’Boy’ or ‘Boss’: Water Keeps a Hit Movie ‘Green’!

If there’s a song whose meaning I’ve always misconstrued, it’s those of the  American folk melody, Water Boy.

I first heard it sung in a satirical version by American Jewish comedian, Allan Sherman. But even later, hearing the real lyrics, I mistook them as a call to the cotton field workers’ own slave – the abused child who brought them water during their labours.

I could not have been more wrong!

According to contributors to Lyrics Mode it is a prison work song and the prisoner, doing hard labour, laments how his bad luck gambling in card games has cost him ‘silver and gold’ – along with his liberty. The singer is either calling for the water boy to bring him water or is telling the guard, whom he calls ‘boss’ how hard he's working and that he's the best worker on site. It is suggested further that the word ’boy’ is mistranscribed from the original and should be ‘boss’.

There are innumerable versions of Water Boy, with fans claiming a wide range of musical references encompassing classical composers, a Jewish marriage song and a Native American tune.

The song and the many artistes who have covered it have enjoyed renewed interest with the release of the movie, Green Book as The Don Shirley Trio recorded a most compelling instrumental version.

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Water boy, where are you hidin’

If you don't come right here

Gonna tell you pa on you

There ain't no hammer

That's on a this mountain

That ring like mine boy

That ring like mine

I'm gonna bust this rock boy

From here to the Macon

All the way to the jail boy

All the way to the jail

You Jack o diamond

Jack o diamond

Know you of old boy

I know you're of old

You rob-a my pocket

Rob my pocket

Silver and gold boy

Of silver and gold

There ain't no sweat boy

That's on a this mountain

That run like mine boy

That run like mine

© Natalie Wood (18 February 2019)

Of the Burning of Jewish Books There is No End …

Two men, two women.

Four modern Hebrew poets whose work has had such a profound impact on Israeli life and culture that their verses are sung in kindergartens while one has given a name to a recent war.

What’s more, observed Dr Eli Ben Joseph addressing the English speakers group at the Emet Veshalom Progressive Synagogue in Nahariya, northern Israel, it is thrilling to note that Rachel Bluwstein – known universally as ‘the poet Rachel’ – was the first woman to write in Hebrew since the biblical judge, Deborah.

Dr Ben Joseph, a US-born Israeli of 44 years standing, who taught English as a foreign language at the Western Galilee College near Acco, also examined the work of Leah Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai and Chaim Nachman Bialik, who is regarded as Israel’s national poet.

As present-day Israel is still the home of the ‘People of the Book’, it is difficult to exaggerate what has been described as the ‘mythological ‘status’ of personalities like these four:

There are signposts to the cemetery near Lake Kinneret in Tiberias where Rachel lies. Bialik’s Tel Aviv house, converted into a museum, is a major tourist attraction while streets, a moshav and a suburb of Haifa are named after him. Goldberg, like Rachel, is among four poets featured on Israeli banknotes while it is said that Amichai is the most translated Hebrew language poet since King David!

But here I would like to examine an aspect of Bialik’s life not touched upon either by Dr Ben Joseph or former UK MP and broadcaster Michael Portillo, who featured the poet in his BBC documentary, Rail Journey in the Land of Israel, and that was screened last night for an ESRA Karmiel crowd.

It is something I thought about in relation both to the ‘Kaddish’ prayer protest in London last month and historic rows in world Jewry from biblical times onward.

The poet was born into a traditional Orthodox Jewish Russian family and studied at Talmudic academies in Russia and Lithuania. But as a young adult he drifted away from the life for which he had been prepared and it appears that there were those in ultra-strict circles who viewed his later activities as behaviour somewhere between gross disrespect and brazen treachery.

So they burned his books!

Bialik wrote in Yiddish as well as Hebrew, so it is not clear from what I have read what caused so much animus among the ultra-religious. I would welcome input from anyone who reads this feature.

Meanwhile, in view of the innumerable anti-Jewish book burnings that have occurred in history, it is hard to over-dramatise the malice that may inspire one set of Jews to thus destroy another Jew’s work on a matter of so-called religious principle.

But it is clear that Bialik’s stature and legacy prove he had already won the argument almost without breaking into a sweat. He continues to be regarded as Israel’s best known, most loved literary giant while his enemies lie as dust and ashes, their work forgotten – except in relation to him.

© Natalie Wood (05 June 2018)

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Alwayswriteagain: The Music and Murder of Trees

Alwayswriteagain: The Music and Murder of Trees: As Israelis celebrate Tu B’Shevat - the biblical ‘birthday for trees’ - residents of the leafier suburbs of Sheffield, Yorkshire, England a...

כתיבה וחתימה טובה

Very best wishes for a sweet and successful 5778 to all who are celebrating the Jewish New Year.

Natalie Wood and Brian Fink (Karmiel, Galilee, Israel).

(© Natalie Wood (17 September 2017)

Yes: Far Too Soon to Say Goodbye!

As we mark the bi-centenary of the death of novelist, Jane Austen scholars still debate its cause.

Was it tuberculosis, cancer, Addison’s disease or – as most recently suggested – arsenic poisoning that killed her aged    only 41?

We’ll never know the full truth. But I reflect on this as I consider the coincidental passing of Ukrainian dissident poet, Irina Ratushinskaya as the modern writer also died far too young, aged only 63.

While the immediate cause was cancer, Ratushinskaya’s constitution had been irreversibly damaged by her incarceration in the ‘small zone’ of a labour camp in the republic of Mordovia, a ‘prison within the prison’ reserved for women deemed as particularly dangerous political criminals.

