Maramures: Fiddles, Song, and Food for the Dead

In the summer of 2001 I had made plans to travel back to New York with Fumie to work a few months (probably as ignoble temp Christmas warehouse help) as I had the year before. It’s the expat version of Romanian migrant labor, only it requires a US passport and knowledge of Windows Excel. But the attacks on September 11, 2001, changed all that. After a few weeks of overdosing on news (Anthrax! Sleeper cells! Weapons of Mass Destruction!) and faced with several months of no work and no gigs while stuck in Budapest, I decided it would be best to get as far away from the news as possible. We decided to go back to Ieud, one of Maramures’ most isolated and traditional villages, and spend a month hanging with the late Gheorghe Ioannei Covaci, who at that time was the oldest living Maramures fiddler, and one of the few still alive who had actively played for Jewish dances before the second world war. On the second day my crank-operated wind-up survival shortwave radio died and after that we had no news at all. The local peasants all wanted to know what we thought of the terror attacks (Razboie! Boom! Boom!) but were genuinely nonplussed about the anthrax attacks. After all, in a village where everybody lives with sheep and cows anthrax was anything but an exotic weapon. While there we met the amazing Nitsa, who offered to rent us a room in her home. I spent the days fiddling with Georghe Ioannei while Fumie learned Romanian from Nitsa and temporarily became the village mortuary photographer, snapping portraits of people to be used on their grave markers.Today, the Greek-Catholic cemetery in Ieud is Fumie’s most enduring gallery presence. It is hard to forget a Japanese woman living in your village and everybody asked about Fumie… and Nitsa announced to her friends “I taught Fumie to speak Romanian!” by pointing to objects and shouting out their names. She also taught Fumie to make stuffed cabbage and mamaliga, skills every Japanese housewife should master. We’ve been back to Ieud a few times since then, including one visit with Canadian singer songwriter Geoff Berner (“The Whiskey Rabbi”) and his band (fiddling Dione Davies and drumming Dwayne Adams) Geoff eventually incorporated a lot of Maramures energy in his re-imagined take on Klezmer music which culminated in his most recent release “Victory Party” (which was recorded in Montreal last year and included Klezmer major leaguers Mike Winograd, Benjy Fox-Rosen, Josh Dolgin, and Brigitte Dajczer as well as myself on vioara cu goarne and insane screaming.)Geoff also used an image of Nitsa on the cover of his 2007 CD The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride and last year asked me to deliver a few copies. She was delighted. Nitsa housed us in her huge wooden house up the street a bit, and she used to wake the band up in the morning by standing over the bed with a bottle of 110 proof horinca and booming "Goooooddd Moooorning! IT'S HORINCA TIME!" She has become something of a legend out there in western Canada.She was also delighted to grab Eleonore and dress her up in proper Maramures costume, and when I asked her if she would sing for us she demurred just long enough to fill a bottle of horinca brandy and then… she sang like an angel.Nitsa is often sought out by Romanian folklorists because of her vast knowledge of Maramures folklore, especially the singing of colinda (Christmas carols) and ritual music. In Ieud the religious traditions are more conservatively guarded than in other villages, and special regard is given to the presence of the dead in daily village life. When we arrived we found Nitsa with some neighbors making a prodigious batch of sarmale (stuffed cabbage.) When asked who it was for, she answered “For the dead!”The next day they would take it to the pauper’s cemetery in Sighet to be blessed by a priest and distributed to the poor. Ieud attracted the attention of American ethnographer Gail Kligman in the 1980s, a time when it was especially difficult to work as a field anthropologist in Ceausescu’s harsh communist era. Her monograph "The Wedding of the Dead" describes how