For virtuoso and Holocaust survivor Flory Jagoda, music is the impassioned legacy of an unforgotten past.
Stepping into Flory Jagoda’s condominium in Alexandria, visitors glimpse a fancy for beauty, fellowship and nostalgia. Large picture windows offer sweeping views of the Potomac River. Multiple sitting rooms, soothingly appointed in soft pastels, provide space for sharing stories and songs. In a room that serves as a studio, one finds a wall-to-wall showcase of photographs, awards and poster-sized ads for her worldwide concert performances. Her most prized possessions are on display in the living room: a dozen or so musical instruments, some aged to a fine patina. Perched among them is the storied accordion that once saved her life.
On this Tuesday morning Jagoda, 92—a singer, composer and virtuoso of guitar and other instruments—greets her visitors warmly, offering a handshake and a kiss on the cheek even to one whom she is meeting for the first time. Standing just under 5 feet, the nimble nonagenarian must reach up to embrace Howard Bass and Susan Gaeta, two of her musical proteges, who have come to help tell her story.
That story is rooted in a much bigger story, one that stretches back more than 500 years to the time of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1492, the same year Columbus set sail for the New World, Jagoda’s Jewish ancestors in Spain were forced to flee the country after King Ferdinand issued the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews. Tens of thousands died in bloody pogroms as they fled, while many others ended up in places like Turkey, Greece and the Balkans. For the world’s Jewry, the violent diaspora exemplified history’s repeating itself. History would do so again in the 20th century, at a terrible cost to Jagoda’s family.
Her 15th-century forefathers settled in the kingdom of Yugoslavia, then part of the Ottoman empire, in a village named Vlasenica. But they never forgot their heritage as Sephardim—members of the Judeo-Spanish sect that had inhabited Spain since the time of King Solomon, circa 950 B.C. (The word “Sephardim” derives from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sepharda.) Their language was Ladino, a Spanish dialect blended with Hebrew derivations. (The more commonly known dialect of Yiddish blends Hebrew with German.)
Born in 1923, Jagoda grew up immersed in all things Sephardic—the language, customs and, above all, the vibrant music of the bards and instrumentalists from whom she had descended. She was privileged to be part of the musical Altaras family, her maternal kin, who were revered in Vlasenica for their passionate singing and agility in playing a variety of string and wind instruments. Jagoda was especially devoted to her nona (grandmother), who spoke only Ladino and, in accordance with Sephardic custom, served as the family’s central command. Nona was also the principal purveyor of the art of songs.
For the young Flory Kabilio, Sephardic rhythms became a way of life that would sustain her through the agonies of World War II and the Holocaust. After her journey brought her to America as Flory Jagoda, a young wartime bride, she would become a virtuoso and a torchbearer, preserving age-old traditions and passing them down to her children, grandchildren and countless others.
Stories, Cigars and Songs
As she pores over the faded images of her relatives, Jagoda’s crystal blue eyes grow solemn. She has difficulty conveying the fullness of what the pictures mean to her.
There’s a formal portrait of her aunts and uncles, proudly poised in oblong Sephardic headdresses. There’s another of the family’s women playing their instruments. At its center is the sturdy, dark-haired Nona looking up from her guitar.
Their village was located a couple hours by road and train from Sarajevo. “The people used to say, ‘It will take you about two cigars,’” Jagoda wistfully recalls. She adds, “They made their own cigars. I still smell it!”
The Sephardic Jews of Vlasenica were mostly small merchants. Her family lived over their store, which sold everyday items like flour and thread. “We were not rich, but we had everything we needed,” she recalls.
Howard Bass of Alexandria, a guitarist and retired Smithsonian program director who has played alongside Jagoda for more than 20 years, enhances his mentor’s recollections with his rich knowledge of history. Susan Gaeta of Burke, a singer-guitarist who teaches fifth grade at the Nysmith School in Herndon, likewise offers insights she has gained as Jagoda’s onetime musical apprentice, a privilege bestowed by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Bass weighs in by noting that Jews have long been renowned for their competence as business owners. The Ottomans of the 15th century therefore welcomed them into the empire after their expulsion from Spain: “There’s a popular story among Jews,” he says. “The Ottoman emperor once said something like, ‘While King Ferdinand weakens his kingdom, he enriches mine.’”
In Jagoda’s recollection of her early years, the relative prosperity of her Judeo-Spanish community never sparked envy or animosity. She remembers Vlasenica as a place of cordial coexistence among Jews, Christians and Muslims. “There was no hate,” she says with pained emphasis.
In this climate of tolerance and camaraderie, her family’s Sephardic culture thrived. While she spoke Serbo-Croatian at school, home was exclusively the realm of Ladino, a tongue whose kinship to Spanish can be compared, says Gaeta, to the likeness between Shakespearean English and the English spoken today. Among Jagoda’s kinsmen, Ladino flourished in the lifeblood of stories and songs.
