Balkan Jazz

Recently, I encountered, as if returned from the dead, the great uncles of my childhood, characters who aroused in me little sympathy and considerable revulsion on those Sunday afternoons in the fifties when I was forced to visit them. In winter this meant sitting in dreary parlors on hard, antimacassared furniture while they drank Slivovitz, raku, or vodka schnapps, and in summer endlessly pumping the porch glider as I watched circles of perspiration spread in shock waves from their armpits. Who would have foretold that forty years later I would discover a deep retroactive affection for them?

To my second-generation immigrant mind, these relatives were too European, or perhaps too Jewish, their appetites vast and unseemly. Had they never heard of antiperspirant? Why couldn't they speak English? As a child, I found them embarrassing. To the ideals of self-improvement and change that fueled the American dream, they responded with an old-world belief in the immutability of character. They were fatalistic; in lieu of a diet, they took seconds of salt herring and halvah, burping aloud to seal their satisfactions and flaunt their destinies. All their enemies were external; one battled the world, not one's self. None of them ever spent a dime or a moment to correct scars, accents, skimpy educations, girly hips, hammer toes, or crooked teeth: these were flourishes, even if miserable, in the human signature.

The occasion that triggered their reappearance was a "Gypsy Festival" presented by the World Music Institute. This two-part evening concert began inauspiciously with an Hungarian ensemble who sheepishly announced that contrary to the billing, they weren't going to play any real gypsy music! The audience groaned. My companion whispered, "This is one of those cryptic eastern European political statements." There followed the sort of violin music you hear in Hungarian restaurants, a succession of schmaltz in higher and higher keys punctuated with official pronouncements by a cultural attaché from the Hungarian embassy. Only the guest soloist, a Transylvanian gypsy, delighted us with his Roma embellishments and the sheer speed of his fiddling. Transylvania is best known in the United States as the birthplace of Dracula; it's also the birthplace of my grandmother Minerva and her mama-liga, the Rumanian national dish, a kind of corn meal mush. During this energetic fiddling, my family album stayed shut, even the pages where my grandmother had hinted of taboo assignations between Jewish meydeles and Gypsy stable hands. Though bored and exhausted at intermission (two hours later!), we decided to stay to hear the authentic gypsy band.

Eleven ragged-looking men, most of them well past retirement age, walked onto the stage from all directions. Their entrance looked unrehearsed, more like a bunch of men breaking up after a poker game than a band preparing to perform. Like most musicians, they were clad in a wild assortment of finery, most of it ill-fitting and eccentric in the extreme—a blood-red sport coat topped by a leather hunting hat, a silk suit paired with a beret, black and white checkered trousers breaking over white patent leather loafers. The lead vocalist, a dead ringer for my Uncle Benny the carpenter, wore a shiny gray suit jacket that barely reached his waist, riding so high over a watermelon belly that he looked like a double biological miracle: a pregnant seventy-year-old man. Certainly this bunch of sartorial misfits and graybeards could not be Taraf de Haidouks, the "Band of Musical Brigands," whose first recording in 1991 topped the European charts and elicited invitations to perform outside of Romania. No, this motley crew of impersonators must have been scooped up from a sidewalk cafe in their village Clejani, near Bucharest. They were somebody's grandfather and somebody's alcoholic uncle and someone else's destitute cousin. "Oh my God," I said. "They look exactly like the men in my family." To my amazement, tears sprang to my eyes. "Do they look like yours?"

"No!" (Loudly, definitely.) Then, "Yes! They could be Turks! They look like they smoke and drink too much." My companion, born in Edirne, in the European part of...