🎼✡️❤️
German Jewish Berlin Symphony Orchestra
Cathedral Jewish Synagogue
Berlin, May 4, 2026
Jewish Folk Song: Tumbalalaika
For me, ‘Tumbalalaika’ is not merely a Jewish folk song. It is one of the melodies of my own life.
TUMBALALAIKA — THE SONG THAT HAS ACCOMPANIED ME THROUGHOUT MY LIFE
One of the Treasures of Jewish Folk-Music Tradition — a Song of Love, the Mystery of the Human Heart, Memory, and the Remarkable Power of a Simple Melody to Outlive Generations
There is music that a person hears once and remembers.
There is music to which one returns from time to time.
And then there are songs of an entirely different kind. They enter our lives so early that, decades later, it is no longer possible to determine exactly when we first encountered them. It seems as though they have always existed — even before we learned to understand words, distinguish between countries and peoples, reflect upon history, or ask ourselves questions about our own origins.
For me, such a song is the Jewish folk song “Tumbalalaika.”
I have listened to it since my earliest childhood — one might say, since I was still in the cradle.
It has accompanied me throughout my entire life.
The years and countries changed. The people around me changed. Joys and trials came and went. Some chapters of life closed, while others were only beginning. The world that once surrounded the child I was gradually disappeared and became a memory.
But the melody remained.
Tum-bala, tum-bala, tum-balalaika...
And it takes only the first few musical phrases for the distance between the present day and that distant childhood suddenly to become astonishingly short.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest mysteries of folk music.
It knows how to preserve time.
A SONG WITHOUT A SINGLE AUTHOR
“Tumbalalaika” belongs to the vast cultural world of songs in Yiddish — the language that, for centuries, was the language of everyday life for millions of Ashkenazi Jews throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
As is so often the case with genuine folk songs, it is impossible to name one individual who once sat down at a table and wrote “Tumbalalaika” in the way that a composer writes an opera or a symphony.
A folk song has a different author.
Its author is the memory of a people.
One person once sang it. Another remembered it. A third changed a few words. A fourth gave the melody a slightly different turn. A mother sang it to her child. Young people performed it at a celebration. A musician carried the melody he had heard from one town to another.
Decades passed in this way.
And then generations.
That is why such works develop different versions of their lyrics, pronunciation, musical phrasing, and performance.
Yet there is an inner core of the song that survives all these changes.
In “Tumbalalaika,” that core has proved extraordinarily enduring.
Before us is a small musical story about a young man, love, and riddles.
At first glance, there is almost nothing more.
No grand historical drama.
No kings.
No wars.
No political declarations.
No philosophical treatise.
A young man thinks about a girl and asks riddles.
Yet precisely through this simplicity, the song unexpectedly touches upon questions that human beings have asked themselves for thousands of years.
What can grow without rain?
What can burn endlessly?
What can yearn and weep without tears?
And the girl answers the riddles.
The precise wording may differ among various versions of the song, but its poetic structure remains recognisable: nature gradually becomes a metaphor for human existence.
Stone.
Love.
The heart.
And suddenly, a small folk song becomes philosophy.
THE BALALAIKA THAT BECOMES THE RHYTHM OF MEMORY
The very word Tumbalalaika possesses an almost magical musical quality.
It is simultaneously a word and a rhythm.
“Tum-bala-laika.”
One needs only to pronounce it, and already there is a sense of movement.
In the refrain, it becomes a kind of musical engine driving the song forward. This is precisely why the melody is so easily remembered even by a child who does not yet understand the meaning of the words.
First, a person remembers the sound.
Later, one learns the words.
Later still, one begins to understand their meaning.
And many years afterwards, one discovers that the meaning has changed together with oneself.
In childhood, “Tumbalalaika” may seem like a cheerful song.
In youth, a song about love.
In maturity, a song about time.
And when a considerable part of one's life already lies behind, something even deeper begins to be heard within it:
the memory of those who are no longer beside us.
Thus the same melody grows older together with the person who listens to it.
The notes remain almost the same.
It is we who change.
YIDDISH AS AN ENTIRE VANISHED UNIVERSE
It is impossible to speak about “Tumbalalaika” without speaking about Yiddish.
Today, for many people, it is simply the name of a language.
Historically, however, behind that word stood an immense human civilisation.
People spoke Yiddish at home.
They argued in it.
They joked in it.
They wrote letters in it.
They bargained in marketplaces.
They told children fairy tales in it.
They published newspapers in it.
They created literature in it.
They performed in theatres in it.
They declared their love in it.
They sang lullabies in it.
And, of course, they sang “Tumbalalaika.”
Behind the language existed an entire world — Warsaw, Vilna, Odesa, Chișinău, Minsk, Kyiv, Berdychiv, and the towns and shtetls of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia, and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe.
