"In the noble city of Granada - Bingo!": Microworlds of Sephardic Music in Montreal and Toronto 

En la sivdad de Toledo, en la civdad de Granada,
alli se ha criado un mansevo que Diego Leon se llamaba....

In this age of music of cultures available at the click of a mouse, and of fusions of musical traditions barely known outside their home territories only a few years ago, elderly Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardic Jews in the two musically diverse cities of Montreal and Toronto, the main centres of Sephardic life in Canada, have maintained staunch musical affiliations to their countries, towns and sometimes even streets of origin. Over a period of several years, my interviews with them have suggested that, while they identify with other Jews of whatever background on a general basis, their vernacular musical loyalties remain with the areas they grew up in. These areas were mostly cities too, so that their musical activity is well suited to the themeof this conference, the city as festival. While most of my fieldwork in Spain and Portugal is carried out in villages and hamlets, most Sephardim live in cities or large towns. These urban areas vary widely in location and cultural atmosphere – from Tangier to Salonica, from Paris to Jerusalem and even more - what one might call travel ex urbe ad urbem. Here, we will examine how some people maintain tradition by adapting it from city life in early to mid-20th century North Africa and the Near East, to late 20th century city life in Canada.

“Diaspora” is a buzz-word these days, and the Sephardic experience in Canadian cities is a diaspora culture on several levels and spanning milenia: to Canada from Morocco or from ex-Ottoman lands, to Morocco or ex-Ottoman lands from what are now Spain and Portugal, and to Spain and Portugal from what is now Israel. During the centuries of their diaspora in North Africa and former Ottoman lands, Sephardim absorbed not only the melodies, rhythms and singing styles of their host cultures, but as well, popular styles, again mostly urban, of other influential cultures of the time: tangos from Argentina, popular songs from France, or rebetiko from Smyrna.

Musical occasions and contexts

Institutional context

In their more recent diaspora from a diaspora, in Toronto and Montreal, Moroccan Sephardim are more numerous than Sephardim from anywhere else, and Sephardic institutional life is primarily based on the Moroccan community. As well, on an institutional level, musical life among Sephardim in Montreal is more formalized than in Toronto. In Toronto, it is more based on synagogue affiliation and activities, while in Montreal it depends more on a large, over-arching umbrella organization which includes all kinds of cultural activities, the Communauté Sépharade du Québec. The few Sephardim from former Ottoman lands, especially Salonica, tend to affiliate with Ashkenazi communities rather than with Moroccan Sephardic communities, while elderly Moroccan Sephardim often continue to identify with their original towns – Tangier, Tetuan, Larache, Ouezzane, Arzila, and Alcazarquivir (Ksar-al-Kibir).

In the synagogue, prayer services and life and calendar cycle events are the main musical occasions. Services are held in Hebrew, and melodies may be generations old, or may be newly adapted from the surrounding culture, following a contrafactum tradition reaching back milenia to the Psalms. A religious, but not liuturgical tradition associated especially with Moroccan Sephardim and adapted to North American city life, is the hilulá, which they brought to Canada in a necessarily adapted form (see Voinot; Elbaz.) This is essentially a pilgrimage to the tomb of a revered rabbi, often the legendary second century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai. In Morocco, the hilulá was a large community affair, mostly outdoors, with processions, singing, torches and bonfires. In Canada, some pilgrimages to the original sites in Morocco do take place, as charter trips with a package deal including air fare, pilgrimage to the tomb and four-star accomodation. Usually, however, the celebration takes place without leaving the city – Montreal or Toronto – it is held at a synagogue or community centre, often as an effective means of fund-raising for the community or for a charity. The first time I attended it, in Toronto, I naively imagined it would be held somewhere to simulate the outdoor pilgrimage quality of the traditional hilula, perhaps a large park near the main Sephardic synagogue in the north end of the city. Accordingly, I packed not only my video equipment, at that time much heavier and bulkier than today’s digital products, but also running shoes and a flashlight – these items were of course quite superfluous. For the community, if the event was transferred to a city, then it was now a city event: chic evening clothes and no thought of muddy darkness, much less of a large group crossing busy Bathurst Street at night. The old songs were maintained, mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, interspersed with auctioning off – in Judeo-Spanish - the honours of reading from the Torah, with a typically singsong intonation whose content was adapted to the Toronto environment.

