Barbara – the lady with a sad face

The Jewish girl Monique Cerf, Barbara, is perhaps France’s greatest singer of all time, thanks to being at once a poet (“a songwriter,” by her own definition), a composer, a performer — and such a human and tormented character. She has only one competitor for this title — Edith Piaf. But Piaf, a great singer with a rare voice, was “only” a performer.

I wanted to define Barbara as “the greatest Jewish singer,” but on second thought, the title would not have pleased her. Not because she denied her Jewishness, but because she defined herself, simply, Une femme qui chante — “a woman who sings.” The 60s made her a superstar at once, alongside Brassens, Montaigne, and Berle, who were the objects of our admiration, we high school students and then the young students of the Left Bank.

Barbara, for us, was also a musical “must” of those years. We didn’t deal with her biography, certainly not her Jewishness (which only dawned on me many years later). She was a unique voice in the Sixties — and over the years, a voice that transcended time and place.

The complicated relationship with her father

Monique Serf (meaning deer), was born in 1930 in Paris, the daughter of Esther Brodetzky from Moldavia and Jacques Serf, a Jew from Alsace. The Nazis' Approach to the Capital France Forced the family to flee, until they found refuge in the city of Tarbes in southwestern France. Monique attended school, hiding, of course, her Jewishness. At the end of the war, the family returned to Paris—and broke up. The father left, and she stayed with her mother.

"Wonderful Poetry"Nantes” (Nantes) describes her hasty journey to her father’s deathbed. She receives a phone call, which she recreates in a poem: “Come quickly, there is not much hope, he asked to see you.” She is late. The father is already dead, and in the room at the end of the corridor, in the pale, cold light, “four men in Sabbath clothes” rise to meet her.

She sings of her love for her dead father, whom she had not seen for many years, and who before his death “could not have been content to warm himself with my smile.” There is sadness in her face as she sings it, and one can assume that it is about her father’s death, and about the loss. She completed the song only four years after it was written.

Thanks to an extraordinary film about Barbara that was shown years ago on the Arte channel, I discovered for the first time the connection between her life and her songs. The film reawakened in me the emotions and vibrations of listening to her works in my youth. Barbara always said that in order to write, one must live (the things).

From the film I learned that during the war, when she was ten years old, she suffered sexual abuse from her father, who later abandoned her until the day he died. She wanted to forgive because “she got out of it, thanks to the song” — but she couldn’t. The regret she expresses in “Nante” is that she didn’t have enough to tell her father that she forgave him. The film is the first source I found that referred to the terrible, “fart-inducing” experience she went through. But today, the matter is also mentioned on Wikipedia.

The terrible childhood experience also explains the mournful poem “Mon Enfance,” one of her most intense and moving works, about the difficult return to her hometown of Tarbes, to the house where she and her parents lived when they were “outlaws,” Jews hiding from the Nazis. But when she sings, “Childhood memories are the worst of memories,” she is not just referring to the war.

The beginning of Barbara's career

בParisAfter the war, she studied singing and sang in operettas, but due to family financial difficulties, her piano was taken away from her. She quarreled with her mother, left home, and moved to Brussels. She didn't know a soul there, and wandered the streets, with a constant dream in her heart — to sing. She began performing in a cabaret in the city of Charleroi as Barbara Brody – her mother's name was Brodetzky.

Later in Brussels, at a student club, she sang songs by the singer who is admired by all the French, Edith Piaf, who was then at the height of her fame. Barbara stood on stage like her, awkwardly planted. But Piaf's songs did not suit her, and the student audience threw objects at her from all directions. She realized that she had to build her own repertoire.

She sang songs by singer-poet Leo Ferré and other poets, and with such not-so-simple songs she appeared at the White Horse Literary Club and became the star of the show. This was her first success, which lasted about a year. During this time, she also released her first record.

In 1956 she returned to Paris and was accepted into the club L'Ecluse, the Dam, on the left bank of the Seine. With a piano and no microphone, she had to deal with a spoiled audience who drank, talked and paid no attention to the artists. For the next six years she was given the restrictive label of a singer. cabaret, and a baseless stigma of being an “intellectual,” which prevented her from moving forward and fulfilling her dream: to sing on a music hall stage. She dreamed of Bovino, the leading music hall on the Left Bank. But managers and promoters did not believe that she would succeed in front of a large popular audience.

And she still sang songs by others—Brel, Brassens, Aznavour. Due to a writing delay, as she defined it, she had not yet written anything of her own. The phone call about her father, received in December 1959, changed her life in an instant and turned her into a composer and poet—and a superstar. She wrote “Nantes” with labor and anguish, and in it she began to formulate her unique style: sensitive and delicate songs, exquisitely polished, with light humor and subtle irony.