The family also retained the age-old customs of Judaism: synagogue attendance, a strict kosher diet and folksier practices, including the lighting of candles. In a 2010 interview published on a website called Sephardic Horizons, Jagoda reflected on the ubiquity of candles in Sephardic folk life: “Is it going to rain or snow? Light a candle! You have a problem with la nuera (the daughter-in-law)? Light a candle!”
Not all divine invocations were as gentle as candlelight, however. In typical fashion, Nona delivered harsh admonitions about a God who would exact vengeance on sinners—including children who gazed longingly at foods and bric-a-brac when traversing the local markets. “Nona would tell us, ‘Il Dieu ti va motari!’” (God will kill you!”) Jagoda “never agreed” with Nona’s chilling version of theology but concedes that the demands of a nona’s job had to be met: “That’s what it was to be a nona in a house—to make you believe in something that would save you.”
Then there was the music, that impassioned legacy of an unforgotten past. The Altaras family plucked the strings of guitars and lutes and even the Greek bouzouki. They played bagpipes and accordions. “Everyone played by ear; there was no such thing as knowledge of a note,” Jagoda says. Their songs were hymns and ballads and love songs that had crossed the continent from medieval Spain. “The old music was never lost,” she reflects.
Nor were the traditions that allowed for its perpetuation. The first gift to a newlywed bride was the tambura, a treasured string instrument that came in different sizes, including a smaller version called the tamburica. As Bass points out, the custom bespeaks not just the centrality of music, but also to its importance in the sphere of womanhood. Moreover, when someone died, Jagoda recalls that everyone would immediately reach for their instruments. “Sadness was always connected to music,” she explains. “Just like happiness.”
That connection is highlighted by another historical anecdote offered by Bass: “There’s a written account from 1492 by a Spanish priest who was watching Jews boarding boats—going into exile. He reported that the rabbis were encouraging the women to sing and play their tambourines in order to keep everyone’s spirits up.”
Such was clearly the thinking inherited by Nona. As a midwife, she used music as a balm for the agonies of birthing. She also prescribed it to her family. As Jagoda recalls, “She would always say, ‘Why is your face not happy? Sing!’ The answer was always, ‘Sing!’”
Serpent in the streets
In another photograph, circa 1940, a radiant young Jagoda stands poised with her accordion. She has thick brown hair, bright eyes with sweeping brows and a broad, happy smile.
The image evokes the aura of a Holocaust victim who remains forever young—Anne Frank, who was born in the same decade as Jagoda and wrote her famous diary while hiding with her family in Amsterdam, later perishing in a German concentration camp.
By the time she was a teenager, Jagoda was living with Nona and other extended family in Vlasenica only in the summers. During the school year she lived in the city of Zagreb with her mother and stepfather. Rosa, her mother—whom she describes as quite the “rebel”—had divorced her first husband while Jagoda was still a baby. (Jagoda never knew her biological father.)
Moreover, Rosa had always yearned to flee the provincial life of the village, somewhat to the dismay of Nona. She and Michael Kabilio, who would become a father figure to Jagoda, opened a store in Zagreb selling ties.
Prior to the Nazi invasion of Zagreb in 1941, Jagoda had little notion of the anti-Semitism taking hold across the continent. Her parents had done a good job of sheltering her from that affliction, she recalls. And so she was content to attend school and report each evening to the home of Eida, her beloved accordion teacher, who marveled over Jagoda’s natural talents as a musician.
But everything changed the morning the 17-year-old awoke to thundering booms, then jumped to her window and discovered what she describes as a “serpent,” a long line of German tanks winding through the streets. The next day she and her parents heeded orders to report to a station for their badges—the Star of David, a marker of their Jewish identity. The full force of that distinction hit her later that evening, after she knocked on Eida’s door with her accordion in tow.
Jagoda recalls, “She opens the door and looks at me, sees the badge and yells, ‘You can’t be one of them!’ Then she yells, ‘Go home! Go home!’”
Back on the streetcar, a stunned Jagoda cried and cried. A stranger put an arm around her and cried, too. Jagoda’s voice still cracks as she recalls that searing episode of innocence suddenly lost.
Within days, her father came home looking “white as a sheet, shaking.” The Germans were rounding up Jews, so the family would have to run away, he declared. Jagoda would go first—taking nothing but the clothes she was wearing, fake identification papers and her precious accordion. A four-hour train ride would take her to the coastal city of Split, where a family friend would meet and shelter her. Unable to secure a train ticket, Kabilio issued Jagoda a stern command about avoiding detection: “Don’t speak! Just play the accordion!”
Jagoda did just that, swallowing her crippling fear and playing her instrument nonstop for the duration of the journey. The train car filled with passengers drawn by the vibrant rhythms. The conductor himself was so enthralled that he never bothered collecting tickets. “The music saved my life,” Jagoda reflects.
After a month’s stay in Split, the family again picked up and migrated after authorities declared the need to disperse the refugees among Yugoslav islands. “’There are too many of you,’” she recalls one saying to the scores of Jews who had been summoned to a station.