the Ieudeni resisted the collectivization of the communist era by withdrawing into a maze of traditional custom and ritual, including the tradition that any young person who dies unmarried will be symbolically “wed” at their funeral. American ethnomusicologist and fiddler Maimon Miller also worked in Ieud in the 1970s at the time when Gheorghe Ionnei was more active.Gheorghe’s brother Nicolae Covaci, however, is still alive and fiddling two villages over in Dragomiresti, though. At ninety years of age he was actually playing better than I have ever heard him. Both Jake Shulman-Ment and myself have learned Maramures Jewish music from Nicolae over the years. As they say in Maramures, you don’t learn fiddle…. You steal it.Like so many folk traditions, the fiddle style is not directly taught, but learned by generations of younger fiddlers immersing themselves in it. I have sat in a bar in the nearby village of Botiza, which is known for its fiddlers, and watched as a series of peasant men passed my fiddle from hand to hand around to play tunes. And over the years we have stolen quite a lot, so it is proper when visiting a musician to bring a bag of gifts (coffee, chocolate, fiddle strings) and pay the musician for his trouble.Remember folks – when you visit a Gypsy musician (as opposed to peasant musicians) these guys live off of tips for playing, not for “sharing” their wonderful music for you, so if you do visit cough up a hundred lei for the fiddler and bring his wife a kilo of coffee, at least. Not that Nicolae is feeble at his age, though. When I arrived he said he had been to Israel four years ago. Why I asked? To work on a farm. Now, a lot of Romanians go abroad for work, but usually to western EU countries – Israelis used to hire a lot of Romanian peasants for agricultural labor after the Intifada made imported foreign labor necessary in Israel. Think about this. Who the hell would have hired him? A tiny 86 year old toothless Romanian Gypsy musician? What were they thinking? But work he did, and he made enough money to fix up his house and buy a watch. Nicolae is probably the last of the oldest style fiddlers of Maramures – comparable to an old time fiddler in the USA as opposed to a modern Bluegrass fiddler. Most Maramures fiddlers today are influenced by recordings and videos of other famous musicians like the Petreus Brothers and the late Gheorghe Covaci of Vadu Izei. Nicolae still plays in a less ornamented, highly rythymic style unchanged from the recordings he made in the 1970s when he and his brother were recorded on a Radio France Ocora label LP of Maramures folk music. There, the two fiddles played against a single guitar, strummed to produce a drone without any of the distinctive chord changes that usually distinguish Maramures songs. And that means one thing: when the ethnomusicologists arrive, there is no need to hire (and pay) extra band members. Just have your wife play!And whenever the wife plays, you don’t hear any chord changes. The guitar here is called a zongora (which is the Hungarian word for piano, oddly enough) tuned to a re-entrant open 'A' chord. This was probably the same guitar used on the Ocora recordings, and it was held together by some stiff wire to counter the fact that the home made wire strings had easily pulled the neck off of the body years ago. Check out the high action of the strings - about an inch above the neck.No matter, because it basically morphed into a percussion instrument. The tail bridge was also a bit of masterful jerry rigging. And the funny thing is it absolutely worked. The old time Maramures fiddlers also liked to cut as much of their violin bridge out as possible, to increase the volume of the instrument.Nowadays they tend to simply switch to playing the $150 electric violins manufactured at the insidious Hora instrument factory in Reghin. Nicolae - for those of us interested in the Jewish and other multiethnic traditions of Transylvania – is like a Rosetta stone of folk music, a unique yet modest musician bridging the lore of the past with the practice of the present. Ninety years old and still kicking strong. Sa traiste, Domnu’ Nicolae!

