Moni Ovadia / Theaterorchestra
Dybbuk

Memory.

I didn’t want to write this "review," and I’m still not sure if I will. I just feel an infinite anger at this moment, and I have the hope of exorcising it by writing everything that flows inside me now without thinking, without reasoning, just as it comes.

A few moments ago, I was wondering what are anniversaries for, memory days, when you only need to look around at Iraq, Rwanda, Palestine to realize that humanity has learned little to nothing from its history. Yet, just a few moments ago, thinking that today is January 27th, a day dedicated to the remembrance of the Shoah, I felt the irresistible urge to listen once again to a painful album: Dybbuk by Moni Ovadia. A special album because it was created within the context of a theatrical performance dedicated to the memory of the Shoah.
The Dybbuk in Jewish tradition is the spirit of a man who died a violent death. A restless spirit, thirsty for life, a life unjustly taken away, for no real reason other than human madness. The Dybbuk demanded memory. Memory of something I have never experienced, but that no one should ever have lived through. The Dybbuk told me "Listen, remember what you cannot remember." And I decided to listen, finding myself once again faced with an array of indecipherable sensations that this music conveys.
"Why does music have a meaning that transcends the notes themselves?" Someone once asked this to composer Aaron Copland, and he replied something like "Of course, it has a meaning." Then the interlocutor added: "And can it be translated into words?" He said it was not possible.
So I really don’t know how to find the words to express the pain that emerges with an untranslatable force from these notes, from the frenzied violins, from the cellos, from the harrowing voice of Moni Ovadia, which becomes a witness of a pain that does not belong to a single people, but to humanity. The spirituality of pieces like "Es Brennt" is unsettling, written in 1938 in the face of impending disaster:

It burns brothers, it burns
our poor city is already on fire
evil winds full of anger
rise, break through and blow violently
the wild flames grow stronger
everything around is already burning...

Then, without any musical accompaniment, the solitary voice of Moni Ovadia manages to shatter the soul when he sings the words of "Piskhú Li" in a dramatic crescendo:

Open to me the gates of justice
I will enter.

And the sense of tragedy becomes unbearable when one learns that "Piskhú Li" was a Hasidic paraliturgical song sung by Hasidic Jews before being led into the gas chambers. They, precisely they, who by cultural and religious upbringing were raised with the idea that man’s blood should never be shed, found themselves having to pass through the lucid madness of other men to the chimney. Der camin...

The dramatic sound of the cello introducing "Oy Avraham," progressively joined by the flute, the violins, and all the instruments of the Jewish musical tradition, evokes the beauty of this people, their joy, their energy that was meant to be erased from the face of the earth for a foolish design. But these moments don’t end, because the anthems to the resistance of the ghetto, like "Zog Nit Kain Mol," have all that vitality and strength of Jewish culture, capable in its infinite journeys of absorbing like a sponge all the cultural ferment of the countries it came into contact with. In this case, for example, Balkan influences are felt. These pieces thus have the strength and richness of contamination, which can and must originate from the meeting of cultures and diversities, which someone wanted to nullify for a pale idea of a world without colors and contrasts.
Alongside the tragedy then also appears irony, sarcasm as weapons to defend against hunger and misery, emerging among the notes and words, like those of "Tsen Brider / Mir Leben Eybik," which describe how ten brothers in trade gradually disappear from the face of the earth until:

We were two brothers
we traded in bones
one of us died
I am left alone
I was a brother to myself
we traded in candles
and I am dying day by day
because I have nothing left to eat.

And at the end of this journey of memory, I felt the Dybbuk calm down in anger, but not in the desire for a life taken. Now there is silence, it’s a beautiful night, the stars are an assembly before my eyes, I look at them and imagine each of them is a Dybbuk, the soul of a man unjustly robbed of life. Souls of Jews, but not only. The victims of man are everywhere, at all times, even as I write these words.
Let us never forget them, let us not allow the clouds to steal their view, and not only on days specifically marked on the calendar, but always.