Roza Eskenazy

D. Semsis, A. Tomboulis, R. Eskenazy (Athens, 1932)

Roza Eskenazy ( Greek Ρόζα Εσκενάζυ , * mid-1890s; † December 2, 1980 ) was a Greek singer who performed the works in the style of Rembetiko and traditional Greek songs from Asia Minor . Her musical career and work on recordings lasted from the late 1920s to the 1970s.

The childhood

Eskenazy was born into a poor family of Ashkenazi Jews in Constantinople , from which the family name Eskenazy is derived. She was named Sara Skinasi. Her father Awram Skinasi was a junk dealer. Besides Rosa, he and his wife Flora had two sons, Nissim and Sami. Roza Eskenazy always hid the date of her birth during her acting career, claiming to be born in 1910. She was probably born between 1895 and 1897.

After the turn of the century, the family moved to Saloniki , which was then part of the Ottoman Empire . Awram Skinasi found work in a cotton factory and had various sideline jobs to support the family. Sara learned to read and write from a girl next door, that was her only "school lesson". Sara, her brother and her mother lived for some time in Komotini , which at that time still had a large number of Turkish-speaking residents. The mother served as a maid in the home of a wealthy family, and Sara helped her with the housework.

One day they heard the owners of a Turkish tavern sing and wanted to hire her as a singer for their bars, which the mother, who absolutely did not want her daughter to become an actress, refused. In an interview, Roza later said that the time in Komotini was the turning point in her life. It was then that she decided to become a singer and a dancer.

The beginning of the career

Back in Salonika, the family rented an apartment near the city's Grand Hotel, where some of their neighbors were performing. Sara helped two dancers with their costumes and dreamed of appearing on stage as well.

As a young girl, Sara Skinasi fell in love with Janis Sardinidis, a rich young man from one of the most influential Cappadocian families. However, the family did not consent to the marriage of the two because they believed Sara was a dissolute person. The couple then secretly married around 1913, and Sara changed her first name to Roza, the name given for her artistic career.

Sardinidis died around 1917, leaving Roza with her son Paraschos. Since she was unable to combine her child's upbringing with her career, she handed him over to the Holy Taxiarchis Poor Asylum in Xanthi City ; the father's family supported the child financially. Paraschos Sardinidis later became a senior officer in the Greek Air Force. He did not see his mother again until 1935 in Athens .

Athens

After Sardinidis' death, Roza moved to Athens to continue her musical career. She performed with the Armenian cabaret artists Seramus and Sabel. Soon she got engagements as a dancer in clubs, where she sang in Greek, Turkish and Armenian. In one of these clubs she was discovered by the composer and impresario Panagiotis Toundas in the late 1920s . Toundas recognized her unusual talent and introduced her to Vassilis Toumbakaris from Columbia Records .

K. Lambros, R. Eskenazy, A. Tomboulis (Athens, ca.1930)

The first two recordings for Columbia, Mandili kalamatiano and Koftin eleni tin elia (1928), marked the beginning of a forty-year phase of recordings that lasted until the late 1960s. By the mid-thirties she recorded more than three hundred songs in this studio and became a popular star. Their repertoire included folk songs, mainly from Greece and from Smyrna, which is now Turkish . But her most important contribution to Greek music became the rembetiko , especially the Smyrna variant. She managed almost single-handedly that music of this genre could take a place in popular music. The Rembetiko is still associated with her unique voice today.

Soon after the first studio recordings, their first appearances began in the Athens nightclub Taygetos. She performed on stage with Toundass, the violinist Dimitrios Semsis and the oudist Agapios Tomboulis . The star of the group was Eskenasy, who received an unheard-of fee of 200 drachmas for each performance . She later told her biographer Kostas Chadsidoulis that she spent most of the fee on jewelry. Her weakness for expensive jewelry robbed her of most of her income.

At the height of her career, she signed an exclusive contract with Columbia Records around 1931/32. According to this contract, she should record at least 40 songs per year with a share of 5 percent for every record sold. At that time she was the only Greek artist with whom Columbia has signed such a record deal.

The international career

Soon Roza Eskenazy's songs spread beyond Greece and found supporters among the Greek population of the diaspora . Together with Tomboulis she gave successful concerts in Egypt, Albania and Serbia, which were not only visited and appreciated by the local Greek communities. Her songs aroused the anger of the Greek government, the song Preza otan Piis (Πρέζα όταν Πιείς, 'When you breathe the cocaine') was banned by the Greek general and dictator Ioannis Metaxas . The singers of the traditional rebetiko were then declared 'parias' of the Greek state. But the new forms of the old genre, as they had formed with Vassilis Tsitsanis , paved their way.

Second World War

Roza Eskenazy continued her appearances in Greek nightclubs during the Second World War with the attack on Greece by Italy in 1940 and the German occupation. In 1942 she was even able to open her own Kristall nightclub with her son Paraschoss . As a Jew, she had been able to obtain a false baptismal certificate; besides, she felt safe because she had a love affair with a German officer. However, she was not an assistant to the occupiers. She used her privileged location to support the local resistance movement and hid resistance fighters and English agents in her house. She also succeeded in helping many Jews from Athens and Saloniki to escape. Her own family was among those she was able to save from being transported to Auschwitz . In 1943 she was escaped and arrested and imprisoned for three months, until after great effort her German lover and son managed to achieve her liberation. After the liberation, she fled Greece and remained in exile until the end of the war, fearing that she would be arrested again.