Asa bea' oamenii buni: How the Good Folk Drink

Some people think “European Vacation” and dream of the canals of Venice, the boulevards of Paris, the coffee shops of Amsterdam. I however, dream about Maramures. This northern region of Romania, remote and mountainous, preserves a Europe most of us can only wonder about, a slice of history preserved in vague memories from our grandparents, cloudy ideas about the “old country” and the accounts of ethnographers plainly surprised that anyone in modern Europe still lives in log houses, uses horse wagons, and wears home spun folk costumes in the 21^st century.

Maramures is all that, a starkly conservative culture that survived the communist era by withdrawing into a domestic fortress of folk ritual and custom, rendered virtually impenetrable to outsiders by a lucky combo of wretchedly bad roads, a thick dialect, a tradition of class and economy based on barter rather than cash, and the inability of visitors to live for months on end on nothing but corn meal mush mamaliga and sheep cheese. But change has definitely come to Maramures. Since Romania entered the EU in 2007, Romanians have gone abroad in droves to work in agriculture and construction in countries like Italy, Spain and France. The local mountaineers – Morosani in the local dialect – have an international reputation as hard workers, earned by farming the poor soils of the Carpathians where it takes double the work to produce half the potatoes of any other region. The money they sent home is evident in the building of new homes and the sprouting of new small businesses in villages that used to have nothing but a bar and a general store (usually in the same location.)Add to that the growth of a well developed agro tourism industry and one can feel the sea change in the local culture. Maramures is heart-stoppingly picturesque, and and until recently only the most adventurous tourist would cross the mountain passes to visit, but about a decade ago the region became a magnet for French eco-tourists and one transplanted Frenchman, Bernhard Houlihat (now the director of the Institute Francaise in Cluj) began working locally with village mayors and peasants to set up a network of local homes that could accommodate the flood of tourists.The results are an open secret to informed tourists: where else can you stay and be fed for about EU 25 a day? Agrotourism pensions have sprouted everywhere in Marsamures. For a culture that, until very recently, lived on almost no cash the sight of tourists is welcome indeed. We stayed at the home of a fiddler I had met previously in the village of Poenile Izei named Ion Ilieş, well known as a musician by the name of Ion de la Cruce.For no extra charge, Ion also gets dressed up in his local folk costume, calls over a neighbor to play the zungora (the local version of a cross tuned guitar) and presents an after dinner fiddle party with his wife singing and pouring out copious shots of the local home brew. Thinking of making fun of the funny little hats? Don't. The "clop" is a symbol of Maramures male identity, and until about a decade ago it was still everyday wear for huge, beefy, easily antagonized truck drivers and lumberjacks. No, you do not make fun of the funny hats around here. Ion’s house has been set up with spotlessly clean guest rooms and modern bathrooms, and his wife cooks local Maramures food from the produce of Ion’s own farm and animals.Now, I have been on a pretty stern diet for the last half year, but there was no way I was going to refuse my host’s meals. No. I did not eat the cute bunnies. I wanted to - cuteness always tastes good - but my hosts had other things in mind. Pancakes. Donuts. Fried bread. All the things I have avoided for the last half year. And you know what? Carbohydrates taste really, really good. After a half year of nibbling on the occasional Wasa rye cracker I got to wake up to this.Home made clatita (thin pancakes) served with home made plum jam. Everything was served with fried bread, called placinta, which was like a Hungarian langos but less greasy and filled with a light cheese, green onion and dill mixture (just to add to the confusion, in Hungarian the pancakes would be called palacsinta.)Later there would be dinner of ciorba de perisoare (sour soup with meatballs) and the ever present mamaliga. Mamaliga is one of my favorite foods, often described a “polenta” but in fact much more robust and filling. My father grew up eating this during the depression in the USA, when my Moldavian born Grandmother had to feed four kids while my Grandfather was ill and unable to work. We called it "Jewish cement."The Romanian version here is usually layered with cheese and fried bacon bits, it is something I dreamed about and will probably obsess about while I go back on my weight loss regimen, but I am glad I got to slake my hunger on a bowl nevertheless. But wait! There is oh so much more! Homemade donuts! Yes!Called pancovi in Maramures, gogoaşa in most of Romania, these were just what the diet doctor did not order. You could split one open and fill it with a spoonful of jam or just eat them plain, cramming them into my mouth as fast as my greedy hands could manage. For months I had been dreaming about donuts, waiting for a visit to Cluj, Transylvania’s capital city, to get my hands on a Gogoasa Infuriata (“The Angry Donut”) at the city’s signature donut stand, only to find that my beloved Cluj donut has disappeared. Either gone out of business or going into some kind of franchise hell, I considered myself lucky to jump on a donut feast in Maramures rather than pin all my hopes on the now lost fried dough of the lowlands. Of course, all this eating can create a thirst. In Maramures, this is easily solved by drinking horinca – which astute readers will know from the URL of this very same blog. Horinca, the nectar of the Gods, or at least of their Romanian speaking lumberjacks and shepherds is thrice distilled fruit brandy. Ţuica is single distilled, palinka is brandy that has gone through the still twice, but horinca cashes in well over the 100 proof mark and is usually so clear and pure that it is more like fruit vodka than brandy. Which means less of a hangover to worry about, a good thing since the Morosani here drink quite a lot of the stuff on a very regular basis, poured fresh into the ubiquitous plastic Coca Cola bottles from two gallon plastic jugs.Most homes make their own from their own fruit trees, although by EU laws they are supposed to have it distilled for them in a village EU designated still. I had promised Fumie a bottle of horinca (with strict instruction by her not to accept any inferior twice distilled palinka) and had let it slip my mind until we were actually on the road out of Maramures. I asked Jake to stop in the village of Sacel, where there is a weekly market, and walked around looking for a suitable underground moonshine contact. Walking up to a big Maramures peasant guy selling axes and other lumberjack tools, I asked if he know where we could get any horinca. “Yes. From me.” Five minutes later his wife was pouring 110 proof goodness out of a blue plastic vat into one liter cola bottles.So if you haven’t made any summer plans for travel, consider Maramures. Heading into Maramures is best done by car, but there are now a lot more village bus services that can get you from the main town of Sighet Marmatei and into the countryside on a regular schedule. Just about every village offers “cazare” (accommodation) in both official guest houses as well as in regular village family homes. Certain web sites such as can make reservations for you, but I actually just called Ion from the outdated website that started the rural tourism business, and got his information right here.

