When only the music is left

Robbed of speech, Esther Davis remembered to sing

By Mayer Fertig

Dementia in her final years robbed Esther Davis of her ability to speak. But remarkably, until several months before her death on Rosh Chodesh Elul 5769, she still sang. Every Shabbos morning when her son would visit, she would emerge from the silence imposed by Alzheimer’s disease and join him in singing familiar family melodies, some actually composed by family members. It was an impromptu form of music therapy that on one occasion yielded an amazing result.

Esther’s son is Mayer Davis, a longtime West Hempstead resident and, since 1991, the cantor at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he and his wife spend Shabbos most weeks. Mayer succeeded his father, Cantor Avrum Davis, who began at KJ in 1973 after a long tenure at Congregation Shaaray Tefilah in Far Rockaway. After Mussaf each Shabbos, Cantor Davis would walk next door to his parents’ apartment.

“In her last years she mostly sat there with a blank look on her face. I would walk in and touch her hand, and start singing,” he said, and she would sing along.

“One of the songs I started singing with my mother was a melody for ‘Aishes Chayil’ [A Woman of Valor], which she had heard my grandfather sing to my grandmother every Friday night at their Shabbat table,” Davis wrote in the liner notes of “Bridges of Generations” (Sameach Music, 2010), a just-released audio documentary he produced, of the songs he would sing with his mother and father-in-law, who also suffers from dementia. “Aishes Chayil” appears on the album as track 4.

“Like many simple Shabbat songs, it had a Part A and a Part B,” he recalled. “As I sang with her, she hummed along beautifully, her eyes closed intensely as though she were conjuring up every musical note and emotional feeling from her own childhood. He finished both parts of the song and was about to begin again, “when Ima suddenly opened her eyes wide with a smile on her face and shook her head left to right animatedly. She then put her hand on my chest and proceeded to teach me Part C — which I had never before heard in my life. Now, it seemed, the song was, at last, complete.”

According to the English-language abstract of a 2009 article in a German medical journal, “Patients suffering from dementia are nevertheless still able to render exceptional musical performances. For example, they can recognize music from childhood and reproduce lyrics and melodies of songs with four verses.” The article was inconclusive, recommending further research into the long-term influence of music therapy on patients with dementia.

In an interview before Pesach, Cantor Davis offered a somewhat more emotional explanation. “Such kavana, such feeling, and so happy that she was teaching me something,” he said. “It just blew me away ... You speak to scientists, you speak to doctors, they say that part of the brain wasn’t affected. I think it’s the spiritual part. I think it’s the Neshama [the soul]. It’s the spiritual power of melody.”

Davis reports several unusual episodes surrounding tunes heard on the album. He credits the first track, “Zayde Charlie’s Niggun,” with calming his bronchitis-stricken father-in-law, Chaskel Fastag, or Zaydie Charlie, during a Purim 2007 visit to the emergency room.

“It saved his life,” Davis said. “We were about two minutes from being on a respirator.” But the family was able to bring Fastag’s panicky, inadequate breathing under control with song instead, and soon their beloved patriarch was able to sing along through his oxygen mask.

“Koh Echsof,” the 16th and final track, “was one of my mother’s default niggunim,” he said. “It’s a gorgeous melody with a lot of neshama.”

In January, he and his brother were in a cab in Yerushalayim, where they were about to unveil the monument on their mother’s grave. “As we were approaching Har Hamenuchot the driver turned on a CD,” Davis recalled, and the familiar tune poured out of the speakers.

“Bridge of Generations” is “a musical memoir in memory of my mother, and it’s an attempt to bring generations together. That’s probably the best way to put it,” Davis explained. “This is a documentary. This is about continuity. This is about continuing traditions from generation to the next, even though they’re gone. Their music lives on and they live on thru their music.

“In an ideal world this is meant to be heard while you’re reading the stories,” in the liner notes, he said.

The project took about two years. It is not ordinarily commercial Jewish music — a description Davis doesn’t challenge.

“Its weakness and its strength are the same thing,” he said. “It’s so personal. But everybody who I speak to about it — it resonates with them.”

The album includes several short clips of Davis singing along with his mother or father-in-law - the only such recordings in existence.

“I went into record them about a year and a half ago — that’s what you hear on the album. A few months after I recorded them, they could no longer sing,” he said sadly.

“My mother was beautiful. She was vibrant — she had red hair. She was a travel agent; she was a great cook,” recalled Davis. His parents were married for 64 years.

“My father in law — he was so sharp and so special.” Zaydie Charles — Chaskal Fastag — has been in the throes of a dementia-like illness for the past four years or so.

A portion of the proceeds from “Bridge of Generations” will go to the Alzheimer’s Association. The album is available at Judaica stores and online at jewishjukebox.com.