That world must not be idealised. It knew poverty, exhausting labour, social restrictions, discrimination, and periodic eruptions of terrible violence.
Yet it possessed a culture of extraordinary vitality.
Then the twentieth century dealt that world a catastrophic blow.
The Holocaust destroyed not only millions of individual human lives.
Entire communities were destroyed.
Families.
Streets.
Schools.
Theatres.
Libraries.
Places in which Yiddish had been the natural sound of everyday life.
And that is why, today, an old Yiddish song assumes an entirely different dimension.
When “Tumbalalaika” is heard, we are not listening to a museum exhibit.
We are hearing the voice of a world, a substantial part of which physically disappeared, but which refused to disappear from human memory.
And the song continues to live.
WHY IT NEVER GROWS OLD
The remarkable destiny of “Tumbalalaika” lies in the fact that it requires no historical commentary whatsoever in order to move the listener.
One may know nothing about the history of Yiddish.
One may know nothing about the history of European Jewry.
One may be hearing the melody for the very first time.
And yet there is something in it that remains immediately understandable.
I believe the reason lies in the extraordinary human simplicity of the song.
A person loves.
A person doubts.
A person tries to understand another human being.
He asks questions.
The other person answers.
But behind this game of riddles lies something that cannot be fully expressed in words.
Love cannot be reduced to a definition.
The human heart cannot be completely explained.
That is precisely why the form of the riddle is so beautiful here.
The young man seems to be trying to speak about his feelings not directly, but through the world around him.
This is a very ancient artistic device.
It is difficult for a human being simply to say:
“I love you.”
And so he speaks instead about stone, fire, rain, and the heart.
Nature becomes the language of love.
And the girl understands that language.
There is extraordinary tenderness in this little dialogue.
A JOYFUL SONG WITH A TOUCH OF SADNESS
There is another quality of Jewish musical tradition that is particularly familiar to someone who grew up close to this culture.
Sometimes it is remarkably difficult to answer a simple question:
Is this music joyful or sad?
It may sound lively and energetic.
People may dance.
The musicians may smile.
The rhythm may become faster and faster.
And then, suddenly, within a single musical phrase, there emerges an intonation that inexplicably makes the heart ache.
This remarkable union of joy and sorrow is characteristic of much of Eastern European Jewish musical culture.
To laugh while remembering pain.
To dance after surviving misfortune.
To love life while knowing how fragile it is.
Perhaps this is why such music has proved so extraordinarily resilient.
It does not promise humanity a world without suffering.
Instead, it says something else:
Despite suffering, we shall live.
We shall love.
We shall raise children.
We shall tell stories.
We shall make music.
We shall dance.
And we shall sing.
A SONG THAT CROSSED THE OCEAN
The later geographical journey of Yiddish song is equally remarkable.
During the twentieth century, together with Jewish emigration, this musical culture crossed national borders and oceans.
It reached America.
Israel.
Canada.
Argentina.
Germany.
Great Britain.
France.
Australia.
In the Soviet Union, it continued to exist under its own distinctive and, at times, extraordinarily difficult historical circumstances.
But the melodies continued to be passed from one person to another.
And something remarkable occurred: a song that had developed within the cultural world of Eastern European Jewry gradually became part of international musical culture.
Professional singers and folk ensembles began to perform it, as did chamber groups and large orchestras.
Every performer brought something different to it.
In some interpretations, “Tumbalalaika” sounds almost intimate — like a quiet conversation between two people.
In others, it becomes a dance.
Elsewhere, it acquires theatrical grandeur.
And in a symphonic performance, the small folk melody suddenly reveals itself in an entirely different way: an immense orchestral world emerges behind it.
Yet the song withstands even this transformation.
Because a true folk melody has nothing to fear from a great stage.
BERLIN AND THE SPECIAL MEANING OF JEWISH MUSIC
When Jewish music is performed in Berlin today, it is impossible to separate the music entirely from the history of the city.
Berlin was one of the great centres of European Jewish culture.
But Berlin also became the capital of the state from which the Nazi policy of extermination of European Jewry was directed.
That history cannot be changed.
But history has a continuation.
And therefore a Jewish song sounding freely in Berlin today possesses a special symbolic power.
When an orchestra performs a Jewish melody, when people gather in a concert hall, when Yiddish is heard once again — this is no longer merely a cultural event.
It is testimony to the fact that human culture cannot be completely destroyed as long as memory survives.
A house can be demolished.
A book can be burned.
A theatre can be destroyed.
A human being can be forced to leave his homeland.
But if a child remembers a song and then, decades later, passes it on to another person, the chain of memory has not been broken.
And that is why the thought of “Tumbalalaika” sounding in Berlin is particularly meaningful to me.