Back in Maramu'

Early May. The best time of the year to be tooling about Romania with my friends Jake and Elenore. It has been about five years since I visited some of the older fiddlers here, and it is good to know some of them, at least, are still with us. "It sometimes seems that the viability of traditional music is proportionate to the amount of potholes on the road it takes to reach that music. That certainly is the case in Romania. We have been jolting our merry way across Maramures and the Szekely country over the last few days, and travelling on the back country roads is more akin to dancing that driving. Distances that seem small on the road map become long drives as one weaves between potholes and washouts and gets stuck behind horse wagons. Every evening around 7 pm the real traffic jam starts: goats and cows clog the roads on their way back to their barns in the village from the upper pastures. But if you don;t mind the slow pace of travel, and don't crack your axle in a fit of pothole jumping impatience, you can be rewarded with some of the greatest music you will ever hear. “Maramures covered with flowers... mai dorule mai...

Now that Romania is an EU member nation, so many Romanians have gone abroad to find work in Italy, Spain and France that some villages have been transformed beyond recognition by the cash sent back home from abroad. The Oas region, once one of the poorest zones in Transylvania, is now a riot of sprawling palaces, including one famously kitsch palace with ornate marble sculpture befitting a renaissance prince or a minor New Jersey mafia don.Even in staunchly traditional Maramures, the old massive wooden houses are slowly being replaced by stone houses and suburban palace fantasies now dot the hillsides. I asked one farmer how much it would cost to buy one of the old wooden houses, and he said “I don't know. We all want new stone houses now. Only foreigners come here and want to buy a wooden house these days. You know... those that have old want the new, andthose that have the new, want the old. We are still on the road, and internet access is spotty, so more to come in a few days.

The Republic of Hungary: So Long, It's been Good to Know You!

