Hepzibah: Schmalz

I was a lucky kid. I had an adoring grandmother and I came to understand a long time ago how important a role a grandmother can play in a kid’s life. I’m not talking just about the grandmas who end up raising their grandchildren because something happens to the parents. I’m talking about the grandmas (and this extends, in many cases, to grandpas, as well) who supplement the work of parents, leave the disciplining and training tasks of parenting to those in the middle generation and flood the kid with excessive love. I had one of those.

Actually, I had two, both deserving of the title “grand,” one born in Canada, the other born in Germany. I loved my Canadian grandmother dearly, but she had five other grandchildren, including two she was raising in their mother’s absence, and had to portion out her time and attention accordingly. My German grandmother, in contrast, had become a single mother without resources in the First World War in the Weimar Republic, and had had to give my mother to her sister to raise, and never quite recovered from the guilt. As a result, when I came along she evidently decided God had given her a chance to make up for her sins by showering attention on her daughter’s first-born. I never had any doubt that I was special.

I had other advantages. I was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in class-conscious New England at a time when WASPS still had a higher-class status, and our family fit into the pattern of a two-class family – working class for the parents, and middle class for the kids.

What came with schooling was not only the three Rs, but also the cultivation of tastes of the upwardly mobile. Art and music, familiarity with distant lands and cultures, and the ability to distinguish between those with talent and those without, and the difference between the cultivated and the profane. It didn’t take me long to realize that the grandmother, whom I adored, had tastes in art that I had come to describe as kitsch, and tastes in music I would, in great dismay, dismiss as schmalzy.

It would take many years before I was able to recognize the degree to which I had internalized a sense of shame at the ways of my working-class parents. I was both a snob and simultaneously a fish out of water at Middlebury College, even back then a school for the children of privilege. My social insecurity was total. I cheerfully went into the homes of my friends, but precious few got invited into mine.

Now all these years – decades – later, I look back on my young years in astonishment at the power of the culture to inculcate such insecurity, and at how deep and how wide it went into the corners of our brain. There was a time when I was in graduate school at Stanford when I found myself among a group of people from backgrounds similar to mine. After a few glasses of wine, one by one we began to share some of our deepest secrets. We pretty much all believed that we had been admitted to Stanford by mistake. One day they would discover the error and we would be thrown out. We were working class kids taking up space reserved for our “betters.”

Another experience sticks with me, the time when someone in class made some patronizing remark about the importance of not looking down on working-class people, and celebrating, as did the likes of Studs Terkel, the pride of coming from the working class. Bullshit, I said to myself. You know you're got a real working class kid when you spot somebody fighting like hell to get as far from his background as he possibly can. That's not true, I've come to realize in time. Not everybody needs to work so hard to shed the shame that comes with social climbing. In any case, you’ll find no tear of nostalgia in this eye for the good-old days of life among the working-class. I got out. I’m glad I did. I have no desire whatsoever to look back.

Something happened the other day that took me by surprise. I found myself listening to something that I would have had no trouble labeling as schlock – or kitsch – not so long ago and being quite caught up by it. Not because I’ve suddenly developed a taste for schmalz, but because it brought my grandmother to mind. How she would have loved listening to this, I said to myself, and when one song finished, I immediately sought out another.

If you’ll permit me, I’d like to wallow for a moment in the world of schmalz, a song or a story characterized by excessive sentimentality. Or schlock, a close synonym, meaning, more specifically "Cheap goods.". Or kitsch, the word for tacky (non-discriminating) artwork. Or Schnulze, a tear-jerker film or a schmalzy story, lacking in subtlety. A family of words brought into English mostly via Yiddish, rather than from German directly. First the words themselves. Then some examples of what they refer to.

I don’t know what it is about the “sh- sound” (written sch- in German, sh- when writing Yiddish words in the Latin alphabet), but it seems to carry with it a kind of humor, probably because of the Yiddish influence on the language. Yiddish has a huge vocabulary of sh-words, including schmalz.

Some examples:

shlemiel and shlimazel (“A shlemiel goes around spilling soup on people; a shlimazel is the loser he spills it on;” schmuck - (German= jewelry; decoration) - equivalent to English “dick,” meaning a jerk; shmegegge – nonsense; shlepp – to drag from place to place; schmutz (same as original German = dirt); shmeer (German schmieren = lubricate) - spread, as in cream cheese on a bagel; schmooze – to chat in a friendly (often with intent to persuade) manner; schvitz (German Schwitz) - sweat; schmatte – cleaning rag; schmalz - (German = lard; Yiddish = chicken (or goose) fat); shlock – inferior goods; shnoz - (German Schnauze=snout) - Yiddish – nose; Schnulze - (not Yiddish, as far as I know; German for a schmalzy (tearjerker) film or pop song)

Großmutter (unlike most Germans, I never called her “Oma” but used the literal word for “grandmother”) loved a good Schnulze. Particularly one set in a German context, like The Student Prince and The Sound of Music.

