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3. Di Rusishe Progresiv Muzikal Yunyon No. 1 fun Amerike: The First Klezmer Union in America
- University of California Press
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In his 1902 play, The Kreutzer Sonata, Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin presents an intriguing scenario: two klezmorim, Efroym Fidler and son Gregor, emigrate to New York. The son goes on to become a successful classical musician and teacher, while the father struggles to make a living from music and complains bitterly of restrictions on his craft: “I, an old klezmer, must stand for an examination to see whether I’m a decent musician. And if I’m good enough as a musician, I still have to bring in twenty-five dollars in order to be allowed to work as a klezmer. And, worst of all, when I am already a klezmer, I must stand in line until someone officially declares me to be a klezmer. Oy, I’ve been a klezmer for forty years already. Oy, I need to eat. Oy, I don’t have twenty-five dollars. . . .”1 What makes it so difficult for Efroym Fidler to survive by playing music? It is, of course, the Jewish musicians’ union, which labels him a scab for not paying its exorbitant entrance fees. Efroym himself notes the irony, that “Gevald, in darkest Russia, anyone who wants to fiddle does so and here in free America you need to ask for permission !”2 Yet before the play’s end, the older klezmer is reinvented again. He reveals that he has quit the union and opened his own music school on Houston Street, joining the ranks of the well-paid capitalists.3 What is one to make of this chain of events, especially given that one hears so little from later immigrant klezmorim about the role of the union in their lives? Is Gordin’s portrayal an accurate critique or a melodramatic mischaracterization of the union as it existed then? Although chapter 3 Di Rusishe Progresiv Muzikal Yunyon No. 1 fun Amerike The First Klezmer Union in America james loeffler 35 there is much speculation as to the activities and experiences of American klezmorim before World War I, short of saying that these musicians found work in the Yiddish theater and at weddings, restaurants, and cafes on the Lower East Side, historians know little about this prerecording community. To some extent this chronological gap stems from a lack of information; written sources from this period are rare and the 36 James Loeffler Figure 3.1 Cover to sheet music for a Trauer-March played at a 1905 rally. From Mark Slobin’s collection. [54.210.143.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:32 GMT) wave of klezmer oral history began too late to catch survivors. But it is also characteristic of a certain trend in American Jewish history, that of canonizing certain cultural epochs and institutions at the expense of others . Few remember, for example, that the Jewish Daily Forward (1897) was preceded by twenty years of Yiddish-language journalism, or that before Ellis Island immigrants disembarked in New York at the even more notorious processing center known as Castle Garden. So, too, is it with the first generation of American klezmorim. The interwar recording age of American klezmer music is well documented and heavily promoted as the classical period, the Golden Age, therefore obscuring several decades of earlier activity.4 What follows is a brief attempt to rescue another early American Jewish institution from historical oblivion—di rusishe progresiv muzikal yunyon no. 1 fun amerike (the Russian Progressive Musical Union No. 1 of America)—the first Jewish musicians’ union in the United States and the missing link in the history of the migration of klezmer music and musicians from eastern Europe to the United States.5 The origins of this union also reveal a great deal about the early effects of social, cultural, and political currents of urban America on this genre of eastern European Jewish music, and about the overall transformation of traditional Yiddish culture in the New World. While the Jewish labor movement was destined to become the single most important force in the lives of Jewish immigrants within a decade, in the 1880s it was still struggling to gain a foothold in the community. Political organizations such as the Russian Progressive Union, the Central Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, the Socialist Labor Party, and even the Libertarian Socialists (anarchists) each made several unsuccessful attempts to organize Jewish unions throughout the early and mid 1880s. The birth of a Jewish musicians’ union owed everything to the establishment of what was to be for decades the...