Music: Fascinating Yemenite

A slender, lustrous-eyed young woman, appearing on Manhattan’s Town Hall stage one night last week, completely fascinated an audience which was unable to understand a single word she sang. She was Sarah Osnath-Halevy, a Yemenite from Palestine. By singers’ standards her husky nasal voice was unimportant. But Sarah Osnath-Halevy does not pretend to formal singing any more than she does to conventional dancing. She is an interpreter of folk songs from her corner of the world. Those she presented last week were Persian, Arabian, Yemenite, Schabazy, Sephardic, Felahi. Whatever they were she made them invariably exciting by her intonations, her subtle gestures.

Her characters were as varied as Angna Enters’ or Ruth Draper’s. In a severe black cloak she was a tortured Yemenite youth wailing to God to take away his sadness. Just as surely, she was a voluptuous young Spanish girl wandering wistfully in her garden at dusk, an Arabian merchant comically scorning the Jews, a Felahi shepherdess who lost her pet lamb and joyfully found it again. Deeply stirring was her impersonation of a Persian woman possessed by grief and awe as she swayed over her father’s tomb. Never did she make her audience feel a need for words.

Like many a diseuse, Sarah Osnath-Halevy gained telling effects with a .shrug of a shoulder, a lift of an eye. More marvelous, though, was what she could suggest with her long, slim hands alone. Each finger seemed to have a definite part, each pose its own particular beauty. That such hands should have washed dishes and scrubbed floors seemed almost incredible. But it is a fact that Sarah Osnath-Halevy was a domestic servant before she made her mark as an interpreter of songs. Her family, driven out by Arabs, left Yemen when she was 4. On the long trek to Palestine her father was killed. Her mother died shortly after. Young Sarah grew up in an orphanage until she was old enough to get a place doing housework.

She studied nights, was eventually given a chance to perform on a program at a Tel-Aviv theatre. Her ambition was so strong that she proceeded to do endless research on the manners and music of all the nearby tribes. She gave her first performances in Europe in 1930. For the past six months she has been in Paris, giving repeated recitals. Her U. S. future has still to be decided. Many an offer was made to her before her debut last week. Refusing them all, she said: “I must first show what I can do.”