מיר זײַנען דאָ

I left my house at five this morning with my sheet music and concert script, my performance clothes, two bottles of water, two bags of cough drops, a protein bar, three trip books, no sleep due to fever, a fever, and a period like the closing of the Red Sea.

I returned at three-quarters past midnight minus the protein bar, most of the cough drops, and all of the water. Still have the period. Can't tell about the fever. I like to think the performance adrenaline and the happiness have burned it out of me.

I wouldn't have caught a train out of South Station at dawn if I hadn't thought I would enjoy singing with A Besere Velt for its first time ever at Yiddish New York, but it was my first time singing with an ensemble in fourteen years and I loved it, all of it, the entire sleepless, ceaseless day. I napped a little on the train, but I woke like a stopped clock at New Haven and spent the rest of the trip watching the light over the Northeast Corridor, dry haze-gold on the skyscraper glitter the Amtrak route winds scenically toward. I had no trouble finding the 14th Street Y, picking up my day pass in the form of a wristband and a badge with my name on it that would have entitled me to participate in workshops and attend other concerts if my plans for this week had been entirely different. We were singing next door in the sanctuary of the Town and Village Synagogue, where the microphone arrangements for the narrative portions of the concert turned out to be complicated, but nobody fell off the bimah and I call that a success. Actually I call the fact that the audience kept applauding for a second encore when we had only come prepared for one (so we did a second round of one of our standards) a success. The concert was called Sing Out, Fight Back!; it was in seventy-fifth anniversary memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, interspersing the songs and their translations and contexts with the testimonies of fighters and survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto. I read in the person of Vladka Meed. One of the tenors spoke of his mother, who to the literal end of her life sang "Zog nit keyn mol" as she had learned it in the Vilna Ghetto and sung it in the camps. We end in the present day, with the call to resistance and memory and action. Everyone was invited to rise as they could and sing with us—never say that you walk the last road. I sang wearing my grandmother's scarf; I was coming home to my grandfather's yahrzeit. My mother couldn't make the trip, but my father was in the audience. There'll be another concert in the spring, in Boston, in Yiddish. We are here.

Tiny Wittgenstein got no chance to get a look-in over the legitimate mistakes I made during the performance (there always are some) because I got deluged immediately with people saying incredibly nice things about my voice, singing and speaking. I got asked if I was a professional actor. I got told I was an asset to the chorus. I got hugged. And then that weird thing of two months' intense devotion to something that's over just like that, but I know a recording was made; I hope it will be publicly available. I hope we come back next year.

Because I was now traveling with my father, who had caught a later train down but there was only the one evening milk run back to Boston, we walked a couple streets over and had dinner at Veselka, which was serving Christmas borscht with mushroom dumplings for me and blintzes with raspberry sauce for my father and the best chocolate egg creams he says he's had since his childhood; then we glitched the timing for visiting the Strand and instead walked to Times Square to participate in the true holiday tourist experience. It involved crowds and a blasting quantity of screen-light. I do not regret seeing Macy's space-age Santa window displays, but I have been persuaded it is never worth my going to Las Vegas.

I napped as far as New Haven and read Ladino poetry the rest of the way home. I am now attempting to wind down before I spend another night around the clock, especially with Christmas impending.

Please enjoy this photo, taken by my father, of an exhausted and glowing person waiting for a bowl of borscht.