Well, they went and did it. Our new FIDESZ government voted in a new constitution for Hungary, replacing the former constitution adopted after the fall of communism in 1990. A lot of people both inside and outside of Hungary are not extremely happy about this. During their election campaign, which saw FIDESZ running against the MSZP (Socialists) FIDESZ never proposed any program for dealing with the economy or mentioned proposing a new constitution, which can only be done if a party has a full 2/3 majority in the Hungarian Parliament. Since the MSZP and SZDSZ (the two liberal parties who were the ruling coalition since 2002) had become flabby on the issue of internal corruption, FIDESZ easily ran over them, rather like a steam roller meeting a small animal on the road at night.Poor things didn’t have a chance. (Actually, that’s a hedgehog that Fumie saved a few nights ago from being squashed by a bus in the city park. Which brings to three the number of hedgehogs we have saved from death in the past year.) Now, if you want to learn more about our new constitution, I suggest you read about it in the Economist or perhaps the German reaction in Der Spiegel, which carries a quote from the late-night news program Tagesthemen on German television station ARD: "It's strange, the more some countries profit from the European Union, the more prone they are to anti-European sentiments. The constitutional state has largely been abolished, future elections are efrfectively meaningless, the media are being whipped into line, as are theaters and museums and everything else that could shape the nation's culture..."After kicking up a big storm of debate in the EU parliament last January over the arcane new media law, FIDESZ reformulated the media law somewhat and plowed on formulating its new constitution. What stuns me the most are not the details about gay rights, or definition of when life begins, or even the religious references to Hungary being a Christian nation (it case anybody thought they were all Baha’i.) What gets me is that we just went from being the “Republic of Hungary” to simply “Hungary.” Magyarország. What does that mean? Well, considering that FIDESZ started out as a bunch of law students at the Bibo Collegium of the ELTE Law School, you have a bunch of hair splitting lawyers taking apart the idea of what “republic” means and stands for, and replacing it with something that can be molded to fit the Dear Leader’s vision of what he wishes it to be - which is increasingly the idea of one Party rule, a form of governance that Dear Leader's generation is all too familiar with and perhaps nostalgic for. The new constitution also reinstates the Hungarian Holy Crown as the seat of political authority in Hungary. This is interesting in a modern, EU state, since the Holy Crown’s role in history has been that, unlike western Monarchies and later Parliamentary Monarchies in which the King is the legitimizing authority because he has the crown, in Hungary the legitimizing authority is the crown itself.According to popular tradition, St Stephen I held up the crown during his coronation (in the year 1000) to offer it to the "Nagyboldogasszony" (the Virgin Mary) to seal a divine contract between her and the divine crown. Anybody who has read Harry Potter can easily understand where this is going. We have a Magic Hat, and if the Bishop of Esztergom lets you wear it, you are the ruler. In truth, nobody has worn the Magic Hat since Franz Jozef in 1867 – which legitimized his authority over the Hungarian domains in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But now it all goes pear shaped and trying to explain the twentieth century history of the Hungarian Holy Crown becomes something you do not want to attempt in a bar after 11 pm because it quickly becomes a bad parody of the Jerry Springer Show in Hungarian, as do so many historical arguments in Hungarian. But I’ll try… After the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the new Hungarian Kingdom quickly passed from a Social Democrat coalition to one led by Communist Bela Kun, who hoped that the new Soviet Union would help Hungary regain lands lost during the war. Kun declared the First Republic of Hungary, won a few battles in Slovakia, but soon was faced with Romanian Army occupying Budapest and Serbs in the south demanding territory. In marched Admiral Horthy on his white horse, which reinstated the Holy Haberdashery as the legitimate apex of power in Hungary, with himself ruling merely as regent. And rule he did.Having signed the flawed Treaty of Trianon, Horthy immediately set about denouncing it and for the next twenty years led Hungary towards its tragic collision course with World War Two and Fascism. In 1949 the Communist Party of Hungary, having easily jacked the elections, redefined Hungary again as a “Republic” albeit a “People’s Republic” in much the same way as East Germany and North Korea loved to define themselves as “Democratic Republics.” Stolen by the Nazis and held in Austria, in 1945 the Holy Crown was placed in Fort Knox, Kentucky for safe keeping by the US Army, in order to deny any legitimacy to the Communist rulers, a state of cold war affairs that lasted until 1978 when Jimmy Carter negotiated its return to Hungary on conditions that made it a museum piece which no Communist government official could take any part. So you can see why FIDESZ, a party of hair-splitting, bone-headed lawyers would decide that “Republic” is probably just some smart commie trick to push the Holy Headgear into the background and make all decision making a function of the messy rabble of democracy. On January 1, 2000, during the second year of FIDESZ’ first round as government, the Holy Crown of Hungary was moved to the Hungarian Parliament Building from the Hungarian National Museum. It has been there ever since… symbolically ruling.But enough of our bygone republic and its crown bedazzled rulers. Let’s get more local! In our District, (Zuglo, District FOURTEEN REPRESENTIN’, y’all) the city council has erected these welcome signs at six roads leading into our district. Notice the runic script on the signs. This is an ancient Hungarian form of writing based on the old Turkic runes of central Asia, which was brought to Hungary during the great migration and actually remained in use until the 1700s in Transylvania. Of course, only a few people have learned to read it, but it has become very popular among the extreme right wing crowd who like to wear T-shirts with maps of pre-Trianon Hungary with some runic inscription on it, and you can even find it on a local brand of “Extra Hungarian” bread. And so our local right-wing Jobbik representatives took time out from their busy schedule of harassing Gypsies to push the district government into officially marking Zuglo as a right wing territory. Great.Yes, when Jobbik tell us that "The Truth will set you free" all I can do is to quote George Clinton: Free your mind and your ass will follow. Personally, I would like to see the Nagyboldogasszony herself appear and give them a lecture on the power of love and tolerance. Speaking of Mary and the whole Ben-Joseph family, it is Easter this weekend, and in Hungary that means… pork-pork-pork-o-rama!It is the ham festival, heavy on the smoked pig, a few hard boiled eggs, and sprinkling water or cheap perfume on girls on Monday! The market this week is bullish on hams of all varieties: smoked knuckles, great wanking peasant hams, haunches smoked almost until they are black with soot and salty goodness. But what would Jesus think of this. He was after all, the King of the Jews. You can’t even get to the point where that is debatable unless the person in question is, in fact, Jewish. (And there are an awful lot of folks on the right wing in Hungary who just don't abide with that line of thinking...) So here the whole country is celebrating His Escape from the Tomb with… a feast of forbidden treyf meat. But hey… it tastes good. It’s completely hamalicious! OK, the Savior would probably be fine with matzoh balls and gefilte fish, but that shouldn’t stop Hungarians from engaging in a national pig out for a few days of gleeful swine ingestion.Actually, most of these hams are terribly salty… you need to soak them in water overnight at least to remove some of the salt, but most people don’t, so the upcoming week can be characterized as National High Blood Pressure Week.

