Slobin, Mark, ed.. American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. vii + 245 pp., music exx, 9 b&w photographs, notes, index, bibliography, discography, other sources. ISBN 0-520-22717-4 (cloth $49.95), 0-520-22718-2 (pb $19.95).

This is a fascinating book for anyone who is interested in klezmer music. It originated as a collection of papers that were given at the first Klezmer Research Conference, held at the Wesleyan University, Connecticut, in 1996. Its contributors include many leading names in the field: klezmer’s academics, leading musicians and festival organisers. The book claims to be representative of the range and scope of klezmer studies rather than a complete history or social survey of current American practice, and consequently the subject matter and quality of writing are a little patchy, and some of the same stories occur several times, sometimes with interesting variations and sometimes repeated verbatim. On the other hand the original material in the book is very well developed, and debunks many of the myths surrounding both klezmer music itself and the complex processes of assimilation into mainstream society experienced by Jewish immigrants in the USA.

The two parts of the book, ‘Roots’ and ‘Offshoots’, correspond to the two most recent and documented periods of klezmer history. ‘Roots’ covers the period roughly 1900-1950, from the earliest commercial recordings in the States to the demise of the music at public functions and its replacement by American popular genres. Musicians of the earlier part of this period travelled the Atlantic, bringing tunes and ideas from Europe. In order to make a living in America they often performed other styles of music, commonly jazz or theatre music, in addition to klezmer, and the klezmer that they played changed considerably during this period. The music disappeared as a commercial genre after the second world war, although it lingered on till the 1970s in a few provincial districts. ‘Offshoots’ refers to the period from the 1970s till now, and covers the various facets of the klezmer revival and its sustained growth and expansion since then. Historical researchers face severe difficulties when attempting to expand knowledge beyond these boundaries. In Europe, the destruction of east European Jewish culture by Hitler and Stalin makes research into European roots nearly impossible. Pre-war European klezmer was not a particularly highly regarded form of music and consequently, like many other aspects of Jewish life was not documented. Similarly in the USA, the musical life of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century was not recorded in any detail. However, in America Jewish musicians were politically active, particularly in the nascent trade union movement, which did keep records of meetings, marches and strikes. Many of these events took place with a live musical accompaniment.

The title ‘American Klezmer’ accurately reflects the nationality of the book’s authors and the locus of most of the events described in it. However, in his introduction Mark Slobin says ‘Klezmer has spread across virtually all of Jewish and non-Jewish Europe and to Jewish communities elsewhere, from Buenos Aires and Mexico City to Johannesburg and Sydney. Everywhere, including Israel, it is understood to be an American form with distant European origins’ (2, my italics). Does he really believe this, or is he being deliberately provocative? The consensus round here, amongst klezmer practitioners in the North of England, is that people think of klezmer as a European music with American developments. And what do people think in Romania, Moldavia and Russia, where the music originated? Maybe this point is trivial, or maybe it is symbolic of yet another instance or cultural appropriation by the USA, since a later writer, Walter Zev Feldman, makes the point that there was remarkably little influence exerted on American klezmer by other non-Jewish American musics. Slobin completes his introduction with a brief outline of klezmer, developed along the theoretical lines laid out in Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (1993). He describes the defining quality of klezmer by using the metaphor of penumbra, ‘The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body …in an eclipse’ (5-6), with reference to the holocaust which caused nearly all of a thousand years of European Jewish history and culture to be permanently erased.

The book begins with a brief history of klezmer in America by Hankus Netsky, founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a lecturer in jazz at the New England Conservatory. This of necessity starts off in Europe and includes interesting biographical data about immigrant musicians and their subsequent careers in America. He maps out the Americanisation of the genre and its disappearance, finishing with a brief description of the revival mentioned above. It is easy to imagine that New York was the only centre of early klezmer activity, but in chapter four Netsky contributes a much more detailed description of klezmer in the provincial Jewish community of Philadelphia. He says that this research was difficult, and that it would have been nearly impossible if he had not been descended from a klezmer playing family. He adds, tellingly, ‘Still, many of those I contacted were far too bitter to be helpful. They had watched their music (and the culture that produced it) die a slow and painful death and had little faith in its resurrection. It was only after serious evidence of the music’s resurgence finally hit the old-timers that meaningful research became possible’ (53). Many of these old-timer’s families had come from the Ukraine and Moldavia. In both Europe and America these people were apparently regarded as being less religious than Jews from elsewhere in Europe, but more enthusiastic about preserving their traditional secular music and dance, hence old-style klezmer survived much later than in Philadelphia than in other cities. Philadelphia also had its own klezmer repertoire, profoundly conservative and relatively uninfluenced by the experiments with jazz and other ‘assimilationist tendencies’ (68) that were perceived to have happened elsewhere. Netsky adds that his suspicion that the Philadelphia klezmer scene had many similarities to older traditions was confirmed by recent contact with young musicians in the surviving Jewish communities of Bessarabia and Ukraine. He ends with a call for others to investigate the klezmer traditions of their own communities.