Not as a song of the past.
But as a song of life continuing.
MY “TUMBALALAIKA”
But there is the history of a people, and there is the history of one human being.
For me, this song has never been merely an object of musicological interest.
It entered my life before I was capable of analysing its origins.
I heard it when I was still a child.
It was there at an age when music is perceived not through reason, but directly through the heart.
And perhaps that is why, decades later, the bond between this melody and me remains something that could never be artificially created.
Every person has certain sounds, scents, or melodies capable of instantly opening a door into the past.
Sometimes only a few notes are needed — and the room of one's childhood returns.
The voices of loved ones.
The faces of people.
Their intonations.
The light coming through a window.
A world that no longer exists in the form in which we once knew it.
For me, “Tumbalalaika” is such a door.
I listened to it as a child.
I listened to it later.
I returned to it again and again.
And today it remains my favourite Jewish folk song.
Not because I once decided to select it from a catalogue of music.
Songs like this are not chosen.
They choose us.
MEMORY DOES NOT BEGIN IN AN ARCHIVE
In adult life, we become accustomed to searching for evidence of the past in documents.
In archives.
In photographs.
In testimonies.
In letters.
In old newspapers.
History requires these things.
But personal human memory works differently.
Sometimes music becomes its archive.
A melody can preserve what no photograph has preserved.
A photograph shows us a person's face.
Music can restore the feeling of what it was like to be beside that person.
A document tells us a date.
A song restores the atmosphere of an era.
And so music sometimes becomes the most intimate archive of a human life.
If the same song accompanies a person from childhood into old age, it gradually becomes filled with that person's own biography.
Every new listening adds another invisible layer.
Childhood.
Youth.
Love.
Separation.
Work.
Journeys.
Losses.
Returns.
New cities.
New people.
And when, many decades later, the original melody sounds once again, a person no longer hears only a musical work.
He hears his own life within the music.
TUMBALALAIKA AS A SMALL PHILOSOPHY
I find it particularly beautiful that such profound emotional power should be contained within a song constructed around riddles.
For human life itself is a riddle.
We enter this world without knowing what road lies ahead.
We meet people without knowing who will remain beside us.
We make decisions without knowing all their consequences.
We love, although we cannot rationally prove why we love this particular person.
We lose those dear to us and try to understand how memory continues to bind us to them.
And all the while, we ask questions.
That is why the young man in the old Jewish song, asking the girl his riddles, remains astonishingly modern.
Centuries pass.
Technologies change.
Empires disappear.
States arise.
Borders change.
Human beings travel into space and create artificial intelligence.
Yet before the person he loves, a human being remains what he has always been — a creature attempting to solve the most ancient riddle of all:
What happens within the human heart?
There is no final scientific answer to that question.
And so music remains.
AS LONG AS THE SONG IS HEARD, MEMORY LIVES
Today, “Tumbalalaika” may be performed by musicians born many decades after the people from whom versions of the song were first collected.
It is heard by people for whom Yiddish is not their native language.
It is performed in countries that did not yet exist in their present form when this musical tradition was developing.
And still the song lives.
That is a genuine cultural triumph.
Not a loud one.
Not a political one.
Not a military one.
A human one.
Those who once sang this song to their children could never have known that generations later entirely different people would walk onto a stage, an orchestra would play the opening notes, and the familiar melody would sound once again.
But that is precisely what happened.
And somewhere among the listeners there will always be someone for whom this melody means far more than merely a beautiful piece of music.
He will hear the first few notes and suddenly remember his childhood.
And then music will once again perform its most extraordinary task:
it will unite different moments of time.
For me, “Tumbalalaika” is precisely such a song.
It is the song of my childhood.
A song of memory.
A song of Jewish culture.
A song of love.
A song that has travelled beside me through the years of my life and has remained recognisable no matter how much the world around me has changed.
When I hear it today, I hear both the present and the distant past at the same time.
Perhaps that is why certain songs cannot simply be called favourites.
They become part of who we are.
And if someone were to ask me why, among the immense musical heritage of the world, “Tumbalalaika” occupies such a special place in my heart, my answer would be very simple:
Because I cannot remember my life without it.
I listened to it from my earliest years.
It was with me in childhood.
It remained with me long after childhood had passed.
And it is still with me today.
Let times, countries, and generations change.
Let people pass away and the worlds familiar to us disappear.
As long as the music continues to sound, memory continues to live.
And once again comes that old, simple, almost childlike rhythm:
Tum-bala...
Tum-bala...
Tum-balalaika...
And somewhere deep within, for a brief moment, a person once again becomes the child who heard that song so very long ago. ❤️
For me, “Tumbalalaika” is not merely a Jewish folk song. It is one of the melodies of my own life. 🎼✡️❤️
