The singer/songwriter puts the story of his grandmother, who survived the Holocaust, into darkly beautiful songs.
The Joka that gives JOKA its title survived the Holocaust. Gidon Carmel never met his grandmother; after a fulfilling life in Israel, she died before he was born there. On JOKA, the singer/songwriter, who now lives in Berlin, reconstructs a life’s journey that begins in Hungary, leads to Auschwitz in 1944 and ends in Israel. A journey on which dear people were lost, thousand-year empires fell and new hope grew.
Carmel relies on letters from his grandmother, her self-written biography and other documents that he found by chance in the basement of his parents’ house. Together with the musician Kyle Morton, otherwise the singer of the US indie rock band Typhoon, he translates this story into dark, beautiful songs that constantly change perspectives, sometimes telling from Joka’s point of view or recording a dialogue with her brother Robi, who was murdered in the extermination camp.
The past is fanned out in a complex manner, and the shadows of Eastern European folklore or classical music haunt the heavy-blooded folk rock. Field recordings also add a disturbingly authentic level, and JOKA brings the abstract story of humanity’s greatest crime back into a tangible present.