An Interview With Basya Schechter

credit: Allen Schlossman

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Leah Vincent (Unpious): Tell me a little about your background. I know you grew up in Borough Park. Was your family Chasidic?
Basya Schechter: No, but they were religious. My father grew up in the Orthodox world on the Lower East Side. He had his little bout with music, which didn’t work out, and then he went back to yeshiva for four years to study, while he was in college, and went to Borough Park to get married and, you know, build a bayis neemon.
Unpious: And your mom?
BS: She was from East New York. Her mom was a single mother raising two girls and they only had enough money for one kid to go to Bais Yaakov, so my mother’s older sister went to Bais Yaakov and my mother went to public school. But it was an Orthodox home.
Unpious: You went to Bais Yaakov?
BS: That was the obvious route. Bais Yaakov: nursery, kindergarten and Pre-1-A, all in Bais Yaakov of Borough Park. I made it through third grade and then I had a meltdown. I remember I was on the roof on the last day of school, and I said, “I’m never coming back here, I hate you all.” That was the summer before my parents divorced. The next year I went to Bais Yaakov of Flatbush.
Unpious: Is Bais Yaakov of Flatbush more to the left?
BS: No. Hatikvah was even banned. It was as religious, but was poorer and quirkier. Kids who went there had many siblings and half the kids wore dresses made out of sheets and pillowcases. There wasn’t one proper school building. A house served as the main building, and every grade you went from a room in the house to the garage, and from the garage to the shul, and from the shul to the JCC, where we used their lunchroom. I was happy there, I made my first friends.
Unpious: And how did you go from Bais Yaakov of Flatbush to successful musician?
BS: Long road. I made it to eighth grade there. In seventh I discovered an aerobics class at the Borough Park Y around the corner from my house that used English music for the routines. I discovered I was good at dancing, and signed myself up for real dance classes after that.
Unpious: And they were cool with you doing that?
BS: Well, at that point I lived alone with my father, and my father was re-pursuing his music career as a singer-songwriter, so he was getting promo shots and playing guitar for the Jewish singles scene. I sang backup with him – he thought I’d make good bait [for dating].
Unpious: Was there a problem with you singing as a girl?
BS: I was under twelve. I think in the Borough Park world the system works really well if your home life, your school life and your community life are all copacetic. When something falls apart, there’s room for the outside world to creep in, which it did.
I suddenly had all this exposure to the outside world. When I was alone, I watched tons of TV. When my parents were together I was only allowed to watch PBS, Sesame Street, Electric Company, some cartoons. But then I was alone, my father was never home and my brothers lived with my mother. I had a TV, no supervision, and I pretended to be sick half the time so I could stay home and watch soap operas. At ten, I looked in the phone book to call ABC, CBS, because I wanted to be on the soap operas.
Unpious: What did you say?
BS: I was like, “How do I get on the soap opera?”  I wanna do that. I thought, Oh wow, there are some kids on the soap opera, I wanna be on the soap opera.
Unpious: What did they tell you?
BS: Someone told me, “You need experience. Do you have experience?” I was like, “No, I wanna be experienced on your soap opera. That didn’t work. After I found listings in newspapers for children’s roles, and I tried to audition for things, I had my father put me in acting school and dance school, I figured these things out at 10-13. I was giving myself an education in the arts.
Unpious: Did you have friends who supported this or were you a lone figure?
BS: I was a fairly lone figure except for my best friend, Giti. Her mother dated my father, that’s how we met. She was, at ten years old, a self-proclaimed atheist from a Chasidish family. She was a voracious reader after discovering the library. She discussed atheism with me, which I thought was really cool. She exposed me to the ideas of atheism and agnosticism. I chose the latter. I said I don’t think I want to be an atheist, I think I want to be an agnostic.
Unpious: Why?
BS: Atheism sounded very final to me. And I wasn’t sure I didn’t believe in God. The truth is, I did believe in God, but I thought it was way cooler to be an agnostic than a God-believer. I was enamored of her brilliant, crazy, magical personality. She created worlds in her imagination and wrote poems. My first song was a song I wrote with her at eleven or twelve. I could sing it to you, because I remember it.
Unpious: Please.
BS:
(Sings)
Nobody is nobody,
everybody’s somebody
everybody’s got a life of their own.

Everybody’s got a heart,
everybody’s got a soul,
everybody plays a major role.

So stop being nobody,
get out of your shell,
now’s a good time to exist,
now’s the time to break the spell.

‘Cause when the night is darkest,
and morning seems so far,
in that sea of darkness,
you shine like a star.