The second chapter is by Robert Rothstein, professor of Slavic and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts. It is about ‘Klezmer-loshn’, the professional jargon of the hereditary European, Jewish, male musicians; useful for privately discussing money or the appearance of attractive females when performing in public places. It starts with a consideration of the novel Stempenyu, which is about a klezmer violinist of the same name and was published in 1888 by Sholem Aleichem. The English translation uses jazz jargon in place of klezmer-loshn, which isn’t quite appropriate since klezmer-loshn was a secret language, but jazz musicians’ jargon has spread into general usage. Klezmer-loshn comprises some six hundred words, adapted from a range of European languages including Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish. The adaptations are often humorous, such as the word for Hasid which is botshkar, derived from the Russian word for barrel and alluding to the stereotypical Hasid’s love of drinking (29). Other adaptations play on the similarity between a word in say Russian and a Hebrew word which sounds similar but means something strikingly and surreally different. Many other words are anagrams of their Yiddish equivalents. The jargon has many words in common with thieves argot (Ganovim-loshn), possibly reflecting the low status and bad reputations of many musicians.

The third chapter is by James Loeffler, who is a doctoral student at Columbia University. It moves to the United States and charts the early Jewish labour movement, in particularly the Jewish Musicians’ Unions, from the 1880s until the 1910s. This was a previously little known period of klezmer history since no recordings were made then, but Jewish musicians were active at a range of political events, strikes, socialist rallies and parades, in addition to traditional community celebrations. They also played a wide range of music, including national dances from all the countries of eastern Europe, dispelling the notion that the diversification of klezmer musicians’ repertoire took place between the two world wars. Thus the unions formed an intermediate stage, historically and culturally, before musicians made the move to mainstream American musicians’ unions and work. The practice and profession of the Eastern European musician was transformed by the radical politics of the New World, which generated both new opportunities and venues a performance, and a secular means of creating and maintaining a close community in a difficult New World. At the same time, musicians were becoming involved with the commercial music business of dance halls and Yiddish theatre. This generation of musicians kept their European identity as ‘Klezmorim’. Loeffler concludes by offering some suggestions about their subsequent disappearance following the First World War, as the next generation distanced themselves from the term klezmorim and it acquired connotations of ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘musically illiterate’.

Chapter five is contributed by Michael Alpert, a founding member of the band Brave Old World. He traces the connections between some of the early klezmer stars and the current revival, and proceeds to detail the life and diverse professional experience of Ben Bazyler, a drummer who was born in Warsaw in 1922. His parents owned and ran a bar, but his mother's family had been musicians for generations and the local folk orchestra was led by Bazyler’s uncle. Bazyler himself started performing in the orchestra at the age of eight: a range of Jewish dances and songs, plus Russian, Polish and American dance music, tangos, waltzes and well-known classical tunes. This was in Poland, and so puts paid to the notion that European klezmorim played only klezmer music. During the Second World War Bazyler fled to Soviet occupied Eastern Poland. His family was deported by the Russians to labour camps in Siberia, where most died of starvation. Bazyler was saved by his skill as an entertainer, and after his release settled in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan. There he made the acquaintance of many other Jewish musicians and learned music from the other regions of Europe. He returned to Poland in 1957, and then emigrated to the United States in 1964, where he continued to pursue his career as a professional musician and also worked part-time as a barber. He became involved with the klezmer revival, and taught at KlezKamp in 1989. Alpert states that the contours of this life are not unusual for a Polish Jew of Bazyler's generation, although Bazyler's long stay in the Soviet Union was uncommon. Alpert spent many hours talking to Bazyler about the music that he loved, and offers insights into how music and remembrance of the past may be intertwined. Bazyler was both conscious and proud of being the last of the ‘Kalushiner Klezmurim’, his family orchestra, of which he was the sole survivor until his suicide in 1990.

The Roots section of the book concludes with a chapter by Walter Zev Feldman, musician and author. He traces the transformation of the klezmer dance genre now known as the Bulgar, from its roots in Bessarabia, where it was known as the Bulgărească, through an intermediate form called Bulgarish to the final, Americanised Bulgar. The original form was documented in the first half of the 19th-century, and its name means ‘in the Bulgarian manner’. It was distinguished from other traditional dance forms by the presence of triplets in the music, and was related to another dance called the ‘Sîrba’. In America the Bulgarish became very popular, at the expense of other traditional dances. Many new tunes were composed, and detailed inspection reveals steady development in structure, modality, modulatory schemes and cadential formulas. Drawing on his survey of world-wide klezmer repertoires, Feldman says that the most surprising result of his analysis was that there was no significant input to these changes from non-Jewish American influence. What influence there was came from Europe, even though the Bulgar came to be the quintessential dance form of American klezmer, right until the demise of klezmer in about 1960. Is there a suggestion here that klezmer might not have died out, if it had assimilated more of contemporary American styles? That by drawing exclusively on European idioms it became too ‘other’, too distant, too associated with old-fashioned rituals, too painful, and hence stagnated?

