A Girl’s Longing for Her Voice to Be Heard

As a little girl growing up in Baltimore in the years just following the Second World War, Deborah Weisgall wanted more than anything to open her mouth and delight everyone with her singing. One of the chief frustrations of her childhood, as she recalls in her memoir, “A Joyful Noise,” was being told that when it came to carrying a tune, she was hopeless.

Weisgall’s lack of singing talent was particularly distressing to her because she came from a musical family. Her paternal grandfather, known as Abba, served as their synagogue’s cantor, chanting melodious prayers in his exquisite tenor voice. Her father, Hugo, conducted the synagogue’s choir, taught music, sang in a rich baritone and composed a number of modernistic operas. Even her father’s brother Freddie, a civil rights lawyer by profession and not especially interested in music or religion, was able to lend his mellow bass to the choir.

“Their three strong voices . . . rose up into the hemisphere of the synagogue’s dome,” recalls Weisgall. “I could almost see them playing, dancing up there with the seraphim. . . . With all my heart, I yearned to add my own voice to it. It was a music of men’s voices, though; men sang in the choir, men sang in my family.”

Weisgall, who grew up to become a poet, a novelist and an art critic for the New York Times, vividly recalls one incident that seemed to epitomize her predicament. It was the festival of Passover, and 7-year-old Deborah had diligently memorized the Hebrew “Ma Nishtana,” the Four Questions traditionally asked by the youngest person at the table, prompting the telling of the ancient story of the Jewish people’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt. When little Deborah opened her mouth to chant, her voice came out high and squeaky. Worse yet, when she paused dramatically after each question, her grandfather brusquely prompted her with the next line, making it look as if she had forgotten the words, which she certainly had not.

Wanting to be part of a world from which she was excluded seems to have been the keynote of Weisgall’s formative years. At any rate, it is the central theme of her memoir. In her mind, the joyful realm of music was not only the exclusive preserve of men but was also associated with Czechoslovakia, where her grandfather, father and, owing to a strange twist of history that sent her parents to Prague just after the Second World War, Deborah herself had been born. Convinced that Europe, with its postwar food shortages, was no place to raise her infant daughter, Deborah’s unmusical, American-born mother insisted that the family return to the States. Surrounded by artwork, ceramics, glass and other treasured European mementos, little Deborah felt a deep nostalgia for a beautiful, old-fashioned, cultivated world she never knew.

As I was reading, I found myself asking questions that this book does not answer: indeed, that it does not even ask. Why, for instance, seeing how much the little girl loved music, did neither her grandfather nor her father think of letting her learn to play an instrument? Weisgall also seems to suggest there was a considerable amount of tension between her father and mother but does not go on to explain or clarify its significance. Her attempt at imposing thematic coherence on her experiences sometimes seems forced, and her feminist emphasis slightly misplaced. Weisgall may well have resented women’s exclusion from the choir of her family’s synagogue, particularly after she discovered there were other synagogues--including the one in Czechoslovakia that her father had attended as a little boy--that had women in them. But insofar as she was unable to carry a tune, what difference would this have made to her?

Although there is something vaguely unsatisfying about a memoir that raises issues it seems to lose sight of, Weisgall’s lucid prose, her eye for detail, her ability to evoke characters and tell a story keep one turning the pages. At the end, the author and her daughter join the choir of a synagogue that sings the beautiful melodies she grew up with. It is not quite clear whether her singing abilities have improved over the years, or whether this choir is led by someone less concerned with vocal perfectionism than her father had been.

Weisgall is extremely skillful at evoking the atmosphere, the sound, the look, the feel of a particular scene, the emotion of a particular incident. She is not quite as adept at analyzing and elucidating the motives and meanings behind these experiences.

What she does convey effectively, however, is precisely how things appeared to her, what it felt like to be her--which, after all, is the chief goal of any autobiographical undertaking.