Initially deprived of paper, she wrote by scratching her work on bars of soap; memorised and erased the verses then rewrote them when paper became available before somehow smuggling them to her husband, Igor Gerashchenko who arranged their publication.

Ratushinskaya had been found guilty in April 1983 of “agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime” and so given a maximum sentence of seven years in the camp followed by five years internal exile.

She was released suddenly on the orders of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who wanted to prove he was genuine about improved domestic human rights as part of his policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction).

Ratushinskaya then emigrated to the U.K., moved on  to the United States and then returned to Russia in 1998, settling in Moscow with her family, but in relative obscurity.

While many of the best known dissidents of the period were Jewish, Ratushinskaya was a devout Christian. It seems the cruellest irony that she is now dead while contemporary Jewish heroes of the Soviet human rights movement like Jewish Agency chief Natan Sharansky who was released only a few months before her and Knesset Speaker, Yuli Edelstein survived to live at the acme of Israeli society.  

I conclude this short tribute with her appropriately titled piece, Too Soon to Say Goodbye.

I must point out that the date at the end of the poem implies it was written after her release:

Too soon to say goodbye,

Too soon to say forgive me,

Too soon to send us your instructions:

You know what our luck is like.

Not a door but it will be locked!

Not a net but it will be cast!

Others took to the bottle,

And others just vanished.

Only a few of us left now,

So they're firing at us point blank.

What now? We can read Dostoevsky;

Chip in roubles - for vodka,

Only a few of us left anyhow.

And we know we must fight to the death.

And we know that cruel blacksmith

Forged as out of some unknown metal,

Perhaps doubting our endurance,

Perhaps expecting us to recant.

No! Give us your instructions!

We swear to fulfil them precisely.

Too Soon to despair yet.

You ought to know our luck.

Irina Ratushinskaya

Kiev, 9 December 1986

© Natalie Wood (20 July 2017)

Restoring Miss Toyah

‘Erasure poetry’ is defined as a form of ‘found poetry’ or ‘found art’ created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem.

This piece is based largely on a feature and blog post by former BBC correspondent Andrew Whitehead, whose sympathetic research has helped to rescue the short existence  of Victoria M Sofaer, a young Baghdadi Jewish woman, from total oblivion.

I have attempted to use an ‘erasure’ style format to echo  - metaphorize – what happened to Victoria.

Most of the words in this piece are Whitehead’s, along with some of my own.

Restoring Miss Toyah

In Chennai, once Madras,

lies a half-forgotten resting

place for the twice re-settled

residue of the town’s long-time

Jewish dead.

Here, half-faded, and one

further step removed, stands

a solitary gravestone illumined

briefly by a shaft of sunlight

sifting through the trees.

So mystery’s spotlight

shines for the moment

on ‘Miss Victoria M Sofaer’,

lying for eternity aged only

twenty-two.

Who was she?

How did she end

in Chennai? Why

did she meet her

death so young?

Baghdad beginnings had

also ended in an untimely

end when Victoria’s (‘Toyah’)

birth led to her mother,

Dina’s death.

Then in 1939, perhaps 1940,

as a second universal war

began, Toyah romanced an

Armenian man.

From different worlds,

different religions, they

met in secret and when

Toyah's family found out,

they sought to marry her to a

Jewish boy.

But she rejected all suitable

suitors and was shipped out

to India in disgrace.

Towards the close of 1942,

Toyah’s father, Menashi and

Naima, his second wife, who

was Dina’s sister and so Toyah’s

aunt, arrived in Bombay with his

daughter in tow.

There onlookers saw something

in Toyah - her face and demeanour –

that deeply perplexed them.

Her silence left an impression

of a person in shock. There

was something mysterious;

most difficult to understand.

She would not utter a word.

After some time, the three

moved on. In another

Indian city, Toyah died.

So her parents returned

to Baghdad.

Abraham, Toyah’s only surviving

half-brother, now aged 94 and

once the closest to her in the

entire family, still wonders what

caused her untimely demise.

The doctor who had looked after

her in India felt the urge to

tell the authorities about her

serious decline and the role

her parents played.

But he did not pursue this.

The Armenian lover also felt

the need to alert the authorities

about Toyah's deplorable condition

and the role that her parents

played in her incarceration.

But he did not go through with

this idea, either.

So there was no public scandal.

Even within the Jewish

community in Baghdad,

the romance was hushed up.

No-one talked of how Toyah

had died from a broken heart.

And there is yet one more

tragic aspect to this tale:

One rare photo shows Toyah’s

three half-brothers : Elias, the oldest

and tallest; Abraham, standing beside

him and Jack, the toddler.

It was taken in 1927 when Toyah

was aged seven.

Why isn’t she there?

But she once was!

On Elias's left!

After her death, the

image was retouched

to excise her likeness.

This was to ensure there

would be no reminder of the

scandal and tragedy of her life.

Then there are unfounded rumours

of a Baghdadi Jewish custom;

that when people died all pictures

of them were destroyed.

Still, one further photo,

shot in Baghdad, probably

in the early thirties, shows

Grand mère Farha Shamash;

her husband, Saleh and Toyah’s aunt,

Khatoun Meir.

Then – finally – stands

a girl with wavy hair, peeping

out above Khatoun’s head.

This may, just may, be

Toyah Sofaer.

© Natalie Wood (04 July 2017)