Ode to the accordion

Last Friday I dropped by Whole Foods for some peanut butter and ended up in a real-life piece of Palo Alto street theater.

The evening’s soundtrack came from Naomi Zamir, who was playing Central European folk songs on her gleaming accordion on the sidewalk. She smiled at me as I stopped to listen. A woman on her way into the store exclaimed: “Squeezebox sister! I play, too.” Zamir would have been happy to play a duet, but she had to settle for a chat with me.

Zamir, who lives in Menlo Park, told me she grew up on a kibbutz in Israel. The Hungarian nurses that she and the other children had gave her a connection to Central European music. The nurses also had too-vivid memories of World War II.

Zamir kept playing her plaintive songs, and presently a young woman came out of the grocery store in tears. The music, she said, made her emotional because it reminded her of her home in New Orleans. She comes from a neighborhood that was destroyed by the hurricane, and she and her accordion-playing friends all ended up in different areas after the disaster.

She lingered for a long time to listen, wiping her face from time to time, and Zamir said encouragingly, “It’s good to cry.”

Photo by Davi Cheng, courtesy of morgueFile.com.