Layering Text and Perspective: An Interview with Singer Songwriter Katherine Bulthuis

Grace Rosenberg: So! How did you get into Yiddish?

Katherine Bulthuis: I was a Bronfman Fellow in the summer of 2021. We were really lucky to have a faculty member from Emory University, Miriam Udel, with us. She’s in German Studies and teaches Yiddish. I’d already been working with German for a bit of time at that point — I was getting ready to leave for my exchange year [Katherine participated in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange] and I was considering doing a German Studies program in college. So I was already really interested in Yiddish linguistics, and in Yiddish as a language. And then when I had these experiences reading Yiddish poetry with Miriam Udel and visiting the Yiddish Book Center, and seeing the breadth of material and culture that was there, I really fell in love with it. I would say Kadya Molodowsky is what really hooked me. We read her poem “Olke” in a shiur with Miriam, and I just really fell in love with it. I was a child with a very active imagination, so Olke’s active imagination as a young child in this poem is really relatable. And then that’s also where I got my artist moniker.

GR: Tell me about [your artist moniker] Olke! What’s she like?

KB: It’s interesting, because I do see her as a character. I see her as someone, for this project, who is able to narrate the Froyen Lider from her point of view. That’s something I always find interesting with music, who’s telling the story, because there are so many points of view you can tell a song from. I like to think of Olke’s world as a fusion of the tradition and cultural heritage surrounding Yiddishkayt with this new synthy, magic sound. That’s something I felt when reading the first poem in the cycle, and I think it comes through in the music as well.

GR: Based on my exposure to Yiddish, which I didn’t grow up speaking, I definitely see fusion as central to my experience with Yiddish. I see the magic! Anyway. Tell me about the project — how’d you get into it?

KB: It started while I was at Bronfman, and I read that first Molodowsky poem. We all had a responsibility, after our summer seminar was over, to create what’s called a Beyond Bronfman project: taking something from the summer seminar that really stuck with us and developing it as a project over our senior year in high school. I had been reading more about Kadya Molodowsky with the Jewish Women’s Archive and in exploring email communications from the Yiddish Book Center, and through this reading I had learned about “Froyen Lider,” and I decided that I wanted to develop them into songs. ^{1 1} “Froyen-lider” is a sequence from Kadya Molodowsky’s first book, Kheshvendike nekht (“Nights of Heshvan”) (1927). And then I was really fortunate to receive an Alumni Venture Fund Grant from the Bronfman Fellowship, which was how I was able to finance the album, and which I’m so grateful for. It has opened up so many doors to me — I was able to work with a producer, and then release it on Spotify.

GR: Before we get into the individual songs — we talked about your experience with Yiddish. What about your experience with music?

KB: When I was really little, after church services, once everyone had left I would just go up to the front and sing. I think that’s the best description for the role music has played in my life. It feels very human and it feels very natural. I learned how to play guitar as a hobby and in high school was in a number of amateur bands. Then these poems came. I had never really considered a career as a solo artist or as a musician, but it was just this serendipitous project. I had this intuition that it would work and that it was the right thing to do.

GR: Tell me about the songs themselves! How did you write the music?

KB: I come from a theater background. In writing the songs I saw each as a short film in my head, which was helpful for figuring out how I wanted them to sound. Almost like I was soundtracking these short films. I translated the Yiddish into German then into English, and having these multiple points of reference linguistically, I felt I was able to get a deeper understanding of the text in a language I’m not yet fluent in. So I had these short films in my head, I had the meaning of the text, and after that it was a lot of sitting on the floor in my living room strumming and singing. I had almost a musical mood board in my head of things I wanted certain parts of the music to evoke. Prince and the Revolution — the drums in their music were part of it, and Lorde and Mitski. Again it was just this sense — it would click. Even if something sounded good, if it didn’t feel right I would scrap it. And eventually I ended up with what I have now.

GR: The experience of listening to what you have now is almost trancelike. It feels like you’re entering into some land you hold us in for those three or four minutes. It’s a very cool aesthetic experience.

KB: When I came up with the first song, “Di Froyen,” I remember saying to my mom that I wanted this project to sound like a loon call. Because my mom’s from Minnesota and we would spend summers up there. And one of my favorite sounds is the sound of a loon on a lake, calling. or singing, really. And it’s just this really haunting, beautiful kind of trance, as you described. I’m glad it came off that way because that was kind of the goal.

GR: There are so many places involved in this work — where you’re writing, where you’re writing about, where Kadya Molodowsky is writing, where she’s writing about. How does a sense of place figure into these works for you?

KB: These poems were published in Poland. As for me, when I wrote the first song I was living in Germany with my host family, living this German, European life. So many different places and environments went into making these songs — Germany, northern Utah, Minnesota. I don’t know if I can pick out a part of a song and say, that sounds like Utah, that sounds like Minnesota, but I do think it adds dimensions to a piece of art.

GR: Why did you choose these three poems?

KB: Originally I was intending to do all eight poems [in the cycle]. This was my first time producing music, and even though I did it with the help of a producer it was really daunting. My original vision was to release all eight songs at the same time. It would be this sonic universe — maybe I’d even have music videos to go along with them. And then once I started doing the project and saw how monumental it was I said okay, I have to scale this back a bit. And my mom and Miriam, who has remained a mentor throughout the process, helped me arrive at that decision. Because I did want to do the songs justice. I was working in a chronological order, and so when I arrived at the decision the first three were the strongest of the eight. I have other songs written and I hope to release all of the Froyen Lider at some time in the future.

GR: What do the poems hold for you? What do you make of them?

KB: They’re very layered. I love that they’re the kind of art that, every time you turn to them, you can find something new. It feels almost Talmudic to me, and I think very Jewish, that you can keep returning and gain new layers and meanings each time you interact with it.

GR: Let’s talk about the first one. What interests you in it?

KB: There’s something really meaningful about the mother-daughter relationship. That relationship is something we as a society can’t stop analyzing. It’s often a pretty complicated relationship. So I think that first poem is really relevant to, I imagine, a lot of young women today. For the first three poems I see them as a cycle of darkness and light. So for this first poem, “Di Froyen,” I see our narrator and she’s walking through the dark streets and her ancestors come to her. And then in the next one, “Der Man,” for some reason I saw it in the early morning, with the sun just coming up. “Shteynerne Shtogn” is then again at night, when she’s really tired. That was also an interesting contrast that influenced the melodies I wrote and also the production to a certain extent.

GR: What about the second and third poems (and songs)?

KB: I’ve discovered through this project that music has free will. I’d read the poem and think, this is what it’s going to sound like — and then once I got to the studio it just wasn’t behaving. It was very much showing me what it wanted to be. With that said, with the third poem I imagined it as that really liminal stage between consciousness and sleep, where it almost feels like you’re not in control of your own mind anymore because you’re just slowly drifting off. I think that one sounds a bit more raw and a little darker. For the second poem I thought it would be interesting, because she’s addressing this former lover of hers, to approach it almost as a montage of their relationship. Even if the text doesn’t explicitly come out and say that. So what I saw at first was the soundtrack for a John Hughes coming-of-age story, and I think some parts of that are there. I think the electric guitar is kind of reminiscent of that in some ways, but it also has its own kind of flavor, which I really like. I had actually intended for it to be fully electronic, and it didn’t do that either, but I think it ended up being its own combination of more acoustic and electronic influences. And among the collection of poems as a whole — I did notice that in two of the poems later in the collection, the penultimate and the one before that, more women are featured than in the first half of the poems. I’m excited to explore that shift from more of a solitary narration to one with other people.

GR: Back to the first song — I noticed that you restructured the poem somewhat (and it works!). What motivated you to do that?

KB: Mostly this structure we often see in pop music, with a chorus. I wanted something that contemporary listeners could more easily relate to, that would be more accessible. Not in the sense that I was watering down the poems, the art; I kind of viewed it as almost enhancing it. Especially with “Der Man,” the part I chose as the chorus felt especially meaningful and deep, and that’s why I chose it for that.

GR: I asked before about place, but what about time? How do the multiple temporalities at play figure into the album? You mention electronic sound, which of course was not available in the same way when Kadya Molodowsky was writing.

KB: We were talking before about this fusion of perspectives we have in the Yiddish world now, a merging of Eastern European culture and history, and the perspective of contemporary Yiddishists, who are often coming to it not as people born and raised in Eastern Europe. I think that also ties into the theme of layering text and perspective, into approaching a poem again and again from a different perspective. And I mentioned Talmud earlier, that really kind of makes it almost immortal. And I think what I’m doing is another form of that. Even if it’s not a literary analysis, taking my musical background and then adding that to another piece of art I’ve developed a connection to.

GR: That’s amazing.

It’s been so awesome to hear about your ideas and the approaches you took to the work. I can’t wait for the rest of the songs! Thank you so much!

KB: Thank you!