Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia by Hankus Netsky (review)

“Jewish music” is, for many, Irving Berlin or Debbie Friedman, George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein. Musician, scholar and historian Hankus Netsky broadens this perspective by sharing the rich and fascinating story of a unique genre of Jewish folk music, klezmer, in a particular Jewish community, Philadelphia. He makes the case that this music is more than entertainment or contemporary popular culture; it is the door to understanding a community’s history, ethnic identity and sociology.

Netsky commences Klezmer- Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia, with these words: ”There are many ways to uncover the story of a Jewish community” (1). Employing scholarly methodology, he presents the documentary sources used to research a community, from its synagogues and organizations to scientific statistics and studies. But Netsky does so much more: he writes an historical and musical love letter to his family as viewed through the lens of his and their personal stories, overlaid with socioeconomic studies of Jewish culture and musicology. With personal reminiscences, interviews, and just a bit of family gossip, Netsky creates a compelling and fascinating web of “meises” mixed with scholarship, seen through the colorful recollections and memories of his uncles, their friends and cronies, his bandmates and, ultimately, his musical colleagues and historians.

At the same time, Netsky, Chair of Contemporary Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory, provides his readers with socioeconomic and ethnohistorical studies of Jewish culture as interpreted through the history of Jewish musicology from seminal historian Abraham Idelson in 1929 to today’s contemporary scholars. One cannot read this book without recognizing that its author has, almost singlehandedly, inspired the revival of the klezmer musical genre, which for decades had been a distant memory of a few surviving elderly musicians or aficionados, turning it into a musical style appreciated by Jews and non-Jews, young and old. He became to klezmer music what his friend Aaron Lansky was to Yiddish books, two young men enthralled with their Jewish cultural identity and determined to make it vibrant, contemporary and attractive again for a new generation by honoring the past while creating something new.

Why Philadelphia? In part, because this is the community best known to Netsky. His family had lived there for decades. In part, because it was not New York. Was he writing as favorite son of the Philadelphia klezmer music scene or as a nationally recognized historian and musician? Netsky recognized this potential conflict himself when he wrote “I must admit that, at various times when I was working on unearthing Philly’s klezmer scene, I found myself on slightly uneasy footing as a researcher. As ethnomusicologists are so fond of asking, was I an outsider or an insider?” (6) Fortunately for the reader, he is both. He brings the training of a scholar and musicologist, and combines it with the perspective of a participant and lover of the music which he himself did so much to revive and popularize sixty and seventy years after most of the genre had largely disappeared.

The book is structured from the universal to the specific, beginning with the definition and history of klezmer music in Eastern Europe to the twentieth-century history of the klezmorim (musicians) in Philadelphia. As might be expected, this story is divided into “before the Holocaust” and “after.” One might assume that the immediate post-World War II story was rife with tragedy and sadness, but, in fact, Netsky tells of the blossoming of Jewish music in postwar Philadelphia. With the enormous expansion of suburban life came the mixture of old world Eastern European musicianship with modern American trained musicians, filling the demands of social and cultural events, simchas of b’nai mitzvah and wedding receptions, at synagogues and venues around the Philadelphia area.

The book focuses on the musicians themselves. Netsky shows obvious respect and affection for these professionals who laid the foundation on which he has built such an amazing composing and recording career. While most...