Outside the synagogue, musical occasions take place in community centres and organizations. Montreal’s Sephardic Festival, held every other year, includes theatre, music, dance, lectures, discussion groups, art exhibits, films and so on, hosting an international roster of artists and speakers. Specifically Judeo-Spanish content is usually limited. Musical events have included the Israel Andalusian Orchestra, the Moroccan-Israeli cantor Emil Zrihan, Russian Jewish immigrant musicians, flamenco, as well as a musical version of Oliver Twist adapted to a Moroccan Sephardic context, and concerts of Western concert music by young Montreal Sephardic musicians. The 2006 event was presented as Méditerranéenne de Montréal, with the theme of “convivencia – convivialité” and included aspects of Muslim and Christian culture, echoing the “three cultures” festivals which have been proliferating in Spain over the past several years, and verbally or virtually repositioning Montreal in the Mediterranean.

The Home Context

While aspects of religious and ceremonial singing do take place in the home, a marked change in lifestyle which began well before emigration and, of course, was further altered upon arrival in Canada, severely reduced the traditional contexts for many ballads and recreational songs. Among the many changes is the absence of the matesha (columpio), the outdoor courtyard swing, which in Morocco depended on the way towns were built: several houses would often converge in back, secluded from the street and the gaze of passers-by, in an open-air patio. In the springtime, a wooden swing would be set up, and girls took turns, singing as they swang back and forth: cantares de matesha, or “songs for swinging”, at ease and protected from the curiosity of passers-by. Although this singing context disappeared when they left Morocco, when interviewed in Montreal or elsewhere, Moroccan Sephardic women often classify ballads (romances) as being de matesha (for swinging) or not de matesha (not for swinging.) In fact, the association between swinging and singing was so close that the authors of a study of Montreal Sephardim found it unecessary to explain why an elderly woman would comment “[mon mari] me faisait un balançoire, mais m'interdisait de chanter." (Berdugo-Cohen: 102.) Jumol Edéry of Montreal provided a glimpse into adolescent life which is rarely encountered in the literature when she told me how the boys took advantage of the opportunity to push a girl in the swing as she sang a ballad: “..este cantar es de mateshas, …tiraban la matesha para que fuera fuerte - los mansebos tocaban aqui en el pecho – las muchachas a propósito lo hazían para tocar a las muchachas…” (laughs).

Neither Montreal architecture nor the long, icy Montreal winters are conducive to singing ballads on a swing set up in the courtyard in the early spring. In the community, Senior Citizens’ clubs have become an important context for collecting, and to some extent transmitting, songs . The songs I have recorded in these groups often are heard against the sonic backdrop of rather boisterous Bingo games. My tapes include ballads, wedding songs, stories, pasodobles, popular Israeli songs, multilingual versions of "Happy Birthday" and a memorable, if incongruous, rendition of the popular Christmas song "Deck the Halls", intoned in a rather absent-minded and grumpy fashion by a lady intent on her bingo card. Songs usually sung as solos in this context often end up being sung by a group, accelerating along with the suspense of the bingo game.

The Singers

Many of the best performers of Sephardic music in Montreal and Toronto focus on liturgical and para-liturgical singing, and do not see themselves as performing musicians. The Moroccan hazzan Salomon Amzallag (1922-2008),was well-known for decades to audiences in Morocco, France, Israel and Canada as "Samy el-Maghribi" performing Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish songs, Arab-Andalusian music, and his own compositions (see Benbaruk). Aharon Ben-Soussan, also from Morocco, moved from New York City to Toronto, where in addition to his cantorial duties, combining, as did Samy el-Maghribi, Sephardic and Ashkenazi liturgical singing, and non-synagogal public performances of Sephardic music. Solly Levy, a multi-talented singer, playwright, actor and researcher, moved from Montreal to Toronto, where he founded the men’s choir of the largest Sephardic congregation. Since his retirement from a long teaching career, he also tours frequently as a performer and speaker to Spain, Israel and elsewhere. Solly, along with myself and Kelly Sultan Amar, a Montrealer from Melilla, Morocco, and Charly Edry, a Montrealer via Morocco and Israel, was a founding member of Gerineldo, founded and directed by one of Solly’s own former students in the city of Tetuan, Morocco, scholar and storyteller Dr. Oro Anahory-Librowicz. In Gerineldo, I was the only one born in Canada, the only Ashkenazi member of the group, and the only one whose first language was English: it was a fascinating experience to be an outsider in my own native city, almost as if the diaspora had been reversed.

Community Singers in Montreal

Hannah Pimienta (b. ca. 1905), a native of Tangier, lived in Casablanca for several years before coming to Canada, where Sephardic community groups quickly recognized her knowledge of traditional repertoire. She recorded for me some two dozen romances in fairly complete versions, wedding and calendrical cycle songs, a few Arabic songs and a couple of zarzuela excerpts. Julia (Jumol) Edéry ( b. ca 1903) came to Canada from Larache and identified her songs very firmly with her home town: "estos son cantares de Larache: “Los de Tánger, de Tetuán no los saben... los copiaron de nosotros" (See also Cohen 2007 and 2007b).

