A Voice for Yiddish

Chava Alberstein’s name may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but in Israel it is instantly recognizable and has been for years. One of the country’s most popular--and sometimes controversial--artists, Alberstein has released more than 50 albums since the late ‘60s. She has been described as an Israeli combination of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

“If we have a true folk singer,” proclaimed Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper, “it is Chava Alberstein.”

But Alberstein, who performs at UCLA’s Royce Hall tonight, has always had what she describes as an “underground” area of her music--her fascination with the rich tradition of Yiddish culture. Her latest album, in fact, is simply titled “Yiddish Songs” and represents her effort to illuminate this increasingly neglected body of traditional music.

“Sadly,” says Alberstein, “Yiddish is becoming a memory. It’s not really a living language anymore. Nowhere. Even in Russia where people are getting older, and the young people are not speaking Yiddish. Only the orthodox communities still speak Yiddish. And it’s ironic. A month ago I gave a concert in Strasbourg [France] in the European Parliament building. And afterwards, when I was speaking to the mayor of Strasbourg, I suddenly realized that if there is a European language, it’s Yiddish. This is the only language that was spoken all over Europe.”

Interestingly, the klezmer revival that has brought a much wider awareness of Jewish/Yiddish tradition to the U.S. and Europe has had little impact in Israel, Alberstein reports.

“It has been difficult,” she says. “In Israel, some people thought that Yiddish was the biggest enemy of the Hebrew language, of the Zionist idea. I think that was a mistake, because Yiddish didn’t threaten Hebrew. But the people who thought it was going to threaten Hebrew destroyed it. They felt we should get far away from it because it is a reminder of only bad things--of the diaspora and of being weak. And not of the future, of the new power that we want to get through a Hebrew Israel.”

But, she notes, times are changing, and a younger Israeli generation is more receptive to Yiddish, even though, Alberstein says, “they see it as a kind of exotic thing, not a living thing.”

Still, she feels the time may be ripe to bring Yiddish back into the mainstream.

“Today it doesn’t threaten anybody,” she says. “So I think maybe it’s time for me to, how do you say, come out of the closet with a Yiddish program. I think the atmosphere is right now, because we’re more involved in our environment. This is where we live, not in Europe. But in the process we’ve lost some beautiful parts of our culture, and Yiddish is one of them.”

Alberstein was born in the Polish port city of Szczecin in 1947, a year before the establishment of the state of Israel. When she was 4, she moved to Israel with her parents. Surrounded by a love of music--her father was a music teacher, her mother a seamstress who referred to her sewing machine as her piano--Alberstein was exposed to every imaginable style. So it’s no surprise that her first public performance, when she was 17, included a gospel number, a Spanish folk song, a tune by French pop composer Jacques Prevert and a Yiddish song. Her first recording was released in 1967, after her Army service.

Maintaining that musical open-mindedness, she has thus far earned a dozen gold albums, six platinum and one triple platinum, and received the Kinor David Award--Israel’s Grammy--six times.

In her early albums, Alberstein primarily recorded other people’s songs, often expressing a leftist, peace-oriented point of view. But in the mid-’80s she experienced what she describes as a “little miracle” and started to write her own songs.

Her subject matter ranges widely, from deeply personal views to subtle, often metaphoric commentary on the complex social and political currents of Israel.

“The Magician,” for example, was immediately understood to be a less than laudatory commentary on Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the former prime minister’s name is never mentioned.

But perhaps her most passionate song, one that was so controversial that it was banned for a while from radio airplay and generated controversy in meetings of the Israeli Parliament, is “Chad Gadya.” Based on a traditional children’s Passover tune, it is a typical folk-style round describing how “the cat ate the kid, the dog bit the cat, the stick hit the dog,” etc.

“I wrote it in the late ‘80s at the beginning of the intifada,” Alberstein explains. “It’s a song that we usually sing in a very happy manner. But when the troubles started, I saw it differently, as a song about the circle of violence, in which everybody is chasing everyone else, no one wants to stop, and in the end the big winner is the Angel of Death.

“I wrote it in modern Hebrew, and I added a few lines of my own about the violence. I said that there was another question to add to the four questions we ask at Pesach [Passover], and that question is, ‘When will this circle of violence stop?’ ”

“Chad Gadya,” even in today’s escalating Middle East violence, remains at the heart of Alberstein’s beliefs, and she sings it at every performance.

“This is a very difficult time for everybody,” says Alberstein, “because things are so complicated. For myself, I still have the same ideas--that we should give back what we should give back. Because in the end, there’s only one solution, so why wait so long? But there’s also the feeling that the other side doesn’t know exactly what it wants back.”

But Alberstein insists that she will continue to express her views as freely as she has in her career so far.

“How could I do otherwise?” she says. “It goes into your work, because if you are a citizen and a human being, you cannot just think about stars and clouds and flowers. And the truth is that although I’m critical about so many things, Israel is still a democracy. I’m still there, I’m still singing, I’m still saying what I need to say, and nobody is exiling me.”

* Chava Alberstein, today at Royce Hall, UCLA, 8 p.m. $20 to $32. (310) 825-2101.