Travel Guide to Nicaragua

TRAVEL GUIDE TO NICARAGUA

The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor

Maya Beiser, cello

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 @ 7pm
Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia

Thursday, November 17, 2022 @ 7:30pm
Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York City

PROGRAM

Travel Guide to Nicaragua (2022) Michael Gordon
–world premiere–

Co-commissioned for The Crossing and Donald Nally
by Carnegie Hall and Penn Live Arts

1. Go (after Genesis 12:1)
2. My father’s father
3. The most famous Nicaraguan
4. Goldie
5. After my father was left in Poland
6. Cuando quiero llorar
7. The story of our sister
8. I remember

NOTE + TEXTS

Travel Guide to Nicaragua
words and music by Michael Gordon

Co-commissioned for The Crossing and Donald Nally by Carnegie Hall and Penn Live Arts.

a note from the composer:

My father, an immigrant from Poland, who was not a particularly religious man, turned to me one day and quoted the opening of Genesis 12:1, (Lech Lecha) “Go out from your land, your people, your father’s house.” He said, "That’s the story of my life." I realized that my father was sharing the beginning of my family’s journey, from the old country to the Americas.

No one knows exactly the circumstances surrounding my grandfather’s departure from Dzyatlava, (Zdzieciol in Polish, Zhetl in Yiddish) to Cuba in the early 1920s. The various accounts include – that he abandoned his family in search of a different life, that he was gassed in WWI and lost a sense of himself, that he got himself into some kind of trouble. It was possible at that time to get a visa to Cuba. Also, there is no clear explanation as to why, in 1927, my father’s mother Goldie chased after her husband to Cuba, and why she left one child, my father, back behind in Poland. In Travel Guide to Nicaragua there are different streams of information that are hazy, even contradictory, and very little is conclusive.

Travel Guide to Nicaragua was to premiere on March 25, 2020. That performance was postponed, as concert halls around the world closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In isolation with my family, I took time to rethink the piece. Things were missing. I began to focus on the shoe box that served as a container for the remnants of my father’s former life – old photographs of friends and family from his town Dzyatlava, WWII medals and documents from when he served in the Philippines, and small trinkets. Everyone in the photographs had been killed by the Nazis. That memory, ever present, loomed silently over my childhood home, like an invisible bird hovering overhead. Also missing at that time from Travel Guide was my chance meeting with a survivor from my father's town, a woman who at age 16 fled into the surrounding woods when the Nazis began shooting. She brought that hovering bird into a clearer reality.

None of this has been easy to write. Like my father, I put past events in a box somewhere deep in my memory, and move on. My father rarely spoke about his past. He never complained. He moved through life with good humor, with an upbeat disposition. His memories stayed in the shoe box.

Throughout Travel Guide to Nicaragua only my grandmother Goldie has been called by name. Everyone else is referred to as father’s father, sister, brother, cousin, relative, and so forth. I left out specific names because this story is just one of so many stories of immigration and displacement.

This work is written for The Crossing led by Donald Nally and for cellist Maya Beiser. My first work for The Crossing, Anonymous Man, is also autobiographical. It tells the story of living on my block on Desbrosses Street in lower Manhattan, and my interaction there with two men who lived outside, on the street. For both Anonymous Man and Travel Guide to Nicaragua the vocal music is inspired by the great artistry of this ensemble. Travel Guide to Nicaragua continues my long musical collaboration with the spectacular Maya Beiser, a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, for whom I have written two solo works: Industry and All Vows.

–Michael Gordon, October 2022

1. Go (after Genesis 12:1)

Go out from your land, your people, your father’s house.
I remember my father saying: that’s the story of my life.

2. My father’s father

My father’s father left Poland in the 1920s
My father’s father abandoned his family
Some say he was gassed during WW1
My father’s father
Some say that he was in trouble
Either way my father’s father left for Cuba

He ran away.
He was in trouble.
He abandoned his family.
He returned from the war confused and crazy.

3. The most famous Nicaraguan

The most famous Nicaraguan of all time is Rubén Darío.
He wrote a new kind of Spanish poetry, Modernismo,
Expressing pride in Latin American identity,
His name is everywhere - on the currency, on the Teatro Nacional,
Even as a boy I knew his name, Rubén Darío.

In school we all learned his poetry, from memory,
Every student would dramatize a poem -
This one is called “A Margarita Debayle"

Rubén Darío,
While convalescing at the home of his doctor
From the effects of alcohol consumption,
Wrote this poem for 8 year old Margarita
In exchange for a glass of whiskey.

Margarita, está linda la mar,
y el viento
lleva esencia sutil de azahar;
yo siento
en el alma una alondra cantar;
tu acento.
Margarita, te voy a contar
un cuento.

