Cantor Umpy

There are some people, on a faraway planet, who wouldn't be touched to the core by the film "One Hundred Voices," but probably nobody reading The Great Plotnik. It played last night as the final film in the 2011 Jewish Film Festival at the Castro Theater, preceded by a twenty minute performance by four cantors, two women and two men, accompanied by the Castro's fine old silent movie-era Wurlitzer.

Cantors Sharon Bernstein and Roz Barak are from Saint Plotniko and Cantors Nate Lam and Marcus Feldman are both cantors at Steven Wise Temple in Stiletto City. Cantor Nate (who Plotnik knows as "Umpy"), second from the right above, just happens to play The Umpire in "The Perfect Pitch," but last night he was presenting his glorious film made by a team of American Jews, including 75 cantors, who traveled to Poland to give concerts of chazzanas (the old Jewish liturgical music) in Polish cities and towns that were, once upon a time, the centers of the cantorial world.

It sounds dry, doesn't it? Tear jerkers about holocausts and Hitler and the awful Poles? Nope, nope and nope. The music is transcendent. Umpy has a brilliant barritone but you should hear Cantor Mizrahi and Cantor Mendelsson and Cantor Goel. You get insights into the cantors themselves and their lives (often sons and grandsons of famous cantors either killed by the Nazis or who escaped in the nick of time) and what drove these --- big -- men, while growing up in Brooklyn or L.A. or Greece or Israel or England, to want to become cantors themselves.

They are singing in front of a world class 100-piece symphony orchestra, with two choirs -- one made up of kids they brought from America and the other a choir of Polish children. Cantor Nate says that when he heard these Polish kids singing "Hatikvah," the Israeli National Anthem, everything began to make sense to him.

Women cantors? -- Well, this is an American thing. In the Old world you needed an enormous belly and bushy beard.

You get to see the astonishing burst of interest in now-disappeared Jewish culture, among young Polish people. The cantors sing in front of 16,000 people at an outdoor concert in Krakow, they fill up the Warsaw Opera House, they sing in the one remaining synagogue in Warsaw that predates World War II (out of 117 (!) synagogues that existed before the war, when the capital of Poland was one half Jewish), and everywhere they go they are mobbed -- this time with adulation.

Nate says they had no idea what they were getting into when they put this project together, and though it is written in the Torah that No Documentary Shall Ever Make Money, you can feel how important this labor of love was to everyone involved in it. It's too bad that the Jewish Film Festival felt it necessary to charge so much for this performance and film ($25 each) but after Cantor Sharon Bernstein (above left, holding the music), sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", in Yiddish (music written by Harold Arlen, the son of a Polish cantor), which immediately reduced Plottie to gobs of tears, he turned to Ducknik, wiped off his own face and said "OK. That was worth the fifty bucks right there." And that was before the film started.

(Before she sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" she introduced it as "the only song I would ever sing in The Castro.")

There is so much more to say.



When Plottie took Ducknik and The Great BZWZ to Poland in the year 2000, to find his father's father's home town, he was one of many Americans who make this journey. We want to know where, why and how come? It is a pull that is so difficult to describe to someone else, this need to go back to see the tiny shards of an enormous thousand-year-old intermingling of lives and culture, and yet it proved to be so fragile, so vulnerable and destroyable. Now, there is so little to see.

Christians can go to Jerusalem, or Nazareth, or Bethlehem, and they see, at the very least, the ancient streets, or the shadow of the streets, or the hint of the world that was.

We can't do that. The tiny villages, the wooden houses, the world that bred this music, has been obliterated, the people gassed, the towns themselves grown over with grasses and wildflowers with, in a few cases, a dusty monument stuck in the back of an old graveyard somewhere. Or not even that. The people who did this: all gone. The people who remember what happened: fewer and fewer.

Soon, Auschwitz will be like Chichen Itza. Who were these people? What happened here? Why? (Shrug)

But here, in 2011, we've still got the culture, the food, the music. The sense of making light out of dark, humor from despair, sense from non-sense -- this remains. But it too is getting older. Still, The Castro was full last night, full of complaining, coughing old Jews, talking too loudly on cell phones during the show, but also singing along with the ancient melodies -- dai dai dai dai dai.

The Great Plotnik feels proud this morning, thanks to Cantor Umpy. The lines from The Perfect Pitch: "Music from the Hemispheres, Music to Last a Thousand Years" -- this morning it all makes a little more sense.