Bouena Sarfaty Garfinkle. (b. ca. 1920), was not from Morocco, but from Thessaloniki, “Salonica”, Greece. During her decades in Montreal, until her death in 1997, she put together elaborate scrapbooks documenting life in Salonica and her own work as a heroic partisan during the Holocaust. During our sessions she recorded over 100 songs, some 500 proverbs and a collection of rhymed toasts in honour of various members of the Salonican community and in vilification of Hitler and the Nazis. Her material forms a vibrant and moving picture of a lost community, filtered through her life in Montreal (see Cohen 2009).

Nina Vučković, b. ca. 1905, came to Canada from Bosnia, via a refugee camp in the Sinai, and then England. Her story is a long and fascinating one which I have related elsewhere (Cohen 2007b), and in the context of Canadian city life, most unusual: surely she was the only Bosnian Sephardic Jew to live for over 30 years on a Mohawk reservation, Kahnawake. Her life as a young woman in Sarajevo is described by Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which she immortalizes Nina as the beautiful ”bulbul [nightingale] of Sarajevo.” Her house on the reserve, opposite "Chief Poking Fire's House", was a startling but harmonious mixture of books, art and artifacts from the Balkans and Mohawk souvenirs.The "Bulbul of Sarajevo" died in 1987 in Montreal, and along with her, her voice, about which Rebecca West wrote (323) "listening to her, one might believe humanity to be in its first unspoiled morning hour."

Songs reflecting Canada

In the diasporas of Morocco and Salonica, and to an extent Istanbul, several local songs reflected Sephardic daily life in those cities. Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle sang about the Great Fire of Salonica of 1917, and an ode to “Moderno Selanik”, and Moroccans often sang “Me vaya kappará” about the evening promenade in Tangier when young people would dress up and stroll up and down covertly inspecting each other. Few songs of this sort have emerged in Canada. In the New York version of the popular Sephardic Turkish song “Barminan” , there is a reference to Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where the first American Sephardic immigrants lived. Probably because she didn’t know the Lower East Side, a young Turkish Sephardic woman I interviewd here in Toronto changed “Rivington” to “Wilmington”, reflecting, rather than Manhattan’s colourful Lower East Side, Toronto’s rather austere, moderately upscale Willowdale neighbourhood.

The Tangier song Me vaya kappará pokes fun at "current" (1930's-1940's) fashions in dress and behavior, and Solly Lévy added a verse about the icy climate of Canada (Cohen 1989). The theme of being cold in Canada is echoed in several songs by Tangiers-born Jack Benlolo in Toronto. Avramico y Davico is set to the incongruous tune Dominique by Soeur Sourire, the "Singing Nun" of the 1950's. It tells of two Moroccan Sephardi immigrants whose despair at Canada's "fríos y nevadas" (cold and snow) is somewhat mitigated by the accessibility of central heating and warm blankets. El emigrante, based on the song of that name by Juanito Valderrama, features an immigrant to Canada who returns to Tangier, having braved "mucho frío" to bring back "dólares calentitos" (hot little dollars). The Spanish song Cinta negra, pelo negro is transformed into Djellabías y tarbushes (traditional clothing) made of "esas lanas marroquíes" which, along with spicy "hariras", are called upon to help the immigrants battle the Canadian climate, with a final despairing note: "judíos, vamonos de aquí/esto no es para un tangerouí - olé!" Consciously or not, these references to cold weather may also reflect the differences felt by the immigrants between the emotional climates of the Mediterranean and Canada.

Maintaining a musical identity of Moroccan towns, in Canadian cities

Among the people I interviewed, many identified not only songs but specific singing styles to the towns they grew up in – and sometimes even to the specific street. Alegría Benhamron and her husband Rafael Benamron, who passed away recently, not only sang many old songs for me, but participated with great interest in discussions about their repertoire. When I asked Alegria how she thought the singing of Alcazar differed from that of the other towns, she replied that she felt there was more emotion in Alcazar singing than in Tetuan or especially in Tangier, where, she said, they were a little more « détachés.”In Alcazar, she maintained, more people sang well – in fact “everyone, men and women”, sang well and often: as she put it in Moroccan Sephardim’s typical mixture of Spanish and French, “Je chante en bas, esperando el taxi.” (see my article of the same name, Cohen 2007a.)

