Tzadik
2003
Filmworks XIV: Hiding And Seeking
About This Album
The latest volume in John Zorn's provocative and prolific series of soundtrack collections belongs to one film, the very instructive and moving documentary Hiding and Seeking by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky. The film, a follow-up to the duo's A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, is a post-Holocaust picture that acts as a mirror image to its predecessor. Whereas the former film tried to humanize Hasidic Jews for outsiders, this film seeks to humanize outsiders to the Haredim. Centering on a trip to Poland by the family (Daum, his wife Rivka, and his two sons, who are ultra-orthodox Yeshiva students in Israel) to uncover family history and to seek out a Polish family that sheltered Rivka's father during WWII, the film is a dialogue back and forth about the insularity of the Haradem's world that shuns outsiders, humanism, and the kind of dialogue that can take place when even the notion of community is addressed. Zorn's score is one of his most beautiful and accessible. Written for acoustic guitar (Marc Ribot), vibraphone (Kenny Wollesen), percussion (Cyro Baptista), bass (Trevor Dunn), and voice (Ganda Suthivarakom), the 12 titles are all centered around a kind of Yiddish form of exotica.
Track List (try tracks 1,6 and 9)

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