ברוכים הבאים! שלום עליכם!

Welcome to KlezKanada’s first weblog.

Every summer, fans of Klezmer music and other aspects of Yiddish culture gather in the Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal, and spend a week learning and celebrating as much Yiddish culture—especially klezmer—as can be crowded into the week. This year, several of us will be keeping a contemporaneous weblog of what we see and hear. If you are attending KlezKanada and want to participate, do contact us.

In the meantime, the primary instigators of this weblog are Ari Davidow (host of the KlezmerShack) and Judy Pinnolis (host of the Jewish Music Web Center). Our intent is to post some items here as we prepare our talks and as we talk to attendees of the forthcoming event. But we also have to get ready for the camp, so there may not be much here until kamp starts.

We can accept comments and postings in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. The Yiddish and Hebrew will only work if you can type Unicode-compatible text (cutting and pasting from AbiWord or MS Word files saved as HTML may be the easiest way to get here). But, the reason this is being started now is, in part, to let us explore the technical issues. We’ll see what works!

I am Ari Davidow. I am best known to the Klezmer world for my website, the KlezmerShack, a website that was started to support an article I wrote for the Whole Earth Review back in 1995. I was last at KlezKanada a few years ago. Judy and her two children and I had a glorious week, which included the sight of our klezmer-resistant youngest son jamming on the sax with Hankus Netsky and friends. We’ve been conspiring to come back ever since.

Back when I first discovered klezmer in the early 1980s, I worked primarily as a typographer. Worked “primarily”? Heck, sometimes we lived at the typeshop for days on end when things were especially exciting. It was an especially exciting time to work with type: new phototypesetters, then digital type enabled us to do things with type that we had never done before, and to do them more easily, less expensively, and faster than ever before. It didn’t take long for me to convince the owner of the shop I managed to purchase some Hebrew fonts. I then wrote software that converted pages input in Hebrew on our computer to codes that the typesetting system would understand. The only problem was that the typesetting system understood only how to break lines from left to right, not right to left as with Hebrew and Yiddish. That had to be handled manually.

Over the next couple of decades, I studied old manuscripts, especially old printed manuscripts, to get a sense of how Jewish tradition best understood putting letters and words on paper. Of special interest were issues to do with mixing Hebrew and English, or in the case of the wonderful polyglot bibles of the Middle Ages, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, German, French English, or some combination thereof. In 1990 I even lectured on the subject at a type conference at Oxford, England.

For many years it has bothered me that the beauty and grace of the best of Hebrew and Yiddish calligraphy and typography were unknown to people just discovering the means to use computers to set Jewish languages. Worse, after centuries of tradition suggesting best practices for setting text, translation, and transliteration, new generations were attempting to solve problems for which there were already easy, sensible solutions.

Even worse, the heyday of the best of Yiddish literature occurred during the nadir of Hebrew/Yiddish typography. Looking at books published at the end of the 19th century or early 20th century one can only be depressed by the contrast between often stunning calligraphy or experimental typography on the covers, and the mundane, near-unreadable (or worse) type inside.

I figure that it’s time to expand our sense of Yiddish culture to ways of putting Yiddish and Hebrew onto paper (or posters or mugs or CD covers). This summer I’m going to be very excited to be doing a lecture on the best of Hebrew typography at KlezKanada, as well as workshops on how to put Yiddish onto paper in ways that are simplest and best for songsheet readers, CD lyric sheets, or any other purpose. I have even started a Hebrew Typography weblog to document things as I get prepared. Come visit!

Hello to ALL coming to KlezKanada! I’m looking forward to meeting you in August, and very excited to be returning to a wonderful week of Yiddish and music. I’m Judy Pinnolis, and most days I work in the Goldfarb Library of Brandeis University. At the library I do things like help people with research of all sorts, including Yiddish Studies. Some of you, (in a studious mode), may want to take a look at our library’s research guide which I wrote for our Yiddish students here at Brandeis.

For fun, I created the website The Jewish Music WebCenter which documents all sorts of information on many aspects of Jewish music. (Being a true librarian, I just couldn’t help myself in also making it a research site!) One of those are webpages devoted to Jewish women and music which is how I got started learning all about the activities and history of Jewish women and Jewish music! This is something I add a little bit to all the time, as I learn about more and more people. I hope to talk to a lot of you during camp who are girls and women who are active in Jewish music. You never know, your name and biographical sketch may wind up added to the women’s pages!!

Ari and I are also planning on writing about the great fun and activities at camp while we’re there, keeping everyone posted on what’s happening.

Take care and I look forward to hearing from you!

[Note: There was no internet access from KlezKanada this year, so this year’s weblog is being posted after the fact, on a week delay. In the meantime, our camera has ceased to download digital images, but we have a lovely library from Bob Blacksberg, who has supplied all images used today. If you have written about KlezKanada and want to add to this weblog, do please e-mail me.]

KlezKanada lasts about a week. This year, musicians are due to descend on Camp Bnai Brith, about an hour north of Montreal, on Monday night. Some are flying or taking the train to Montreal, where they will be picked up by camp shuttle. Judy and I, like anyone else within a day or two’s driving distance, are driving.

In our minds, this is a five hour trip from Boston. In real life, we leave late, stop for a leisurely lunch, encounter road construction, then hit Montreal at the height of rush hour. But we make it in time for dinner, and all is well.

We are so excited to arrive. First, even though it is before dinner, there is already music in the air. Then, we see loads of friends—people we try to make time to see in regular life, but whom we inevitably only see at this sort of gathering. In fact, as we check in, one of my best friends that I know from Israel 30 years ago, comes into the office to register right behind us. How could our timing have been better?

Camp Bnai Brith is a kids summer camp. It is a modern camp—there is an exercise room, and even a computer room. The latter is where we are hoping to hold our workshops. We had originally thought of doing these as one-time classes, similar in length to our lectures (Judy is lecturing on “Women in Jewish Music” on Saturday; I’ll be talking about Hebrew Typography on Sunday.) Since music workshops last all week, we are theoretically on call during the week for an hour and a half each day. I am hoping that at least a couple of musicians will come by to get advice on some technical problem to do with getting Hebrew letters on their computer, and will leave with the idea that there are easily-accessible rules to making a page with Hebrew or Yiddish with English more readable. Since we have a computer lab in which to teach, I have also brought a CD with an OpenSource multilingual word processor called “AbiWord“. I also have the slides from my Type90 lecture on doing Hebrew typography, which I can walk through if anyone is interested. And, like Judy, I have handouts. I am also thinking that next year, if we do this, or something similar, again, it may work better to let people arrange time to meet with us one-on-one as fits their schedules. First, we’ll see how things go with regular hours.

Judy is teaching a workshop on how to do Jewish music research on the Internet, but, as we quickly discovered, there is no Internet access from the camp. This isn’t an entire surprise: who expects summer camps to have internet access. But this year we thought that there would be, and indeed it is being worked on. But it isn’t here yet. Judy will, instead, show slides from a presentation she gave a few months ago.

After dinner we all gather in one of the halls where Michael and Jeff Warschauer introduce each of the faculty. Each person describes their workshop(s), or their availability as a private tutor. It takes about an hour to go through it all, but it fun for us staff to talk about the workshops, and good for our fellow attendees to hear an in-person description of what we think we will be teaching.