Táncháztalálkozó 2011: The Unpronounceable Power of Music

The surest sign that spring has arrived in Budapest is the National Folk Festival, otherwise known as the Országos Táncháztalálkozó és Kirakodóvásár, or but if that is too many Hungarian consonants to pronounce you can shorten it to simply Táncháztalálkozó (Dance House Meeting.) Don’t worry - by the end of the weekend, even the most linguistically challenged foreigner can pronounce it. I wrote up the festival on the blog last year, a post which unexpectedly turned into a tempest in a teapot when it was reprinted on the Táncháztalálkozó web site and in a Hungarian folk music magazine. Hungarians don’t react well to criticism, whether constructive or not. Rather than run through that gauntlet again, this year I went to the festival with a different attitude: I wasn’t going to expect anything other than a good time hanging with friends and hearing good music. Which is what I did. I managed to avoid the consumer zone although it is hard when you have stands selling books and CDs of things as minutely focused on the ‘Hey, you! Bob! Buy Me!’ market as regional Hungarian bagpipe repertoire books and rereleases of Moldavian Csango fiddle music recorded in the 1950s. I used to snatch these up and come home wondering where all my money had disappeared to… no more.I am able to resist temptation, even while passing through the Room of Many Transylvanian Peasants Selling Stuff: wall hangings, table cloths, embroidered shirts, dancing boots, old ceramic painted dishes and pottery. But I already have enough of that to stock a small museum, so much so that most of it lives in cardboard boxes in my small flat and only comes out when I have need of a special birthday gift. But the real attraction was the outdoor bar area – actually the rear parking lot of the sports arena. Sure, it is a party in a cement walled bus parking lot, and everybody is complaining nonstop about it, but you can smoke there, which is something that the Hungarian folk scene definitely likes to do, and there is beer, and you can dance, so bus garage or not, this is the party. A group of Gypsy musicians from Gőmőr, a Hungarian minority region of Slovakia were playing at a table when I arrived, and this was some of the old fashioned Gypsy music that was the basis for the modern Gypsy restaurant music that most people associate with Hungarian folk music.Ethnologist Gergely Agócs was there with an elderly Hungarian shepherd who sang and played tarogato as well. Think of that. It is the year 2011 and you can still find shepherds who play shepherd music in this part of the world. Of course, they aren’t parked nose to nose in every village, but there still is some tradition out there if you look for it. And at least at the Táncháztalálkozó you don’t have to travel far to bump into it. Our old friends the Gypsy Band of Palatka were there after a stage set, playing for younger dancers and musicians for whom they are living legends.I was standing there listening when Sue Foy and Portaleki László showed up. We watched the amazing synchronized bow strokes of the two fiddlers and reminisced about how the village kids in Palatka grow up playing alongside their parents. To them it "comes naturally" after years of playing. “Poros” is a fiddle legend on his own: the original fiddler with the Teka band, he now shares lead fiddle work in Muzsikás and has his own band comprised of family members which is about to tour in the USA – do not miss them, they are one of the best things happening in the Hungarian folk music scene these days.When the leader of the Palatka band, Kodoba Marton (father of Florin, the younger lead fiddler today) passed away a few years ago the band asked Poros if he would step in and become their new lead fiddler, an offer that Poros considers one of the greatest honors ever bestowed on him. I spent a few hours just chatting with old friends who I don’t see as often anymore, since we aren’t; all meeting every weekend at some dance house or another. Kids, career, the same old reasons. But the vibe was like the old days and the hang was great. Before I left I passed a crowd of young musicians singing their lungs out while the musicians stood on a table for room to play.One of the Transylvanian Gabor Gypsies who sell handicrafts at the festival was listening… and this is a first for me… recording the whole thing on her I-phone. Like the old folk song says: Nem úgy van most, mint volt régen. Things just ain’t like they used to be.

