Yiddish in the Heart: Evgeny Kissin and His Soulful Bond

A Warm Evening in Paris

In the middle of September, the hall of the Centre d’Art et de Culture Juive, the Centre of  Yiddish Culture in Paris, was bustling and happily overcrowded. It was the time of the ceremony of a well-known Max Cukierman Prize, an annual international award for contribution to the Yiddish language and culture, which is also the oldest prize for Yiddish culture today, existing for over 40 years by now. The Award was established by a well-known Jewish personalities in France, brothers Roger and Henri Cukiermans in memory of his father Max. But not only.

Max, whose native name was Chiel Meyer, was born in Poland. By the  twist of  destiny, he moved to France in 1932. And was left the only person from his large family in Poland who survived the Churban, as Elie Wiesel preferred to call the Shoah. The entire Polish Cukierman family was annihilated in Treblinka in the beginning of the Shoah.

For the rest of his life, a successful French businessman Max Cukierman kept ‘his shtetl’, as he himself was known of saying, established by him the French Association of Jews from his Polish town of Ozarow. He and his family  also supported and still do Israel in many ways all these decades. For over forty years, Meyer Cukierman’s sons, both very notable leaders of the French business and the Jewish circles, are keeping the tradition set by their father of honouring, promoting and supporting those who help the Yiddish heritage to blossom. 

And it was a very special recipient of the prize this year. 

In their speeches, esteemed leaders of the Yiddish Jewish world of Paris expressed their surprise that ‘this year’s laureate is sitting in the audience, very unusually for himself, while we all are here, on the stage. Usually, it is the opposite”. And it was indeed. That overcrowded hall, full of smiles and admiration, as any other hall world-wide, normally sees the Cukierman Prize 2024 laureate on the stage, and listens to his music in awe. 

Maestro Kissin, sitting in the audience, was not at his usual place, smiling. His acceptance speech was in a flawless Yiddish, which warmed up the enthusiastic audience yet more. 

Laureate of the Max Cukierman Prize 2024 maestro Kissin during the award ceremony in Paris. September 2024. (C)FSJU. With kind permission.

In his speech, Evgeny was not only thanking the Cukierman Prize Committee and not only once again reaffirmed his deep love and devotion to the Yiddish language, its tradition and culture, the milk of so many of us. He, the real and deep to the core Jewish and Israeli patriot, who was awarded an Israeli citizenship due to his outstanding support of the Jewish state at the international stage, spoke also on October 7th, and the world after that terrible and decisive watershed.  People gathered in the audience were very impressed by Evgeny’s moral clarity and his ever-strong stand for Jewish life and Jewish dignity.  These days, it does matter ten-fold. 

The Journey of Love 

Witnessing such a warm recognition of our dear and close friend, my husband Michael and I, were inevitably remembering the way which has brought Evgeny to the stage of the Centre d’Art et de Culture Juive in Paris as the Cukierman Prize laureate, and before that to so many many incredibly well-deserved awards for contribution in Jewish and Yiddish culture. We were happily remembering, in a family way, Evgeny’s journey of love – not to the language only, but to everything that Yiddish, of many languages, exemplifies. The way which we were so lucky to witness in many parts of it during the last decade and yet before, and about which we have been speaking with Evgeny a lot. 

His devotion to the Yiddish world, in many aspects of it,  is truly special, and it is unique. A boy in Soviet Union where during our time there, even a word ‘a Jew’  or  term ‘Jewish’ was not in use, got an unmistaken feeling of a special bond to the language – and everything it tells about  – from his grandparents from his mother’s side, with whom Zhenja the boy was staying during summers. Zhenja’s grandparents were speaking Yiddish in between themselves, as mine or my husband’s families did, and it was a warm and special  psychological harbour for them all, and us too, for the Jewish people in the USSR of the generation who were an young enough, but adults already at the time when the Bolshevik regime has decided for them all that they are not Jewish any longer, once and for good. Being adults, that generation of Evgeny and our grandparents did have their mother-tongue with them, in their veins. And they always used  it, they did  love to do it, at any suitable moment, within the families. 

This was not the case with the generation of our parents who grew up in a solid Soviet system which did not allow that to happen, and which aborted a national belonging as such, for everyone, twice so for the Jews. Our parents only knew some words and some phrases, but they were not living inside the language, inside the world which a language creates. 

My mom, for instance, who was a super-avid reader ( who was not among the Jewish intelligenzia?), loved, just loved all those books by Mendele-Moishe Sforim and Sholom Aleichem who were occupying a sizeable place at our bookshelves. But she read it in Russian, in translation. And I do remember as my grandfather and my grandmother exchanged their looks and smiled with those meaningful smiles, of which full meaning I didn’t quite get, when my mom was another time saying praises to her favourite Yiddish writers whom she read in the Russian translation, again. “Well, what you read is not exactly Sholom Aleichem, neither is it Sforim”, – my grandfather would have mentioned semi-mysteriously. “What did grandpa mean, really?” – I remember thinking at such moments, overhearing their quiet dialogues. Nobody would explain it to me. But I do remember all the covers of my mom’s  favourite books of the main Yiddish writers as they are in front of me today, sixty years later. 

That special love of the Jews from the Yiddish world that marked them with that indelible mark, still is part of me, and my favourite Yiddish writer, Yitzhak Peretz, still speaks volumes to me every time I re-read him. As Michael’s mother  and grandmother’s Yiddish lullabies to him are all still part of him and some of his most cordial, heart-melting artworks. 

Michael Rogatchi (C). Ljuli-ljuli. Yiddish Lullaby. Zion Waltz series. Oil on canvas. 2016.

