Song(s) of the Day # 3,411 Levyosn

 

I graduated in 1990, and running away from fear of a job in an office, motored off to Czechoslovakia with my brother and sister in law in Autumn 1990. We drove through fairytale Prague and grim Bratislava, and successively grimmer Slovakian fields, towns and villages, to a couple of teaching jobs in a town in Southern Czechoslovakia, namely Komarno, a bordertown on the Danube, between Slovakia and Hungary.

I was made very welcome there by my teaching colleagues and students but it was a strange year of personal experience. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet soldiers departed, having sold their guns to the local gypsies, leaving a momentary political void. The Gypsies seem to have rushed to fill the economic vacuum that existed there too. I had my name spray painted on a wall. There wasn't much to do there.

Nobody would come to the Gypsy bars with me after work. The best entertainment, and food that Komarno seemed to offer was at The Europa Hotel, in the heart of town, near to the bridge over the Danube to Hungary. I'd go to the hotel for my cigarettes, sold in the kiosk in the front foyer by a middle aged woman with blue hair and a mouth full of gold fillings. The gypsies hung around everywhere in the hotel, opening wallets crammed with banknotes whenever they got the opportunity. 

The meals served in the Europa's restaurant were pretty damned good. Chicken stews, schnitzel and goulash. A glass of red wine. There was always an excellent Gypsy band playing there and the violinist would prowl the carpet floor to lean over your table  and play solos for you. Thirty years and more on, it remains a vivid memory.

Listening to the Levyosn album Levyosn's Lullaby yesterday morning shook these memories loose. It's a fabulous evocation of Eastern European history and memory. The record is actually a product of Boston's Yiddish music scene. But the thoughts of appalling historical experience listening to it are inevitable. It's a wonderful if rather painful spin. I must go back to Komarno . The Europa Hotel, looking at it now on Google has been seriously upgraded and is barely recognisable from what it once was. I imagine that goes for the whole town.