A Joyful Noise: Claiming the Songs of My Fathers - Hardcover

Art critic and novelist Weisgall (Still Point, 1990), whose father and grandfather were distinguished Czech-Jewish composers, writes a sentimental memoir of her upbringing in an emotionally overcharged artistic family. Ideals of music drive the memoir. Weisgall descends from generations of composers of synagogue music. Her father, Hugo, marked a turn toward the secular in the operas he wrote (Six Characters in Search of an Author, among others) but for years led the choir at the Baltimore synagogue where his own father, Adolph (``Abba''), was cantor, and where the family's liturgical melodies dominated. The memoir opens with a precocious Deborah at Passover service and closes as Deborah, now grown, tours ancestral Prague, the city that symbolizes her parents' lost world of high culture and art. Music is Abba's dignity, and Hugo's solace in his tempestuous marriage. In the shape of the family's liturgical compositions, it represents as well Deborah's goal to ``claim the songs of her fathers'' by singing them as part of a synagogue choir, a hope she realizesagainst Judaism's traditional bias toward male service leadersin the book's epilogue. Unfortunately, Weisgall has not achieved enough distance from her earlier self to represent it critically, a condition of autobiography that wins a reader's sympathy. The tone of the author's adolescent self-assessment``I had never thought of myself as anything but perfect''never quite yields to a more mature voice. This shows up most glaringly in her account of a Yom Kippur service she attended away from home: her histrionic reaction to the Reform liturgy practiced there (``awful and ugly'') wants critique. Instead, Weisgall turns the remembered reaction uncritically toward sentimental affirmation of her family's own musical traditions. The decision for sentiment cuts off any larger reflection the memoir might have inspired on, say, the relation between Judaism and secular or even Christian art (which her family holds in high esteem). A missed opportunity for critical self-reflection. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

At the beginning of her memoir, poet and novelist Weisgall (Still Point), recalls her childhood longing for a place within the musical and religious culture of her family. But, as a girl, she was excluded from taking part in the rituals that resonated so deeply for her. Descended from generations of cantors, her grandfather Abba brought his family to America from Czechoslovakia in 1920. Her father Hugo composed secular operas (among them Six Characters in Search of an Author, which was based on a play by Luigi Pirandello and opened at the New York City Opera in 1959) and conducted the synagogue choir. Growing up in 1950s Baltimore, Weisgall developed a sharp eye for family dynamics. Her father's career as a teacher and composer periodically uprooted the family, but he was never quite able to separate himself from the Baltimore synagogue of his father, often traveling home hundreds of miles for a single religious holiday. Weisgall observes her father and grandfather's "musical struggle between parochial and secular life" (choosing between the steady job of a cantor and the more tenuous but diverse career of an opera singer) and tried to find for herself where faith and music intersect. It is only when she became a mother herself that Weisgall joined the more tolerant choir of the synagogue in her parents' community in Maine, finally able to take an active part in her musical and religious heritage, confident that her own daughter wouldn't have to struggle to be heard. This simply written chronicle subtly traces the author's coming of age, providing a highly personal vision of music as part of Jewish religious culture. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.