I grew up in a home with a strong sense of Jewish identity. Although we weren’t observant, my mother lit Shabbos candles, and my father made kiddush over the Welch’s grape juice.
And then there was Grandma Rose. She came to America from Romania when she was eight years old and, though she spoke English fluently, I never heard her use a sentence that didn’t contain some Yiddish. There was the Yiddish song she used to sing to me and my siblings, a tragic folksong, really, composed by a woman whose husband had died of tuberculosis. Grandma Rose learned it while rocking the cradle of the woman’s fatherless daughter.
Although the song was born of tragedy, that never stopped Grandma from singing it to us as she tucked us into bed or bathed us or served us her noodle kugel.
Growing up, I have to admit, I often took her for granted. But all that changed one afternoon in 1974, when I got the brilliant idea of “borrowing” some plastic tubing and Pyrex beakers from the eighth-grade science lab to create the world’s most elaborate hookah pipe. On my way to the basement, pant-legs bulging with newly liberated science equipment, I passed Grandma Rose in the kitchen as she chopped eggplant and onions. After half an hour in the basement experimenting with my new invention, I went back upstairs and found her still busy, humming quietly to herself. I stood in the hallway watching. “Grandma,” I finally said, “would you sing that song-the Yiddish one that you always sing? I want to write it down.”
From that day forward, those eight stanzas have become much more to me than a quaint old tune. With that song, I began to forge a link with a part of myself that had been hidden away. I learned to play Grandma Rose’s song on the guitar and later, after she lapsed into senility, my family called on me to sing it for her-as if to temporarily pull her back to us. It worked for a while. The song made her sit up straighter. It made her eyes brighten; sometimes she would even mouth the words. Eventually, though, something pulled her beyond even the reach of that fragile tune.
Music continued to pull at me. One night, years later, I was in Los Angeles, playing a show. The record company people were out in force; the talent booker from the “Tonight Show” was there. I still don’t know why, but in the middle of a set, I stopped the show and began to sing Grandma Rose’s song. When I got backstage, my agent and my music publisher-both Jews, of course-were very upset. Arms folded across his chest, the publisher spoke first. “Pete, you gotta understand, what you did out there tonight was fine for a JCC, but for the Roxy? C’mon, it was way too Jewish!” My agent nodded in agreement. After collecting my thoughts I said, “You idiots, if I were a Seminole Indian and I started playin’ a song that I learned from my Grandma, about the Great Spirit or whatever, you guys would have been moved to tears. But since you’re both so filled with self-loathing, none of the beauty of that song could touch you.”
Now I’m not saying Grandma Rose’s song has mystical powers or anything like that, but the end of the story is this: The agent is currently…uh, “between” jobs, and the music publisher…well, he’s grown a long beard and is living with his family in the Old City of Jerusalem.