"Éste era un rey que tenía
un palacio de diamantes,
una tienda hecha del día
y un rebaño de elefantes.

Un kiosco de malaquita,
un gran manto de tisú,
y una gentil princesita, tan bonita,
Margarita, tan bonita como tú."

Margarita, the sea is beautiful,
and the wind
carries the subtle essence of orange blossoms;
I can feel
in my soul a lark singing;
it is your voice.
Margarita, let me tell you
a story:

“There was a king that had
a palace made of diamonds,
a tent made of day,
and a herd of elephants,

A kiosk made of malachite,
a huge lamé robe,
and a kind little princess, as beautiful.
Margarita, as beautiful as you.”

4. Goldie

My father’s mother, Goldie, chased after her husband, my father’s father.
Goldie didn’t have the money to take all three children to Cuba.
She took the baby girl and the wild older brother and left the quiet one,
my father, behind in Poland.

Goldie, why did you leave my father behind?

Goldie found her husband in Cuba.
It didn’t work out. Or maybe he just left again.
A cousin said he got in trouble again.
My father’s father changed his name and found his way to Nicaragua.
Goldie smuggled into the United States of America on a boat.

5. After my father was left in Poland

After my father was left in Poland –
I know little about his life
He had some pictures he kept in a shoe box
But he wouldn’t talk about them.
His grandfather, in whose trust he had been left,
Died later that year.

The twelve year old boy
Bounced around from relative to relative.
Once a week a relative would send him a loaf of bread
Which he would cut into seven pieces,
One for each day of the week.
After a twelve year wait, in March 1939,
my father was summoned to the US Embassy
For a visa interview.
The diplomat asked him a lot of questions,
To determine his political leanings.
The diplomat’s secretary stood in back
And signaled the appropriate responses to my father.
With visa in hand, he was advised to leave Poland immediately.

Reunited with his mother, brother and sister in Boston
He was drafted and shipped out to the Pacific.
I know little about his life in the army.
He had some medals he kept in that shoe box,
But he wouldn’t talk about them.
The shoe box says: Florsheim, White Weave, 9C
I don’t remember my father ever wearing white shoes.

I asked my father about the shoe box.
Inside there were photos of young men and women -
All dressed up
My father and his friends.
He would shake his head and say “all gone.”

By chance, I met a woman who was from my father’s town.
She was sixteen years old in August 1942,
When the Nazis marched all the Jews to the cemetery and started shooting.
She ran into the woods.
The few survivors lived in the forest and fought with the resistance.

After the war, the survivors wrote their memories of their town and that day
In a book that is simply called a Memory Book.
They wrote names of those who died.

The woman I met, by chance,
From my father’s town,
She asked me to write this song.

6. Cuando quiero llorar

Juventud, divino tesoro,
¡ya te vas para no volver!
Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro…
y a veces lloro sin querer…
(from Rubén Darío's poem Canción de otoño en primavera)

Youth, divine treasure,
you’re gone, never to return!
When I want to cry, I do not cry…
and sometimes I cry without wanting to…
(from Rubén Darío's poem Song of Autumn in the Springtime)

7. The story of our sister

My sister says the story of our sister is important, so this is it.
Did you ever wake up and the world you knew was different?
Maybe your father wasn’t your father,
Or your brother wasn’t your brother,
Or you had a sister that you didn’t know about?

My sister says the story of our sister is important, so this is it.
After the War, my father went to Nicaragua and to see his father, the father who ran away. While he was there, he met a woman and had a daughter.
She grew up in the house of my father’s father.

My sister says the story of our sister is important, so this is it.
My father’s father told my sister,
(the sister I didn’t know about)
That the stories about him were not true.
He was not the one who left our father behind.

Did he anticipate that one day we might be asking questions about him?
Did he anticipate that one day we would meet and our sister would defend him?

My sister says the story of our sister is important, so this is it.
My father ran a store in downtown Managua where he sold textiles.
I would jump on the long rolls of fabric and run around the store talking to everyone.
Our sister also came to the store. Not when I was there.
It’s strange to think that we didn’t know each other, or about each other.

My sister says the story of our sister is important, so this is it.

8. I remember

I remember my mother baked a cake
I remember my father ran a store
I remember that over the cinder block wall
Was the jungle and there was quicksand there
And I climbed over the wall and into the jungle

I remember iguanas in the field
I remember my dog, his name was Rusty
I remember the parrot in the tree
And he bit me and I was bleeding
And I still have the scar

I remember my mother baked a cake
I remember my father ran a store
I remember iguanas in the field
I remember the parrot in the tree
I don’t remember my father’s father

I called my sister and asked her
She said: “I have clear memories
He gave me two puppies
Dad used to take me to his house”
“Did I go too?”
“I don’t remember that”

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