A language can disappear from a family surprisingly quickly. Grandparents speak it fluently, parents understand it but answer in another language, and the grandchildren inherit only a handful of expressions whose exact meaning nobody bothers to explain.
A song behaves differently. It can remain after ordinary conversation has vanished, surviving in a melody learned without grammar, in a chorus repeated phonetically, or in a tune somebody recognizes before remembering where they first heard it.
I have been thinking about that while looking through two stories from my work as Lev Warshavsky at NAnews. One is about young singers in Kyiv performing in Yiddish and Hebrew even though many of them did not grow up in Jewish families. The other is about Tamara Gverdtsiteli, whose biography moves through Georgian, Jewish and Odessa family memory and whose repertoire has crossed languages throughout her career.
I wanted to bring those stories together here, on the NAnews page at 8b, because they made me think less about “preserving culture” as an abstract task and more about the strange durability of a song.
Sometimes music remembers what people no longer know how to say.
A language does not have to be yours before you can sing it
The Kyiv ensemble “Bou Nashir” was created around young vocal students and Jewish musical repertoire. Its singers perform songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, including material deeply associated with Jewish family life and Israeli culture.
What caught my attention when I wrote about the Kyiv students singing in Yiddish and Hebrew was a detail that could easily be treated as secondary: many of the performers are not themselves from Jewish families. They are learning the songs because the music interests them, because it demands serious vocal work and because it opens a cultural world they did not inherit automatically.
That changes the usual story about heritage. We tend to imagine cultural memory moving vertically: grandmother to mother, mother to daughter, father to son. Something is inherited because a family already possesses it.
But culture also moves sideways. A student hears a song that belonged to someone else's grandparents, becomes curious about it, learns the pronunciation, studies its meaning and gives it a new voice.
At that point the song is no longer surviving only through ancestry. It is surviving through interest.
I find that idea more hopeful than “preservation”
The word preservation makes me think of glass cases. An object is fragile, so we protect it from touch, temperature, light and change.
Languages cannot live that way. A living language is constantly damaged, repaired, borrowed from, mispronounced and reinvented. People bring in foreign words, shorten sentences, invent slang and complain that the younger generation is ruining everything.
Then another generation does exactly the same thing.
Music is particularly good at surviving this disorder because a song does not demand full linguistic competence. You may understand only half the words and still know exactly when the next line begins.
That is not linguistic fluency. It is another form of continuity.
Yiddish is an extraordinary example
For centuries, Yiddish was an ordinary language of Jewish life across much of Eastern Europe. People argued in it, fell in love in it, negotiated prices, told children to put on warmer clothes and sang both serious songs and ridiculous ones.
Then the world in which that language was embedded was catastrophically destroyed during the Holocaust. Migration and assimilation changed it further, while Hebrew took on a completely different national role in Israel.
Yet songs continued to move.
The YIVO Ruth Rubin Legacy archive preserves more than two thousand Yiddish songs recorded from traditional singers between the 1940s and the 1970s, along with lectures, manuscripts and other material collected by Rubin over decades.
It is difficult to browse such an archive without realizing that a language can lose much of its everyday territory and still retain an enormous emotional geography.
The voices survive because somebody considered them worth recording. But recordings are only one kind of survival.
A twenty-year-old student learning one of those songs today is another.
There is something strange about hearing Yiddish in Kyiv now
Not wrong. Strange in the best sense.
The language once belonged naturally to the streets and homes of Jewish communities across the region. Today, hearing it may require a museum, a university classroom, a cultural project or a rehearsal room.
That change can easily be described as loss, and much of it undeniably is.
But there is another movement happening at the same time. A language that is no longer simply inherited can become consciously chosen.
That choice has a different emotional quality. A grandchild may sing a song because a grandmother taught it. A student with no Jewish family background may sing the same song because she encountered it in an archive, a museum or a vocal class and decided it mattered.
The melody is identical. The route is entirely different.
Then I thought about Tamara Gverdtsiteli
Her biography reverses the direction.
Instead of someone entering a tradition from the outside, here is a performer whose life contains several cultural inheritances at once. She grew up in Georgia; her mother was Jewish and came from Odessa, and Jewish family memory became increasingly important in the way Gverdtsiteli spoke about her own identity. Her repertoire has moved across several languages, including Hebrew.
When I worked on her story and the Odessa-Jewish branch of her family history, what interested me most was not the possibility of assigning her to one neat cultural category.
The opposite was more interesting.
What happens when no single category is enough?
We are very fond of asking people what they “really are”
Georgian? Jewish? Connected to Odessa? A singer of Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture? A performer who can move between several musical traditions?
The instinct is understandable. Categories help us organize complicated biographies.
But a human life is not required to respect our filing system.
One person can inherit a Georgian cultural environment from one side of the family and Jewish memory from another. A city where one's mother grew up can remain emotionally present even if one has built an entire career elsewhere.
A language learned later in life can become meaningful without replacing the first language. None of this needs to be solved.
Israel should understand this especially well
There may be few societies where the question “What language did your grandparents speak?” produces so many different answers within a single room.
Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, French, Amharic, Persian, Romanian, Ladino, Georgian, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian — and then, often within one or two generations, the grandchildren answer in Hebrew.
That sounds like a story about linguistic disappearance, and partly it is. Entire vocabularies can vanish from a family astonishingly fast.
But some things remain: a blessing, a joke, a nickname, a song.
Songs have one practical advantage over family history
You do not need to explain them all at once.
Family history often arrives as a lecture: this was your great-grandfather, he came from this town, then this happened, remember the name because it is important.
Children have an impressive ability to forget such information immediately.