From there, it is on to the first night cabaret, where performers cover everything from familiar folksongs to jams to theatre. I am mostly hanging out in the hall, greeting friends, and munching on potato chips. After the long drive, I am tired. Knowing that there will be music all week, and feeling comforted and at home with the sounds from the cabaret mixing themselves with sounds from jam sessions around the building, Judy and I walk back to our bunk, past additional jam sessions, and go to sleep.

[Note: Many of these photos are by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery for today at rblacksberg.com/KlezKan04Tuesday/index1.html]

Tuesday began auspiciously. We actually made it up in time for a breakfast of eggs, cereals, porridge, bagels, cheese, fruits, vegetables, and juice. The table waiters were quick to bring an entire pitcher of coffee when several of us, blearily requested same. As the meal wound down, Hy made the day’s first announcements over the din.

Immediately after breakfast, the first workshops began. Sruli and Lisa gathered the kids by the flagpole for their usual amazing combination of music instruction, play, and beach time.

 

Judy and I were trying to figure out how to handle the fact that we were listed as giving a workshop each day, but we had each planned for a one-session workshop. My workshop was titled “Practical Yiddish Printing” and was to cover everything from installing a Hebrew-capable word processor, to adding Hebrew system resources to computers, to layout issues—anything affecting putting Hebrew- and Latin-alphabet words together, by pen or computer. Judy was doing a special workshop on researching Jewish music on the Internet. We decided to try to encourage people to drop in on whichever day worked, and we would be present all week for the drop ins. Hy made an announcement to that effect (Later, we also tried to arrange to work with people on “off hours” as was convenient—our goal was to reach people who would usually be in music workshops.)

I met with the camp’s general computer maven and he showed me to the computer room where our workshops would be held. He also informed me that rumors were correct: There would be no internet access. This would have been a major problem for Judy, but it isn’t the first time she has had to give her workshop without the internet. She had a CD at hand and was prepared.

The main body of the day at KlezKanada includes two workshop/lecture sessions in the morning, and two in the afternoon. Judy and I would be at the computer room in the afternoon, me during the PM1 session, Judy during the session following. To take advantage of the morning, Judy had brought her tsimbl and went off to class. After class she stayed and practiced for the rest of the morning.

I walked back to my bunk to get my computer. As would be true for the rest of the week, I bumped into Alan Bern teaching outside and we eagerly greeted each other and made plans to sit down and shmooze, somehow, sometime.

Since my workshop had to do with practical Yiddish, I decided that the signage outside of our building should reflect Yiddish typography, as well as English. I made my slow way towards the center of camp looking for a fluent Yiddish speaker who could help translate. Along the way, of course, I met friends, and we would shmooze for a while, until I felt obligated to continue. It occurred to me, looking around at the camp, and enjoying the sunshine, that I was, after all, on vacation.

One question that I asked a lot as I wandered had to do with Jewish identity. For many of the people my age that I met, the music was effectively, Jewish identity. Participation in events such as KlezKanada was the main connection to anything Jewish in lives that were otherwise secular. Others were active in mainstream Jewish activity. Their own, or their children’s pleasure in making Jewish music was what brought them to KlezKanada. In listening to various stories about discovery of Jewish identity, living Jewishly or not so overtly Jewishly, it seemed as though I were again listening to the diversity of Jewish experience through the last couple of American generations. What I especially enjoyed, however, was how many parents were there with kids, and were generally involved in their Jewish communities, wherever they were. This was a nice way to take a vacation. In this post-revival generation, klezmer and Yiddish culture are part of the American Jewish cultural mainstream.

In the end, it was the redoubtable Pesakh Fiszman who came to my aid and provided the translations. Thus, “Practical Yiddish Printing” became ממשדיקע יידישע דרוקעריי and “Jewish Music Research on the Internet” became פאָרשונג פון יידישער מוזיק אויף דעם אינטערנעץ. I created a file on my laptop with the signs, copied the document to my USB memory dongle, and brought it to the office, where they hooked the dongle up to their computer and printed the pages in seconds. Staff then got someone to put them up outside the Computer Room for me. [Aside: copying files to the USB dongle was easier than using a floppy disk and I wound up sharing mine with several campers who had arrived with Macs or PCs and wanted a simple way to get notes or other ephemera printed. Since the office computers had Hebrew enabled, we were able to print in either Hebrew/Yiddish or English without thinking twice.]

While people around me were playing beautiful music and jamming (sometimes both at once), I enjoyed seeing the many people with whom I correspond on the Jewish-Music mailing list, or friends from all over.

After lunch, I headed back to the Computer Room where I taught my first drop-in student, who was looking for a way to incorporate Hebrew into the decorative flyers and awards she made for her synagogue. An hour and a half later, Judy came and worked with her first students while I headed back down to the Retreat Center, the main gathering area, for more conversation and sun. One of the really delightful aspects of hanging out was watching how first one person, or two people would gather around a table and start playing a bit; perhaps working on something that they had learned in class, and then someone nearby would open an instrument case and join in. As I walked back to my room to put down my equipment, I realized that throughout the camp, there was almost never a moment or a location where one couldn’t hear at least someone making music. I had a brief moment where I realized that there were some tunes that I just don’t need to hear again in this lifetime: the klezmer equivalent of “LA Woman” or “Happy Together”. I especially didn’t need to hear beginning versions of those songs. But after that first disquieting thought I realized that I was, instead, really enjoying the polyphony of the many voices playing often-familiar music. For today, at least, I seem to have forgotten to be bored, and even the familiar sounds fresh, and fun.

Eventually, it was time for dinner. As it happens, two KlezKanada alumni, Jason Rosenblatt and Rachel Lemisch, had just gotten married, so each night at KlezKanada, we were celebrating Sheva Brachot the ongoing week of wedding feasts. Needless to say, dancing broke out, yet again.

Afterwards, there was a special program for staff and music workshoppers (see next entry), followed by, of course, the late night music cabaret and more jamming and dancing.

     

[Note: Many of these photos are by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery at rblacksberg.com/KlezKan04Tuesday/index1.html]

After dinner on Tuesday night, we were invited to the Main Rec Hall, the same place we staffmembers had introduced ourselves and our workshops and lectures the previous night, for something called “History of Klezmer”. I knew that part of it would be Pete Sokolow talking from his deep knowledge and experience of American klezmer, but wasn’t sure what else to expect. Michael Alpert was MCing, and he and Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer had already filled some large notepages for us all to see with what appeared to be rather random phrases unrelated to history. As has happened before, I took some notes, but didn’t always hear well, and didn’t always understand what I was hearing, so do let me know if anything needs correction or elaboration. But I think that the notes make my own limits clear, as well.

Deborah begins. She immediately begins talking about ornamentation. Huh? Ornamentation as the first part of a lecture about what klezmer music is?

Set this aside. Listen. Move with her as she guides the audience through singing exercises, exploring sounds. Not too much ornamentation. Sense the core melody and what you want to do with it. Then there are possibilities. You don’t have to do all of them.

“Sometimes a trill will help you sit on a note”. A trill is not necessarily there because you can do it. A trill is there when it helps you with the melody. Next, a krechts. Not because you learned it, but here, because it imparts motion.

Everything is there to do something, not just to fill space or because you can. This person would have made a great typographer!

