Batsheva, an award-winning musician and writer, will bring thousands of years of Jewish folk music, along with her own inimitable songs, to Temple B'nai Sholom in Huntsville, Ala., on Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012, at 3 p.m. (Courtesy of Batsheva)
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Batsheva Capek -- who will bring centuries of Jewish folksongs in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and English to Temple B'nai Sholom Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012 -- is used to being a rare commodity.
“There are not a lot of Jewish folksingers at the best of times,” said Batsheva, a native Canadian, from her present home in Nashville.
“When I started touring Ladino music across Canada in the ‘80s, I knew of only one other person working with that music – a ethno-musicologist at McGill University.”
“My goal is to go find the Jews and sing for them.”
Batsheva, an award-winning musician and comedy writer, be singing for Jews – and non-Jews, too – in Huntsville on Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012, at 3 p.m. Her concert, which is open to the public, will be in the historic Temple B'nai Sholom, at the corner of Lincoln Street and Clinton Avenue in downtown Huntsville.
Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for seniors, $5 for teens, and children are free. Getting there early is a good idea; the Temple can only hold about 350 people. Ticket information: 256-536-4771.
Batsheva says she enjoys singing for anyone who is interested in the folk music that manages to squeeze into rhythms set by East European or Spanish contexts the yearning that is bred into the marrow of Hebrew music. Now that she is touring the southern U.S. for the second year as an artist supported by the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, she's found audiences in the South, both Jewish and non-Jewish, particularly receptive to this music.
“In New York or Florida, people are more used to it,” Batsheva said. “In the South, people are very hungry, very happy to hear a whole dose of Jewish culture.”
Batsheva's 2008 CD, "i, batsheva, singer," collects both ancient folksongs in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino, along with her original compositions and translations in English. The CD's title is an allusion to the name of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the beloved Nobel Prize-winning author who wrote in Yiddish.
While her concert comes on the first full day of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown on Dec. 8, Batsheva said she only plans three songs that will reference the Jewish victory over the forces of the Syrian emperor about 2,300 years ago.
“Frankly, Hanukkah has a really crappy repertoire,” Batsheva said, laughing. “But these are some unusual songs, really lovely.”
Batsheva’s voice, a resonant, unaffected mezzo-soprano, is perfect for the elegant melodies that emphasize the words of each song. When she sings in Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ladino, the Hebrew-Spanish language developed by the Sephardic Jews who lived in Spain, she includes a verse in English so it’s clear what’s going on – and what’s going on is the point in folk music.
Batsheva said that she herself started paying more attention to that as a young adult. She said she suddenly realized she knew a lot of Jewish history, and hardly anything about the lives of Jewish women.
“I realized my music had to change,” she said. “I had to bring a different eye to it.”
One result is her send-up of a classic Yiddish folksong about a young maiden who is wooed, won and then discarded by a wandering scholar.
"Let's be frank," Batsheva said. "People have sung this like it's a light, happy story – and this is a rape."
Her version? “Damn Little Yiddish Folksongs.”
“My treatment is virtually a verbatim translation of the text, only I make it funny,” Batsheva said. “I’m saying, ‘Here’s what a Jewish woman has to say about that!’”