Hani Gets a Haircut: A Roma/Jewish Love Story

Last week we had the honor of being invited to the first haircut ceremony of Hani, the daughter of Claude and Mina. Among the Roma the haircutting ceremony is a rite of passage between the two most important life events: birth and marriage. As Mina explained, in the traditions of her group of Roma, the Dzambaş, the child is given four random objects and urged to choose one from among them. The Godmother (Mina’s sister Otela) and the Godfather - in this case Claude’s old friend Vijay who works in Geneva - chose the objects which included things like a Burger King drink cup, a Bic lighter, a flower, and other random effects picked up during the day. Hani chose the lighter, and then a lock of her hair was shorn, to be placed in a vial of water. These objects will be saved away and given to her on the day of her marriage.Claude and Mina are among our oldest friends in Budapest, although today they are residing in the Republic of Moldova where Claude works as a UN official. Claude was part of the posse in the wild east days of Budapest in the 1990s. Originally from the US, he taught English in Prague and slung his guitar around the alternative punk clubs of east Europe before settling in Budapest. Eventually he found a position with the European Roma Rights Center, learned to speak Romani, and soon was active in the defense of Gypsy human rights campaigns as a case worker and writer. He also worked with legendary Serbian Gypsy singer Saban Bajramovic to reclaim the copyright and publishing rights to Saban’s music, which the singer had never protected. Not bad for a Jewish kid from Hartford. Along the way he met Mina.Mina comes from a Roma family in Romania, and she was the first in her family to finish school and attend University, taking a degree in Psychology. She and Claude met at a Roma Rights conference and kept in touch, and pretty soon they fell in love and decided to marry. It wasn’t an easy matter. The question of marrying out of one’s official religion, which is taken rather seriously in Romania, was solved by fabricating a mixed ceremony for the wedding, which took place with a Romanian Orthodox priest and included a Reform Jewish blessing added into the mix. Claude used to describe himself as “The King of The Yekkes” – Yekke being the Yiddish term for a German Jew, his father’s family, from Furth, having gotten out of Germany at the last minute before the Holocaust.According to Romani tradition, there were traditional dowry issues to overcome. A certain amount of wealth is required to “reserve” a bride, and I used to send Claude SMS text messages saying “Hey Claude, want to go fishing this weekend?” and get responses like “Yes. Do you have any gold? Bring lots of gold!” If you think about it, that was one of the most romantic things I ever heard about any relationship. How many of you need to collect gold to make your bride’s parents assent to wed? I never did that for my girlfriends…Speaking of fishing, this is a photo we took while fly fishing for trout on the Revuca river in Slovakia. Jewish-Gypsy trout fishing is something not to be missed. Normally Claude and I, like any self respecting noble fly fishing anglers, practice catch and release with trout – carefully landing trout on artificial flies I myself tie on tiny de-barbed hooks, never using live bait, and settling down to a nice hot soup or something else for dinner instead of killing fish. This practice ended with Mina, who does not stand for the idea of going fishing and letting perfectly good, legally caught food go running away after having even paid for a damn license to catch them. Goodbye catch and release. The problem is that now we miss going to Slovak restaurants and when the waiter asks if we would like the English language menu, we ask if they have a menu in Romani... and while we burst out laughing nobody else ever seems to get that joke. Fumie and Mina spent the weekend cruelly laughing at us in our rubber fishing waders and calling Claude and myself the “Chippendale Boys.” Of course, Mina caught the first fish.The girls: Kali and Hani, are beautiful. Born in France while Claude worked in Geneva, they now go to a Romanian language kindergarten in Moldova, while being raised in both English and Romani by their parents with equal respect for both Romani and Jewish culture. They always get a little giggly when I speak to them in Romani, which is like “our secret language with Mommy” but they are going to grow up to be amazing multilingual European language monsters when they start school.Thanks to Tom and Amy for lending their apartment for the ceremony, and for piling on the hospitality we take for granted when there is a “Tom Party” although this was a heck of a lot more like a combination children’s play date, family gathering, and informal ceremony than the blow outs we usually enjoy at Casa Tom. And hopefully we will all find the time to get outdoors and meet again on a stream in Slovakia someday soon. The trout are biting, I hear. And always remember to use barbless hooks, and carefully release your catch... a trout is too valuable to catch only once...