The early 60s were the period of her breakthrough and rise to the top. First, performances at the Capucine Theater, where the character Barbara, the one and only singer-performer of her songs, was born. “The lady in heat” — a slender figure in dark clothing, a face with narrow angles, short dark hair, huge eyes, delicate movements of a bird — and a fluttering left hand raised to emphasize the end of the poem.

Then Bovino. Brassens was the main star, she was the supporting star, and she sang in the first half of the evening. He gave her a chance, and she stole the show for him. Her success was enormous. “The time had come, after ten years of school,” she said. “If success hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have continued much longer.”

A year later she was back in Bobino, this time as a leading star. The premiere was a media event on a national scale. Barbara was recognized as equal to the greatest, Berle, Brassens and Piaf, her sources of inspiration. All of France already knew the character, the wonderful way of presenting the songs, the captivating voice. Every audience found in her qualities that spoke to their hearts. Within two years, she was everything to everyone.

Barbara released her first album of songs, Mourir pour Mourir, literally "To Die for the Sake of Dying," meaning "If I have to die, then..." — and her choice is to die young — a wonderful album that has been listened to hundreds of times. Since then, for thirty years, she has created and sung her life as a woman.

“I couldn’t sing love songs written by men,” she said, and so she began writing love songs for women. The first of these is Dis, quand reviendras tu, “Say, when will you return,” full of emotion and longing, but as always with a smile, without despair.

She wrote serious songs with emotion and humor and lighter, more entertaining songs, and in each of them is a story that is polished down to the last detail. Each song is like a diamond. To the point where one wonders if she is just a poet, or if she writes novels in miniature. A kind of Marguerite Duras of the singing world. Barbara did not know solfege and did not read music.

She sat at the piano, played—she was an excellent pianist—and hummed to herself. Then she threw words on paper. That was how the birth of a song began. Everything was instinctive. When it came to arranging with the musicians, she asked them to produce sounds and arrangements that she couldn't name, and she made strange sounds, which they tried to translate into the language of the instruments. The arrangement she wrote always turned out to be a hit.

Barbara suffered from insomnia. She wrote at night, with enthusiasm and passion, and as soon as the grain of a song took shape in her soul, she needed someone else. One of the musicians was sleeping in her house, and she would wake him up in the middle of the night and ask him to come and listen. She didn't always listen to him—but he was like a first audience, in whose presence the song developed. She experienced finding the most appropriate words to express her feelings as an insurmountable struggle.

But it was precisely when depression took hold of her that the wonderful poem Le mal de vivre, “The Misery of Life,” was written almost automatically. “I write a poem like I write a letter, but I have no talent for writing to order. I have to live in order to write,” she explained.

In 1965, her best friend Lillian Benelli was killed in a car accident. Barbara was shocked, and with great difficulty composed “The Little Cantata,” a eulogy. “The cantata is so hard without you, I only have my heart and ten fingers to write it…”

Although she did not want to sing in Germany, she once went to Göttingen to perform for students. The piano in the hall did not please her — capriciously she demanded a grand piano, and no, she would not sing. The porters went on strike. The students volunteered to carry a grand piano to the hall. The warm treatment touched her heart so much that she composed the beautiful “Göttingen,” her song of reconciliation, as a Jewish Holocaust survivor and as a Frenchwoman, with parts of Germany.

After forgiving her father, she also became ill with the Germans. She also sang the record containing “Göttingen” in German—the only time she sang not in French: she was increasingly known around the world, and was understood in her own language.

Barbara was afraid of failure, and also of success — “Because what will happen next?” she wondered. In 1966, at the height of her fame, she fell into a deep depression and asked to retire. Superstar status did not suit her and she abhorred it. She did not like the character Barbara, hated cameras and tore up her photographs. “I can’t stand the way I look.”

“A pirate’s face,” they told her jokingly. “I prefer a woman’s face,” she replied, seriously considering fixing her aquiline nose. She hadn’t been seen in a television studio for twenty-two years.

The monstrous profession

The stage, that's what she really loved. She was a stage animal. She traveled all over France, from city to city, sometimes giving 300 performances a year. Each concert was like a mass, meticulously prepared. Every day she fought anew with venue managers over every detail. Everything was important to her. Before the show, she would lock herself in her dressing room for hours, with her fetish objects, and the dark stage costume that no one was allowed to touch. The long makeup ritual, during which Monique transformed into Barbara, was like a ritual of preparing a sacrifice.

She loved to hear the bustle of the gathered audience. Then the slender figure, at once simple and theatrical, would enter backstage. “I’m not suited to the profession,” she once said. “The moment of entering the stage, when you have to make a decision, ‘I’m going in’ — monstrous. But the moment I’m on stage, everything is forgotten.”

