Music has the unique ability to trigger pow
erful recollections. A piece of familiar music provides an instant soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head. It calls back memories of a particular person or certain place and you might all of the sudden see the person's face in your mind's eye. I think about this soundtrack when I chose a cd for my children to listen to while they play.
The selection of Jewish music and dvds has grown quite considerably since I was a child and there is no shortage of options but perhaps its for that reason I find myself reaching for the music that reminds me of my childhood. The music that brings me back to a time when Bubbeh Sarah was alive and spent her winters in our backyard watching us play in the treehouse attached to the wooden swingset. To a time when Zeidy Fellig's visit would have us running to the door for a rectangle fruit candy and a warm smile. The memories are fleeting, fading slowly over the years, pushed further and further back in the recesses of my mind by the new ones we are creating in our own home these days.
What music will bring them back here?
My first real childhood flashback was produced by
Shalom, Shalom Aleph, an album I picked off the shelf because it claimed to be "the classic Aleph Bais tape you grew up with". The first notes of the piano turned me into my five year old self again. It's simple; repetitive and monotonous, but it's a peek hole into my past, providing me with not much else than a feeling I can only identify as
home.
Recently another album from my past inspired me to make a long over-due visit to the the woman who wrote them.
Still vibrant and dynamic, Morah Blanca is a musical pioneer; the first person to write and record Jewish music specifically for children with the record "
Stories Under The Mitzvah Tree" released in 1973. Morah Blanka is a legend in her time and I am proud to have a unique connection to her. To me Morah Blanka is 'Tante Blanka',
the only sister of my Zeidy Fellig o'h, and my great aunt. Yesterday she opened her home, heart and photo albums for me. And told me her story.
In 1938, Blanka was all of ten years old when her mother sent her with the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that took place 9 months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Blanka recounted boarding the train happily, completely oblivious to the circumstances. She remembers how her mother smiled and laughed with her, not wanting her only daughter to leave her arms in tears.
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Morah Blanka's mother, my great grandmother Bubby Itty
Blanka was placed in a foster home in England where she was rasied as a gentile, alone and without any contact with her family. In 1946, the chief Rabbi of England arranged a religious woman from Montreal to retrieve her. After 9 years(!!) living with strangers, she was reunited with her two older brothers Yosef and Nussen.
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| Nussen, Blanka and Yosef reunited in Montreal |
My grandfather Yosef (to many known as Joe as my grandmother called him) was married at this time, raising his young children in Montreal. Uncle Nussen arranged that Blanka room and board with a frum family in Williamsburg in hope they would find her a Shidduch. At 20 years old, Blanka again was on her own. She recalls a memory where she sat eating soup in the living room of her new landlords, and as she eats, her soup bowl continues to fill with her tears. So many years later she remembers the loneliness so vividly, it brought her to tears to talk about it.
She marries a quiet Litvisher boy soon after and moved to Lakewood where she spent the first few years of her marriage. Soon after her husband meets the Skverer Rebbe and they settle in New Square where she and her husband raise 7 children, all Skverer Chasidim, who live there until this day.
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| Morah Blanka (right) with Rebbetzin Dr. Gruenfeld who brought her back to Montreal from England. She was in charge of the Jewish Secondary School in London and the one responsible for all the jewish children who were evauated to shefford from London during the war. She had a tremendous influence on Morah Blanka and guided her into the life she leads today. |
Tanteh Blanka describes how excited she was to have a home all of her own. She takes painting lessons so she can paint pictures to decorate her house instead of buying them. Her love of children is manifested when she becomes a preschool teacher, a career she has cultivated and nurtured for over 50 years. (Not a person in Monsey hasn't passed through her classroom!) As a young teacher of Jewish children (Yeshivah of Spring Valley in Monsey) Blanka notices a tremendous need for Jewish children's music. (Can you even imagine a time when there were absolutely no recordings of any Jewish children's music at all?).
Sitting in her parlor, she describes how the words to the songs come down straight from Shamayim, and in frantic inspiration she begins to write the songs for what becomes "The Mitzvah Tree", "I Hear A Mitzvah", "Free To Do Mitzvos" ,"Stories Under The Mitzvah Tree", and "The Mitzvah Tree Triplets Make A Kiddush Hashem". Her cassettes produce the classic songs that hundreds of thousands of Jewish children learn every year, songs like "Hashem Gave Us A Present" and "Latkele, Latkele".
Her stories are narrated and recorded by young children and she remembers each one by name. Many are still in touch with her today.
Tanteh Blanka impressed so much on me in the few short hours we spent with her. "I love the Eibishter!" she proclaimed more than once. "My goal in life is to get closer to Hashem!". She sang me the songs she is still writing and teaching to her preschool students and showed me a picture of the bulletin board they had put up in school this month. Warm, positive, excited and generous are just some of the words that came to my mind as spoke.
It was powerful.
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Congratulations Natalie Turetsky and Very Thankful Mother who won Miriyam Yerushalmi's beautiful book set. Please email me your contact info to chanale@hotmail.com
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Today this story comes with a special
giveaway that has a direct connection to Morah Blanka and myself. As I mentioned above, Morah Blanka had only two brothers, my grandfather Joe and Uncle Nussen, both infamous for their Gemilus Chasadim and larger than life personalities. Uncle Nussen is the father of another very talented woman, another famous Morah that we all know and love as
Morah Music.
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| From right, my grandparents Joseph and Miriam, Blanka, and Suri's parents Nussen and Shoshana. |
Suri Levilev is my father's first cousin and a close friend of mine. Her five Music and Movement albums are incorporated in school curriculums and play on repeat in my house since my little one is a tiny baby. One random commenter on this post will receive the
entire Music and Movement set plus Morah Blanka's only album on CD "The Mitzvah Tree's Simchas Yom Tov".
All you gotta do is follow this blog (by clicking Join This Site on the top right) and leave a comment. What do you remember about the music of your childhood?