Jeff takes over. Rhythmic improvisation. He is referring to a different group of terms, already written on the blackboard.

1. Phrasing within a rhythmic pattern. Most of us tend to think of that as a pattern of four. Pete plays a steady four beat pattern as Jeff improvises around that. “I’m free, but we get together every four beats.”

Aside, from Jeff: Husidls tend to phrase in two.

2. Flexible variation of a rhythmic pulise. We (Deborah and I) use a lot of rhythmic improvisation. But you wouldn’t do this to dancers. You follow dancers and vary a little, but not extreme rhythmic variation.

   What is especially interesting is that while those of us who aren’t sure of this material listen, trying to soak it all up, the audience veterans chime up with questions and comments, which turns this into a broader panel of peers, quite informal and quite comfortable. I am reminded of the scene in “A Jumping Night in the Garden of Eden” where the Klezmer Conservatory Band is working in a room sort of re-inventing what live klezmer sound like. Here, teachers and musicians are refining how you teach the music, how you explain it. We are the “generation after” and it is fascinating to watch and to listen, and to the degree that I can, try to understand.

3. Harmonic chord density. How many chords per minute.

4. Free rhythmic recitative.

5. Text-based rhthymic improvisation.

Michael comes back as MC and comments on the use of the term, “not so jewish” by Jeff to describe some chord progressions. Many are Romanian or a Roma take, which Jewish musicians interpreted in other ways. Or, Jewish musicians became influenced by things like American swing music.

That forms a bridge to Pete Sokolow to talk about the development of Jewish music on this continent.

Pete. Actually, in this country, in the period of time in which I specialize, about 1935 to about 1964. Includes the transition of the klezmer from an outdoor player to an indoor player. From tsimbl, strings, even brasses and woodwinds in the latter part of the 19th century. One story told by many people to Pete is that Jews went into the band in the army to avoid being on the battlefield. With the advent of this army training, came a brassier, different sound of the band.

When musicians came to US, there was a transition to indoor weddings, in wedding halls. Among other things, all wedding halls had pianos, so the third string violinist would play rhythm on piano. Over time (20 years?) the two instruments Jewish kids had to learn were piano or violin. Piano players began to play fuller. The style was influenced by ragtime or Gershwin. Gershwin, especially, had a big fat sound.

In the context of the wedding band, the violin moved to the background.

A klezmer was a guy who could play only a couple of wedding tunes. It was an insult to call someone a klezmer. The professionals learned foxtrots and rhumbas and new American dances. In this country, the horn became the featured player. In the US the saxophone became the favored instrument in the ’20s. Fiddlers? What to make money? Get a saxophone. A C melody sax could use the same charts as the violin. But, from there, people migrated to alto or tenor sax. You’d have piano, maybe bass or tuba, a clarinet, fiddle as bandleader. The tuba and banjo became popular because the early recordings would be saturated by bass or guitar. In 1925 you got electric recording and the recording style began to change.

The three kings of klezmer clarinet were: Naftule, Tarras, Shloimke Beckerman (father of Sidney).

Forget those variations that we started with. In those days, what dancers wanted was rhythm. And that was critical. The kings of clarinet ornamented with little bits of shtick, but not overdone. Max Epstein to Pete: The dreydlakh are there to enhance the melody, not the other way around. [Different words for what Deborah said, earlier, I think.]

Most of the great clarinet players, even Naftule in his prime, sounded a bit like cantors.

The big transition in klezmer came with Sammy Musiker, combining the best effects of jazz and freilach bulgars. Unfortunately, it didn’t take. Sammy thought he could take the young generation and give them a Jewish music to which they could relate. Unfortunately, this new try was killed by the new Israeli music, “Hava Nagila” became popular as the new generation rejected that “old world” stuff.

Aside: Max Epstein recorded a “klezmer” hava nagila.

Max was the only American-born musician who played like a European.
But he was saved by the hassidim, who came to this country as refugees. And all of the klezmorim ended up playing hassidish: Howie Leess, Max Epstein (who hated hassidish), Dave Tarras hated it, too, and to the Hassidim, Tarras represented goyishkeit.

Pete continues, “Klezmer music is far more varied now than when I was a kid, when it was a dance music and everyone played like Dave Tarras.”

And then it’s over. I reflect on an evening called “A History of Klezmer” that runs us through ways of phrasing and ways of improvising, and only then turns to some of the timeline history. Everyone has gone to their first workshops, and here, as soon as they were able, the staff is trying to provide some context in which to put everything they are learning. Much fun. And now, as I wrote earlier, time to get to the cabaret.

Monday night, when we arrived, was quite cold. Tuesday had been much warmer, and on Wednesday morning Hy announced that the weather was guaranteed perfect for the rest of the week. Indeed, it certainly seemed as though we had reached that perfect balance between clear skies and temperate, warm weather.

Judy headed off for her tsimbl class in the morning and I took advantage of my last day before the non-music presentations and lectures started to sit in the sun a bit until I began to worry that I might be getting a bit of sunburn, and then working on my own presentation.

At KlezKanada, musicians arrive on Monday of the week so as to get a couple of extra days of music jamming and instruction. On Wednesday, the camp starts filling up with visitors who, like me, enjoy the music, but also come for the lectures and presentations by scholars from around the world. While the musicians (or those of us married to same) stay in the Camp Bnai Brith bunks, the newcomers mostly have rooms in the hotel-like Retreat Center. They also add more flavor and more stories for those of us sitting in the sun and enjoying being on vacation. By dinner, most of the contingent has arrived, and the dining hall is noisier and fuller than before with hundreds of excited voices and conversations. Indeed, by now there are even a couple of tables set aside for conversation in Yiddish, only. As a typographer, I can’t decide whether declaring this in English only signs is adequate. On the one hand, those who can’t speak Yiddish need the English, and the Yiddish speakers also understand English. But even as a non-Yiddish speaker, my personal crusade would have been for bilingual signage. The rest of the camp population seems quite comfortable with the signs as they are, and perhaps relieved that this doesn’t become an echo of the province outside where so many items are labeled in both French and English.

One of the things that is especially exciting is the large number of unique workshops. There are the usual ensembles teaching a specific instrument for beginners on up to experts. There are also ensembles for specific sounds: Hankus Netsky and his uncle, Marvin Katz, explore the “Sound of Philadelphia,” subject of Hankus’ PhD thesis, and something that Marvin has been playing his entire life. Another ensemble works with German Goldenshtayn on the Bessarabian band, and Pete Sokolow is teaching “Classic American Klezmer”.

But now, in keeping with those questions that Jeff Warschauer and Deborah Strauss raised last night, there is more. Josh Dolgin has a workshop, “Di Shereray/the Barbershop” in which the group will work on learning a new vocal work and Deborah Strauss is focusing on “Music and Words”. Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer make the connection with other Jewish traditional music in “Cantorial Recitative for Klezmer Musicans and Yiddish Singers.” Alan Bern and Zev Feldman focus on “Traditional and New Jewish music.”

Several ensembles focus on the connection between playing and dancing, from Sruli Dresder’s “hasidic melodies for dancing” to Michael Alpert’s, Chayala Domergue Zilberberg’s and Zev Feldman’s “Souls on Fire” to Kurt Bjorling’s “Dance Music Ensemble”.

And then there are the extensions beyond music. Josh Waletzky is working with documentarians and home videographers about “The four questions” they should ask before filming. Joanne Borts and Hankus Netsky tackle “Creating Yiddish Theatre”. Emily Sokolov builds on the lectures that she, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Mayer Kishenblatt, and Itzik Gottesman will be doing on ways of life in Eastern Europe with a way of grounding that knowledge in something real, with a “Childhood Memory Quilt” workshop. And Judy Pinnolis will be leading a workshop in “Researching Jewish Music on the Internet.” In that light, my own lecture on Hebrew typography is balanced by the daily workshops in “Practical Yiddish Printing.”

It is as though we aren’t just learning nostalgia—how to play old music or to appreciate Michael Wex’s Yiddish, or to see old movies or hear about stuff that was. We are creating new things. Yiddish culture seems to be in revival, not just as Yiddish culture, but as a wide range of new things inspired by, based on, or grown from that past. Most of the time it isn’t visible: there are no national Jewish culture magazines or forums, and the biggest market is in nostalgia, but here, spilling over in the bunks and halls, whatever Yiddish culture is becoming is live and well and very, very exciting.

After dinner Judy and I go back to our bunks for a short nap before the evening concert: the first of two evenings featuring staff. While I focus on shut-eye, Judy grabs the camera and tries to capture the stunning sunset over the lake.

As expected, the staff concert is pretty incredible. There is the obligatory line of video cameras and tapes at the back of the hall as several of us tape the event. I had forgotten how amazing Michael Wex, master of Yinglish satire, really is. He filled in the time between acts to good advantage, keeping us in stitches. Many of the staff are folks that I see frequently outside of KlezKanada, but this was my first chance to see Pete Rushefsky and Ellie Rosenblatt (the rabbinic branch of the Rosenblatt family) bring the music live that they recorded a couple of years ago. Josh Dolgin was a riot, as well, with the best, most amazing version of “I like she” even than the version recorded on the last Shtreiml album, or even on the live new Beyond the Pale album. In between songs he also revealed that he didn’t yet speak Yiddish but was absolutely committed to learning it by next year. I hope that he does better at making good at that commitment than I have.

Also new to me was the incredible Folksbiene program, “Kids and Yiddish”, here represented by Joanne Borts dressed up as Cher, and one of Zalmen Mlotek’s sons as Sonny, doing a Yinglish version of “I got Beis”. Both were incredible, as were the lyrics.

After a couple of hours of playing, it was time for dancing. We quickly stacked the chairs to the side and Sruli Dresdner’s dance band took first shift. It was an auspicious start to the more active part of camp life. Judy and I later repaired to the cabaret for a short period, but I was exhausted. We missed an amazing set of performances by Josh Dolgin with a wide variety of friends which had the entire cabaret up and dancing at 1 am. It is, indeed possible that I am growing old. Or at least, have reached that part of aging where sleep, too, has attractions.

[Note: Many of these photos are by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery at rblacksberg.com/page2.html]

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has been one of my heroes for a long time. She has been there, actively fomenting ways to consider and to learn ways of Jewish culture and folklore for decades. She is one of the few academic people to actively encourage the KlezmerShack at times when I wonder what the point of it might be. And her book, “Destination Culture”, a collection of essays on what culture becomes and how it is viewed as it is learned not by participation in the culture, but by attending an exhibition, or a folklore event, or a museum, is simply brilliant. (You can see “Destination Culture” all over Ruth Gruber’s amazing “Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe,” as well. That doesn’t diminish Gruber’s work or insight, but merely provides one example of how Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work and writing have influenced a new generation of thinkers.) In a way, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has actively been a bubbe (grandmother) figure to everyone trying to explore and preserve old ways of life.

This morning I was able to attend the first of three lecture panels that she is doing with Emily Socolov, Itzik Gottesman, and her father, Meyer Kirshenblatt, “Growing up Jewish in Eastern Europe.” Today’s introduction will work on the theme, “how a child turns a town into a playground.

The format of the lecture is rather interesting. Meyer took up painting just a few years ago, and has done remarkable pictures of the life he remembers in Eastern Europe. Ms. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has been interviewing him since 1967, so here they present a slide of one of his paintings, then she interviews him about the scene, and Socolov and Gottesman then add comments, as well. The result is several views of many different facets of Jewish childhood life in Eastern Europe.

In describing how she has been interviewing her father since 1967, Barbara explains that interviewing is “listening with love”, and that is apparent throughout.

Meyer was in the first group of Jewish students that went to public Polish school. He started heder at four, but at that age it was less school and more babysitting center. He learned to copy the alef-beys (Hebrew alphabet). At six he began attending public school for half a day, followed by heder in the afternoons. It was a life without much time to run and play and be a child. He showed one particularly poignant slide showing kids playing soccer in front of the Beis Midrash (study hall, where services were held) in that brief period between heder and afternoon services.

Another slide showed a group of Purim Spielers: Purim Players. Different from the long presentations now common in several Hassidic communities, these were very short plays performed at each house as a sort of Jewish version of wassailing, this during Purim, however, and like wassailing, focused on performing long enough to get tips from each household before proceeding to the next. This led to a great discussion on how the custom has morphed today, and on the details of the long Hassidic Purim plays. It was all new territory to me. In my mind, I have always visualized a Purim Spiel as very similar to the relatively short plays put on in synagogues and minyans I have attended during my life. There is certainly some similarity in that the old Purim spielers would practice all year, and would include topical references. But unlike today’s play which is most often focused on the Purim story, the older plays would dramatize other aspects of Jewish history, instead. People, after all, heard the megillah being read and already had the Purim story re-enacted. These were quick entertainment skits, a sort of indoor busking as the players went around the village.

One of the biggest crowd-pleasers was the discussion of Lag Ba’Omer where there would be picnics and bonfires. Kids made “toy guns”. Meyer showed us a homemade version of one consisting of a hollow key in which kids would stuff match heads. Attached to the key with a string (to keep it from flying off and hurting someone) was a flattened nail. Meyer put the head of the nail into the hollow key and then banged it down on a table, resulting in a loud bang, similar to what kids in my day achieved with cap pistols.

The panel talked aobut the lifecycle: beyond the familiar bris and Bar Mitzvah (a relatively informal ceremony), there was pidyon ha-ben (redeeming the first-born) and ceremonies for changing a child’s name to confuse the angel of death—one response, for instance, to serious illness. The bar mitzvah, too, was different from what we do now (and the bat mitzvah, of course, is entirely a modern invention, from Mordechai Kaplan in America, moved to Orthodox practice by Rabbi Riskin, all in the last century). What was most interesting is that a child wasn’t necessarily called to the Torah when 13. Instead, it was done when the child was ready to assume adult prayer responsibilities. It might be a bit earlier, it might be later—when the child was felt ready. And then, the ceremony was otherwise no big deal, especially since after the bar mitzvah poor kids left off with heder and went to work.

Other childhood toys included a hoop, driven around town with a stick. Kids didn’t get manufactured toys, they improvised in minor spare time outside of heder, school, and work. One of our favorites, however, was the mouse that mothers would offer kids to play with while t the synagogue. The panel distributed handkerchiefs to all of us, and then instructed us in folding it to look like a little mouse, and even how to make it look like the mouse was jumping. Great fun! And a photo of all of us, on stage, with our finished mice on our shoulders. Even though our kids are grown, I am tempted to try this out next time we are in the synagogue.

