Tributes

"The original inspiration began when I sort of spent some time...how would you say it?" Romy asks her sister. "You were spending some time healing after, you know...," Sari prompts.

Romy finds the thread: "I had a close friend of mine that passed away," she says. "I was doing a lot of healing work and I was spending a lot of time with this one woman who kept saying to me, 'There's something about your ancestry, especially on the matrilineal side you should really look into.' She kept saying, 'It's a great-great-grandmother.' And I didn't really know what she was talking about."

The woman who revealed this to Romy was a "Celtic shaman," Nancy Sherwood, a healer who works on the South Shore. This was a few summers ago, Romy recounts, though the sisters still visit Sherwood and fellow practitioner, David Cameron. (They live and work near The Ovens and, among other things, hold sweats, Romy says.) The great-great-grandmother at the heart of the revelation---and appearing in an old family photo on the cover of Tasseomancy---is Clara Chernos, their maternal great-great-grandmother. Sari and Romy eventually learned about Clara from their own grandmother, Merle (mother of their mother, Ryla).

Clara lived in a Russian village near what was then the Latvian border and survived the pogroms---a term referring to anti-Semitic riots which states throughout history allowed to happen, but also an event, a tool of violent oppression that has come to be most strongly identified with 19th-century Russia, the era in which Clara lived. She lost her parents in the pogroms and married young.

"Before she moved to Canada she married a man twice her age that they used to call The Grandfather," Romy continues. They had several children. Eventually, "he moved here [to Canada] first and she stayed. The real kicker I guess was, simultaneously, he was beginning an affair with the landlady at the place he was living in Toronto. And also there was another pogrom in the village."

Clara gathered her children into hiding with the exception of a son, who was "forgotten," as the song says, in the haste to escape the house, a target for the coming mob. When she rushed back to the house, Clara found her boy in his cradle covered in glass. Already notified of her husband's adultery, the latest pogrom was the last straw for Clara. She moved the rest of the family to Canada.

On the title track, Clara's beautifully evoked with her "shtetl skin and rosewood eyes/an eighteen-year-old orphan bride." The story is underscored by a wonderful waltz-and-strings arrangement (mandolin, guitar, viola and violin) that calls up the mournful but still uplifting---melancholic---mood of Jewish music.

"Tasseomancy," the term for the practice of tealeaf reading, was a skill of Clara's and one she used to make income for her family, according to her great-great-granddaughters. She came to it, Romy says, "because at that time there was a lot of mysticism in Judaism in Russia."

There was more to Clara too. "She was a singer and maybe if things had gone differently for her...she would've led a far more creative life," Sari says.

Romy and Sari Lightman sang throughout their childhood. The former remembers a time when their great-grandfather, who lived until they were 11 or 12 years old, made the connection between past and present in the family---a connection the Ghost Bees are illuminating on their debut release. "I used to sing in the synagogue, the temple that we used to go to," Romy recalls, "and he actually came one night and he turned to my grandmother and said, 'She has the same voice as her...Clara, our great-great-grandmother."

Learning of a bond with a major forbearer and making music that explores and celebrates it with her sister Sari appears to have played a role in Romy's healing, though she's careful not to overstate it. "It was almost like this obligation---not that guilt-infused obligation---but just in the sense of...doing some healing work for our ancestors," she says. "It just kind of seems like something we're all a part of so we want the story to continue."