Petrozavodsk, Russia
I am a singer (trained as an opera singer and work as a cantor and also have a bit of the recording/performing career). So I did not bring an instrument. If I did, it would be a piano.
Oh boy do I have many stories. I will share this one. I came to Chicago on a flight from Helsinki. I was living in Finland at the time performing and recording with my band. Before the flight they told us to hold tight to our possessions because they said, Chicago is ridden with crime and you can get robbed or murdered there.
My relatives met me at the airport in the morning of November 1st. We came out to the parking lot and I saw a car and hanging from the trunk there was what looked like a human leg bloodied and dangling. In horror I thought to myself "they did not lie about this terrible place. Someone apparently was killed and stuffed in the trunk and people pass by and don't even pay attention to it!" I turned to my relatives and said: Did you see this? This is horrible! And they said, don't worry, it's Halloween. And I asked "what's Halloween?" For I had no idea.
Oh boy do I have many stories. I will share this one. I came to Chicago on a flight from Helsinki. I was living in Finland at the time performing and recording with my band. Before the flight they told us to hold tight to our possessions because they said, Chicago is ridden with crime and you can get robbed or murdered there.
My relatives met me at the airport in the morning of November 1st. We came out to the parking lot and I saw a car and hanging from the trunk there was what looked like a human leg bloodied and dangling. In horror I thought to myself "they did not lie about this terrible place. Someone apparently was killed and stuffed in the trunk and people pass by and don't even pay attention to it!" I turned to my relatives and said: Did you see this? This is horrible! And they said, don't worry, it's Halloween. And I asked "what's Halloween?" For I had no idea.
A lot of the Jewish music that I sang while still in Russia and also in my brief two years in Scandinavia on the way to the US, was something that I collected personally from older Jews. There was no sheet music for Jewish music available at the time and so we collected what we could from old records and people's recollections. This brings up funny stories about old Jewish guys interpreting the words of the songs to us and improving on the way adding their own versions.
But these songs were my treasures that I brought to America so that I could sing them here. I had them all in a binder together with all the posters from the concerts that I had.