One of the most striking characteristics of the Benamrons’ singing is their use of floreo: we heard a sample of Alegría singing “Landarico” (tape). Rafael said, “nous avons l’habitude de mettre du floreo. – partout meme dans l’hébreu, on la fait plus jolie. » Alegría said over the telephone, “Beaucoup de floreo … moi j’ai appris à chanter le flamenco, c’est peut-être de ça que cela vient, mon floreo ». I asked whether her mother had used a lot of floreo : «Non, mais elle mettait autant de sentiment.” Yet, listening to field recordings from the different towns, there does not seem to be more or less palpable emotion from any one place: generally, Sephardic ballads are sung in a detached style - If anything, the two most emotional singing styles I have encountered among Moroccan traditional woman singers came from Tangier and Tetuan rather than from Alcazar – depending of course on what one considers “emotional”.

Examining other versions by Alcazar singers, I found that that, while some include considerable floreo (vocal ornamentation), others do not. The same is true of other towns: few people from Tetuan, for example, use as much complex ornamentation as does Alicia Bendayan, and few in Tangier use the profuse ornamentation of Hannah Pimienta. Chantal said to her mother in our first interview, in 1985, “Maman, tu chantes toujours avec du floreo, tu le mets même pour les chansons du Moyen Age!” Alegria told me that she had begun to listen to flamenco when very young, Rafael as well – yet, there seems to be no stylistic connection to flamenco singing in his or Alegria’s renditions. Finally, in a later conversation, Alegría reflected « Peut-être le floreo est propre à notre famille… » - ie perhaps not ttypical of her town but of her family.

Rafael said «dans 20 ans vous ferez une cassette, on va chanter comme vous parce que vous allez le mettre à la mode…» But he and Alegría were more concerned with floreo, to some extent vocal timbre, and with the enjambement structure than with the addition of instruments and arrangements : in fact, they criticised my old ensemble Gerineldo for using the very instruments we had chosen as being most traditional - oud, derbukka, tambourine – rather than those THEY thought of as “traditional”, as they put it: violin, piano, and guitar.

Not far from Alcazar is the pretty seaside town of Larache, In Montreal, Jumol Edéry of Larache sang many of the same melodies heard in Alcazar, but told me, “Estos cantares son de Larache, no son de Tanger, de Tetuan, los copiaron de nosotros.” The same week Ester Bentolila of Alcazar itself told me, “no, no, nuestros romances son todos de Tetuán”: she identified the wedding songs more with Alcazar and the romances more with Tetuan.

Unfortunately, the last generation born in these small towns is dying off, and their songs are either being forgotten or adapted to early 21st century “world music” standards – so the musical differences among these towns and memories of them in Toronto and Montreal as well as elsewhere of course, may never be sorted out. It is rather common in ethnomusicology today to disparage “salvage ethnomusicology” and focus on change and hybridity and adapting to a new life, and so on, but nevertheless, a world of several small worlds is being lost, - and among its last manifestations have been its brief existence in these two Canadian cities.

References

• Anctil, Pierre, ed. Juifs et réalités juives au Québec. Québec: IQRC 1984..
• Benbaruk, Salomon et al. Samy El Maghribí. Montreal: Rabbinat Sépharade du Québec, 1984.
• Berdugo-Cohen, Yolande and Joseph Levy. Juifs Marocains à Montréal, Montreal: VLB, 1987.
• Cohen, Judith. 2007a "Je chante en bas esperando el taxi: Les Romances d’Alcazarquivir vus par les femmes qui les chantent”, in Kelly Basilio, ed. Romances de Alcácer Quibir. Lisbon : University of Lisbon, Arts Faculty / Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnología. 125-139.
• Cohen, Judith. 2007b «Three Canadian Sephardic Women and their Transplanted Repertoires: From Salonica, Larache and Sarajevo to Montreal and Kahnawá:ke.» In Anna Hoefnagels and Gordon Smith, eds. Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology: Canadian Perspectives, Past and Present. Cambridge Scholars Press. 150-162.
• Cohen, Judith . 2009.” Selanikli Humour in Montreal: the Repertoire of Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle (1916-1997).” Acts, Judeo/Spanish Conference, Thessaloniki. In preparation.
• Cohen, Judith R. “Le Rôle de la Chanson Judeo-Espagnole dans les communautés sépharades de Montréal et Toronto.” Ph.D. dissertation. Université de Montréal. 1990.
• Elbaz, André. Folktales of the Canadian Sephardim, Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1982.
• Voinot, Louis. Pélérinages Judéo-Musulmans du Maroc. Paris: Larose, 1948.

Universidad de Toronto

NOTA: Esta conferencia se presentó en la CUMS (Canadian University Music Society), en su congreso del año 2006, celebrado en York University, Toronto, dentro del congreso anual de la Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHSS).