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Yiddish lives as a Jewish youth subculture
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Jewish Herald-Voice, Yiddish lives as a Jewish youth subculture >>
By AAron Howard
As a spoken language, Yiddish is dead in many locations. As a cultural tradition, Yiddish is alive and kicking. The mother tongue of Eastern European Jewry, Yiddish was spoken written and read by the largest body of Jews in the world at the turn of the 20th century. Migration (the largest in Jewsith history) ans the Holocaust destroyed Yiddish as a living language. But as Isaac Bashevis Singer said, "there's a big difference between 'dead' and 'dying.'"
Yiddish, as a sensibility, an identity ort an ideology is a large part of a Jewish renewal movement in North America and Europe. Yiddish drives the growing popularity of klezmar music. Although it is too early to clain that klezmar is "the identity music of Jewish American youth," as envisioned by Alicia Svigals, Yiddish articulates a set of "distinctive sensibilities and their sounds" for some young Jewish subcultures.
Three recent klezmar recordings provide clear examples of the ways Yiddish is now being used as a sensibility, identity of ideology.
The Klezmatics "Rise Up," (Rounder) is an example of Yiddish as a part of an American Radical Jewish Culture movement - that is, Yiddish as emblematic of an edgy, outsider, "resistance" culture that challenges systems of domination.
Yale Strom's "Klezmer: Café Jew Zoo" (Naxos World) is an example of Yiddish as memory; that is, the use of Yiddish to evoke the "vanished communities" of Ashkenazic Jewry and the "last Jews" of Europe.
Les Yeux Noirs "Live" (World Village) is an example of Yiddish as imagined theme or mood. French-Jewish violinists Eric and Oliver Alsbiak lead a group of Romanian non-Jewish musicians. The band links Yiddish, Gypsy and Romanian genre. This is Yiddish as a universalized abstraction, a European Jewish space that is often filled by non Jewish neo-klezmers and played for a European non-Jewish audience.
Seth Rogovoy, in his book "The Essential Klezmer," describes klezmer as "Yiddish music in language." As a listener and music writer, Rogovoy describes his reaction to klezmer as "finding a musical home." Or, as Alicia Svigals (formerly with the Klezmatics) declared, "The Klezmatics have made it a mission to provide a soundtrack for this new Jewish identity."
Well said.
However, identity always resists a single interpretation.
From the postmodern avant-garde to religious orthodoxy, Yiddish klezmer (like modern Jewish identity) is up for grabs. Klezmer's contested meaning makes for some powerful discussions - and for some powerful music.
The Klezmatics have always been on the leading edge of the "klezmer as radicalism" movement. This movement identifies Yiddish with a secular, social activist Jewish identity.
With two openly gay members in the band, The Klezmatics also advocates a "Queer Yiddishism." This is the idea that neither one's Jewishness nor one's gayness should be marginalized (kept in the closet). Instead, this identity should help define one's authentic reality.
On the Klezmatics new new album, one finds "Loshn-Koydesh," a song that links Talmud Torah, the yeshiva practice of studying in pairs and homo-erotic love. One also finds Yiddish used as the language of radical activism on "I Ain't Afraid" and "Barikadn."
Because The Klezmatics have defined the band and its music as being on the edge of a contemporary , living Jewish culture, the story behind the delay of the release of "Rise Up" is of particular interest. The album release was delayed for eight months due to a sex-discrimination lawsuit filed by former Klezmatic violinist Alicia Svigals.
According to an account in the New-York based Forward newspaper, Svigals, a cofounder of the group and band member for 17 years, was fired last year for missing out-of-town performances during her pregnancy and after the birth of her son.
When Svigals first became pregnant, band members proposed that she take an unpaid leave of absence since she was unable to travel with the band. Svigals argued to continue her role as a paid band member. Although she could not tour Europe, she could continue to appear at a majority of the band's concerts in and around their New York home. What would David Dubinsky do?
