditional pronunciation and there is the Ashkenazi pronunciation. Which he had grown up with. There’s a letter in Hebrew that is “T” in the traditional pronunciation and has a “t” sound, but if it’s without a little dot in the middle it is a “s” sound in Ashkenazi. And I remember that he would always correct me on that. It was one of those things that stuck until my bar mitzvah. When I got done – I got bar mitzvah’d in a reform synagogue, with a – y’know in Texas, so like I’m not sure if it counts –

 

After I trained for months to do my bar mitzvah really well – I had a kickass bar mitzvah, I probably worked harder on that bar mitzvah than I have on anything else in my life. I cared. Y’know I really wanted to fuckin’ kick some ass up there. I really wanted to impress Rachel. Whatever. Not that it matters.

I don’t know. They’re not stories, they’re just like little things.

Tell me about your whole bar mitzvah process, or traditional things that people made you do or partake in.

What’s great about a bar mitzvah is when you’re a thirteen year old kid you don’t really know how to do anything, if that makes any sense. You think you are a capable human, but you’re clearly not. Because you’re thirteen years old. And you’ve never really had any responsibility, and you’ve never really had to do anything. So when I was training for my bar mitzvah, I had never really done that amount of work before. And it really kind of haven’t since. It speaks to my level of either work ethic or choice of career. But it taught me discipline. Because I realize I had kind of bailed on Hebrew school before then, and I really didn’t know a lot, and I wasn’t a particular student of the game. And so I got a tutor, an 80-something year old woman named Sarah Purcell, who was just kind of this five-foot-nothing lithe little force of nature, who just took no shit from anybody. And was very very good at teahing large amounts of material in a short amount of time. And so I buckled down for about six months and I learned my torah portion, my haftara, all of it. It was very intense and I studied constantly – listening to the tapes, she had made tapes of her singing it because it’s very hard to read – what’s really cool about Hebrew is that they actually have music built in to the language in certain places. And there are little tropes that you can use to identify what note or whatever thing to say. And I knew those for a brief period of time.

Did you learn both the torah trope and the haftara trope?

Yeah! I sang the whole thing. It was quite an endeavor. And then I wrote a speech, and I thought I was a writer – I wanted to be a writer since I was like eleven years old. I wrote this speech that was part of the bar mitzvah and the speech was the worst part of it. And I cannot. Just. Thinking about that speech makes me so sad. Just because – I recited something that I thought I was proud of in front of like 70 people and I was like, “this is a great speech you guys, I’m such a great writer,” and I failed so miserably. Everything else about – I thought I was being so deep, and I wasn’t; I think I quoted The Da Vinci Code in my speech – because every twelve-going-on-thirteen year old thinks The Da Vinci Code is so deep and interesting. And it’s so not. It was such a pseudo-intellectual moment. And I realized the second I stepped off the stage that’s just not that. Anyway. I don’t know.

Were your other friends going through this at the same time?

That was a really interesting period in my life. Just because, um… Some of my friends were. I did youth theatre and so that’s where most of my friends were. And a couple of them were inevitably Jewish. But for the most part, I uh… And my sixth-grade girlfriend. Who to this day is probably my only legitimate girlfriend. Um. That was a joke, but still kind of serious. She was going through it at the same time, I suppose. But it was very weird because I was about to move. And so I was kind of wrapping up with the three really close friends that I had had there. We were all very close – like not ALL of us were very close but I was very close with the three of them individually. And so – none of them were Jewish. In fact all of them were card-carrying Christians who’d go to church on Sunday. They really tried.

I was about to move. So I guess the bar mitzvah was weird in that it was kind of a capstone to a period in my life that I didn’t want to end. I kind of developed a good community, I developed good relationships, and I was unhappy to leave it. So at the bar mitzvah I was like I was going out on top.

Your friends that weren’t Jewish came to your bar mitzvah?

Yeah! And they were very supportive and they were sweet. Although they didn’t have to be at all. And we’re still friends. Most of them – actually one of them is here with me at school right now and we still hang out and do stuff. It’s very cool.

 

—

Informant was the first among many interviewed who, when asked about traditions, initially thought of something related to religion. I didn’t set out to collect religiously-tied traditions, but it was a trend that appeared!