At age 78, Henry Altman is willing to indulge those of us in the talk trades, as we press him to tell his story, to ruminate and reminisce and comment on things that defy words.
But he makes it clear: This talk is cheap, especially when measured against the value of a cantor’s voice during the Jewish high holidays.
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“Fifteen or 20 years ago–no way I would have talked to you for an hour the day before services began,” he said Tuesday. “But I’ve relaxed a little bit over the years.”
By the time this weekend is over, Altman will have sung for a total of five or six hours, pouring his rich bass out over the congregation of Temple B’nai Yehudah in Homewood as it celebrates Rosh Hashanah. A few deep breaths later, he will be at it again, singing the services of Yom Kippur.
In Judaism, where prayer and music are inextricably linked, the cantor is both focal point and workhorse during the services of the high holidays.
If Altman is more relaxed these days, it might be because he has chanted the high holidays for 51 straight years for the same congregation, known as the Hyde Park Liberal Congregation when he began in 1947.
But that’s not to say he is relaxed when he sounds that first long note of the season.
“You are up there and you’re a little nervous that you do justice to the prayer–not to sing a wrong note, but to make it meaningful,” Altman said. “You want to sing it with the soul, not just the vocal cords and the tummy.”
To put it another way, he quoted a line of one of the traditional prayers he chants:
“Behold me, of little merit, trembling and afraid, as I stand before You to plead for Your people . . .”
Those words have stuck with Altman from the time he was a boy, growing up amid the artistic fervor of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.
“We had fabulous cantors in Berlin,” he recalled. “When the old cantors would sing, sometimes you would get goose pimples down your arms.”
The other tingle he remembers came from the one-sided, shellacked 78s of tenor Enrico Caruso that played on the Victrola in his home. Even the young man Altman’s parents hired to tutor him in mathematics would rush the boy through his homework so that they could play the piano and sing.
But it was Uncle Sam who gave Altman the push he needed to become a cantor.
Altman and his family fled Germany in 1938, landing first in New York, and shortly after, on the South Side of Chicago. Four years later, Altman was drafted into the U.S. Army.
Presented with a young Jewish cabinetmaker’s apprentice who was too nearsighted to fight, the brass at Ft. Sill in Oklahoma had an inspiration–Altman was made the camp chaplain’s assistant.
He sang at Jewish services on Fridays, Christian services on Sundays. When, at his first Roman Catholic service, his desire to do as the Romans did led him to unwittingly take the sacrament of communion, the chaplain hardly flinched. Altman was too good a singer to make an issue of it.
When the Battle of the Bulge finally dragged Altman over to Europe, he made the most of it. At war’s end, he had himself transferred to a short-lived musical academy run by the Army in the French Riviera vacation town of Biarritz, an institution whose setting attracted some of the finest musicians of the day as singers.
Finally back in Chicago, Altman hung out his shingle as a cabinetmaker. On the day in 1947 when three well-dressed men came to his shop, he thought it was much needed business walking in. Instead, it was the leaders of the Hyde Park Liberal Congregation, asking Altman to fill in for their sick cantor, just for the high holidays.
Altman happily told those old stories this week, talked about rabbis and tenors, composers and cardinals he has known, talked about his family. But when the conversation turned toward God and music, the retired cabinetmaker said
little.
He could have talked about how the high holidays are known as the “days of awe,” how awe is something better expressed in music than in words.
He could have talked about how Johann Sebastian Bach, composing music in the service of a different religion, once said that God was in the bass.
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He could have talked about that point at which prose and logic fall short, where human experience falls outside and beyond our attempts to shoehorn it into words.
Instead, sitting at his kitchen table, Altman simply opened his mouth and sang out the rich, intoxicating and transporting notes of that prayer, “Behold me, of little merit . . . “
And it was clear: He never needed to talk about anything in the first place.