I took very rough notes at Itzik Gottesman’s lecture on “Dybuks, Golems, and Demons in Jewish Folklore. Gottesman is a former university professor who is now Associate Editor at the Forverts. As with other lecture notes, it is entirely possible that I misunderstood or mistyped, so please feel encouraged to use the “comments” section to enrich this description of the lecture.

Some of the customs that involve giving away—pouring out the wine for 10 makot—were originally to appease demons. The rabbis coopted some customs by attaching “why Jews do this” in Jewish terms.

There is always more than one reason for a custom. For instance, the issue of breaking a wineglass at a wedding tied to being a reminder of the destruction of Jerusalem is relatively recent. More likely that it has more to do with keeping away the evil eye.

Demons

They live everywhere, especially where it is dark. So, one reason for a mezuzzah in a doorway is as an amulet against the demons that inhabit the darkness of the doorway.

This also (demons in dark places) ties into why we light candles.

In Jewish folk tradition Jesus was a demon, and on Christmas Eve, pots had to be covered to protect them from Jesus. The Winter Solstice is a change of seasons.

Iron protects against demons. Iron is what weapons are made of. A horseshoe protects us not just because of the shape, but also because it is of iron. Iron came after demons, and protects against them. Iron in Hebrew is “barzel”, which is also interpreted by the rabbis as an acronyn of Bilha, Rahel, Zilpa, Leah.

Demon: shed, mazik (damager) In Jewish tradition, demons are less big hairy creatures and more troublemakers.

So back to Jesus. In the talmud is a folklore version of Jesus called “Toldot Jesus.” He was a scholar who broke into the Temple and stole the holy name of god and sewed it into his leg and began flying. On Christmas Eve, Jesus, the demon, is flying around. So, in Toldot Jesus, the rabbis give Judas the flying power and he pollutes Jesus and the two fall to the ground.

The general behavior of Jews on Christmastime is not to do anything sacred, so as not to honor Jesus. On Christmas, Jews don’t study, even. They played games, even cards. In Yiddish, Christmas is “nitl”. There is all sorts of Jewish folklore even around the word, “nitl”. If you read the Talmud on Christmas Day, because Jesus will come to taunt you and pee or spit on your Talmud.

What is fascinating is that this custom starts with folklore related to the Solstice, because at seasonal changes, demons are about and the angels are changing.

Why the Winter Solstice? Why Christmas and not Easter? Itzik suggests that this ties into universal myths tied to the Winter Solstice and the rebirth of the sun.

Cards, and even dredl is a game, inside, and that period between Christmas and New Years, Jews stayed inside.

Among Poles, the first person you greet on New Year’s Day determines your fortune for the new year. On this day, if you meet a Jew (or a gypsy) you will get good luck (reversal of the traditional folklore).

Places where demons are most present: birth, circumcision, wedding.

How do we guard against demons at birth? Amulets, certain colors (for ashkenazim, red; for sephardim, blue–color of sky, water to keep away demons). Spit - water - also keeps away demons. Three is the magic number. Amulets often incorporate written elements: psalms, for instance.

Circumcision: night before the bris, you need to prepare against them. Stay up all night singing the Shma.

Weddings: supposed to wear something red (ashkenazi color against demons). Thurwoing rice appeases demons. If they aresn’t satisfied with the rice they’ll be mad. With breaking the glass, the sound also keeps away demons. (Shofar, grogger)

Demons are waiting for people, but they aren’t that bright.

There are monster demons with chicken feet, and demons that look like us.

The best way to keep demons away is to lead a pious life.
You can also buy them off witha little wine, or by throwing rice.

You can also deceive them. Changing the name of a sick child works. The angel of death comes for one child and there is no one of that name, there. Talking opposites also works. A cemetery is “beis chaim”.

Dybbuk

Tzfat, then Sepharad, then Ashkenaz

Once the dybbuk was driven out, the person was reincorporated into the community despite all of cursing and so on—it wasn’t the actual person.

Golem

There are entire manuals on how to make a golem. Gershom Sholem maintained that despite the manuals, the real intent was for mystics to reach a state of ecstacy, not to create something.

In Jewish tradition, only God should create something. So, most rabbis view the idea of creating a golem as black magic, idol worship. On the other hand, a different view says that one is recreating God’s glory by creating, say, a cow for shabbes.

In the beginning of the 20th century, there is a collection of legends, by Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, that is the source of all of our current Golem knowledge/belief. This is the source of the “Golem of Prague” (although that was one of many medieval legends?).

Clearly this idea of fighting the blood libel was related to protecting the powerless.

There were local Golem legends, as in Vilna.

Me: The thing about looking at Jewish folklore from a secularist view is that it’s a bit like looking at the cheery gloss that the George Bush the minor puts on the last four years. The rabbis tie everything to God and to Judaism, but folk religion is folk religion. Just as Jews came back from Babylonia with a fear of the afterworld and new burial customs and the belief that the dead would be resurrected and a new demonology (all courtesy Babylonian religions), so, too, folklore is universal. Those customs the rabbis can’t forbid or prevent are given Jewish clothing as the rabbis co-opt (a point Gottesman makes) the folk beliefs into normative Judaism.

The weather, as Hy promised yesterday, is beautiful. For the first time I am happy to get out of bed before breakfast and to brave the weather on the way to the shower. I was also very excited about Barbara Kishenblatt-Gimblett’s lecture, partly because I had so looked forward to meeting her, and partly because my schedule was such that today might be my only opportunity.

Indeed, her lecture, with Emily Socolov, Itzik Gottesman, and her father, Meyer Kirshenblatt, was quite a pleasure. At lunch I amused my table partners by trying to create a mouse using a paper napkin. It didn’t quite work—the final step involves tying the mouse’s ears, and trying to do this with an end of a fragile paper napkin proved beyond me.

In the meantime, I enjoyed walking back and forth to the Computer Room for some work, and the sounds of music coming from bunks and rec halls that had been converted to classrooms, and from people sitting outside throughout the camp making music informally. After the first lecture, I met with Avi Rosenblatt, KlezKanada’s webmaster and we spent the next couple of hours talking about how to put up lecture notes, maybe create ongoing discussion forums, and to tie KlezKanada together, perhaps, with sites like the KlezmerShack and the Jewish Music Web Center and Di Velt fon Yidish into a global, interconnected “yiddishland” of Yiddish culture, old and new. Finding time and resources for all of this may take time, but we’ll see what we can do. I have lots of ideas. Avi has lots of ideas and knows how to program. Much is possible.

After a raucous lunch, I work with the day’s workshop students and catch Itzik Gottesman’s lecture. Even for me, KlezKanada has shifted a bit—it’s no longer shmoozing, writing, and hanging out in the sun. Now I am attending as many lectures as I can fit in. Judy is excited about a morning workshop she attended after her tsimbl class: Nahmo Sandrow’s “Bronx Express” workshop. I had meant to attend, but feared that I would be out of place, understanding little Yiddish and sight-reading it poorly. Turns out the workshop consists of a playreading of a translation into English from Yiddish, with lots of discussion and fun. I make a note to make sure I catch the next session.

