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    Ukrainians Fill Streets With Music, Echoing Past War Zones

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    When bombs began falling on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv late last month, forcing Vera Lytovchenko to shelter in the basement of her apartment building, she took her violin with her, hoping it might bring comfort.In the weeks since, Lytovchenko, a violinist for the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, has given impromptu concerts almost every day for a group of 11 neighbors. In the cold, cramped basement, with nothing in the way of decoration except candles and yellow tulips, she has performed Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Ukrainian folk songs.“My music can show that we are still human,” she said in an interview. “We need not just food or water. We need our culture. We are not like animals now. We still have our music, and we still have our hope.”As their cities have come under siege by Russian forces, Ukrainian artists have turned to music for comfort and connection, filling streets, apartment buildings and train stations with the sounds of Beethoven and Mozart.A cellist performed Bach in the center of a deserted street in Kharkiv, with the blown-out windows of the regional police headquarters behind him. A trumpeter played the Ukrainian national anthem in a subway station being used as a bomb shelter. A pianist played a Chopin étude in her apartment, surrounded by ashes and debris left by Russian shelling.Impromptu performances by ordinary citizens have been a feature of many modern conflicts, in the Balkans, Syria and elsewhere. In the social media age, they have become an important way for artists in war zones to build a sense of community and bring attention to suffering. Here are several notable examples.The Pianist of YarmoukAeham Ahmad became a YouTube star by playing piano in the ruins of a Damascus, Syria, neighborhood. This video follows his journey to Europe through a single song, starting in Syria and ending at a performance in a Berlin.Photos by Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesAeham Ahmad gained attention in 2013 when he began posting videos showing him playing piano in the ruins of Yarmouk, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, that was gutted amid his country’s civil war. Sometimes friends and neighbors sang along. The news media began calling Ahmad the “pianist of Yarmouk.”At the time, government troops kept his neighborhood cordoned off, hitting it with artillery and sometimes airstrikes, as insurgent groups fought for control. Many people suffered from a lack of access to food and medicine; some died.“I want to give them a beautiful dream,” Ahmad told The New York Times in 2013. “To change this black color at least into gray.”Musicians have long played a role in helping people cope with the physical and psychological devastation of war.“They’re trying to recreate community, which has been fractured by war,” said Abby Anderton, an associate professor of music at Baruch College who has studied music in the aftermath of war. “People have a real desire to create normalcy, even if everything around them seems to be disintegrating.”The Cellist of SarajevoDuring the Bosnian war in 1992, Vedran Smailovic became known as the “cellist of Sarajevo” after he commemorated the dead by playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor every day at 4 p.m. in the ruins of a downtown square in Sarajevo. He kept playing even as 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on the city.“Many, like Mr. Smailovic, who played the cello for the Sarajevo Opera, reach for an anchor amid the chaos by doing something, however small, that carries them back to the stable, reasoned life they led before,” The Times reported then.“My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim, but I don’t care,” Smailovic said at the time. “I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a pacifist.” He added: “I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can.”A Russian Orchestra in a War ZoneThe Mariinsky Theater Orchestra of Russia held a special concert in the historic city of Palmyra, Syria.While ordinary citizens have risen to fame for wartime performances, governments have also sought to promote nationalism in wartime by staging concerts of their own.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 8Olga Smirnova. More

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      Jasmila Zbanic Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home

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      Jasmila Zbanic, named Europe’s best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities done as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”, for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”Ms. Zbanic speaking after the first public showing of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” in 2020 in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995.Kemal Softic/Associated PressMs. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.“I’m very much against S.D.A., the main political party, so they know I am not theirs,” she said, noting that she had several times selected ethnic Serb actors for starring roles in her movies. “I don’t choose actors because of their nationality but because they are the best,” she said.In her most recent movie, the main role, a Bosniak translator working for the United Nations in Srebrenica, is played by Jasna Djuricic from Serbia. Ms. Djuricic, who won the best actress award from the European Film Academy, has been pilloried in Serb media as a Muslim-loving traitor.The actress Jasna Djuricic, left, with Ms. Zbanic on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Ms. Djuricic has been called a traitor in her native Serbia.Imrana Kapetanovic/DeblokadaHaris Pasovic, a prominent Bosnian theater director and Ms. Zbanic’s professor during the war years at the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, said his former student’s collaboration with the Serbian actress demonstrated her faith that culture transcends nationalism.“Events were meant to separate these two people forever, but they came together to create this incredible work of art,” Mr. Pasovic said.International acclaim, he added, has made Ms. Zbanic “the most successful woman in Bosnian history” and, as a result, “she terrifies Balkan politicians,” nearly all men. “She is very careful not to be used in Balkan political trading and has never wanted to be part of anybody’s bloc,” Mr. Pasovic said.Bosnia has a long, rich history of filmmaking from when it was still part of Yugoslavia, the multiethnic socialist state that fell apart in the early 1990s and spawned Europe’s bloodiest armed conflict since World War II. More than 140,000 died in the ensuing conflicts.