‘Cause nobody is nobody,
and everybody’s somebody
and everybody’s got a life of their own,
and everybody’s got a heart,
everybody’s got a soul
and everybody aims to reach a goal.

Unpious: What happened to Giti, did you keep up with her?
BS: She’s still my best friend  - we talk every day. She married a non-Jew, and has a bunch of kids.
Unpious: So that was your first song – did that kind of open up the door?
BS:  In a roundabout way. I was writing poetry like her. Sometimes I put melody to some of my poems, but not thinking about myself as a musician. I think that part was because my father did that, I think I was aping him a bit.
Unpious: So at what point did you start thinking, hey, maybe this is what I want to do?
BS: That didn’t come till much later in the middle of college. In high school I wanted to be a dancer.
My father really discouraged me as a singer. He encouraged my dancing and my interest in cloning. In eighth grade I wanted to go to the high school of the performing arts, and he wanted me to go to Sarah Schnierer. Somehow I ended up at Shulamis, which was a compromise. There, I became the head of dance “production” for three years with this girl who’s now a rabbi’s wife at a Philly Chabad. She and I were very inventive dancers and choreographers for a yeshiva. We had our movements censored, and were only allowed to use instrumentals, but we still found inspiring music and had great moves. Because we brought in money for the school, we had a lot of freedom, about a month during class time a year to research and choreograph. We listened to scores of records at Lincoln Center.
Unpious: So you weren’t really being exposed to modern music – more classical?
BS: More new age. Yanni – I mean what Orthodox school doing “production” doesn’t use Yanni? Jean Michel Jarre, as well as Broadway style instrumentals and there were some really good pieces that we found. We were listening to Herbie Hancock, lots of things. I was choreographing in my head on the train rides back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I was studying at Steps dance studio.
By then, in high school, my father had remarried a woman with eight kids in Kensington, so we moved there and they, keneine hora, had more children, so suddenly I was dragging a bunch of kids with me to ballet in Manhattan. That part was fun.
Unpious: You didn’t get any flak for any of your explorations? Your dad was just too busy with his life?
BS: My mother stopped being religious when they divorced, so definitely no flak from her, she’d encourage me to wear pants. For example she signed me up to run this 10K race in Central Park when I was twelve. I only had shorts and T-shirt pajamas, so I went in my pajamas. I trained on Ocean Parkway during school recess.
But I did start buying my own jeans and hiding them in my drawers, changing in train stations behind beams for short excursions. [My rebellion] wasn’t reserved for Judaic infractions, I was also a little bit of a renegade in other ways. I was jumping turnstiles and making Giti jump with me. She had no idea what I was doing. The police would yell, “stop!” and we’d run!
Unpious: Did you have a sense of the identity of a rebel, of doing your own thing?
BS: No, I wasn’t a rebel, because if anybody caught me I would start crying. I was one of those kids that had zero defiance.
Unpious: So what really drove you to do these things that most people were not doing, I imagine, in Shulamis?
BS: No, they weren’t. The renegades there were doing things like… boys. For some reason, that seemed impossible to me.
Unpious: Spiritually impossible or practically impossible?
BS: Everything. I just had no experience with boys. Where was I gonna meet one? What was I gonna do? Dancing was more my rebellion. I went with the things that were intuitive to me. I was also an adventurer, for sure, but not rebellious. One time when our teachers were late, Giti and I went to the roof, with my tape recorder and practiced our routine from the Y to Flashdance. And then the Menahal at the Mir yeshiva, which was right next door, called our principal who was yelling at us about a call from the Mir yeshiva! “Their students can’t concentrate because there are two Bais Yaakov girls shaking on the roof!” So Giti is stony-faced, yeah, whatever. And I burst out into tears. I was always bursting into tears, I was never defiant. We didn’t have class, so why not just go up on the roof and dance?
Unpious: When you did things like putting on jeans — which was pretty clearly crossing a line – did you feel guilt?
BS: My father was very against it, but in high school a quarter of the class was pants-wearing and three quarters were [regular] Bais Yaakov or Moshava girls. First time I freely wore jeans and shorts was when I was 15 and went to Israel to a co-ed camp – Morasha. I told my father that the girls started north and boys started south, and we met in Jerusalem for a day. That was a lie. It was totally co-ed, and I wore tanks, shorts, jeans etc. Instead of kissing boys, I raced them. I got exposed to classic rock, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, The Doors. I didn’t show him one picture from that trip. And the other time I started crossing the line was also in Israel when I went for the year.
Unpious: Was that at the end of high school?
BS:  Yes. I chose Sharfmann’s to frum out, but I didn’t. I hated my class – too serious, and it felt like a lot  of brainwashing. I thought I wanted to be brainwashed, though. There was a part of me that really deeply wanted that, to be able to do what everybody else was doing and to have that life.
