Frankenstein's Cantors
Frankenstein's Cantors
On Reviving the Cantorial Dead
The leaves change, the sukkah goes down, and the High Holiday Season turns swiftly into the Halloween Season. To celebrate the march of the fall festivals, my wife and took in a ritual reenactment of all of the things I actually appreciate about Halloween — yes, I’m talking about Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.
The musical was on tap at the Geva Theater in Rochester, where an excellent cast brought Brooks’ timeless lampoon to life. Brooks’ musical is irascibly Jewish — not just for the jokes, but for the original movies not-so-subtle narrative of a well-heeled American scientist returning to his ancient Transylvanian roots. The show is also a throwback to the golden age of broadway, which Brooks (at 98 years of age) soaked up first-hand. And finally, the show encapsulates my ideal of Halloween: humorous, fun, and devoid of horror.
You may remember that I am not a fan of Halloween scare tactics. Though it functions well as a neighborhood hospitality festival, the holiday has largely devolved further into a day of dystopia and death culture, as people play out their increasingly apocalyptic and horror-filled visions of the future and of themselves.
To counteract this purposeless phantasmagoria, let’s celebrate some weird and spooky coincidences with a tale of old manuscripts, horror film actors, and Canadian cantors — oh my!
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A few months ago, I was very grateful to become the recipient and caretaker of a cantorial manuscript collection. It was of a cantor I had never heard of, but whose name seemed very familiar. The cantor in question was Boris Charloff.
Where had I heard that name before?
A few paces back and forth later and the lightbulb went off — it bore a striking resemblance to that of the king of horror, the original Frankenstein of the silver screen, Boris Karloff.
As I would discover, the two couldn’t be more different. But allow me to present them together again — for the first time — in keeping with the haunted holiday ahead.
I. The Anglo-Indian King of Horror
Boris Karloff (1887-1969) was not actually a Karloff at all. He was born William Henry Pratt to parents of English and Indian descent, giving him a swarthier complexion than his British schoolfellows. The young Pratt was also not your typical actor material — he was bow-legged, stuttered, and had a lisp. After dropping out of Kings College London, he made his way to Canada where he did odd jobs until he came upon the acting profession. This stuck, and he went on to have a staggering film career —one hundred and seventy-four films plus numerous television and radio appearances. He was most especially known for his iconic work in American horror as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939).
Never seen any classic horror films? Don’t worry, there’s one film that Boris Karloff participated which still lights up American televisions even today. Every December, you can still hear Boris Karloff’s dulcet tones as the voice of the Narrator of The Grinch Who Stole Chrsitmas.
Now that you’re in the spirit of the season — nu, what’s the Jewish connection?
William Pratt claimed to have chosen the name “Boris” because it was foreign sounding, and “Karloff” because it was a “family” name. But there’s little evidence to substantiate this second claim, and the Karloff family has not established any such connection. So there is no relation to similarly-named rabbinic Jewish family from northeastern Poland—the ancestors of our next Boris.
But interestingly, Karloff did star in one of the more pro-semitic films of the pre-WWII era: The House of Rothschild (1934). Karloff himself played the menacing Prussian Count Ledrantz, an antisemitic noble bent on foiling the dreams and aspirations of the eighteenth-century banking magnate, Nathan Rothschild, played by George Arliss. As Eric A. Goldman points out, the producer Darryl Zanuck (who would later go on to make the Jewish-related classic, “A Gentleman’s Agreement”) wanted to bring attention to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of 1930s Germany, fighting the tide of Nazism through the medium of film.
So Boris Karloff may be only a minor Jewish interest, other than starring in The House of Rothschild and being part of the classic horror film that inspired Mel Brooks’ own Young Frankenstein. But his near-namesake, Boris Charloff, couldn’t be more the opposite.
II. Puttin’ on the Cantorial Ritz
Nearly decade after the birth of Boris Karloff, Boris “Berele” Charloff (1895-1971) was born into a rabbinic family in the Polish town of Tykocin where his father was the cantor of the local synagogue. The younger Charloff had a traditional yeshiva training in Slonim and a particularly broad musical education: He studied in Warsaw with Cantor Elias Zaludkowski and one Professor Giustiniani; sang in the choir of Cantor Pinchas Minkowski in Odessa while learning with its choirmaster, David Nowakowsky; and spent three years at the Rostov conservatory while holding cantorial pulpits.
While his career began in the Russian Empire, Berele emigrated to the United States in 1925, where he served prominent pulpits in Brooklyn, earning the respect of the local cantors and publishing a number of his compositions.
After his success in the states, Charloff left for Canada and became the longtime cantor at Goel Tzedec — one of the largest synagogues in Toronto affiliated with the then-young Conservative movement. It ultimately merged with Beth Hamidrash Hagadol in 1955, forming Beth Tzedec — now a large and well-known Canadian synagogue (One of my classmates, Cantor Sidney Ezer, grew up there and now serves as its cantor).
Of all of this I knew naught when I began staring at Charloff’s manuscripts. Reading through them, I found a very unique cantorial voice — one with a cultured European elegance well married to that sacred strand of small shul, old world Jewish prayer. This came through in dozens of unpublished recitatives and art songs, like this beautiful Mah Noimar (“What can we say?”):
Charloff was well-respected in his day with a number of his compositions published in New York and in Toronto. His voice and name seems to have largely faded into obscurity, at least outside of Canada. Reading through his compositions, it seems such a pity. As Maestro James Conlon of LA Opera discovered in his beautiful work with the Orel Foundation, whole worlds of Jewish musical creativity are easily lost to us from neglect. We are a “culture scarred by omissions.” The idea of reviving works like Charloff’s to me is an exciting project, one which rediscovers individual voices of religious expression that expand our ideas of sonic faith-sharing beyond the LP and concert-repertoire canons.
One such reclamation of Charloff’s own work came in a recent cabaret production called “The Ward,” telling the story of the Toronto’s first immigrant neighborhood. Amidst trying to reconstruct the musical culture of this multicultural community, composer David Buchbinder was given a scrap of a Charloff composition for “Rozo D’Shabbos,” from the Friday night liturgy, which he arranged for choir to capture a bit of Go’el Tzedec’s former grandeur.
What to do with such amazing pieces that will otherwise never see the light of day? To bring them back in such a way feels like a techiyyat hameitim — reviving the dead so that their legacy lives in us. I once helped develop a website just to save cantorial music like this for future revival.
But perhaps these revived cantorial dead really more like the cantorial undead, as we are haunted by mummified cultures and reconstruct chazonus like a Frankenstein’s monster with the musical embodied parts that should have emain buried. My colleague Jeremiah Lockwood often speaks of inhabiting the cantorial world as one of reviving ghosts — the spirits of the dead who possess us with their musical possibilities and potential for a revived Jewish alterity.
This riddle of the two Karloffs runs deep. Yet it minimally reveals how much cantorial music, or any historically-informed performance practice, is an experiment in reviving the dead.
When you do it well, it contains all of the excitement of an impassioned Dr. Frankenstein, seeing what is thought long past come back to vitality.
But for it to work, one must put the right brain. Like the coda of Young Frankenstein itself, only by giving the monster a transfer of mind and heart, not just of body, will he retain an enduring life.
Happy Halloween, and Chodesh Tov.