A great children’s album does more than just make kids jump. It instills in them a whole new mythology of stories, of movements, of words and of dreams.
New Mexico-based Jordan Wax’s “Pantakozak and Other New Yiddish Songs for Kids,” an English Yiddish children’s album that comes out today, does just that. It comes with an evocatively and magically illustrated book, with art by Nina Wright, including lyrics and stories that pair with the music.
Co-produced by Neutral Milk Hotel drummer Jeremy Barnes, the album features klezmer greats like Jake Shulman-Ment and even sounds from Roma lautari musicians Wax traveled to Moldova to record with. The album’s musical sensibilities are likely to please everyone, from the youngest of children to the most discerning of parents. In short: It’s a pure delight.
Kveller chatted with Wax over e-mail about his thoughts on kids’ music, how the birth of his niece influenced one of the album’s tracks and about Pantakozak himself.
This is your second Yiddish album and your first children’s album in the Jewish language after “The Heart Deciphers.” Is there a difference to you in making music for children and for adults?
Both branches of my work intertwine old Yiddish traditions and new forms, but for “Pantakozak,” I let kids shape the material as it developed. As you can imagine, that took it into some totally different places!
In Yiddish there’s this image of the goldene keyt, a golden chain of wisdom, creativity and spirit that each generation adds its link to — it’s all connected, so a good performance of Yiddish art can summon that whole chain of voices from past generations into the present moment. Bringing kids into the conversation extends the golden chain into the future, which for me brought a whole new emotional depth to the work.
I really wanted the songs on “Pantakozak” to be engaging, fun and relatable for preschoolers on their own terms, so I brought them as drafts into my weekly spot as a music programmer at our local Jewish preschool. Testing music with a bunch of rowdy 3-year-olds is a great way to figure out what works and doesn’t! It took me a while to iron out the kinks while the kids ran circles around me, but I’m really proud of the fact that the core of the album can actually be performed for little ones in a group setting.
Did you take inspiration from any other musicians in this album?
One children’s artist comes to mind — not a musician, but an elder New Mexico storyteller named Joe Hayes.
He grew up in a bilingual Spanish/English community in Arizona, and performs tales from that tradition for kids. He is amazing to watch! I always loved watching the way he can create a bilingual space that makes everyone feel included, regardless of how much language they know or where they come from — the whole audience is drawn into that language space and gets to experience belonging there for as long as his story lasts. I want to create that kind of experience with Yiddish in my performances. It’s especially important with a minority language culture as small as secular Yiddish, and even more so when there is no physical homeland, no place you can rely on to go experience the language. The little windows we open together are temporary Yiddishlands, and I want the ones I create to be spaces that are defined by love and belonging, like Joe Hayes’, regardless of the backgrounds of who’s participating.
I love that you included a niggun in this album! It’s so moving. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Sure! That niggun was composed to sing at the naming ceremony for my niece Sylvia Chaya, the first of her generation, on the eighth day of her birth. She was born here in New Mexico during the summer monsoons in the high desert, and that year was particularly spectacular: Every day the blue sky was full of billowing, triple-story monsoon clouds, and the gentle rains that came each afternoon for a month turned the desert into a lush savannah. I tried to capture the feeling of that time — not only the abundance of the desert cycle but the way time changes when you welcome a new generation, the way it changed our family’s identity. The tradition of singing wordless niggunim is perfect for getting at those big ideas and feelings that are so hard to put into words.
I want to know more about Pantakozak itself (himself?).
My elderly friend Misha grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in Eastern Poland before the Holocaust and had an incredible memory. He was always overflowing with songs, rhymes, jokes, anecdotes and stories from his life that he could recount in great detail. He remembered the first few stanzas of Pantakozak from his sister reciting it to him when she would put him to bed as a toddler, which must have been one of his first memories…
The full poem, which I later found in a 1914 publication at the Yiddish Book Center, is a cautionary epic about why kids should go to bed on time and not be too fussy in the process. Misha knew a lot of these kind of haunting tales about gazlonim (highway robbers that Jewish merchants had to watch out for on the wagon roads) and monsters, characters with big swords and bushy beards who lived in caves in the Polish countryside, and he would recount them with great glee. I tried to make it a bit less scary for contemporary audiences — some of my preschool audiences became so obsessed with it, savoring the chance to play out fear and to get to shriek and run when the singer says “Boo!” that they would make me sing it multiple times in the set.
Historically, the Pantakozak character probably grew out of Slavic-language poems and songs about Igor Gonta Kozak, a Cossack leader who led a terrible massacre of Jews in Uman, Ukraine in 1768. In the Yiddish versions, passed down by ear for 150 years, his character gradually morphed into a comical monster. He became imaginary but retained some of the traits that might help kids know how to respond if a Cossack paramilitary group appeared at the edge of their village. My adaptation doesn’t include any of that darker stuff of course, but I’m fascinated with these particularly Yiddish expressions of how, through myth, we prepare children for some of the challenges of the society we’re passing on to them.
I assume you’ve gotten to see kids engage with a lot of this music. What are some things you’ve noticed, reactions that surprised you?
A preschool teacher sent me a short clip of 3-year-olds around their snack time table reciting to each other, “My name is Pantakozak and I blow up like a blow-sack! I put on stripey pants and do my Pantakozak dance!” I think that may be the highest compliment a kids’ performer can get, to see that my work was deemed enjoyable enough to become true childlore, if even for a moment. Especially to hear 3-year-olds having a great time, recreating a chain of Yiddish joy that I learned from an elder friend… that’s pretty endearing.
You can listen to “Pantakozak and other new Yiddish Songs for Kids” here.
