From Jill Ayn Schneider

In 1972, a girl friend from my childhood turned me on to Japanese Buddhism.  I became very interested and shortly thereafter received an initiation through a ceremony performed by a Japanese Buddhist devotee. I went on to spend the next two years sitting in front of a scroll, chanting in a language which I didn’t understand at all.  This was just one of many things I have done to just get some relief from the “tsuris” (problems) that fills up this facakta mind I have going on between these two rather large Spock ears.  I get exhausted thinking about it.  So, because of this, I have reverted back to Oy Vey on many occasions.  I actually experienced relief and then began to speak with friends and clients about the possibility of an Oy Vey Therapy.  Why not?  It’s concise, easy to remember and it flows easily off anyone’s tongue.  

I have had a few careers since teaching school in the late 1960’s.  My parents said that I had get a degree to teach in order to get them to pay for my education, which actually turned out great.  I love to do things in reverse, so besides teaching children how to read and write, I learned everything I could from them, since they were a heck of a lot more intelligent than any adults I had ever encountered.  After ten years of getting my real life degree from Kindergarten, 1^st and 2^nd graders, I moved on to marry, have a child and then I became a massage therapist/bodyworker/ and a juice fasting coach.

I created Annie Sunbeam; the Cosmic Cowgirl in the middle 80’s and proceeded to perform for schools, private parties and community centers.  I wrote my own songs about the Earth and about health and healing.  With the elderly, I performed in nursing homes and assisted living centers.  I stayed with the standards since many of them were mavens (authorities) and I must say that they were a fairly tough audience as were the children.  These nursing home gigs started in Gainesville , FL where I rarely ran into Jewish folks, so I polished my gospel and old time songs but it wasn’t until I moved to Miami Beach that I knew I was up against some serious audiences. I had to expand my limited repertoire of old time songs and protest songs of the 60’s. I quickly brought in 30’s and 40’s Cole Porter favorites, Hebrew songs and a couple of Yiddish ones as well.

Now, you need to understand, that even though I am “Jewish” by birth, I grew up in Westchester County , New York ….not Brooklyn or The Bronx.  The only time I probably heard a real Oy Vey, might have been in the dressing rooms at Loehman’s on Fordham Road in the Bronx, as some zoftic (full figured) woman was trying to squeeze her cantaloupe sized breasts into a smaller size dress that wasn’t a knit.

My mother, petite and perfect, never spoke a word in Yiddish and didn’t even have a New York accent. I found out that my grandparents didn’t speak Yiddish.  They were either born here or came when they were very young. Where I grew up in New Rochelle, NY Jews didn’t speak Yiddish openly.  They didn’t use the perfect word schlep (carry heavy things) or tsoris (problems). I had heard my Grandmother Jenny exert a few Oy Vey’s under her breath, but I never thought much of it.   

Somehow the expression, Oy Vey, truly the Maha Mantra, found its place deeply imbedded in my brain. Why not take a deep breath right now and exhale a few Oy Veys, or even a full hearted Oy veyizmir for the sake of your kishkes (intestines).

The nursing home gigs really brought it all together for me.  I realized 25 years ago when I started to play for mostly elderly Jewish folks that even though they were a “picky” audience, they also were quite open to many “feelings” that these songs and expressions brought to the forefront.  Most of them also had just a bit of Alzheimer’s.   

I stopped short when asked me to play New York , New York .  I liked that song, but singing with an acoustic guitar just didn’t cut it.  After I had finished a performance a few years ago at a nursing home in West Palm Beach , I couldn’t help but overhear a slightly deaf gal comment to her friend, “Vel, she’s no Barbara Streisand, but she has a good poysonality!” That statement sums up my work as an entertainer/music therapist for the elders for sure.  I was very flattered.  I certainly doubted that anyone who could have possibly sounded like Barbara would work for bubcas. ($50) for a three hour schlep in the Florida summer 95 degree heat.

