Sandra Kreisler & Band - Schum Davar

The program "Schum Davar" by the multiple award-winning chanteuse Sandra Kreisler does not come across as soft and gentle, but it certainly does not lack the lightness and the famous Jewish humor.

Cast:
Sandra Kreisler — Vocals
Gennadij Desatnik — Violin, Viola, Guitar, Vocals
Valeriy Khoryshman — Accordion, Cajon, Arrangements

Schum Davar
"You have to have lived a life to sing such chansons..." said a contemporary about Sandra Kreisler. And "Sandra always disrupts by thinking along," was said in Vienna, the city she has long turned her back on. Because she indeed lives a life and thinks along. And this is exactly how her Jewish program comes across.

Schum davar means "no thing" or "nothing at all," but Schum is also the Hebrew word for garlic – much more "the Jew's food" than the onion, as Wilhelm Busch once disparagingly wrote. And Schum is also the name that Hasidic Jews once gave to the great triad of cities: Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, the three cities where the religious Hasidic movement could flourish so well.

This is the tension field in which the multiple award-winning chanteuse positions her program. Along this arc, she addresses contemporary Judaism, the German "ethnotourist" – who loves to attend klezmer concerts while simultaneously blaming the conflict with the Palestinians solely on Israel – but also the question of whether songs are already "Jewish songs" just because a Jew writes or sings them.

This program does not come across as soft and gentle, but it certainly does not lack the lightness and the famous Jewish humor. A gallows humor, a dark humor, but also quirky and unconventional humor. In short, Kreisler presents herself in this program entirely in the tradition of her famous father, Georg Kreisler, whose songs are as naturally included as current, completely unknown songs and hundreds of years old shtetl niguns.

For the Jewish experience cannot only be answered with references to religion, Israel, and/or the Holocaust. Can it even be answered how it is possible that a group of less than 0.2% of the world’s population is discussed so persistently and prominently? And what has actually happened? Nothing at all?

The audience will be confronted with more questions than answers in this program – because thinking along is something you have to practice. Sandra Kreisler is predestined to pose these questions with her songs, and she does so with wit, charm, and a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. You have to have lived a life to sing such chansons.