>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Welcome, everyone, and thank
you so much for braving the weather
and the traffic and, you know,
what passes in Washington
for a weather scare.
We, fortunately, stayed open.
There was a committee that
met at 4:00 to decide whether
to keep the Library
open, and we did.
So, yeah. I'm Thea Austin,
the public events coordinator
for the American Folk Life Center,
and on behalf of the entire staff,
I want to welcome you
here to a screening
of a very special documentary,
"Flory's Flame".
It celebrates Flory Jagoda, who
at 91 is the foremost interpreter
of Sephardic traditional music in
the United States, and is a winner
of the prestigious
National Heritage Fellowship
from the National Endowment
for the Arts.
Flory, where are you?
There you are.
So.
[ Applause ]
Here at the American Folk Life
Center at the Library of Congress,
we have many collection
materials relating to Flory's life
and tradition, including
documentation
from the NEA Heritage
Fellowship Awards collection,
which we have here,
webcasts of her concerts.
Here at the Library March 21, 2007,
was a beautiful one with Susan Beta,
Howard Bass, and Tina Chancy.
That was a beautiful concert.
September 21st, of course, some of
you who are here tonight were also
in that concert, and you will see
some of that in the documentary,
and Flory did an oral
history with Howard Bass,
a longtime friend and
fellow musician.
So we also have that
in the collections,
and you can see those
online as webcasts.
I would like to especially think our
co-hosts tonight for this evening,
the embassy of the
Republic of Croatia
to the United States
and the embassy, yes.
The embassy of Spain to
the United States as well
as Spain Arts and Culture.
And I think believe tonight
we also have representation
from the US Department of State,
and we may later on have people
from the embassies of Hungary,
Montenegro, and Israel.
So I don't think they've
checked in yet, but yeah.
I hope they were able to get here.
At this time, I'd like to
invite Ambassador [Inaudible]
to come up and say a few words.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very much.
Well, I saw the movie,
and you'll see,
many of you will shed
tears of joy I'm sure.
Well, I have, I'm not going to
talk about the movie so much,
but about what I have learned
about Flory Jagoda or Flory Jagoda
as we would say in our
country, and the meaning
of her existence among us.
So, and this is a complex thing.
So I have it in written.
The film you are going
to watch isn't about,
is about an extraordinary person.
Flory Jagoda, born [inaudible]
in Sephardic family in Sarajevo,
spent her youth in Vlasencia
in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and in [inaudible], Croatia.
Survived the Holocaust, married
an American soldier in Italy,
ended up as an American,
and dedicated her life
to keeping alive the miracle of
Sephardic music and language.
When we spoke just minutes ago,
we spoke in three languages.
That was fantastic experience, too.
I believe that Madam Jagoda
was gifted so abundantly
by musical talent that
she couldn't help herself
but to become a musician.
The inner urge was so strong that
we can call her the musician.
She's an artist, worldly outlet
of the divine in us humans.
She's an uncommonly cheerful
lady to whom the very mystery
of the human ability to reproduce a
divine harmony and beauty reaches us
to us commoners, to us prone
to oblivion, and, therefore,
to repetition of not just stupid
but very, but often evil blunders.
Her music is simple.
Sometimes joyous.
Sometimes happy but
sorrow and nostalgia.
The songs, the poetry she collected,
wrote, and performed are simple,
but whether cheerful or sad, they
carry an extraordinary weight.
A hurting burden, indeed,
of history and remembrance.
The history and remembrance her
music keeps alive is multi-layered
and deep.
She sings in Ladino, an old
but forgotten language spoken
by the Spaniards in the 15th century
and preserved in a cultural capsule
of the Jewish Sephardic [inaudible]
of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
The Sephardic Jewish culture,
their language, poetry,
and music have survived the
pogrom of the Medieval Inquisition
in Spain, but have
almost disappeared
under the systematic horrors
of the European Holocaust.
As you will see, it
was fate, faith, music,
and poetry that helped the Jews
survive their exile from Spain.
On the more personal experience
level, as Flory believes,
you'll see that in the movie, it was
her musical talent what helped her
to survive the Holocaust in Croatia.
She literally played
and sung her way
out of certain death while
fleeing from [inaudible] by train
or in [inaudible] the fascists were
rounding up Jews and sending them
to death camps in Croatia
and in Germany.
This event is supported as you
have heard by two embassies,
the Spanish embassy and
the Croatian embassy.
Both nations threated the
Jews with extermination
and almost succeeded in it.
And against all odd,
there is Flory Jagoda,
singing in an antiquated
Spanish, her [inaudible],
and there she is singing Croatian
popular song of her youth in Ladino,
and the other time, there she
is singing Bosnian Muslim songs
in Bosnian and in Ladino, and
there she is with her guitar
like [inaudible] bride flying
above the blue memories of death
and suffering over her people.
Making us all better in
spite or maybe precisely
because the generosity
of her music and poetry,
making us even more deeply
ashamed of our capacity
for inflicting misery and death
to other beautiful human beings
just because they are others.
Flory's culture is Jewish,
but it is also Spanish
and Bosnian and Croatian.
Her culture is, obviously,
American, too.
Its [inaudible].
It is a culture of remembrance,
neither forgiving nor forgetting.
It generously flies
above narrow-minded divisions
we become so easily prone to.
Especially in times of crisis
when we, who at least once
in our history we were all
immigrants, loathed immigrants,
and when we who at one
time were all persecuted
for having different
religion or culture,
loath people of different
relations and cultures.
Flory's art and her life story
remind us, it makes us remember
that we must not allow
ourselves ever again to succumb
to the simple-minded
spirit of the collective we
as opposed to the collective them.
The moment we allow for
the simple-minded division,
we are just a step from
pogrom from Holocaust.
Think about that.
As I said at the beginning, Flory
is, indeed, an extraordinary person.
She's not a genius like
Mozart or Beethoven.
She's not a celebrity like
Michael Jackson, but, still,
she has made it possible for the
genius of multiple cultures to speak
and sing to us in one voice.
In one language saved from oblivion.
The simple story of her life told
in this movie, there is the author,
is meant to save us from
oblivion, not to entertain us.
Last but not least, our special
thanks to, of course, the,
to the institution whose own
[inaudible] is to save America
from oblivion, and that
is the Library of Congress
for making this event possible.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you so much, Ambassador.
That was beautiful.
In just a second, I'm going
to invite the filmmakers up,
but I wanted to let you
know that after the,
as soon as we see the film,
we're going to have a Q
and A with the filmmakers
that will be mediated
or moderated I should say by Dr.
Steven Winick, who's a colleague
of mine in the American
Folk Life Center.
A man of many talents, and one
of them is moderating Q and A's.
So we have that to look forward to.
So I would like to at this
point invite Curt Fissel
and Ellen Friedland of [inaudible]
to come up and talk about the film.
[ Applause ]
>> Well, I'm just trying to recover.
Emotionally, that was just really
so special and so beautiful.
Thank you so much, and as you
were speaking about that, Flory,
I kept imaging kind
of reversing time.
If you coul