The Ballad of Daniel Antopolsky

Or how a Jewish American country music genius wound up farming chickens in France
 

By Daniel Krieger for Tablet Magazine

Last year, Daniel Antopolsky went to Nashville to make his first album, recording 11 songs of the hundreds he’d written over the past 40 years. The sessions had been scheduled for the prior year but one of his favorite chickens on the farm where he lives in Bordeaux fell ill, so he put off the trip to care for her. After she died, he finally set out for Nashville. At 66, he’d like for his songs to be out there on their own rather than gathering dust in a heap of notebooks and scattered papers.

The unlikely path that led Antopolsky from Bordeaux to Nashville began in Augusta, Ga., where he was raised Modern Orthodox, which he said was no big deal in the Deep South of the 1950s. “We thought of ourselves just as Americans. We weren’t closed off at all,” he said, sitting in the back room at the Fanelli Café during a brief visit to New York this past summer. Sporting a few days of stubble, he had on a worn gray Yankees cap and a notepad and pen tucked into the pocket of his black button-down shirt. Observing the Tisha B’av fast, he didn’t consume anything as he talked in a rapid-fire Southern drawl about his life, tossing in a few quotes from Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, whose book The Empty Chair he kept on hand. One message he took to heart was: “Learn to wait. If despite all your determined efforts you cannot seem to reach your goals, be patient. Between acceptance and anxiety, choose acceptance.”

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