
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.
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