Budapest Comfort Food: Home Made Italian Sausages, Natto, and Kimchi

One can never get away from the flavors one grows up with. I was raised in the east Bronx, and while our household was an Ugrian-semitic island of Hungarian food mixed with matzoh ball soup and chopped liver, the east Bronx was - and is - one of New York City's strongest Italian neighborhoods, alongside a healthy dollop of Irish and Plattsdeutsch speaking Germans. But in my nabe off of East Tremont Avenue, we ate Italian food. The neighbors were all Italians from Calabria and Abruzzi, my Dad's best buddy (and NYPD patrol car partner) was Sicilian, and I was essentially raised on Italian American home cooking, a style my immigrant Hungarian mother came to know as "American" cooking since she learned it from the neighboring wives in a place called "America." Even today, the east Bronx is full of Italian bakeries and butcher shops and some of the best pizza to be found in the entire city. It was there that I defined my taste in sausages: Italian sausages, southern style, flavored simply with fennel and hot peppers. My Mom sometimes took us shopping in Yorkville, Manhatten's old Hungarian neighborhood which used to be lined with Hungarian cafes, restaurants, and grocery shops. It was the place where we could stock up on paprika and buy Hungarian debreceni kolbász and hurka (liver or blood sausages) and "real" bread.Yorkville's Hungarians have pretty much disappeared these days, except for the Hungarian church and a couple of newer Hungarian restaurants, mostly pushed out by rising rents and the lure of the "Hungarian" suburbs like New Brunswick, NJ and Bridgeport, Conn. But when I visited Hungary and finally moved here I was a sausage demon. In Hungary, you won't often find sausage on any menu - you eat it at home or standing up in a butcher shop. And it used to be, in my opinion, a lot better. Today, most kolbász seems to be an industrially produced cheap meat tube with a rubbery consistency and an over salted spicing of low grade paprika. Sausages made for grilling - the ones that are "raw" and not intended for a long refrigerator life - tend to be so stuffed with paprika that they end up dry with an almost almost sandy consistency. After a decade or so, I grew strangely tired of the Hungarian grilled kolbász. And so... I learned to make my own. The sausages of my youth. Italian sausages. It really isn’t that hard, although I would need a full meat grinder to do it right. I have one, an old crank handle model I picked up at a junk market, but the blades are wrong, although it does a decent job of churning out the sausages with already ground meat.But for smaller amounts I just use a plastic sausage nozzle attachment and push the kolbász through with my thumb. It leaves air bubbles in the sausages, but since I am not going to smoke or store these babies, I can simply prick the skin with a toothpick and carry on without worry of food poisoning. . Most butchers here sell kolbász bél, cleaned intestines for stuffing kolbász, so after rinsing a meter long section by running water through it in my sink, I mix up the meat and spices. To get the right mix of meatiness and juiciness, I take two thirds measure of somewhat fatty ground pork, and add to it a third measure of hand chopped pork belly meat. This is a fatty bacon cut called "nyérs csaszár" sold cheaply for home bacon hobbyists and emigre chinese home cooks, who seems to be the main customers for pork belly at the Bosznyak ter market where we shop. The spices are insane amounts of black pepper, fennel seeds, and nutmeg, with some chopped parsley for good measure.In the summer I might add chopped fresh basil from the “garden” as well. Half of the batch gets a palmful of crushed dried hot pepper flakes, the other goes without. Fried or grilled, these are a pretty close approximation of a New York Italian sausage. I’ve also experimented with other combinations including fresh Portuguese chourizo sausage (hot paprika and garlic) and German bratwurst (nutmeg, black pepper, and coriander.) Under normal conditions I would eat this with a hunk of crusty bread or a plate of pasta, but since I am under a self imposed regimen forbidding those wonderful things it usually gets served with a salad or my old friend , Mr. Zucchini.I’m gonna hate Mr. Zucchini pretty soon. Fumie is not a stranger to the odd hunger pangs of home, in her case, Tokyo. You might think that recreatring Japanese local specialties would be harder to satisfy than simple Calabrian food, but she does pretty well, what with cans of smoked eel and seaweed sent to her from home and local Chinese groceries and the occasional trip to Vienna. But Edokko people (people really native to Tokyo) like Fumie are crazy for natto. Natto is rotten soybeans, fermented by a special bacteria until they turn sour and emit a gummy stringy slime that Edokko love.Most other Japanese won’t eat natto, and it is one of those foods that foreign food writers always highlight as examples of weird cuisine in Japan, after fried bees and poisonous fugu sashimi. This is the dish that brought Anthony Bourdain to his knees, and he described it as "an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutinous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans... Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty-five years) and making rillettes out of him? Sorry, Pucci." Fumie makes natto at home, on top of the living room heater, in fact. It is not that bad, actually. Stirred into a stringy mush with hot mustard and soy sauce, eaten on rice for breakfast?

Maybe natto takes some getting used to, but I’d say it is a big improvement on Pucci. You can buy natto in Japanese grocery shops in small styrofoam cntainers, but the closest to us is in Vienna, and thus we have been forced to produce natto ourselves. And we only produce enough for ourselves. So don't even ask... On the other hand, Fumie has to have kimchi, the Korean pickled cabbage that has become to Japanese cuisine what Pizza is to New York cuisine. To make decent kimchi, you need napa cabbages (which are easy to get here - although I wonder what, exactly, Hungarians do with them) and red pepper paste - which we can get at the chinese grocery. And also fish sauce, various spices, and glutinous rice flour, all of which we keep stocked in our pantry.The amount you see here lasted about a month, only long enough for it to ferment and get really tangy. Kimchi is something you make in the winter months - while you can store a few pots of it outside on the terrace where it can ferment into stinky perfection. With March coming up... guess we will have to make another batch real soon.