Rosa Eskenazi

One of the great rembetika performers of all time, singer Roza (or Rosa) Eskenazi was born Sarah Skinazi to a Jewish family in Constantinople (Istanbul) sometime around 1890. While she was still a child, her family moved to the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki (Salonica), and then again to Athens some years later. As a young woman, Eskenazi worked in theaters and taverns, performing songs in Greek, Armenian and Turkish. One night Panayiotis Toundas, a musician and head of Columbia Records in Greece, heard her sing and soon after Eskenazi made her first sides for the label in 1929 as Rozita Skinazi.

The singer was an immediate success, and she, along with Rita Abatzi, became one of the most popular female artists. She recorded hundreds of songs, accompanied by the best instrumentalists of her day, and in the years leading up to World War II she frequently toured internationally. During the war, she ran a restaurant in Athens and is said to have been generous in helping others. As a Jew in Greece, she lived in particular danger, since more than 60,000 Greek Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Eskenazi was apparently saved by the direct intervention of a general in the collaborationist government.

After the war, Eskenazi resumed her performing career. In Istanbul in the 1950s she recorded about 40 more sides, and began touring the U.S. as well. She continued to work occasionally until the late 1970s and died in Athens in 1980. Although her voice understandably coarsened and darkened over the decades, her early recordings possess incredible soulfulness matched by fantastic technique, especially in her flawless and sumptuous ornamentations of the given melodic lines.

Among the excellent anthologies and compilations currently available are Roza Eskenazi: Rembetissa 1933–1936 on the American label Rounder; Roza Eskenazi: Rembetissa 1933–1936 on the English label Heritage (which, despite having the same title as the Rounder record, is made up of completely different songs); Ginaikes tou Rembetikou Tragoudiou (Women of the Rembetiko Song), on the Greek label FM; and L'Orient des Grecs (The Orient of the Greeks), from the French label Buda. —Anastasia Tsioulcas