One story sticks out as a major impact in my whole life.  There was Bernie Imberman, who was 86 years of age who didn’t live in the assisted living facility, but would come and volunteer with his violin on the same day and time that I was there.  We became a bit of a duet on some of the songs and just extended the show with his magnificent Yiddish and Hebrew repertoire.  Bernie was a survivor of the Holocaust.  One day when I went to visit him at his apartment near by for a little rehearsal, he told me that he had saved 200 Jews from the gas chambers.  “How did you do that, Bernie?”  I curiously asked.  I was sitting there as though the entire world had stopped and he and I were the only ones on it.  “I had been taken to an internment camp in France with many others who were all awaiting orders to be transported to Germany .  I was there with my wife and my small son.  I began to play my violin and the wife of the French Lieutenant, who was in charge of the camp, asked me if I would accompany her as she played the piano.  We became friends and to make a long story short, I talked her into talking her husband into letting us all go.  And he did.” 

My heart was filled with so much emotion. Now he is someone who could truly understand the implications of Oy Vey to Joy Vey. I couple of years after we had met and played so sweetly together, I was notified that Bernie had died peacefully in his sleep.  I can almost hear him playing right now, those lamenting minor chord Yiddish melodies.  Straight to the heart of Oy Vey they went.  

I began to think more in Yiddish from that time period of my life.  It had an authentic emotional value.  It was a secret language, a language of affection, strong heart wrenching expressions and most importantly of humor and survival.  Yiddish, the language of the simple people and of the mothers who preserved fairytales, legends and memories through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, and cruelty, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.  One of the greatest literary genius’ was Issac Bashevis Singer who wrote in Yiddish and even accepted the Nobel prize in Literature in 1978 for his numerous novels, short stories and more. 

During the middle 1980’s I was given an opportunity to create an intergenerational program to honor him for his work. I had a position at Florida International University ’s Southeast Florida Center on Aging.  I was the Director of Intergenerational Programming.  My purpose was to create Intergenerational Programs for three counties in South Florida .  One of my projects was at a church in Bal Harbour, FL.   I worked along with a school in the area to honor their elders.  Sheppard Broad, who founded the area as a developer, George Abbot, who was 103 at the time, had been a very brilliant and famous Broadway producer and Issac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer.  The children did their research, wrote and presented their reports, created dances, art work and music representing these three men who had contributed so much to the community and to the world.  It was a great day and I will never forget it.

Continuing along this road of my romance with Yiddish, many of my massage clients were elderly Jewish European women. Erna Rosenberg had me come to her condo twice a week.  I would arrive just after she had taken her daily morning swim.  What I loved about these gals was the fact that they were very classy.  They had their own massage tables, so I didn’t have to schlep mine out of my car’s trunk, on a carrier, from parking lots, into elevators and down long carpeted corridors and back.  They had consideration for people who worked for them. Jeanie Berman also had me come twice a week and she had a table as well.  In fact, she knew that her table was a very old one, so she gave me some money to buy her a newer, larger and more comfortable one.  Sometime, she would fall asleep on the table and I just took my money and left her there.  Jeanie was one of the most special older women whom I had ever known.  She loved to sculpt and would carry her sculptures from her studio to her condo in a folding baby carriage.  Very clever she was.  She also used to cause me to say Oy Vey, when she would sometimes answer the door NAKED.  I couldn’t help but give out an Oy Vey and then proceeded to laugh my tush off.  I scolded her and told her that one day the neighbor might have her door open at the same time.  She was irreverent. She didn’t care.  So, of course your know that one day I knocked on her door and at the same time the bellman walked out of the other condo.  Stark NAKED and laughing hysterically, I quickly ran in to her apartment and closed the door.  “I told you so, I told you so,” I said to Jeanie.  She happened to be a beautiful 80 or so year old woman, even naked.  She probably gave those people who worked in the building something to talk about after that.

There were many, many women who allowed me into their very personal domains.  Massage has a way of allowing the heart to stand up and be counted.  They all would say “Jill, you have goldena hanz” (golden hands). And then a sigh of relief would always follow that statement.

I’m a grown up now and I can say whatever the heck I want.  Whew! The 60's revolutionary that I am is now in need of an army of sisters and brothers who want to lament and then get back to enjoying our lives.  That’s the trick.  Freak out, even cry or scream if you want, then say oy vey, take a breath and go back to what you were doing and be better at it.  If Oy Vey can do it for me, it can do it for you.  I’m free from the shackles of painful emotions that end up getting stuck somewhere in my body, then manifesting a “disease”, and then keeping me occupied with self-worry and taking my time to figure out how to heal the damn sickness….and all I really had to do before all this came to be was to just do the Oy Veys, religiously, without trepidation, and giggle my way back into my sanity.