PRECOGNITIONS OF “A LAND SO SWEET AND BEAUTIFUL”

How many of you under-forty Jewish crowd can sing a few bars of Rumania Rumania? A majority of you probably cannot even recall the name Ceausescu or consider an era pre-Holocaust when Jews savored Rumania as “a land so sweet and beautiful.” And, even if you can, can you identify the sanctified Rumanian cuisine of mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea?

Yeah, and so what?

Well, that is precisely the point. Rumania Rumania is a venerated song of the Yiddish stage, composed by Sholom Secunda, whose Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen became a huge hit for the Andrews Sisters. It was the signature tune of beloved song-and-dance-man Aaron Lebedeff, whom a critic once called “the Jewish Maurice Chevalier.” Rumania Rumania is a lighthearted reminiscence of the salad days in the old country. “It was a place,” Lebedeff pines, “where we had no troubles” and even the simplest foods were delicious. Some of the lyrics are even ingratiatingly bawdy, like, “Rumanians drink wine and eat mamaliga, and whoever kisses his own wife is crazy.”

Nowadays, you rarely find anyone – save a few klezmer aficionados and a dying breed of old timers – who truly appreciates the song’s cultural context and Lebedeff’s intricate Yiddish scat. But, generations come and go, and then something really weird happens that bridges the ages while it completely defies rationality . . .

Simeon Isaac, my three-month-old grandson – whom I call “Shimon’dl,” just as my mom endearingly called my dad – is becoming more and more attentive to music, as infants typically are. A smile will cross his face, maybe even a little calm if he is cranky. So, we sing to him, and he is really starting to get into Baby Mozart, the new generation’s ultimate non-prescription narcotic.

So, one day I start warbling Rumania Rumania, and I do not get a mere smile from the kid, but a chorus of the deepest belly-laughs. His eyes are fixed on me with a knowing look, and the laughs just keep on rolling. A few minutes go by, and I try it again. By now we have an audience, and again, the kid cracks up. Rumania Rumania has now become our signature tune, and I am welcomed by same eyes and belly-laughs each time I sing the arcane, loopy melody. Shimon’dl gives no other song, whatever the language, such a spontaneously hearty ovation.

What is going on here? A developmental psychologist would likely say that the resonance of a particular meter or beat or note-combination sends the baby into fits of laughter. Feh. Let an overly romantic zayde offer an alternative theory:

Dr. Gladys McGarey introduced us to the idea that babies are actually "old souls in new bodies." Mystical? Genetic? You need not be a scientist. We who have birthed children know that our babies are indeed old souls, that precognitions both pristinely innocent and worldly wise dwell deep in an infant’s eyes long before its conscious conditioning begins.

So indulge me more in romantic projection than in clinical observation. You know why baby Shimon’dl rings with laughter whenever I sing Rumania Rumania? Because he has been there before. His old soul knows of a place devoid of tyrants and crematoria where “living was a pleasure,” where a glass of sweet Rumanian wine led to merriment and dancing and good-natured joking about the mishugas of kissing ones own wife. He stood behind the kitchen door as Moshe Chayim and Boruch Shmuel mischievously swiped a piece of the cook’s Shabbos kugel. He found delight in a simple peasant’s meal of mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea. And now he laughs and laughs whenever he is reminded of times full of sunshine and devoid of angst and worries and WMD’s and egotistical talking heads.

In that innocent ditty he feels himself again swaddled in the innocence of the womb, as he does at his mother’s breast and in his father’s protective arms. The wisdom he radiates declares that truth is found in the utter simplicity of the love of family and friends, a little merriment and frivolity, a savoring together of times now past, a table set with a modest meal, and a sip or two of sweet wine.

Does Shimon’dl really hear all that as he laughs with abandon at a nostalgically goofy song of the Yiddish stage? All right, maybe I have taken a zayde’s fantasy too far. Yet, if in a newborn babe’s innocence we feel our own yearning for innocence, and if in its wise eyes we see a reflection of our own longing for wisdom, and if in his laughter we hear our own hollowness begging to be filled with laughter . . . then maybe we, too, have in utero visited “a land so sweet and beautiful,” and reveled in times well spent, and now pine for one more chance to be enveloped in its glow of all’s-wellness. Perhaps the hope we see reflected in our grandchildren’s laughter and knowing eyes reassures us that age has not dimmed our own hope for tomorrow.

So, what are mamaliga, castravete and pătlăgea? Go look them up in a Rumanian dictionary. Better yet, find an old timer who got out of Rumania with his life, and ask him. Even better yet, give my Shimon’dl a couple of years. I bet he will be able to tell you all about them in impeccable detail.