The cover of Madison-native Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel’s first album “Toyznt Tamen” (“A Thousand Flavors”) would not look out of place in a collection of old Yiddish records.
Likewise, she and her accompanying instrumentalists make many of the songs sound as if they’ve been sung in Yiddish theater productions for at least that long. But many are new compositions by Seigel herself.
On the face of it, nothing in Seigel’s upbringing would have pointed to her becoming a Yiddish singer, composer, scholar and folklorist, collecting songs that might otherwise have perished with earlier generations.
Growing up Jewish in Madison meant summers at Camp Shalom, services and religious school at Temple Beth El, and trips to Minneapolis for youth group conclaves.
“Like many American Jews of my generation, I grew up hearing some Yiddish at home, but not actual sentences,” she said in an interview from her home in New York.
She also experienced some of the culture that went with it during visits to Chicago. Seigel’s grandparents, who lived there, had grown up in Yiddish-speaking homes. Although they no longer spoke the language to one another, they still used it — particularly when it came to mealtimes.
“She would make amazing food and host big family feasts where everybody would sit around the table,” Seigel said. “We’d stuff ourselves and sit around. It was so much fun for the kids.”
Not until she went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., did Yiddish begin to play a bigger role in her life.
Hampshire is home to the Yiddish Book Center, started in 1980 by Aaron Lansky. The center houses more than 1 million Yiddish books discarded by the descendants of their original owners.
Seigel, a self-described “voracious and precocious reader,” chose Hampshire, in part, because of the school’s open curriculum. Students design their own major and course of study.
She took some Jewish studies classes and signed up for a Yiddish class that turned out to be life-changing.
“I had a knack for the language,” Seigel said. “It was very interesting to me and very new and always something I’d heard in my family. That combination was irresistible.”
Upon graduation, Seigel moved to Minneapolis, where she became involved with several Yiddish clubs and organizations.
She enrolled in the Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Program, a summer intensive in New York run by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She spent three summers at the six-week program, which includes language and literature classes, lectures, field trips and classes in singing and dance.
She also attended KlezCamp and Klez Canada and studied with private teachers.
Upon completing YIVO’s advanced level courses, she realized continuing her immersion in the world of Yiddish at the level she wanted meant moving to New York. She did so in 2003 without a job lined up.
“It was kind of a crazy thing to do,” she said, “but I had contacts. I’d worked in the non-profit sector before, but when I got to New York I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I wanted to do something with Yiddish.”
At one point, she said, she was holding eight part-time jobs. They included freelance translation, Yiddish teacher, private tutor, grant writer and a stint as a nanny and personal assistant to a Yiddish-speaking family.
Eventually, she landed a full-time job in the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. She subsequently enrolled in the Master of Library Science program at Queens College, taking one or two classes at a time until receiving her degree.
Between work and studies, Seigel spent time with friends and mentors like Beyle Schechter-Gottesman, a Yiddish poet and songwriter who’d grown up in Romania, speaking Yiddish, German, Romanian and Ukranian. Schaechter-Gottesman and her family had moved to New York in 1951 after surviving the Holocaust in a ghetto.
“She was a really incredible person,” Seigel said. “Her mother was this amazing Yiddish folk singer, and people from the Yiddish-speaking community would go to her house and sit around the table and sing with her.”
“She was very encouraging to me from the first time I met her when I was a young student,” she said. “She gave me one of her books, gave me unsolicited advice about my music and my writing.”
“There’s something about spending time with native Yiddish speakers,” Seigel added. “People who grew up and came of age in Europe, many of those people influenced me.”
Seigel has no current plans to tour, given her full-time job. But, she said, she will be performing in Milwaukee in October as part of a gathering of the Digital Yiddish Theater Project.
That will be her second Milwaukee appearance. She performed in March 2014 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with Hankus Netsky and the band Hebrew National Salvage. (See May 2014 Chronicle.)
“Toyznt Tamen” is available at Seigel’s web site amks.wordpress.com.
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer, retention alert coordinator at Milwaukee Area Technical College and winner of a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.
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