Unpious: What was compelling about it?
BS: It was safe. It was predictable. When I was younger there were times when I couldn’t wait to finish high school, get married at eighteen, have a bunch of kids, and become a teacher like all the teachers that I looked up to who were so religious. You know, shtark. It was very appealing. It was put in a very beautiful light.
Unpious: So Sharfmann’s didn’t work?
BS: I got kicked out of Sharfmann’s. They had spies and found out I danced for a band called Treif, watched Clockwork Orange and was at the bookstore reading novels during class time. I was also at Jerusalem bars getting drunk and learning how to kiss boys.
Unpious: Did you come back to the US?
BS: I went to Egypt. I rode horses in Giza, I went to the pyramids, the sphinx, hung out in Cairo, heard Middle Eastern music, it was great. Then I signed up to a religious kibbutz near Gaza, Alumim. I wanted to do welding because of Flashdance. I liked the boys’ work clothes: the helmet, goggles, big equipment and shook my hair when I took off my helmet during coffee breaks. I liked the whole thing. I don’t think I was particularly good at it, but there was something romantic about doing men’s work, I thought that was cool.
When I got home, I went to Barnard. I started as a dance major, then I moved to English and writing, but had writer’s block. My brother started playing guitar and he was incredibly good at it right away, immediately proficient, an amazing guitar player. And I thought, if this he can do, I can do it too. And so I took his chord book and I took my father’s guitar and I started clunking away. I wrote songs quite quickly, about not finding love, of course, you know, Barnard, dark singer-songwriter stuff. So that’s how I became a musician. It started innocently. By senior year I was writing semi-performable songs and booked my own gigs, which I continued to do after graduation. I played at  CB’s Gallery and Mercury Lounge, Sine, Sidewalk, and all these folk music songwriter places.
Unpious: Your music is very Jewish, what brought you to that theme?
BS:  After a few years in the songwriter scene, the Jewish Week heard of my story and they sent a reporter to do a full-page bio for the paper. All of a sudden people in the Jewish world knew who I was and took interest. There were fewer Jewish music artists then: Debbie Friedman, Charming Hostess, Klezmatics, Zorn, the Downtown Tzadik. The singer-songwriter scene didn’t pay well, and I found an agent who specialized in Jewish music. I played at  JCCs and synagogues and they wanted Jewish content. I had new music from my travels, Africa, the Middle East and South America, and English lyrics didn’t work anyway. I had so many pesukim of Torah, Tehilim and Perkai Avos and all these things that I’d memorized in yeshiva, and started mixing the music with the texts. Like im ain ani li mi li or taiching in Bais Yaakov. They all seemed like musical opportunities. I love Eicha, so I wrote an Eicha piece. It put me in a niche of Jewish Mediterranean music.
Unpious: Some people who leave the religious community never want to look at Judaism again, but your work is so fascinating because it seems so heartfelt, so connected with these spiritual ideas. Is that hard for you? Do you have any bitterness?
BS:  There’s a part of me that bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker, and maybe it reminds me of that innocent time. There were anchoring experiences, like shalashudes singing, or the gathering of girls during lunch or recess, where we’d sit around and sing songs with three-part harmonies. None of us were musicians but we had such a sense of harmony we enjoyed it, it was emotional. I left the halachic world because I’m not a halachic person, but there are things I find amazing. I think Shabbos is amazing. My Shabbos is turning off the computer, playing in shul, then I have meals with friends and I take naps.
There’s a biological clock thing for people who grew up with Shabbos naps, there is no problem falling asleep. I love it.
I like the “architecture in time” that Heschel talks about, in the way that Judaism carves out space that creates an opportunity for holiness. I’ve always really been drawn to the esoteric and I live more in the esoteric than in the concrete. Kabbalah, mysticism, and superstition. I accept how deeply indoctrinated I am – I’m never gonna lose that. It’s an imprint. When I sing Hebrew songs, you’re like: Oh my god, you grew up in Borough Park, didn’t you? You just hear it.
Unpious: And you have no resistance to that?
BS: No. It’s also helped me make a living.
Unpious: But you mentioned you might want to move beyond that?
BS: I’m open to writing in English again one day, because I started that way. It’s way harder because writing Jewish music for me is natural.
Unpious: What do your parents think about your career?
BS: My mother doesn’t think that I market myself well. My father, he wants to be a musician too, he wants to revive his own career as a musician.
Unpious: Is he proud of you?
BS: I don’t know if he’s proud of me. I think he likes when people in shul tell him that they love my music, I think that makes him feel good. I think he would much rather that I was a scientist.
Unpious: Do you feel any personal connection to female musicians in Tanach?
BS: Definitely not Miriam, even though she’s the one I should be feeling some connection to.
