To Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote related her to her beloved nona, her grandmother, who lived within the mountain village of Vlasenica within the former Yugoslavia.
“I feel all the sensation that I’ve for the Sephardic tradition, for tales, for track — it’s actually a present from her to me that I’ll have for the remainder of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda stated in an oral historical past interview for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1995.
They have been songs of residence and household, of affection and Hanukkah, a lot of them within the diasporic language, Ladino, spoken by the Sephardic Jews who have been expelled from Spain in 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. (The language is a type of Castilian Spanish combined with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish.) A number of the Jews finally settled in Vlasenica, the place Mrs. Jagoda spent a part of her childhood amongst her beloved grandparents and prolonged household.
Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino along with her household in Vlasenica, however she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.
“Our ancestors have been Spanish Jews,” she stated within the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. All the things that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”
A charismatic musician who performed accordion and guitar and was recognized for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded 5 albums; carried out in her homeland lengthy after emigrating to the US; and was named a Nationwide Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts.
She died at 97 on Jan. 29 in a reminiscence care facility in Alexandria, Va., her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy stated.
Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.
Her dad and mom divorced when Flory was a child, and he or she moved along with her mom to Vlasenica, the place they lived along with her grandparents for a number of years and the place she remained when her mom married Michael Kabilijo. When Flory was about 10, she joined her mom and stepfather in Zagreb, although she was sad concerning the transfer; she had change into near her nona, Berta Altarac.
However she adjusted. Her stepfather purchased her an accordion and adopted her. Then the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 compelled the household to maneuver. Her stepfather purchased prepare tickets to the Croatian metropolis of Cut up, utilizing gentile names for the household. Flory went first, charming different vacationers on the journey by enjoying her accordion.
“I play it for 4 hours,” she stated in “Flory’s Flame.” “All of them got here into the compartment. They like it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a celebration, the conductor got here in and sat there and he began singing. Saved my life.”
She later wrote a track concerning the episode, which in English translation says partially:
My father tells me,
“Don’t communicate! Simply play your accordion!
Play your accordion and sing your songs!”
I don’t know why I’m operating.
What have I accomplished?
After Flory and her household had spent a number of months in Cut up, the Italian Fascists controlling town despatched a whole bunch of Jewish refugees, together with them, to Korcula, a Croatian island within the Adriatic Sea. There she taught accordion in alternate for meals.
In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and different Adriatic islands, Flory and her dad and mom fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port metropolis on the Adriatic. She spent the remainder of the struggle there.
Whereas working as a typist for a U.S. Military salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a grasp sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a robe made out of a parachute.
Mr. Jagoda returned to the US earlier than her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian struggle brides.
Over the following 27 years, Mr. Jagoda constructed an actual property growth enterprise in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their 4 youngsters, gave personal guitar and piano classes, and carried out conventional Yugoslav people music with the Washington Balalaika Society and different teams.
However she didn’t sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mom, who had emigrated along with her husband to the US in 1948, was haunted by the wartime bloodbath of 42 relations, together with her mom, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died after they did.
Her stepfather’s demise in 1978, 5 years after her mom’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.
Together with her dad and mom gone, she started writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she additionally began to put in writing new ones within the Sephardic custom. One in all them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah track, has been carried out by the US Military Band and coated by many artists, together with Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.
Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, people festivals, neighborhood facilities and universities, generally in varied mixtures along with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the household gave live shows at a number of cities within the former Yugoslavia.
“In Novi Unhappy, we gave a live performance in a synagogue with no home windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy stated in a telephone interview.
Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who grew to become the older lady’s apprentice in 2003 by means of a program run by the Virginia Basis for the Humanities. They carried out as a duo and because the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.
“Flory embodied her tradition,” Ms. Gaeta stated by telephone. “Singing Sephardic music and speaking about her household was like oxygen to her.”
In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz on the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino track, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Timber Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.
The phrases, translated into English, embrace the strains “I flip and say, what’s going to change into of me,/I’ll die in an odd land.”
Along with her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and 4 great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot each died in 2014.
For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s affect by no means waned.
“It was her mission,” she stated throughout a live performance in 2013 on the Smithsonian Establishment, “to hold and to show her younger ones this language of her heritage — and always remember it.”