Here’s an example, the voice of Mario Lanza singing the Serenade from The Student Prince. I remember vividly the time I saw it in the Strand Theater in my hometown, with Großmutter, in 1954, the year it came out. One of those many experiences that imprinted a German sense of identity.

What brought this all back was coming across a YouTube video of a kid singing the kind of schmalzy songs that first gave me an early sense of connection with Germany that would last a lifetime, music that I still associate with my grandmother. She died in 1970 not long after this kid had come to prominence. His name was Heintje – is Heintje – he is still alive. He’s actually Dutch, but made a big splash singing in Dutch, Afrikaans and German.

Nothing is more quintessentially schmalzy than Heintje singing the song that made him famous – Mama. Großmutter must have loved him to pieces.

Here are the words, with my English translation:

Mama

Du wirst doch nicht um deinen jungen weinen
Mama
Bald wird das wieder uns vereinen
Ich werd es nie vergessen
Was ich an dir hab besessen
Das es auf Erden nur eine gibt
Die mich so heiß hat geliebt
Mama
Und bringt das schicksal uns nur kummer und schmerz
Dann denk ich oft daran es weint für mich immer
Mama dein herz

Mama

Don’t cry for your little boy

Mama

We’ll soon be together again

I will never forget what I had in you

Something that exists only once in the world

Somebody who loved me so dearly

Mama

No matter what pain and sorrow fate may bring

I think often on how your heart always cries for me.

Mama

Heintje at 14 and
Heintje at 62 (photoshopped)

Classic, right? All the characteristics of schmalz in spades. Sentimentality you can schmeer with a spoon. And if you want more, allow the YouTube video to turn over automatically to the next one, where he sings to his Oma, his grandmother, this time.

And here's another one, which I won't take time to translate. Just have a listen. Deine Liebe, Deine Treue (Your love, your loyalty).

And one more, "Ich sing ein Lied für Dich" (I sing a song for you) - a duet between the Heintje of 1969 and the Hein Simons of today - same guy, 48 years later . And how's that for schmalz!

Meanwhile, over in Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we have the yodelers. Because yodeling is associated with mountain folk who raise cattle, it is the antithesis of sophistication – the other extreme of Mozart and the Viennese Opera House – music Sir Walter Scott is said to have labeled a “variation upon the tones of a jackass."*

Großmutter wasn’t much for Mozart or Brahms, who would become my favorite composers, but she loved her Johann Strauss. She couldn’t sit still whenever she heard “the Blue Danube Waltz” but had to get up and waltz around the room. And she would have loved the “Yodel Family” - a family from the Swiss Bernese Oberland who call themselves “the Oesch’s - die Dritten (“the thirds”) refers to the fact there are three generations of them: lead singer/yodeler Melanie, her brothers Mike and Kevin, her mother and her father on the Swiss accordion (the Schwyzerögeli).

In the end, all those insecurities that plagued me as a youth, the ones that made me worry about whether I was associating with “the right kind” of people, whether I had the right kind of taste in music and art, and whether, if I showed a liking for bagpipes – or the accordion – Swiss or of any other sort – I didn’t deserve to call myself a real music lover as I would if my tastes went more for the cello or the harpsichord.

I still roll my eyes over lyrics that include "from heaven above" or "blue skies" or "stars at night" and any mention of flowers and sunshine. Edelweiss does not bring me to tears.

But I have discovered that I smile and feel kind of warm and cozy when I see a kid belting out a song about his mother. Maybe it's just a sentimentality that comes with old age. But I like to think of it as a recognition that I didn't come to a love of music through the high German culture of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms, but through the low culture of the polka, of oompah music and of schmalz. My German grandmother wasn't Marlene Dietrich. She was a music-loving Hausfrau. And that's my history. That's who I am. I live in a world of music, and the question of which door I came through is of no consequence anymore.

Throat singing from Mongolia? Gregorian chant? Japanese enka? American Country and Western? Yodel-lay-hi-hoo...

Bring it on.