In Honor of Yom Ashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day April 17, 2023
My album project The Picture of Rafael (Le Portrait de Rafaël), postoned many times but finally scheduled for release later this year was inspired by a special connection and an incredible discovery I made in the spring of 2015, while I was still living permanently in New York. On the morning of April 17, exactly 7 years ago now, right on the sad 16th anniversary of my father’s accidental passing and the 70th Israel’s commemoration of the Holocaust (Yom Hashoah), I was about to call my mother in Paris with a heavy heart when I received an unexpected message on my Facebook music page coming from a high school girl based in Cairo.
Mariam, the young teen girl, was doing genealogical research on a great great-uncle named Rafael Ohayon. Born in North Africa in 1900, to a family of Spanish-Greek Jewish ancestry, Rafael was a singer and free-spirited poet who traveled and lived in Europe during the first and second world wars. The diasporic and adventurous life of this brave family man, former volunteer soldier, and multicultural artist was cut short after he was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
Rafael was my maternal grandfather. All I had left of him was an old photograph I had posted on my music website to pay homage to my Mediterranean Jewish roots. Thanks to this archive visible on the internet, Mariam found me across the ocean. Through her relentless research, she also connected with Strasbourg-based French painter and illustrator Francine Hertzog-Mayran, who created in her honor a portrait of Rafael based on the same photograph. This painting was to be exhibited at multiple memorial events across Europe. In addition to discovering new extended family, I was then instantly connected to a whole community of artists, intellectuals, dedicated good-hearted people celebrating the memory of my long lost grandfather.
I wanted this recording project not only to be about Rafael but also about the themes that this touching story inspired in me: bonds, love, exile, cultural heritage, resilience and the transmission of our collective memory. Despite the rather serious subject matter and tragic starting point, I did not want the album to dwell heavily into melancholy. In contrast, I actually wanted to feature festive music, positive and cathartic songs to honor the curious, joyous and luminous soul Rafael was. I started imagining what countries and musical styles my grandfather would have explored, what other artists he would have admired, had he survived and lived through the post-war decades that preceded my birth: the 40’s, 50’s and the 60’s.
My grandmother who survived Rafael for forty years on and who died peacefully when I was 12, once told me her diseased husband’s dream was to take the whole family on a ship leaving from North Africa or Marseilles and cruise across the Atlantic all the way to New York or Buenos Aires where they could start a new life in a land of freedom and opportunities. In July 2012, after living and working in New York for nearly 15 years, I officially became a naturalized American citizen at the same age Rafael’s life was taken away from him, 70 years before. I feel like the dream of my free-spirited grandfather lived through mine, a grandfather whose countenance I never saw in person, but whose presence remains forever in my heart, for his courage, dignity, and inspiration.
The album is the soundtrack of this quest and journey. On that special commemoration day, I would like to dedicate it to Rafael, to my late father and loving mother, to my newly-found little cousin Mariam whom I ended up meeting in Paris, to my little girl Liora and her mother Lara, to Francine the Holocaust painter and to the memory of all the victims of tragic events and barbaric acts whose hopes and dreams were taken away from them way too soon.
May the world be filled with joy, love and peace, and be rocked by the music of the heart. May we never lose face or faith ever again.
Never forget, Ne jamais oublier, Ha-Shoa Le’Olam Lo Shuv
Pascalito
Photos: Meeting Mariam in Paris (left), Painter Francine Hertzorg Mayran (right)
Music Video (below) by Arié Ohayon @ Acoustic Sterling Studio, Brooklyn
The Picture of Rafael (Theme song – In the studio)
About the author:
A former Wall Street risk analyst and competitive waterskier, Pascal Lorenzo Sabattier is a French American writer, consultant and translator who divides his time between Paris and New York. As a musical artist, he has released four albums under the moniker Pascalito, produced by his independent label Neostalgia Music NYC. His original works have been licensed and featured in the popular cable network TV shows Burn Notice (USA), Damages (FX) and NCIS Los Angeles (CBS).