“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal,” Ms. Zbanic said. “You can’t live without either.”Like so much else in Bosnia, a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions, the film industry has been left bitterly divided by the traumas of war. Emir Kusturica, a well-known Sarajevo-born director who has embraced Serb nationalism, is now reviled by many Bosniaks as a champion of “Greater Serbia,” the cause that tore Bosnia apart in the 1990s.Ms. Zbanic, 47, said she despised Mr. Kusturica’s politics — he is close to Milorad Dodik, the belligerent nationalist leader of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled region — but still respected his talents. “We should appreciate professionals no matter what ideology they have,” she said.Seventeen years old when Bosnian Serbs began a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Ms. Zbanic said her films, which include “Grbavica,” a 2006 feature about a single mother whose daughter was conceived in a wartime rape, are her “attempt to understand what happened and how what happened during the war is still influencing our everyday life.”Ms. Zbanic speaking to cast members on the set of “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Imrana Kapetanovic/Deblokada“Grbavica” helped pressure Bosnian politicians into changing the law to give previously neglected wartime rape victims the same official recognition and allowances as former soldiers. She counts that as one of her proudest achievements, noting that “truth is always good, even if it is painful and even if it hurts, it moves things forward.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97A charismatic musician, she sang and wrote songs that linked her to Jewish ancestors who lived in Spain until their expulsion in 1492.Flory Jagoda, left, performing with Heather Spence in Potomac, Md., in 2012. She sang songs she knew from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia and wrote new ones in the Sephardic tradition.Credit…Dayna Smith/Getty ImagesMarch 14, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETTo Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote connected her to her beloved nona — her grandmother — who lived in the small mountain village of Vlasenica in the former Yugoslavia.“I think all the feeling that I have for the Sephardic culture, for stories, for song — it’s really a gift from her to me that I will have for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda said in an oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin 1995.They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Some eventually settled in Vlasenica, where Mrs. Jagoda spent part of her childhood, among her beloved grandparents and extended family.Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino with her family in Vlasenica, but she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.“Our ancestors were Spanish Jews,” she said in the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. Everything that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”A charismatic musician who played accordion and guitar and was known for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded five albums; performed in her homeland long after immigrating to the United States; and was named a National Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Arts.Mrs. Jagoda died on Jan. 29 in a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.Her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy confirmed the death.Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.When Flory was a baby, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Vlasenica, where they lived with her grandparents for several years and where she remained when her mother married Michael Kabilijo. Eventually, at about 10, Flory joined her mother and stepfather in Zagreb. She was close to her nona, Berta Altarac, and unhappy about the move to a big city.But she adjusted. Her stepfather bought her an accordion and adopted her. But the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 forced the family to move.Her stepfather bought train tickets to the Croatian city of Split, using gentile names for the family. Flory went first, charming other travelers on the trip by playing her accordion.“I play it for four hours,” she said in “Flory’s Flame.” “They all came into the compartment. They love it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a party, the conductor came in and sat there and he started singing. Saved my life.”She later wrote a song about the episode, which in English translation says in part:My father tells me,“Don’t speak! Just play your accordion!Play your accordion and sing your songs!”I don’t know why I’m running.What have I done?After Flory and her family had spent several months in Split, the Italian Fascists controlling the city sent hundreds of Jewish refugees, including them, to Korcula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, where she taught accordion in exchange for food.In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and other Adriatic islands, Flory and her parents fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic. She spent the rest of the war there.While working as a typist for a U.S. Army salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a master sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a gown made out of a parachute.Mr. Jagoda returned to the United States before her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian war brides.Over the next 27 years, Mr. Jagoda built a real estate development business in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their four children, gave private guitar and piano lessons, and performed traditional Yugoslav folk music with the Washington Balalaika Society and other groups.But she did not sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mother, who had emigrated with her husband to the United States in 1948, was haunted by the wartime massacre of 42 family members, including her mother, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died when they did.Her stepfather’s death in 1978, five years after her mother’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.With her parents gone, she began writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she also started to write new ones in the Sephardic tradition. One of them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah song, has been performed by the United States Army Band and covered by many artists, including Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, folk festivals, community centers and universities, sometimes in various combinations with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the family gave concerts at several cities in the former Yugoslavia.