"I was born in Romania in 1950. My bio is, of course, a little different," Sanda Weigl said, her Eastern European accent undimmed after 30 years in America. "Let's put it like this, because my father was German Jewish and my mother Romanian Jewish . . ."
And so began Ms. Weigl's extraordinary story of growing up in the midst of Communism and racist politics, persecution, antisemitism, of people desperately hiding something in order to survive, of Bertolt Brecht, Gypsies, labor camps, an East German rock band, and, finally, freedom -- really, it's the stuff of Hollywood biopics.
But she found a different medium to tell her story: Singing Roma -- Gypsy is largely considered a slur now -- music that she heard on the streets of Romania as a child. Her show, "The Little Commie Girl: One Story, 15 Songs," will be at The Church in Sag Harbor on Friday, Nov. 18, and Nov. 19 at 6 p.m., during which she will also perform music by other artists, such as Kurt Weill, Tom Waits, Nina Simone, Luz Casal, and Leonard Cohen.
Two weeks ago, on a crisp, autumnal day, Ms. Weigl was seated in the quiet garden of The Church, having agreed to share her epically existential story. Soft-spoken, of diminutive stature -- "I think I'm 4 feet 11 inches" -- with chic, closely cropped hair, she announced: "But I cannot tell you too much about my story because that's what I'm going to be performing in the show."
Okay then, how about just the highlights?
Her father was a "very left-wing" psychiatrist and intellectual who emigrated from Germany to Romania in the 1930s right after Hitler came into power. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, a fascist government took over in Romania, instituting a policy of harsh, persecutory antisemitism. Her father was thrown in jail along with other Jews, Gypsies, and enemies of the fascist state. He survived and after his release became a professor in Bucharest, Romania's capital.
Ms. Weigl's mother was his student, and the pair married -- "Back then it was not a problem; today, we can't do that," she said, laughing. Ms. Weigl was born two years after the Romanian Communist regime was formalized, and her father was persecuted once more -- this time for being a psychiatrist, a profession considered too bourgeois. He lost his university job, and his wife wasn't allowed to work either, so the family had to find ways to scrape together a living, Ms. Weigl said.
"In all the Communist countries, the politics and the system was racist and antisemitic. So, this was something my parents really tried to protect me from, and they went so far that they didn't even tell me that I'm Jewish," she continued. "But of course, it came out."
She was about 10 when she found out about her Jewish heritage, and she was angry at the discovery because it made her different. "I didn't want to be different than the other children. I kept asking myself, 'What do I have that's different? Why am I not like you?' So that's why I was angry. At first, I was in total denial. I said this myself: 'My father is Jewish but my mother is not Jewish, because my mother is Romanian,' " she explained.
She took to walking the streets alone, as a way to exercise and think. "But I was singing, singing, singing all the time," she said. Near her family's house was a police station where Gypsies were often held. "I learned all the songs because there were all the Gypsies around me on the streets. That's how I learned their songs. On the street."
In 1963, age 13, she moved with her family to East Berlin, to join her father's first cousin Helene Weigel, Bertolt Brecht's widow, who was then the director of the Berliner Ensemble.
"I think we were the only case in the history of Communism to move from one Communist country to another -- deliberately. And Romania was actually selling the Jews at the time. They were getting money from relatives abroad who wanted to reconnect with their families." A rich relative in New York had offered to pay for Ms. Weigl's family to be transported to the United States, but her father decided to move them instead to Berlin, then a restrictive society behind the Iron Curtain, the most famous frontier of the Cold War.
By 17, her passion for Roma music had won her a gold medal at Dresden's International Song Festival, but the next year, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, she joined a subversive student group to protest the occupation. She was arrested and jailed, but her sentence was eventually reduced to forced labor in a pharmaceutical factory.
"I wanted to sing, of course, but I couldn't perform in public, I couldn't record or anything. But there were other musicians who were also in this situation." She joined a rock band, which performed in underground venues for several years and even enjoyed a number-one hit. But in 1977, at the age of 27, she was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from the Eastern Bloc.
Landing in West Berlin, she found work as a singer at the Schiller Theater, where she collaborated with the celebrated playwright and actor Klaus Pohl, whom she ended up marrying. The couple, who have two adult daughters, moved to New York in the 1990s, after stints in London and other European cities. They live part of the year in Sag Harbor.
It's a great story, but how good is her music?
Hers is a beautiful voice, rich and sweet, melodic and beguiling. Her music sounds inventive and strikingly original, with a tough edge that does justice to the sorrow in her ballads, filled with centuries-old lore of marginalization and migration.
But she's a true cabaret artist, so there's exuberance, too, in her Romany music. Watching her performances on YouTube, she appears to live up to her nickname -- the Downtown Gypsy Queen of New York -- singing with unencumbered clarity in shows across the U.S.
Over the years she has performed regularly at Joe's Pub and the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan, and at major events such as the Forum International in Monterrey, Mexico, the Ringling International Arts Festival (curated by the Baryshnikov Arts Center), the Jewish Music Festival in Krakow, Poland, and the 2009 Nobel Prize celebration in Stockholm, Sweden, where she sang at the request of Herta Muller, the Romanian-born Nobel Prize winner for literature.
She has also performed alongside Nina Hagen, the German pop star, and met Angela Merkel when the former chancellor of Germany visited New York. Her work has been lauded in The New Yorker, which said it combined "tasteful restraint and occasional pugnaciousness."
And now, Ms. Weigl comes to the East End for the first time, to perform with her longtime musical collaborator, Shoko Nagai, a pianist, accordionist, improviser, and composer.
Such a wildly nomadic woman who sings about Gypsy folklore and performs in Romanian, English, and German. It meant there was only one big question left to be asked: Who is Sanda Weigl? Romanian? German? American?
She paused and then smiled. "I feel Romanian through my music," she said.
The big, existential mystery remained unsolved. Perhaps it will be answered during her show next week.