The second part of the book covers the recent revival of klezmer, which started in the 1970s, after the mainstream American folk revival of the 1960s (many of the Jewish musicians writing and described in this section were active in both). Chapter seven is by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author and professor of performance studies at New York University. She contributes an elegant and elegiac discussion of klezmer, from the perspective of tracking the changes in sensibility which prepared the way for change and led to the revival and current lively interest in the music. In doing so she also reflects on the other articles in the book. This is followed by a chapter by Henry Sapoznik, author and founder of KlezKamp. KlezKamp was the first annual festival of Yiddish music and culture, in all its manifestations, and was highly instrumental in the revival and transmission of Jewish secular culture in the United States and more recently elsewhere (Canada, England, Holland, Russia…). Many now famous bands had their beginnings at KlezKamp, and it has also been an important factor in the preservation of the Yiddish language. The rise and rise of the festival is described with great affection by Sapoznik, who was initially an ethnomusicologist and old-time banjo player. He admits that part of his initial motivation was to gather the best Klezmer players together in one place so that he could play with them! Nowadays KlezKamp and similar events in other places (Limmud here in England) have entered the Jewish calendar in their own right, filling the empty week created by Christmas. In Sapoznik’s words, ‘the prime factor is the kids who grew up attending Kamp and have come to see it as just another event, like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Chanukah, in the firmament of the Jewish calendar - a new generation that assumes the mantle of cultural heritage with great aplomb and for which Yiddish and its culture is no revival but simple continuity. By recontextualising Yiddish culture, KlezKamp has itself become a context’ (186). So nowadays community and culture are lived and enacted only in the holidays, away from home? Aware that this in itself is a major cultural trend, KlezKamp has been self-documenting since its early days.

Chapter nine is by Marion Jacobson, a doctoral student at New York University. She considers two very disparate klezmer performance ensembles, Brave Old World (Michael Alpert's band) and the Klezmorim. Both bands had their origins in the Californian counterculture of the 1970s. Brave Old World took the approach that they were creative contemporary musicians, whose musicality and creativity were as important as their Jewishness. They also wanted to provide a Yiddish alternative to the right-wing, pro-Israel, middle-class Jewish mainstream of that time. Their music has the texture of chamber music, with complex arrangements devised through improvisation. They address their lyrics to contemporary political issues in both the States and Europe. They quickly became well-known, although there were problems because some American Jewish audiences were not happy to attend performances where they could not participate, but their collaboration with the classical violinist Itzhak Perlman vastly increased their popularity and the acceptability of the concert format. By contrast, the Klezmorim were theatrical, drawing on the 1920s novelty music aesthetic. Their music was eclectic and used parody to link quotations from opera, waltz and tango, Bulgarian and Yiddish dance music with cartoon sound effects. This enabled them to reach venues and events well beyond what they described as the ‘moribund folk circuit’ (194), as it is made them visually attractive, but it also alienated many Jewish listeners. In the 1980s they moved to Paris, where audiences were happy with the juxtaposition of Jewish folk music and performance art. Both bands expanded the boundaries of klezmer, drawing on material such as Yiddish labour songs, revolutionary anthems, Israeli pop and classical music. Musical sensibilities continue to be transformed.

The final two chapters are by members of the Klezmatics, another internationally famous and catalytic band. Here are the insider's views, the working musicians who play Klezmer because it is exciting, fun and lucrative, all the way from America to the Ukraine. In Frank London's chapter there is an interesting discussion of the practical consequences of tradition and authenticity, and how a musicians understanding and performance of these concepts can affect his eligibility for grants. This is followed by Alicia Svigals’ manifesto for Klezmer, her faith ‘As an openly Yiddishist Klezmer musician’ (217-9). This includes no nostalgia, high Jewish self-esteem, our own language, and no folk-fetishism or false definition of ‘authenticity’. Both musicians are writing about why they play Klezmer: Svigals locates some of its attraction to its ability to bridge the chasm between secular and religious Judaism. She also talks about the crossover between queer nation and Yiddishist movements, and places Klezmer firmly into the larger context of radical Jewish music.

About the author

Lindsay Aitkenhead is a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield, England, where she is currently writing up her thesis about the viola in folk music. She is also an enthusiastic Klezmorim.