A song does not ask for that kind of respect. You hear it in the kitchen. Someone hums it while preparing food. It appears at a wedding. A grandparent sings a line incorrectly for forty years, and eventually the incorrect version becomes the family version.
Meaning comes later. Sometimes much later.
A person can spend childhood knowing a melody and only as an adult ask, “What language was that?”
That question may open an entire history.
Music is therefore a very inefficient archive — and a wonderful one
It is inefficient because it loses information.
A song cannot tell us everything about a vanished community. It does not provide census figures, property records, political history or a reliable chronology.
It can even distort memory. Nostalgic songs make cities more beautiful than they were. Family performances change words. Melodies travel and acquire invented stories about their origins.
So I would never replace documentation with music.
But an archive can prove that a community existed. A song can sometimes make somebody care that it existed.
Those are different jobs. We need both.
This is where journalism sometimes arrives too late
News is built around change. Something happened today that was not true yesterday: a government made a decision, an artist announced a concert, a cultural center opened, a university presented a project.
Music often carries the opposite kind of story.
Something did not disappear.
A melody survived another generation. A language that vanished from one family's dinner table appeared in the mouth of a student who chose to learn it. A performer crossed from one cultural repertoire into another and discovered that the new language touched an older part of her biography.
This is slower than a headline. It is still worth noticing.
I do not want to call every performance a “cultural bridge”
That phrase has suffered from overuse. Put two cultures in the same room and someone will inevitably announce that a bridge has been built.
Real bridges are more demanding. They require people to cross them.
A Ukrainian student singing a Yiddish song does not automatically resolve anything between societies. A Georgian singer performing in Hebrew does not magically erase historical conflict or misunderstanding.
Culture is not diplomatic medicine. Sometimes people simply like a song.
That is already enough.
In fact, “simply liking it” may be more important than ceremony
Ceremonial culture comes with instructions.
This song is important because it represents heritage. This author is important because the curriculum says so. This event is important because an institution invited us to attend.
Personal attachment is messier.
Someone hears a melody and wants to hear it again. A student struggles with unfamiliar consonants until they begin to feel natural. A singer returns to a language because something in it now feels connected to family.
That is when culture stops being an assignment.
It becomes possession.
There is a difference between inheritance and ownership
You can inherit something and never use it.
A family may have a language that the younger generation does not want. A grandfather's books remain on a shelf until someone eventually gives them away.
On the other hand, a person can take ownership of something not inherited at all.
The Kyiv students did not all receive Yiddish as part of their family biography, yet they can invest time and serious work in learning songs written in it. That does not turn them into heirs in the genealogical sense.
But it does make them participants.
Culture has always depended on both.
Maybe this explains why songs travel so well
A book needs literacy in its language or a translator. A conversation needs two people who understand each other.
A song can travel before translation catches up.
The listener first receives rhythm, voice, tension and repetition. Meaning may arrive later.
This is particularly powerful in migration. People carry songs before they carry libraries.
A melody fits into memory better than a shelf of documents fits into a suitcase.
The suitcase eventually disappears
This has become almost a cliché in writing about immigration: what did people bring in the suitcase?
The better question may be what remained after the suitcase was gone.
Clothes wear out. Documents move to an archive. Objects are lost during another move.
But a song learned at six can suddenly return at sixty.
The human brain is unfair that way. It forgets yesterday's password and preserves a chorus heard once every Friday night half a century ago.
Israel itself is full of these musical afterlives
Songs arrived here from North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and elsewhere. Some stayed inside specific communities for decades; others entered mainstream Israeli culture in altered forms.
The process was not always gentle. Certain traditions were once treated as less prestigious, old languages were sometimes regarded as obstacles to becoming properly Israeli, and children were often much more interested in the culture around them than in what parents hoped to preserve.
Yet music has a talent for returning.
A style ignored by one generation can become fashionable to the next. A forgotten language can suddenly sound intriguing rather than embarrassing.
Cultural memory does not move in a straight line.
That is probably why these stories belong together for me
One story shows young people deliberately approaching a Jewish musical tradition that is not automatically theirs.
The other shows a singer carrying several inherited identities and allowing them to remain visible inside one artistic life.
One moves toward memory.
The other moves with memory.
Both undermine the idea that identity must be culturally pure to be meaningful.
This is where the phrase Israel news makes sense to me
Not because every song needs to be turned into a news item.
But because Israel itself is constantly being reshaped by what people remember, forget, revive and bring back into circulation.
Political events change the country quickly. Cultural inheritance changes it quietly.
A language disappears from one household and returns on a stage. A melody crosses a border that its original singers could never have imagined. A person who thought a family story was irrelevant begins asking questions twenty years later.
These are not spectacular changes.
They are still changes.
The most interesting preservation happens when nobody calls it preservation
A student rehearses. A grandmother sings. A child asks what one word means. A singer chooses a Hebrew song because it now feels personal.
Nobody needs to announce that civilization is being saved.
The important thing is that something moves from one person to another.
That transfer is fragile, but it is enough.
I keep coming back to one image
Imagine a song leaving a Jewish home somewhere in Eastern Europe decades ago. The people who knew it scatter. Some die, some emigrate, their children switch languages, and the neighborhood changes completely.
The song is recorded. Years pass. The recording enters an archive.
Then a student who has no family connection to the original singers finds the piece, learns its words and sings it in Kyiv. At the same time, somewhere else, another performer discovers that singing in Hebrew brings her closer to a branch of family memory that once seemed secondary.
Nothing has been restored exactly as it was. That would be impossible.
But something has survived.
And perhaps living culture does not ask for more than that.
Not perfect preservation.
Just another voice willing to continue the song.