American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots

8. KlezKamp and the Rise of Yiddish Cultural Literacy

chapter 8 KlezKamp and the Rise of Yiddish Cultural Literacy henry sapoznik 174 At the outset of the klezmer renewal in 1976, an arm of the American Jewish Congress, called the Martin Steinberg Center, received a federal grant under President Carter’s CETA program to fund the study of Jewish culture. As musicians, filmmakers, writers, poets, painters, puppeteers , and playwrights made their way to the old carriage house on East 85th Street that housed it, the center became a short-lived oasis for young Jews seeking self-expression and Jewish continuity through the arts. For me, CETA was a dream come true of research, documentation, and study in the largely uncharted field of klezmer music. But if that research had remained academic, klezmer music today would be a relic, a curio piece viewed with nostalgia, instead of the vibrant musical form it has once again become. And if efforts to learn to play the music had remained similarly formalistic—limited, say, to what could be gleaned from listening to old 78s—the depth of our understanding and performance of it would be no greater than the thickness of the discs. Fortunately for my mission at CETA, the preeminent source for Jewish cultural research, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, was located just around the corner. YIVO housed a jumble of unlistened-to 78s, and my days were given over to playing, cataloging, and documenting them. This method of research was not new to me. As an ethnomusicologist /banjoist specializing in old-time music, I’d spent much time perusing the scratchy 78s of American popular music from the turn of the century—the raw and vital first sounds of Appalachian fiddlers, KlezKamp 175 Figure 8.1 KlezKamp, 1988. Lorin Sklamberg (piano), Alicia Svigals (violin), Margot Leverett (clarinet), Pete Sokolow (keyboard), Dave Licht (drums); others unknown. Photo by Albert J. Winn, used with permission. banjo-playing blackface comics, and hot early jazz bands. But the YIVO collection of 78s was surrendering to me the music of my forebears, the passionate and unfettered first American klezmorim. Simultaneously new and old, the records were a passport to a vanished land. However, the sort of face-to-face collecting and observation of continuity through which I’d researched old-time music in numerous field trips to North Carolina was not possible for the study of this music . There was no Old Country to go back to, no Poland, Ukraine, or Rumania where I might find Jewish old-timers tenaciously holding onto their repertoire against all modern influences. These delicate shellacs were three-minute musical Rosetta stones that unearthed a musical language that offered entrée to the klezmer tradition; they in effect were the Old Country, a ticket back to that time and place. And they led to even richer passage when, in delivering the knowledge gleaned from such research , I happened upon the primary source for learning what klezmer was, and is, all about. One of my tasks in the CETA program was to give lectures on klezmer music at various senior centers and nursing homes in the New York City area. While translating some theater ads from vintage Yiddish newspapers , I had come across a reference to cellist Joseph Cherniavsky and his Hasidic-American Jazz Band. What a wonderful and incongruous name—I loved it! Who were they, though? Thereafter I made sure to 176 Henry Sapoznik mention the orchestra in all my lectures, including one on a spring day in the Bronx in 1978. The audience comprised dozens of seniors, some listening, some dozing , some talking. One woman sat up front, knitting furiously. When I mentioned the Cherniavsky outfit, without looking up, she said aloud, “Oh, them. My husband used to play drums with them.” “Your husband. Is he . . . all right?” I asked, fearing that she, like so many of the older women, was a widow. Again without looking up, she replied, “He was when I left him in the back playing pinochle.” Putting down her knitting, Grace Helfenbein headed to a back room of the Bronx Senior Center to fetch her husband , Joe. Thus began my first lecture to an audience that included someone who had lived the experience. Would the man consider this the height of chutzpah? I needn’t have worried. Joe Helfenbein’s radiant, attentive smile was the best assurance that the world he’d known was being accurately portrayed. After the lecture...