In this case, both factions hires lawyers. Svigals filed a suit in New York State Supreme Court charging that a 1996 agreement governing The Klezmatics' partnership gave band members life tenure. Moreover, she charged sex discrimination after the band apparently voted her out of "the partnership" and replaced her with violinist Lisa Gutkin. The band unsucessfully sought a gag order to prevent Svigals from speaking about the sex discrimination suit.
Rounder Records halted the album's release after lawyers for Svigal informed the record compay about the litigation. The case recently was settled. Terms and awards to Svigals were not made public.
Insiders were treated to a band of cutting edge, progressive artists seeking a gag order against a fellow musician. And a manifesto-writing musician seeking an injunction that barred the band from performing, recording or otherwise marketing themselves as the Klezmatics. All of this was disheartening.
In contrast, Yale Strom represents klezmer's traditional wing. In looking back to the music's folk roots, Strom doesn't rely on listening to old vinyl 78s. He is a folklorist and trained ethnomusicologist who has made numerous field trips to Eastern Europe.
Call Strom the ultimate preservationist in his attempt to preserve continuity in the wake of genocide and Yiddish cultural obsolescence. He has directed four films including "The Last Klezmer," a documentary about 69-year-old-musician Leopold Kozlowski, the only remaining Polish student of the old prewar klezmer traditions; "Carpati: 50 miles and 50 years," a documentary about the remaining Jewish communities that survived Holocaust in the Carpathian Mountains region of Eastern Europe; and "L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin" which chronicles the remnants of theJewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan.
Personallu, I've never connected with any of Strom's recordings until "Café Jew Zoo." LIke Brave Old World's "Berlin 1990," if not for the Holocaust, he, too, "would have been Europe's progeny." So, Strom asks are klezmer musicians in Europe merely dancing bears? Is it nostalgia, guilt or a financial deal with the devil that drives klezmer musicians to perform in Europe?
Another album highlight is the appearance of clarinetist Andy Statman who performs two Stoliner Hasidic melodies. Simply arranged for clarinet and violin (played by Strom), there melodies argue the Statman possition that klezmer is a particularly Jewish music.
Can white boys really play the blues? If I understand Statman's current direction, he would say that klezmer only can have authenticity when it is aligned with religiour Orthodoxy.
Place Les Yeux Noirs at the opposite end of the Statman position. File its music under Klezmer/Gypsy/Balkan/world. Klezmer as theme music. Maybe that's where European bands that are mixed or primarily composed of non-Jews must place themselves.
Given a modest renewal of Jewish like in Europe and a major influx of Jewish tourists, klezmer festivals and concerts are now an industry across Europe.
Non-Jewish European audiences appear to embrace this music as a "universal language," a medium of international brotherhood, or as a way of resisting fascism. Klezmer musicians so not need to be insiders. They don't even need to be Jewish!
As a performing band, Les Yeux Noirs reminds one of many of the mocern Celtic-roots bands. Both the Yiddish and the Irish retain a connection with the past, "draped in myth and legends." Both are rooted in an instrumental tradition. Yet they perform the old repertoire to signify authenticity.
As one can hear on the Les Yeux Noirs "live" album, klezmer, like Celtic, can incormporate nearly any other style of music that makes sense to the musicians. So at this level, Yiddish klezmer is not a parochial Jewish music. Instead, it is emblematic of a cosmopolitan, universal, progressive humanism.
Jews have never fitted neatly into categories. So maybe thinking about Yiddish and klezmer also cannot be neatly defined. I would argue that any discussion of Yiddish or klezmer should be grounded in an authentic Jewish particularism as opposed to the repudiation of a Jewish particularism. Like Rogovoy, I define klezmer as my musical home, but I don't see it as opposed to Israeli Hebrew music or even English -language religious music.
Exactly what the inside of home should look like is still up for grabs. Maybe the whole exercise invites us to take a more complex look at the idea of culture, identity and sensibility. One could end up seeing all three of these recent klezmer releases as soundtracks to a Jewish identity. 05/29/03
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