“In Novi Sad, we gave a concert in a synagogue with no windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy said in a phone interview.Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who became the older woman’s apprentice in 2003 through a program run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. They performed as a duo and as the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.“Flory embodied her culture,” Ms. Gaeta said by phone. “Singing Sephardic music and talking about her family was like oxygen to her.”In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz at the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino song, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Trees Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.The words, translated into English, include the lines “I turn and say, what will become of me,/I will die in a strange land.”In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot both died in 2014.For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s influence never waned.“It was her mission,” she said during a concert in 2013 at the Smithsonian Institution, “to carry and to teach her young ones this language of her heritage — and never forget it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in Srebrenica

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Review: Life and Death in SrebrenicaBosnia and Herzegovina’s Oscar entry is the harrowing and rigorous story of a U.N. translator’s fight to save her family from slaughter.Jasna Djuricic is Aida, a high school teacher turned U.N. translator, in Jasmila Zbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?”Credit…Super LTDMarch 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETQuo Vadis, Aida?NYT Critic’s PickDirected by Jasmila ZbanicDrama, History, War1h 41mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, overran the town of Srebrenica, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. Muslim civilians sought refuge at a nearby U.N. base, but were handed over to Mladic’s soldiers, who separated them by gender and loaded them into buses and trucks. Around 8,000 men and boys were murdered, their bodies buried in mass graves, in one of the worst atrocities of the wars that convulsed the former Yugoslavia for much of the decade.At the time, many in the West wondered how this could happen — how genocidal violence could erupt in Europe barely 50 years after the end of World War II. “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” Jasmila Zbanic’s unsparing and astonishing new film, shows precisely how. This isn’t the same as explaining why, though Zbanic’s granular, hour-by-hour, lightly fictionalized dramatization of the events leading up to the massacre sheds some glancing light on that question.Mladic (Boris Isakovic) is an unnervingly familiar figure. A self-infatuated bully who travels everywhere with a cameraman, he punctuates his displays of power with litanies of grievance. But the movie isn’t really about him. He and his officers may be the authors of the nightmare, but the viewer suffers through it in the company of Aida Selmanagic (Jasna Duricic), who works as a translator for the U.N.[embedded content]In her previous life, Aida was a teacher. Her husband, Nihad (Izudin Bajrovic), was the principal of the local high school. At one especially tense moment, she and a Serb soldier exchange polite greetings: he’s a former student, who sends regards to Aida’s sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrovic). That encounter is one of several reminders of the prewar normal, when Serbs and Muslims lived side by side and Aida and her family pursued an uneventful middle-class existence. A flashback shows her participating in a whimsical pageant devoted to “Eastern Bosnia’s best hairstyle.”Now, she runs an increasingly desperate gantlet of contradictory demands. Her U.N. identification badge affords her some protection, which she tries to extend to her husband and children. She persuades Nihad to volunteer as a civilian delegate alongside the U.N. commander in farcical negotiations with Mladic, and uses her access to restricted areas of the base to find hiding places for Sejo and Hamdija.In her official capacity, Aida dutifully translates Serbian lies and U.N. equivocations, a role that becomes both horrific and absurd. She must convey to the panicked masses at the base — some of them her friends and neighbors — reassurances that she knows to be false. Amid the promises of safety, she can see clearly what is about to happen.Duricic’s performance is somehow both charismatic and self-effacing. Aida is tenacious and resourceful, and also terrified and overwhelmed by circumstances. The story she is caught up in moves swiftly and relentlessly, but sometimes nothing seems to move at all. The victims-in-waiting are trapped. Their ostensible protectors are paralyzed, and the predators are in no particular hurry. Who can stop them?There is relentless, dread-fueled suspense here, and a kind of procedural efficiency that reminds me of Paul Greengrass’s fact-based films, like “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93.” The rigorous honesty of “Quo Vadis, Aida?” is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.Aida may have some of those qualities, but her brave attempts to escape only emphasize how trapped she really is. The title asks where she is going. The available answers are grim. If she can save herself, can she also save her family? And if so, what about the thousands of others whose lives are in peril?Her situation is dramatized with exquisite empathy. Pity isn’t the only emotion in play; it does battle with shame and disgust. The failure of the U.N. is almost as appalling as Mladic’s viciousness. The rule-bound, well-meaning Dutch officers in charge of the base become the general’s hostages and then his accomplices. The massacre was a war crime supervised by peacekeepers — a failure of institutional resolve, of humanity, of civilization.Eventually, Mladic was tried in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison. The final act of “Quo Vadis, Aida,” Bosnia and Herzegovina’s official Oscar entry, makes clear that many other perpetrators escaped with impunity. The war ended, and some version of normalcy returned, but Zbanic takes no consolation in the banal observation that life goes on. It’s true that time passes, that memory fades, that history is a record of mercy as well as of savagery. But it’s also true — as this unforgettable film insists — that loss is permanent and unanswerable.Quo Vadis, Aida?Not rated. In Bosnian, English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch through Angelika’s virtual cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More