On the way to dinner I catch the end of an interview of Yaela Hertz. I have been used to thinking of participants at the various klezmer gatherings as people who are interested specifically in klezmer music or Yiddish culture. Yaela isn’t disinterested in these things, but she is a master classical violinist, coincidentally descended from klezmorim who had emigrated to Palestine, where she grew up in pioneer conditions, even living for a while in a tent. And she has a playbill of her mother sharing a concert program with Haim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet. Here she has closed the circle, in a way, with her further ancestors. She is providing one-on-one tutoring to advanced violin students (some of whom have included Alan Bern, Michael Alpert, Deborah Strauss, Kurt Bjorling) and later, at the staff concert, offers a classical violin duo with one of her current proteges. It isn’t klezmer, but it is breathtakingly beautiful music, which is really what matters.

I mean to tape the second staff concert, but after rushing back to my bunk, grabbing the DAT recording and a tape I arrive, concert already begun, only to find that the tape has already been recorded on. If anyone reading this post has a tape of that spectacular concert, please contact me about getting a copy!

I am not keeping good notes on who is playing. I have an unordered list that includes Josh Waletzky with a couple of friends singing a new love song. Yaella Hertz does the aforementioned classical duo. Eric Stein provides a preview of his main band, Beyond the Pale’s new CD with an excellent composition. Deborah and Jeff do a stunning suite—the sort of thing rooted in Jewish song and music that is not only beautiful on its own terms, but even more beautiful when it sinks in how new it is musically. Jason Rosenblatt and Rachel Lemisch, the camp newlyweds, do a piece in which Jason’s klezmer harmonica is accompanied by Rachel, and by three other trombone players, then they perform a more conventionally-instrumented piece. Michael Alpert, Khevrisa, Joanne Borts, Lisa Mayer with a great Sophie Tucker, Adrianne Greenbaum of the wondrous flutes, all play, and then Adrienne Cooper, accompanied by the astounding Zalmen Mlotek on piano, does a couple of brand new art songs written by a poet in the former Soviet Union, and then does a version of “Gefilte Fish” that claims the song as her own forget all previous versions. Like Deborah and Jeff, listening to Adrienne is a revelation not just because her voice is, as always, incredible, etc., but because no matter how incredible you think you remember her as being, it is always better, always over the top more beautiful and wonderous. I will probably be singing “Gefilte Fish” to myself for the rest of the week, including the part where she breaks into cantorial chant, or that ending, operatic high point. Amazing.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a huge band gathers onstage to play a song off downtown Radical Jewish Music artist Aaron Alexander. Alexander has been the drummer for just about everyone else, but this is a piece as far different from klezmer as Yaella Hertz’ piece was, but this time, instead of being grounded in impeccable classicism, the piece is grounded in Jewish music and goes far into the world of new music, jazz, Josh Dolgin’s samples, and stuff I don’t yet know how to describe. And as I watch and listen, enjoying the newness and reflecting on the previous couple of pieces and how they stretched what I thought I knew about Jewish music and I have a moment of clarity. There is a picture at the National Yiddish Book Center of a table in a library in pre-Holocaust Vilna. At the table are luminaries from every aspect of Jewish culture: modern Orthodoxy, socialism, Zionism, and categories in between and overlapping. Everytime I look at that image I reflect that there will never again be such a table. The gaps between those groups are too deep and too bitter. They will never again share the same library, much less the same table. But then, as I look on stage at the folks playing with Alexander I realize that there is a similar diversity and extremism: folks who span the gaps from determinedly secular to modern Orthodox, folks who normally explore hasidic music or traditional klezmer or Yiddish song to the avant garde, and here they are on stage not just studying together, but playing excitedly together. This stage, here at KlezKanada, is our table in Vilna, the place where Jewish cultures come together and share ideas and show us just how much the klezmer revival of the 1980s and 1990s has been replaced by an incredible Yiddishe Renaissance today. It is a wonderful time to be alive and to be present.

The staff concert goes on for a long time and Judy and I skip the cabaret. Fortunately, that doesn’t stop the unstoppable.

 

[Note: Photos are by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery at rblacksberg.com/page2.html]

Again, these are rough notes. I haven’t taken the time to turn them into something more complete. I wanted to get this down and online in a timely fashion, while it is still fresh in my mind. As usual, corrections, emendations, and more are welcome.

Nicolai Borodin is an intense, engaging speaker. A native of Birobidjan who is also teaching Yiddish here, this talk will be about how the Soviet Jewish utopia (Birobidjan) was portrayed in the media.

The audience is mostly retirement age. I am among the youngest, although more folks my age drift in over time. “The village I was born was 5 minutes from China on the eastern borader of the former Soviet Union.”

This lecture is about how the myth of “Soviet Jewish Homeland” was created through the media: articles, movies, even ballet and opera.

Back then, it took a week and a half by train to reach Birobidjan.

First video clip: A soviet film, “Cities of Happiness” made in 1936, about a Jewish family from abroad that moves to the Jewish autonomous region. Opens in a train? Boat? steerage passengers listen to a klezmer playing clarinet. It is a family that was free where they were, but there was no work. In Birobidjan, there is work, and a new life can be built.

They discuss the difficulties of life in the new republic. The film, itself, it quite good and still available as a Russian art film.

The goal of the movie was to propagandize to bring both people (thousands and thousands) and support from around the world. Jews came from South Africa and Palestine came to settle. [I am reminded of the song, “Jonkoye” about building the Jewish worker’s Paradise, also recorded by Shirim on their second album as “Az men fort kayn Sevastopol”.]

Second video clip: Fira Kofman interview. She is a Jew who came as a laborer and is today the director of the Agriculture Museum [correct museum?] The city was built on a swamp and most of the city was built by hand. “We were young and excited and worked idealistically. We thought only about how to work better.” Yiddish was heard on the streets. There was a Jewish restaurant, theatre.

The idea was that if Jews could be gathered - hundreds of thousand of them, or millions, in one place, they could create a new Jewish Soviet society. The attraction of Birobidjan wasn’t to escape antisemitism, but that there was so much unsettled space and great untapped natural resource. It was bearable weather—like Michigan—winter from November to March. And the Soviet Union wanted to settle the border near Japan with people loyal to the Soviet Union. Finally, if all the Jews were taken from shtetlakh and they are totally cut off from their former ways of life, you can experiment, try to create something new.

Propaganda compared Birobidjan and Palestine, arguing that Birobidjan is a much better place for Jews than Palestine. [can I get a printout of the slide of the book about Birobidjan?]

Borodin shows an example of local propaganda with posters announcing, before Passover, a series of lectures targeted to the entire population, in Yiddish, that religion is a bad thing. Struggle against religion, struggle for socialism. The class origin of Pesach. Why shouldn’t we celebrate Pesach. And so on before all major Jewish holidays. [Note the lack of final letter forms—the authorities in Birobidjan were trying to eliminate extraneous “bourgeois” lettersforms.]

There was a beautiful theatre built in Birobidjan. It was a gift of tghe Moscow Jewish theatre which even came out several times to perform. The first production was “Shalom Aleichem’s “mazl tov”, but also used the stage to attack religion and religous Jews.

Third video clip: Jewish religon appears only in caricature on the stage in Birbodjan. There is a film of a theatre production showing people with long beards, long noses.

We see a beautiful poster showing, among other things, Jews deserting the shtetl for Birobidjan.