The Kabilios traveled by boat to the island of Korcula on the Dalmatian coast. They spent two years interred on the island, where they stood in line for their sustenance—mostly bread, water and sardines. Jagoda became the “island accordionist,” soothing her family’s pains and earning a modest allowance by tutoring some of the locals in her craft.
When word suddenly arrived that the Germans were about to infiltrate Korcula, the refugees were again prompted to flee. This time they boarded boats to the Italian city of Bari.
While locals extended the refugees a warm welcome, greeting them in the harbor with baskets of food, lodging in Bari was in woefully short supply. Jagoda had to go door to door with the weeping Rosa—distraught because Michael had been away from Korcula when she and Jagoda had made their sudden escape. Rosa feared he was forever lost.
Many of Bari’s residents did not answer their doors; others turned them away with sullen apologies. Finally, one woman welcomed them. “It was a scene that you could make a movie out of,” recalls Jagoda. The woman wore fancy clothes and an abundance of makeup and jewelry. Like an “angel from the sky,” she invited them inside, offering makeshift beds: a tiny loveseat for Rosa and a pair of chairs pushed together for Jagoda—accommodations they gratefully accepted. Within minutes Jagoda noticed a stream of women emerging from the bathroom. Passing one hand in front of her groin and with a wry tone, she recalls, “They were washing themselves.”
After a few nights at the brothel, mother and daughter managed to find new lodging. Some months later, Michael arrived in Bari looking like he had gained considerable weight—the result of hoarding several outfits beneath his suit. Jagoda remembers his unannounced arrival as a moment of stupendous joy.
To help her family survive, Jagoda applied for a job at a warplane salvage depot. After being asked if she could type, she reports, “I did what everybody did—I lied.” A sympathetic employer, watching her haplessly hunting and pecking at a typewriter, suggested another position, cataloging recovered pieces of military planes that had been shot down, a job she grew to love. Its biggest reward would come later, on the day she met a dashing American army sergeant named Harry Jagoda. They fell in love and married in 1946, just months before setting sail for America.
When music died
While still in Bari, Jagoda and her parents received devastating news about their family in Vlasenica. Like millions of Jews across Europe, the musical Altaras clan had suffered an unimaginable fate. Forty-two of them—Jagoda’s aunts, uncles, cousins and her beloved Nona—had been executed on a farm just outside the village.
The precise details of the 1942 massacre remain in question. But it appears that one dreadful night, Nazi cohorts marched a couple hundred Jews, including the Altaras, to the farm. The captors held them in a barn overnight, then lined them up and shot them dead. A nearby ravine became the victims’ mass grave.
For Rosa, anguish over the atrocity never subsided. Even after spending more than two decades in America, she would always say that her music had died with her family.
For Jagoda, the lingering uncertainties surrounding that final horrific hour remain troubling. When she and Harry returned to Vlasenica some 40 years after the war, their questions to villagers and local authorities prompted mostly shrugs. No one was ever held accountable for the slaughter of her family and scores of other innocents. In addition, there was no trace of her family’s Judeo-Spanish heritage, no synagogues or menorahs or Sephardic melodies. She arranged to have a stone marker placed at the spot where her family perished—a small gesture to ensure that their story would not be forgotten.
Reviving the flame
In America, Jagoda had by this time already embarked on a mission to revive her family’s legacy. Her four children were well-versed in Sephardic culture and music. Harry had become a successful real estate developer who supported her efforts.
But she had to wait some 30 years—until her mother’s death in 1973—to play her songs again. Rosa had shunned any vestige of that past life, including the Ladino language. Even to Jagoda, being Jewish had long felt like a stigma, something she needed to hide.
With her mother finally at peace, and with a newfound will to conquer that hurtful stigma, Jagoda embraced the old music of the Sephardim and even began composing her own songs. These included stirring tributes to her life-saving accordion, to the immortal Sephardic candle and to the towering figureheads of her childhood, especially Nona. Through the Smithsonian and other organizations, she gradually began disseminating her music and stories to a broader audience.
To hear Jagoda and her companions perform is to take in strains that are sometimes high-spirited, sometimes solemn but always deeply heartfelt and rich, with harmonizing vocals that can only be described as breathtaking. Besides Gaeta and Bass, the performers include a number of her children and grandchildren. The ensemble has wooed audiences worldwide in places like Spain and Bosnia, restoring sounds once silenced by edicts and tyrants.
For her artistry and singular revival of the Sephardic flame, Jagoda has received the National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor awarded to traditional artists. On her 90th birthday, the virtuoso celebrated by performing with her group at the Library of Congress, a gala event featured in a documentary titled “Flory’s Flame.”
In the film, Aviva Chernick, Jagoda’s latest apprentice in the Virginia Folklife Program, captures the awe that Jagoda’s legacy has inspired among her many devotees: “Flory is rare because she carries the soul of the music in her tissues, in her whole body … There’s something very profound about receiving it from her.”
( January 2016 )