In 1982, Israeli singer Zohar Argov invited Barbara Ann Quinlan to come to stay with him at his apartment in Rishon Lezion. They had first met at Pinni Cohen’s nightclub, Hallelujah, in Beverly Hills, California and it had been love at first sight. They were instantly enamored with each other and could hardly bear to be apart.
Zohar called her Yasmina, telling her, “You are not Barbara; you are Yasmina.”
When I first met Barbara, about three years ago, she was on a brief visit to Israel and called me in search of a translator-into-Hebrew for the book she was writing, under the tantalizing title, Love Seeker.
I told her I don’t translate into Hebrew, but I could try to find her an Israeli publisher, once the book was published in English and a Hebrew version became a possibility. She was staying with a couple of Israeli friends she had met many years before in Hollywood, where they were working as costumiers in the film industry. They now live in an apartment on the edge of Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
She and I arranged to meet for lunch at my favorite vegan restaurant near the Cinemateque and there was an instant click. In her late sixties, Barbara is a tall, striking woman, with a personality that fills a room. She fascinated me and I felt immediately that I had made a friend for life.
While still in Israel, she was invited by Amnon Argov, one of Zohar’s brothers, to a family event and she asked me to come along.
It was at the (now extinct) Dublin Pub in Rehovot, and Zohar’s nephew sang. It was, unsurprisingly, well-attended and I was introduced to Amnon, among others. It came as a surprise to me that, so many years after his death, Zohar’s family is still so closely tied to Barbara.
The story of her life blew me away, not only the Zohar Argov part, which consisted of five of the most turbulent years of her life and now takes up a significant portion of the second and third volumes in her recently published autobiographic trilogy; but all the rest, before as well as after his tragic death in 1987 at the age of 32. Love Seeker is the story of the remarkable woman who captured Argov’s heart.
BARBARA ANN Quinlan was born in New York to a devout Roman Catholic family. Her father, John F. Quinlan, was Irish and her mother, Jeanette, was of Polish origin, although she told her six children, four boys and two girls, that they were part-German. When Barbara was 11 years old, her father moved his family from New York to California. Soon after their arrival on the West Coast she asked him for permission to enter a cloistered Carmelite convent. He told he would never allow her to shut herself away from the world. She was not born to be a hermit. He was right, of course, although she didn’t know it at the time. By the time she was 12 she had become disillusioned with Catholicism, but continued to attend mass in order to avoid her father’s wrath, until she left his home at 17 years of age.
As a girl, she had been quite reserved and nervous. Even now, she still appears to be quite highly strung, but much more outgoing, due to the six years she spent practicing a series of very rigorous theater studies in Poland that helped her learn how to navigate the world around her. Contrary to appearances, Barbara claims she was never much of a hippie because she wasn’t one for love-ins and, although she attended moratorium marches, she made a habit of keeping herself on the sidelines. She dreaded being caught in a crowd. This is one of the reasons she was so rarely seen with Zohar Argov in public. Nightclubs, too, were not her thing. Although she loved Zohar’s voice, as do so many others, she was in love with the man himself and did not wish to make a show of herself.
At a young age, she had the strange idea that if she ever decided to have a tattoo, it would be of a Star of David in the palm of her hand. At that time, she had no idea of the twists and turns her life would take. In any case, her father disapproved of tattoos and forbade them, as he did ear-piercing and the wearing of ankle bracelets. To this day, she still bears no tattoo.
It wasn’t until Barbara told her mother she had decided to study in Poland, at Jerzy Grotowsky’s Theater Laboratory, that her mother finally told her, “Oh, you’ll be returning to the land of your ancestors.”
Barbara was all at once shocked and pleased. Apparently those with Polish blood were given a more lucrative exchange rate from the dollar to the Polish zloty. Barbara was advised to check the possibility of proving she had Polish ancestry. So, as her maternal grandmother, Johanna, was dead, she wrote to her great uncle, Johanna’s brother. And it was from him that, for the first time, she learned that her great grandparents, Polish Jews from Poznan, had immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, at a time when antisemitic pogroms were rampant. Evidently, they had left all vestiges of their Judaism behind. Her great-uncle told her that his family name, Witkowski, was later changed by a mutual agreement between the siblings, to Schaffer, following their father’s murder behind the bar he owned in Buffalo, NY. It would be many years after Barbara sought to convert to Judaism, and some time after meeting Zohar Argov, that she would finally realize to her great delight, the full meaning of her ancestors’ es
cape from Poland, and that her maternal ancestor’s name, Witkowski, was in fact a Jewish name.
Her Jewish maternal grandmother had hidden their Jewish heritage from her own children and by consequence, her grandchildren. Since Judaism is passed down the female line – from mother to daughter – it meant that Barbara’s mother was halachically Jewish (although she hadn’t known), as was Barbara and all her siblings. It was Barbara who told her mother she was actually Jewish. Her mother’s response was to join her in celebrating the Jewish holidays with Barbara and her Israeli friends. She seemed pleased to have finally found the place in which she truly belonged.
Barbara’s mother supported her daughter’s decision to complete her formal conversion to Judaism under the guidance of Rabbi Yehuda Kelemer and Rabbi Samuel Katz, who supervised the conversion ritual. Ultimately, she would make aliyah and is now a proud, passport-bearing Israeli citizen, although she has never actually lived in Israel for any great length of time. As for myself, I don’t know anyone as well-versed in Judaism as Barbara.
Zohar kept her close within his family and rarely did she show up at his events, preferring to stay behind and wait for him to come home. Their relationship was tempestuous, as she did not indulge with him in the drugs to which he was addicted. Instead, she practiced meditation, wanting to share with him the purest version of herself. Zohar was fascinated by her devotion to love, as well as to life itself. But he would eventually tell her this philosophy was not for him. “I believe what you say about this ‘knowledge of self,’ it is the truth, it is love, it is God, but I do not want this. I want everything that is bad, that is not good.”
Zohar Argov was a tortured soul – out of his depth in some ways and ahead of his time in many others. When Zohar sang, he stood straight as a statue. It was as if he was standing alongside himself, humbly admiring the voice that God had given him. He was not at all arrogant, though. Often he would say, “Sorry, I am a human being, only a little human being.”
For all the years that followed since they met until Zohar’s suicide in a jail cell, Barbara would travel back and forth between America and Rishon, desperately needing to be near him, yet unable to bear watching her beloved Zohar bury himself.
In her fascinating trilogy, Love Seeker, Barbara shares with her readers the intimate details of the turbulent relationship and life she shared with Zohar Argov. In more than 100 pages of parts two and three, she presents a portrait of Zohar known by few, if any, other than herself.
She was also featured in a three-hour documentary, titled Zohar Argov – a Sad and Predictable End, produced for Israeli TV three years ago. The producers and the director traveled from Israel specifically to interview her.
Anyone who thought they knew the enigmatic Zohar Argov may be surprised by how little of himself he actually presented to the world, and may think again about the man known in Israel as “The king of Mizrahi music.”