Borodin notes that the Birobidjan story wasn’t implausible in the rest of the world, was then in deep depression. In Soviet Birobijan there is work: “Assist in the building up of the Socialists Biro-Bidjan! Become a Member of the “African Geserd”! (from an ad in South Africa). Another ad is shown from a paper in Montevideo, Uruguay.

In 1939 there were over 10,000 members of ICOR (the organization supporting Jewish colonization in Birobidjan) in 100 countries. The region was declared in 1934. When they announced the establishment of the region, there was a meeting in Madison Square Garden in NY with 20,000 people—more than were in Birobidjan!

On the other hand, there were many in the US who opposed Birobidjan. The Forverts, for instance, was quite anti-Birobidjan.

Nei leben, the Yiddish propaganda magazine from Birobidjan always listed those people who arrived—never those who left.

In 1936, the first president of Birobidjan, a world-famouns Yiddish scholar, was recalled to moscow, accused of being a spy and trotskyist, and killed.

This might have been the end of Birobidjan, but WWII brough new hope and new Jews. Even after the war, there was an upsurge as Birobidjan represented a place to resettle Jews who survived, who were dislocated. There were claims in American fundraising that claimed that thousands of orphans were being resettled. In fact, maybe 100 were. But 10,000 new Jews did arrive.

And then, 1948-1949 were the darkest years of Soviet Jews. Stalin launched a wave of repression against “cosmopolitan” intelligentias, esp. in Birobidjan.

In the end, Birobidjan was settled as a Soviet republic, but it did fail totally to create new Jewish life. In a sense Birobidjan ws successful - they wanted assimilated Jews and got Jews who became thoroughly assimilated Russians.

Borodin, for instance, growing up did manage to learn Yiddish, despite the local attempts to prevent Yiddish from continuing. He was proud of being Jewish. Was even going to teach Yiddish. But he was entirely ignorant of Jewish religion. He’s walking along the street one day in September and someone wishes him a happy holiday. What holiday? He had never heard of Rosh Hashana.

[From 1948-1982 no permission for printing of Yiddish primer. There was was also a major “printing reform” in which Yiddish was respelled. The final forms were removed. There was also an ideological issue. By removing letters, the Yiddish writings of the past became unintelligable.

Today in Birobidjan you have a state supported school with other 1000 kids studying Yiddish, Hebrew, Jewish literautre, Jewish dancing, and more than 70% are non-Jews. “We live in the Jewish autonomous region and we want our kids to know what is “Jewish”.

Final video: Video of Chinese-looking singers singing “Tumbalaika”. (But for the discontinuity of the faces, the accents and singing seems very good.)

There are more Chinese today in Birobidjan than Jews.

But here’s the thing. Conditions in Birobidjan were as terrible as elsewhere in the USSR, but not worse. And twice, thousands were saved. In the ’30s, people were starving in the Ukraine. Those Jews who went to Birobidjan had harsh conditions, but survived. And then in the Holocaust, thousands, again, escaped to Birobidjan.

Today, there is even a small active Jewish community and even some religious revival with several minyans based in the local synagogue.

I hate to admit it, but even with going to sleep relatively early, I am wearing out. I am tireder and tireder. This morning I was thinking that if we didn’t have our talks to give tomorrow (Judy) and Sunday (me) we’d think about calling it “enough” and going home. But now, as I write this on Saturday, I admit to going to sleep early last night, but also that I have no interest in leaving, at all. Rather, I am back to thinking that this might want to go on another couple of weeks.

In the morning, while Judy heads off to learn tsimbl, and Sruli and Lisa gather kids for klez at the flagpole, I attended Nicolai Borodin’s lecture on how the Soviet’s used propaganda to present Birobidjan as the Jewish People’s homeland and to entice settlers to this relatively sparsely-settled area remote from everywhere.

Next, I made it to Nahma Sandrow’s “Bronx Express” play-reading. Judy had been as excited to meet Sandrow as I had been about meeting Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett yesterday, so I was prepared for something interesting. I was less prepared to be immediately assigned the character of Mr. Pluto, the name of the character selling “Red Devil” products. The “Bronx Express” was written in Yiddish by Osip Dymov, a once-revolutionary Soviet playwright brought to America (by Goldfaden?) where he wrote many popular Yiddish plays. In this play, he seemed to be dealing with Judaism and traditional values vs. capitalism and the selling of everything. The play mostly takes place on the subway, the Bronx Express of the title, where a worker, a button-maker, with two kids and a wife and a home in the Bronx, meets someone he knew from the old country who seems to have made it big. Above his head are advertisements for American products: Murad cigaretts, Smith Brothers Cough Drops, and others, and these advertisements, including my Red Devil, become characters in the play.

Sandrow wrote the authoritative book on Yiddish theatre, “Vagabond Stars.” She has recently translated about five Yiddish plays in a volume, “God, Man, and the Devil,” and this is one of them. Parts are assigned all around, and we continue reading (the prologue and first act were read yesterday). Some cues are missed, but we have a lot of fun reading, and then discussing the meaning of the play. Sandrow seems to be more excited by the variety of sharp comments than in correcting us or in presenting an authoritative opinion on what the play means, who it speaks to, and so on. But then, the main issue is to be sitting together reading a Yiddish play and discussing it, not in being imprinted with the canonical insights, assuming that such exist. I can’t present too much of the discussion without revealing the play, but clearly (to me, at least) the play is an attack on capitalism and the selling of everything, even one’s own culture, in return for the benefits of consumer society.

After lunch I have only one new workshop student—my last one, in fact, since the daily workshop drop-in is now over. It is David Kaufman, who is bringing out a DVD with performances by Brave Old World. As someone who has frequently raved about BOW’s concert appearances, I am a very interested party. (I can trace at least one significant affair to some backrubbing that started while watching an appearance by the band in San Francisco, so I may be more partisan on this subject than most.) We continue talking for another hour or so about photography and typography and Brave Old World’s music and how to best get the word out. This mean’s that I miss that afternoon’s lecture and avoid a difficult decision between Sabel Bender’s talk on “ARTEF—a Revolutionary Yiddish Theatre” and the sole lecture by Professor Eugene Orenstein, this one on “Jewish Warsaw’s Life of Work and Struggle as reflected in the folk songs collected by Shmuel Lehman” that I would have had a chance to see. So be it. For me, KlezKanada has been about good, intense conversation, much of which I will remember longer than any particular lecture (although this morning’s playreading with Nahma Sandrow was quite spectacular, maybe because I did participate—I will make a point of seeking out Sandrow’s workshops and lectures in the future—as was the session led by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett about whom and about which I feel similarly). Musicians who do workshops here feel most fortunate people, to me.

As I walk back to our bunk with Judy, Alan Bern runs past suggesting that we catch “Kids for Klezmer” in the Retreat Center happening right now. We put our things down and I hurry back to catch the full show hinted at by the “I got Beis, Babe” from Wednesday night’s staff concert. It is, indeed, quite imaginative: one number features “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes”, sung in Yiddish, and is tied to which parts of an explorer who is viewing wild animals they would most enjoy eating if they caught her!

