The World Center for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936-1940 (review)

Book Reviews 141 national/historical banner from the early pioneering days of the turn of the century? Every author who writes about jerusalem offers hislher own perspective . This incll.ldes historians, artists, and politicians, as well as ethnographers . Halper thus is not unique in this respect, but rather follows a typical pattern. However, any point of view (especially an approach saturated with ideology) should be fully developed and followed throughout the chapters of the book. If only added as an afterthought to the last pages in an over-simplified manner, it loses its credibility and value. In conclusion, Halper wrote an interesting book of events, deeds, communal life, scandals, conflicts, and happy and sad occurrences in nineteenth-century jerusalem. A sprinkling of tables, figures, and photographs illustrates the narration. Detailed notes provide background material for researchers (although a bibliography is missing), and a very valuable glossary of people and yishuv terminology is added. Nitza Druyan Hofstra University and The Long Island Center for jewish Studies The World Center for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936-1940, by Philip V. Bohlman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 297 pp. £35.00. The rich musical life of the State of Israel, long since taken for granted by resident and visitor alike, figures high among the lasting intellectual, artistic, and organizational blessings that the much maligned yekkes bestowed upon a struggling Yishuv in the nineteen-thirties. Most of the musical institutions they founded and patronized did survive the British Mandate, however precariously, ready for their by no means insignificant contribution to the normalization of Israeli culture once political independence , the dream of generations, had finally been realized. Opportunities lost did call for occasional victims nevertheless, and one such, doomed by unfavorable circumstances before it could fulfill any substantial part of its envisaged task, was the short-lived World Center for jewish Music, the brainchild of Dr. Salli Levi, a dentist by profession, and the Zionist journalist Hermann Swet. A good idea of what might have been, had these two tireless enthusiasts succeeded in securing the necessary material and human wherewithal, can, however, still be culled from the intensive correspondence they maintained with famous and some deserving but not 142 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 so well knownJewish musicians throughout the diaspora during that trying period immediately preceding the Nazi conquest of Europe. Thanks to Professor Bohlman of the University of Chicago a generous selection of important items from the Center's archive currently at the National and University Library in Jerusalem is readily accessible in that author's fine English translation. The financially strapped Center's impressive, though not unproblematic , journal Musica Hebraica never went beyond one attractively produced double issue. Inevitably, its principal concern was the perennial question as to what specifically, if anything, constitutes "Jewish music." And that vexing matter received a variety of more or less objective treatments, as behooves a proper journal. By contrast the letters and sundry personal statements from the pens of a whole host ofJewish composers, musicologists , and critics introduce on the one hand often quite unique viewpoints and above all sentiments yet also testify, at times with considerable fervor, to an overriding commitment to the Yishuv and its cultural aspirations. While several correspondents still under the Nazi heel were clearly moved at least in part by their urgent need of a safe haven, their desire to contribute ideas as well as actual music was no less sincere than that of their colleagues of the most disparate backgrounds and achievements elsewhere. Disagreements-and there were many-pertained as a rule not to matters of principle but to the best way of reaching a given common goal. Admittedly, the debate regarding specific kinds of music likely to serve the needs of the settlers best did reveal some seemingly unbridgeable gaps separating especially those of East European descent from their Central European counterparts even in the face of events that threatened each and every one indiscriminately. Be this as it may, though, the challenge of a situation fraught with obvious dangers as well as prospects for novel artistic tasks elicited any number and kind of noteworthy reactions. Publications of selected correspondence not infrequently place the reader in the uncomfortable...