Her audience became younger and younger. The encores became longer, lasting twenty minutes. Sometimes, she would bring teenagers onto the stage, around the piano, demand “complete silence, so that I won’t hear a fly flying” — and sing, surrounded by jubilant fans.

In 1969, performances began at the Olympia, the No. 1 music hall in Paris, sold-out performances — all the tickets were sold out a whole month in advance. She sang about despair, about the fear of losing love, which is the most poignant of all. At the end of the last performance, she announced, backstage, her retirement. Everyone was shocked.

“I’ve been bartending for twenty years,” she explained. “I can’t go on like this. I’m not retiring completely, maybe I’ll continue writing, and I’ll also appear here and there. I’m disconnecting from the system. My profession is an adventurous profession. I’m adventurous. But in the way I work, I’m like a clerk. I’m the cousin who you know will come back to visit next year.”

The escape from the dull routine of life led her to make a film about the shores of the North Sea with Jacques Berle, an actor and director whose retirement from performances was a model for her. Berl was an old friend from the Brussels years, and they may have once been lovers. But Berl is dead, and “The Sun is Black” — as one of her famous poems is called.

In 1973, she moved from Paris to the village of Plessy on the banks of the Marne River, to a closed and enclosed house with an interior garden. The wanderings ended. She lived alone — she had often had stormy loves, but “not the talent to live in a couple.” She lived with loneliness, another wonderful song of hers, which she sang with a slight smile at the corner of her mouth: “I have no inclination for disasters, and if I have to die, then die of love.” One night, the anguish of life and loneliness became unbearable, and she tried to commit suicide. This event also gave rise to a song, a smiling one of course, in which she states that “it is better to live in hell than to be dead in heaven.”

Barbara was a tragicomic character, with immense pain and immense humor. Those close to her testified that she was completely unpredictable. Her absolute mastery of language allowed her to kill with her mouth. She knew how to be nice, to make people laugh until they were sick — and also to go wild. “An unbearable woman, an extraordinary woman.”

She was a terrible spendthrift. She loved to go on crazy shopping trips in disguise, buying ten items of everything. She was plagued by binges of luxury purchases, of clothes, especially shoes, but also pens, jewelry... The birth of credit cards aroused immense joy in her: “Wonderful! You don’t have to pay.” They had to take her card away.

In every city she sang, she left behind happy merchants. She was attached to objects, and equally ready to give up anything material—a vestige of the time when she had nothing. The lust for purchase was accompanied by a lack of real need. “You have a beautiful watch,” they told her. “Take it!” she replied.

In early 1974, before the end of the Yom Kippur War, she came to Israel. We heard her in Tel Aviv, we traveled after her. to Haifa, where we also talked. In Haifa, I recorded it, from my seat, on a simple tape recorder. I happened to find the recording 28 years later, and listened to it: and it was an almost mystical experience. In 1981, after a long retirement, she returned to the stage. More precisely, to the arena.

Another dream she fulfilled: to sing in a giant circus tent, which was set up on an empty lot in a suburb of Paris. Why circus? Her Moldovan family had connections with circus circles. Thirty songs in the show, a whole month of performances, a huge success. Again, the audience is very young, and she gives herself to this youth.

For a year during this period, she devoted her time and energy to the fight against AIDS. She visited prisons and hospitals. At every performance, she made an emotional appeal, humorously of course, to the young audience, and asked, actually begged, that they wear a condom. She kept a hotline open, day and night, for patients and just people who wanted to talk to her.

Her last fifteen years were divided between her home in Plessis and several tours. By the last one, her health was already in a bad state. The tour ended in 1994 in the city of Tours: she was unable to continue. This was her last performance, and she was 64 years old. Of the 250-300 songs she wrote and recorded, the songs from the 60s and early 70s will be remembered forever.

She began writing at the age of thirty, and her first, piercing poems had the power of a volcano erupting suddenly. There is maturity in these poems alongside freshness. They are simple and profound. They have a rudimentary quality, and at the same time they sound like the works of a veteran and experienced artist. Since 1994, she has been locked up in her home, mourning her life as a woman. She wrote an autobiography, continued to compose poems, and even considered recording a record. She died in November 1997. In a letter she wrote before her death, she said that “a person must be faithful to his truth, always afraid, but constantly moving forward.”

The Parisian Pictures Book

The article you just read is a chapter from the book “Parisian Pictures” written by Avital Inbar and is available as an electronic copy. At the Mendeley bookstoreThrough this book, you will become acquainted with the greats of French literature whom Avital Inbar translated and the great chanson singers such as Yves Montaigne and the poet/singer Bressan, whom the author knew personally. But that's not all, you can also read about the love-hate relationship between France and Israel and enjoy two translations of "Cyrano de Bergerac", one done by the author's father and the other done by Dori France some 80 years later. In short, a celebration of culture French And a must-read for every Francophile.