Klara’s Music

Music seems to pour out of this book, coming in many instances from Klara’s younger sister Gerda and from Gerda’s memory. We get music from the first page, as Klara hears Gerda practicing a Mozart aria (I’ll identify it here, for the curious: “Deh vieni, non tardar” from the Marriage of Figaro).

Klara’s first experience in Seville (1925) is intensified as she witnesses a saeta performed by the immortal Pastora Pavón, “la niña de los peines.” Both Klara and Gerda respond viscerally to the music and to the singer.

At the unveiling at the graveside of their mother, Ida Philipsborn, née Mond, Gerda intones the prayer for the departed soul, El-Malei Rachamim, which evokes Pastora Pavon’s saeta and somehow an ancestral connection. This version is recited by San Francisco rabbi Amanda Russell.

In the first months of the Spanish Civil Wars, Klara invokes Gerda’s voice as she joins her new comrades in the Hospital Obrero in Madrid. After a particularly tedious and bloody day, the kitchen worker called “María” suggests that they all sing. Italian songs abound, and then Klara dedicates to “María”(not her real name; readers are invited to submit guesses) this aria practiced by Gerda, now far away in Delhi but somehow inspiring an unheard beauty in Klara’s voice.

Klara’s path to transnational identity is reflected in her increasing ability to sing in Spanish. She is swept up in the triumphant crowds celebrating the victory at the Cuartel de la Montaña. As they move toward the Puerta del Sol, they break into a march rhythm, accompanying their steps with the ad hoc anthem of the Second Spanish Republic, the “Himno de Riego,” titled for a colonel active in the 1812 restoration of the liberal constitution. By now, Klara has become almost fluent in Spanish: “I have only learned the words of the refrain and was able to join in: ‘Soldados, la patria nos llama a la lid / Juremos por ella vencer o morir’ (‘Soldiers, the Fatherland calls us to battle. Let us swear to conquer or die for her’.) (Yes, it is odd to refer to the Fatherland as her, but I did not create this language.)”

The “Internationale” is heard throughout the book; in her first year in Spain, at a meeting around a tragic workplace accident, Klara sings the words in German. Six years later, together with the Cuartel de la Montaña victors, Klara sings the “Internationale” - now in Spanish -soon joined by a band playing the piece – in a different key! (Where was Charles Ives?).

Standing with the other volunteers with the Fifth Regiment, having just been sworn in by Dolores Ibárruri (“la Pasionaria”), the group spontaneously bursts into singing the “Internationale”.

And here I am, singing it in Berkeley (where else?) in 2015, with friends of the Abraham Lincoln brigade: (Klara did not have these supertitles).

A Russian film, “Chapaev,” shown in the Culture Corner at the Ocaña hospital, features a song to a black raven that resonates with all the viewers and particularly with Klara, who later muses on the raven as a symbol of death in the song and on the role of death for her as a health worker: “Perhaps if I think of the beautiful black raven as soaring away with the life of the patient I could not save, I will be able to surrender.”

During that same event, the international volunteers in the Culture Corner get the opportunity to sing their versions of the Red Army song featured in the film, by then the official marching song of the Chapaev Battalion (XIII Brigade).

Do you think that film would be a good medium for "Home So Far Away?"