There are times to say goodbye, see you, someday while I did not see you at all over decades and we followed our paths. There is always some reason(s) why our ways cross in our life time, difficult to understand why and where from it goes where too it leads, what is the goal? I was a bit surprised to find RKK's obituary on the french site of "La règle du Jeu" to begin with. I just surf here and there and some philosophers publish there, well, always interesting to read some stuff, if any. There, I read yesterday that Rémy Kolpa Kolpoul aka RKK had passed away on last Sunday 3rd of May. I knew him from the time when we were children, I guess we shared some school years in Paris, not that much but still. I knew his mother, always anxious, a widow who had lost her husband too quickly. An after-Shoah family, displaced people, and quite assimilated to the French society. I cannot say that I followed his career or résumé. I just remembered a sort of early age "precarity" that was normal at the time. I am not interested in describing this aspect. On the other hand, he had a touch of "creativity" and this is what kept his name alive in my memory. He had no Yiddish and in my family it was the usual tongue together with Russian and Ukrainian, Hebrew. A connection and a distance at the same time.
Looking backward, I lately discovered, in Israel, the path that he had followed in music, tunes, tonalities, sounds, music expertise and his work from "Libération" to the Paris FM radio Nova, I must confess I never had listened too. I will put on his article on a late encounter with Serge Gainsbourg. The singer was also a Jew from Odessa, by the way, not that far from our family town of Nikolayev.
On the other hand, RKK (with a French touch of humor, he was called "colle pas qu'aux poules/don't clutch, only to hon's/hens") loved Brazilian music and styles and this Latino area creative "continent" spaces our scope of life and swing, dancing and swaying around in intermingled rhythms of diversified tendencies tied up and down in Portuguese, while it also can be from Old Europe. On a Klezmer tradition? I presum that he could have walked on this line, just because it is much trendy and includes all cultures and tunes. And he had some clutch with this, sort of "post-Bundist" must of all "trans" that innervate newness and dynamism.
It is quite nice that we can say him goodbye. I bury a lot of people. I could not be present at his burial (and cremation) today. Maybe, this aspect that we are all sketched up to be human beings beyond all prohibitions or moral judgment is something I deeply experience in Israeli society as for today. It may sound a bit bizarre that far-distanced curricula over years and years still unit us when it deals with life and repose. A Jewish Catholic Orthodox priest in Israel, chanting in Hebrew and hearing confessions in Yiddish can rally wish "memory eternal" to an early friend and greet his life-path. Here, a good way to say something in Yiddish, Russian. Un adieu français. How fascinating life can be, just that as Psoy Korolenko sings in Russian, Yiddish, Esperanto and we are connected because sounds never faint, they continue in "untouchable" ways. Zay gezint, זייט געסונט און מיט אייביקער רו, Вечная память et "you are not under arrest", tudo bom!
אפשר א פאר
ווערטער צו שרייבן, ווייל ס' א ביסל צערדרייט און דאך ס'מאכט זין צו זאגן
''להת'' צו א פריינט פון די קינדעריארן. כ'האב אים גאר ניט געזען אדער
געהערט סעת זיין לעבן, פשוט דידאזיקכע וואך ווען ער איז געשטרבן. און כאטש
איז דאס ווי א צייכן איבער אמונה און אפיקארזלעכקיט אז איך קען זאגן צו אים
שךום עליך און זיי מיר געזונא אויף אייביק.
Tudo bom
נחת
מיר האבן געכאפט א סך שמועס