The post-war years

In the course of her long career she not only met Vasilis Toumbakaris from Kolambija rekords , but also with Minossom Matsossom, who founded the Odeon / Parlofon . This enabled her to contribute to the success of other well-known artists such as Marika Ninou and Stelly Chaskil . Eskenasy introduced them to the Allilowojtija musicians' association , and soon they made recordings with Vassilis Tsitsanis . In 1949 she applied for a new Greek identity card. During one of her concerts she met the police officer Christos Filipakopulos, who was almost thirty years younger than her. Regardless of the age difference, a romance flared between them. This romance lasted - in various ways - until her death. Although she made guest appearances in all Balkan countries from now on , there was a first tour in the USA only in 1952. During this tour she performed in front of Greek and Turkish communities in the USA. The New York restaurant and bar Parthenon sponsored the trip, which lasted a few months . This tour was followed by further guest tours overseas. In 1955 she was invited by the Albanian impresario Ajden Leskowiku from the Balkan record company to concerts and recordings in Istanbul. She recorded around forty songs for Leskowiku and earned around $ 5,000. Although this is a relatively small sum, she later claimed that the fees for the concerts and tips were ten times the sum.

Soon after returning from Istanbul, she toured the United States twice, performing in New York , Detroit and Chicago . On July 5, 1958, during her second US tour, she married Frank Aleksander, a marriage of convenience, in order to get a work permit for the USA. Eskenasy would have liked to move to the USA if her love had not been tied to Christos Filipakopulos. It was because of him that she returned to Athens in 1959. With the money she had earned in the States, she bought a house in Kipopuli, a suburb of Athens, as well as two trucks and a few horses. In her house she lived with Filipakopulos until the end of her life.

Forgetting and rediscovering

Eskenazy was more than sixty years old, and the musical life of Greece had changed during her long career of more than four decades. The Smirneiko , the musical style of Izmir, and the Rembetiko were no longer popular. It lost its popularity and - like other masters of this genre - it had to be content with the random appearances during country holidays and other small celebrations. Although Eskenasy recorded a few songs in the following years, mainly remakes of their old, well-known hits, which were recorded on small record labels in Athens , were released.

In the late 1960s, interest in her early songs reawakened. RCA recorded two records of 45 minutes each, with four songs by Eskenasy (including Sabach amanes ), accompanied by piano player Dimitris Manissalis, but these records were only issued in limited numbers. In the last days of the military dictatorship at the beginning of the seventies, the interest in the old urban songs unexpectedly awoke among the Greek youth. Because of this, some important collections appeared. One of the most famous was the collection of six recordings of the music Rembetiko Rebetiki istoria. In total, several hundred thousand records were sold with this collection. After more than ten years of oblivion, Roza Eskenasy, who was more than 70 years old, became a star again. One of the main differences between this decade and the early part of her career was her frequent appearances on television. Roza took part in a few television shows. In 1973 the director Vassilis Maros shot the short documentary Zou Bouzouki about Eskenasy , in 1976 she appeared on television with Charis Alexiou , which means that some songs and interviews have been passed down. At the same time, Roza did not lose touch with the nightclubs in Greece, so she often appeared in the weekly show at the Temelio nightclub in Plaka. Since few singers like Eskenazy performed with rembetiko at the time, artists and musicologists began to study this music, which was considered “authentic”. Eskenzy's music had a lasting impact on the new generation of singers, including Charis Alexiou and Glykeria . However, the enthusiasm of the young musicians was not shared by the general public, who viewed Eskenazy as more of an exotic person. Nevertheless, she continued her performances. She gave her last concert in September 1977 in the city of Patras .

The last few years

Eskenasy spent the last years of his life together with Christos Filipakopulos in Kipupoli . According to her origins, she was Jewish, but converted to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1976 and took the name Rosalija Eskenasi. Two years later, she developed Alzheimer's disease. After a fall and a long hospital stay, she was again admitted to a clinic after an infection, where she died on December 2, 1980.

Roza Eskenasy was buried in a simple grave without a tombstone in the village of Stomio near Corinth. A local cultural organization organized a collection campaign and had a simple tombstone with the inscription "Roza Eskenasy, the artist" set up on the grave.

The biographies

In 1982 Kostas Chazidulis published the small book of memories "Αυτά που Θυμάμαι" ("The things that I remember"). The book arose from interviews Eskenasy had given in the last few years of her life. It contains a lot of photographs, mostly from the early period of her work.

In 2008 the director Roy Scher made a documentary about the singer and her music with the title "My sweet canary". The film tells of the life and work of Roza Eskenasy. This film, which was produced in cooperation with international film studios, tells the story of three young musicians from Greece, Turkey and Israel who set out in search of the footsteps of the famous rebetiko singer who is very popular in Greece.

Web links

• Works by and about Roza Eskenazy in the catalog of the German National Library
• My Sweet Canary Official website of the musical documentary "My Sweet Canary": the journey into the life and music of Roza Eskenasy.
• Roza Eskenazi in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Roza Eskenazi (Eng.)
• My Sweet Canary, Rudolstadt, 2012, WDR-Mediathek