Evgeny Kissin’s grandparents effortlessly infused such love to young Zhenja who overheard their dialogues in Yiddish.  Having a  phenomenal musical and other memories due to his giant talent, he perceived it as a yeast of love. The yeast which would grow into accomplished mastership of Evgeny over the language, and blossoms further on in his poetry, writing and translating from and into Yiddish. 

I am puzzled over the phenomenon of hours in Evgeny Kissin’s daily circle. It certainly is not the 24 hours which most of us have. One surely imagines the number of hours which one of the finest and mightiest pianists in the world devotes to his direct work and rehearsals.  Those who are aware of Kissin- composer and his works, also would understand that such composing in various forms does require a serious time, as well. He is also taking part, in a new , energetic and convincing way, in several theatrical performances, playing as an actor with a huge success.  Plus all those non-stop journeys in his very intense concerting schedule, practically all the time. 

But this man has been translating the pearls of the Yiddish prose and poetry for years, very successfully, and he is creating his own poetry in Yiddish. He also writes a very intense and rich prose, sometimes doing it  in several languages, using his other talent of a polyglot. Each of those creative directions requires the world which feeds a creator. In all those very different and quite demanding endeavours, Evgeny produces steadily, in a non-stop way, with talent, tempo, and a huge motivation. One must conclude that it is a unique phenomenon, just next to us. With us. For us.  

We saw the overcrowded halls at the most prestigious venues, such as the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C.,  or the Carnegie in New-York, not only at the Evgeny’s piano concerts, which one would expect and which is a fact of life for decades by now, but also at his strong, warm, uplifting, flying evenings of Yiddish poetry and music. I do not remember anything more special and more beautiful in my life, despite being a very active concert-goer for decades. 

My husband and I would never forget another very special evening in New York, back in 2013, when the legendary YIVO Institute had one of its Heritage Galas. But that Gala was outstanding, as it hosted both Elie Wiesel and Evgeny Kissin, both our dear friends, both essentially important personalities for Yiddish legacy and for Jewish world in general. Importantly, Elie and Evgeny have also been close friends, and their mutual love radiated that evening warmly towards all of us. 

But what has made that  nice late spring evening in New York unforgettable is Evgeny Kissin’s reading of Yiddish poetry there. There were a dozen love poems by the classic Yiddish poets, whom we all , who care about Yiddish, know and keep  close to our hearts. Despite the fact of familiarity with the language and the poetry, there was not a single dry couple of eyes in all of the YIVO’s huge auditorium. None. 

Zhenja was standing on the stage, his head up as always, behind him on a huge screen were all those people, all with their so dramatic destinies, all of them who made the language of our families yet richer, and who engraved it into our beings.  A world-renowned great pianist, in his very articulated proud Yiddish of our and his grandparents, was reading those poems, by heart, as he always does due to his phenomenal, thanks G-d, memory,  as he creates music on his grand piano, in a flowing wind of an innermost human emotions. It was an incredible sway of love. Pure, rich, elevating love. And also, we all felt it there in New York very strongly,  it was a glorifying justification of all those Yiddish- speaking people, our people, whose lives were cut off so brutally and so senselessly, and because of that, the language has been wounded and it was interrupted in the very normality, in its organic  life, too, so painfully in many respects, meanings and consequences.

We all cried quietly out of a mix of emotions and gratitude during that unbelievable Evgeny’s performance with Elie in the first row in the audience, his eyes being absolutely wet, too. And we never will forget how Elie got up after Evgeny’s declaration of love, went to him and hugged him so tightly, no word needed. 

 When Memory Builds On

For so many years, we have been hearing about Yiddish as ‘a dead language’. How can it be dead if even one person speaks it, or dreams in it, or remembers a few words, and more of his or her grandmother being organic and happy within her native language? That supposition about ‘dead Yiddish’ always struck me as one of the weirdest things I ever heard. This is not to mention the super-rich and super-creative culture created within  and by Yiddish. The culture and literature which is a great pride of the Jewish world in general, importantly. And of the world culture and its civility, as a matter of fact. 

Additionally to spiritual and material heritage which feeds our memory, there is such a phenomenon as an emotional heritage, always highly individual, but also tangible and special in the way of life as it was for millions of Jewish people all over Europe for centuries, and which was exemplified in our language, in Yiddish. Emotional memory is probably the strongest of all kinds of memory. It feeds the emotional heritage and constitutes it to a large extent, twice so in the case of millions of people living in their own communities, shtetls, with not that large  interaction with an outside world, but instead, with a very intense texture of cultural experience, vision and creativity inside it.  So intense that a couple of tacts in the Yiddish Jewish melody or just a line of its poetry evokes the waves of life and memories back to any of us who has this special background. And it sustains us in generations. 

One can say that Yiddish performs as a reservoir of love for so many people all over the world  today, from Poland and Lithuania to South-Africa and Argentina, who are descendants of the generations who had to emigrate in the early XX century,  and the descendants of the other generation who had to run for their lives in the middle of the same century. The reservoir of love is also the best reservoir for living memory. The one that keeps us who we are. 

In the case of such deep devotion to the Yiddish culture and heritage as we see in everything Evgeny Kissin does with regard to the Yiddish world, his ongoing effort is very tangible and immensely fruitful reconstruction. Reconstruction of memory, reconstruction of talent, reconstruction of thought, writing, image, melody, creation – everything that a human being produces in his or her heart and out of it, in the process of conscious living, and his or hers never ending dreams of a sunny ray. Even in the most desperate of tunnels.  

Maestro Kissin accepting the Max Cukierman Prize 2024 for the contribution to Yiddish culture. Paris. September 2024. (C) FSJU. With kind permission.

When memory is loving, it is often also building. When it is a building one, we all and the generations after us do have a future. 

With love and gratitude to the incredible Zhenja Kissin, a loving  builder of our breathing Yiddish Jewish memory. 

October 10th, 2024