2/2/90

Out of the Ashes, Joy

By: SAM ORBAUM

Songs seek out Tova Lebovits. "I find myself humming songs I'd never heard of," she says. "Then the words come to me. I didn't decide to be a songwriter."
    Success loves a winner, and Tova appears on the verge of success. Her first folk-pop album is to be released in the spring, and the radio stations are already driving the bandwagon instead of jumping on it. But she pooh-poohs illusions of fame. None of that, she says, is supposed to happen to a 40-year-old Jerusalem housewife, a recent American immigrant, an erstwhile office manager with no musical background and someone whose muse hovers above the kitchen sink.
    Tova sings with the sort of confidence that comes from not fearing failure. This is also a happy woman. Her songs are joyful - even when they draw on the litany of her life's sadness.
    Her father, a Holocaust hero, died just a few months ago. When she was seven her mother died. Shortly after that, her beloved grandmother died, and then her brother Ze'ev died. Tova herself almost lost her own life, fighting a severe illness for three long years.
    "My songs take a sad event and turn it around, because I find the positive side," Tova explains, with the sort of expression that looks like a huge warm smile with a face formed around it. "Like Ze'ev" - who was retarded and physically handicapped and died in his early twenties - "we gave him love and got it back tenfold. He is not a bad memory, but a very pleasant one."
    "Love's Labours Lost," which appears on her upcoming album B'yom Tova ("On a Good Day"), is a tribute to Ze'ev and that powerful family love.
    She remembers a warm, joyous, intense home, with four brothers ("a stepbrother, a half-brother, a full brother and a retarded brother"). "The six of us were each born in a different country, and at home we spoke a different language every day of the week.
"There was always laughter and yelling and crying and singing. That nourished me and taught me to adapt to anything."

TOVA IS Israeli-born, but left for America at the age of seven. "I have hot Hungarian-gypsy blood, I'm soft and flexible as an American, but I'm Israeli in my heart, soul and chutzpah."
    Her father was a hassidic rabbi who survived the Holocaust in Hungary by masquerading as a priest. While ministering to Christians, he ran various operations to save Jews. With 12 languages at his command, he became adept at pulling the wool over everyone's eyes. He once posed as the Austrian consul, marched into a concentration camp and, shouting authoritatively in German, ordered the release of "his" Austrian subjects.     Among the Austrian Jews he saved were his future mother-in-law and a man who years later as an Egged bus driver recognized Tova's father and stopped his vehicle in the middle of traffic to give him an emotional hug.
    Such family history is very much at the heart of Tova's music.
    Tova wrote "Heaven and Earth" with something akin to a rear-view vision of Jerusalem. The tune emerged out of nowhere - with the words in pursuit - while she and her family were on a bus to Eilat. "But I had nothing to write the lyrics on, and no way to record the music. So I scribbled the words on the back of our bus tickets, and frantically hummed the tune all the way to Eilat."
    She writes her songs in Hebrew and then translates them into English. "The music would lose something if it were the other way around," says Tova. "English is a richer language, but it is not as singable as Hebrew."
    Besides, she says, Israel Radio will play Hebrew songs or English-language songs from abroad, but not songs written in Israel in English.
    Ironically the radio stations that "discovered" her were the secular left Voice of Peace and the religious right Channel Seven.
    Van Gogh, for whom Tova has a particular soft spot, once observed that "in most men there is a poet who died young, whom the man survived." In Tova is a poet who survived death, from which the songwriter was born.