Unpious: Why not?
BS: I don’t know, I just didn’t grow up with the whole tambourine-playing Miriam. Miriam just had tzaras.
I connect to Hagar. Not from childhood, they didn’t teach me about Hagar, she didn’t really exist.
Unpious: What do you find interesting about Hagar?
BS:  Her family. Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Yishmael and Yitzchak all lived in the same house for a period of time. Even as a mythological story I find that interesting.
Unpious: The prototypical complicated family?
BS: Yeah, exactly. I connect with crazy family stories.
I connect to Leah because I was always the crier, I always thought of myself as an underdog. I was afraid that I was like her. She got the short end of the stick somehow. She wasn’t loved.
Unpious: You grew up with MBD and Avraham Fried. Did any of that influence you?
BS: I consider that part of my influence. I have musical references to Avraham Fried. Miami Boys Choir, Shlomo Carlebach and Jewish music in general all had an impact. I grew up with songs girls sang together, that was a big part.
Unpious: Which is different from recorded Jewish music–
BS: It’s its own world, the kind of harmonies we did.
My father had a semi-extensive Israeli music collection, contemporary Israeli music and then I got exposed to early singer-songwriter stuff: Sarah McLachlan and Suzanne Vega and Joni Mitchell.
Then my other influences are world music – through traveling.
Unpious: And why the name Pharaoh’s Daughter? Because your name is Basya?
BS: It was from Basya and it happens to have all the right references. Mediterranean sound, a good story, breaking the mold from tradition, social action, you know, somewhat of a cool name. But a lot of kabbalists say I shouldn’t use it because it has the name Pharaoh in there, I should go by Basya.
Unpious: A lot of people who leave the religious community have a creative streak. Do you think that’s a coincidence?
BS: No. I think people who are creative don’t see the world in the same way. When you’re creative you’re very non-linear, and Judaism, at least religious Judaism, is incredibly linear. Everything you do and every way you do it and the path your life is supposed to take is all very linear and very predictable. Within that there’s always variation but it’s safe. The charm of it is that linearity: you get to have that kind of wedding, and you get to have that kind of bris and you get to have that kind of house and you get to put your kids in that kind of school. You want to do the same thing that you had. You romanticize it.
I think creative people don’t see things that way. They spend a lot of time in their heads creating other worlds that have nothing to do with ultra-Orthodox Judaism. With creativity, you’re not confined, you’re really more interested in breaking boundaries – it’s about making connections where they might not have obviously been before.
I learned organic chemistry when I was 14, how the electrons closest to the nucleus of the atom keeps the nature of the atom – they were very stable and unexcitable and kept close to the nucleus. Then there were the electrons on the outer rungs that were more excitable, that jumped and would emit light and connect with the other electrons from other atoms and make compounds.
So I always thought that I’m one of those, a jumpy electron. I never thought that everyone should be my way. A lot of people should keep close to tradition, people who feel very secure there, and then there are people who are different, and you need all of it, like the fluid mosaic of organic chemistry. It made sense in a metaphorical way and that was something that stuck, that metaphor.
I’m reading right now Daniel Grossman’s, The Book of Intimate Grammar. He writes about the imagination of children very beautifully. Children’s imaginations are far more interesting, I think, than anything we could do as an adult. I mean, if I had the skill set matching the creativity I had as a kid – I think, children, they have it.
Unpious: Some people who leave the religious world are scared to pursue their creative dreams. What kind of advice would you give them?
BS: Well, I think that the Orthodox world is a different now, there’s more openness for creativity, and understanding the need for creative outlets. If your creativity is something you want to explore but you don’t want to leave the community, that’s one thing. You can be a completely creative religious person, maybe more modern Orthodox, but lots of options. If you feel stifled by that world altogether, there are lots of great organizations and forums that can help you explore.
Now there’s Chulent and Footsteps and Unpious and there are blogs and Facebook groups.
I don’t have the sense that religions caused all the problems in the world. I think human nature is really disturbed to begin with, religion is one vehicle and it can be used for very beautiful things and it can be distorted and manipulated for very dark things. I think religious life is not for everybody. It’s not for me in it’s strictly traditional definition.
Unpious: What are the five songs you recommend that someone who grew up without secular music listen to?
BS: Ok, that’s a good question. I’ll give you albums. Ko Sira, that’s by Oumou Sangare. Lhasa de Sela’s The Living Road. Moorish Music from Mauritania.
Unpious: No classic rock?
BS: Pink Floyd’s The Wall is good. Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell.

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