As six pm nears, I observe a growing crowd of musicians and campers gathering in the dirt road down from the Retreat Center. And, about six, the musicians begin playing a hasidic nign and we all begin walking slowly, backwards, up the hill, in this greeting of the arrival of the Sabbath Bride, and the setting of the everyday week’s last light, taken from a Hassidic village in Eastern Europe. Over and over the band plays the same nign, the rhythm infusing all of us as we hum along and clap. Itzik Gottesman points out that one reason for walking backwards may be that one does not turn one’s back on the encroaching dark, but now, well before sundown, in the warmth and among hundreds of friends it feels only like a transplanted ritual, here given meaning by all of us participating and considering the arrival of Sabbath, as a bride, or as simply another meal.

I spend much time standing outside listening to the ongoing nigunim while some slip away to daven mincha and maariv, and Judy goes to the main rec hall where she joins in the community candle-lighting with the candles and sticks that she brought with us. Then, finally, dinner. There is a kiddush, and challah and wine at the tables and gefilte fish (Adrienne Cooper’s voice from last night echoing through all of our heads) and riotous conversation with Judy and Adrianne Greenbaum and Riki Friedman, an old friend from North Carolina and the rest of the table.

Instead of the riotous yiddish singing that we remembered from our last visit, the group eventually breaks for hasidic nign in the rec hall, and a theatre piece down in the retreat center. I realize that I am exhausted, so while Judy goes to the Singing Tisch, and thence to join with less formal singers outside on the pier, I go to bed, an old fogey for certain. But tomorrow night may be an all-nighter, so I feel no need to prove anything tonight. And this is KlezKanada. Like Klezmer gatherings anywhere in the world I have been, the music will never stop, and no matter how late I stay up, there will still be more music that I missed when I finally crashed.

[Note: Photo by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery at rblacksberg.com/page2.html]

Breakfast on Saturday morning was a little later. It was Shabbes. We could sleep in another half an hour. Real coffee was also scarcer. By the time I asked for a second cup, I was told that it was all gone. This being Shabbes in a kosher facility, no one was cooking, and no fresh coffee was brewing. (At lunch I would be offered “instant coffee” as though both exist in the same universe. Shabbes without coffee is still Shabbes, but instant coffee is, to me, a bit of an insult to the concept of “coffee”. Mileage may vary.)

My intention was to catch Sandrow’s last “Bronx Express” session while Judy did final prep for her lecture on “Women in Jewish Music”, due to be delivered after lunch. But as happened so often, there I was at the entrance to the Retreat Center when I bumped into Josh Waletzky and the time seemed to be just right to view his latest video project, a documentary about the “Pripetchik Singers” (spelling?), a kids Yiddish chorus led by Binyomin Schaechter. Josh had captured the performances impeccably, of course, and they are compelling. He had also gotten them (and Binyomen) to talk about their material, their involvement with the chorus, and their feelings about Yiddish and life and the rest. It’s just an hour-long documentary, to be distributed by Yugntruf, but as is the case in all of Waletzky’s work, it is remarkable and wonderful. Even the typography on the English titles (almost all of the conversation, and all of the singing) is in Yiddish) was quite good. It was the first time we’d had a chance to catch up in almost a year and it was just a pleasure sitting there in the rec room and talk. His daughter has just started school here in Boston, and his son is now working with him as an editor. Life is generally good.

After lunch Judy and I hauled all of her books and videos to the Retreat Center for her talk. As had been the case all week, the Camp Bnai Brith staffperson who was there to help us set up was great. In her case, she was showing video clips, playing excerpts from CDs, and we had to set up her Jewish Women in Music illustrated timeline and a blank page on which people in the lecture would help create their own record of one of her subjects.

If all goes well, Judy will be posting a short description of her talk later, so I won’t recap. She handed out a print timeline starting with Jewish women doing music during the renaissance and continuing to this year. The lecture covered a lot of ground introducing an area of Jewish women’s involvement, and then focusing on one or two specific women in each area or period. In the middle, to help break things up and to provide a hands-on experience in doing research, she handed out documents pertaining to the life of the fascinating Isa Kremer: magazine articles, newspaper reviews, news stories and the like. The audience skimmed through each resource and then wrote a few pertinet facts on the “instant-biography” panel that we had put up earlier. Judy then went over the facts that audience members had provided and added more. As she spoke, some people actually left their seats and came up to take notes off the collective biography. The audience got quite involved, and after the talk ended, continued the discussion.

Outside, everywhere in camp, ensembles were preparing for the student concerts to be held later that evening, after havdalah. Upstairs, at the Retreat Center, Emily Socolov and students were putting the final touches on their Memory Quilts, a workshop that I would love to attend next year.

       

After dinner I eschewed the growing festivities and increasingly frenetic practice and jamming. Instead, I went back to the bunk where I finally had to finish my own talk for the next day. I was hoping that someone would be awake (and would not have left camp) at 10am in the morning when I would compete for listeners with two lecturerers: Itzik Gottesman and Professor Eugene Orenstein, each of whom was giving a lecture on Yiddish culture that I would have loved to hear. I finished a bit after Havdalah and made my way up to the gym where the student concerts were just getting started. It was a wild and wonderful scene. Musicians were hanging out outside getting ready to go on, some were walking down to the Retreat Center for tea and refreshments, and most of us sat enthralled as one of the largest and most diverse set of student ensembles played. Michael Wex MC’ed of course, so the pleasure was, again, double, and made up for the fact that this time around I hadn’t had time to attend any of his Yiddish talks. The combination of wit on subjects ranging from Orthodox practice, to growing up Jewish in a small town in Alberta to the Yinglish puns to his comments about the interesting words his daughter had learned from the walls of his cabin (where generations of campers had written their stories and names) were a scream. I confess that Mr. Can’t Stay Awake (me) gave up around 12:30. I excused myself on the grounds that I was one of the few people who had to actually perform on the morrow. Most of the folks around us had every intention of staying up all night playing, dancing, and then greeting the sunrise by the lake at 6am.

   

[Note: Most photos by Bob Blacksberg. You can see the whole gallery at rblacksberg.com/page2.html]

It’s over.

At 6 am, through an early morning drizzle, I could hear the chanting by the lake as those who had been playing all night gathered to greet the sunrise. As a certified old fogey, I didn’t get out of bed until seven, and walked up to the main camp to greet Itzik Gottesman, Emily Socolov, Matt Temkin, and other early morning risers for a Yiddish nature walk. Itzik’s daughter, Esther, has offered to write up a description of the walk and to provide a description, so I’ll talk only about the pleasure of learning Yiddish words, if only temporarily, for tree (boym), evergreen (nodlboym), fir, pine, maple, and for mushrooms, bushes, and the like. We wandered down a nice walking path for about 20 minutes after which the increasing rain caused us to consider discretion and to arrive back at the dining hall just in time for breakfast.

At breakfast I talked with Itzik and Emily and Esther about the possibility of next year doing a daily paper in Yiddish and English. On little sleep it feels like a brilliant idea, and easy to implement, especially when I tend to walk around with hundreds of fonts, desktop publishing software, and the like on my laptop. We have access to a Computer Room with computers on which people can edit in both English and Yiddish. And who knows? Maybe we’ll come up with some layout ideas that are worth taking back to the פורװרטס. We’ll see what really happens next year: it will be KlezKanada’s tenth anniversary. Not a bar mitzvah, but a significant milestone, nonetheless.

The staff at Camp Bnai Brith has set up my LCD projector, so after breakfast it is a simple matter to set up and be prepared. To my surprise, I get a reasonable crowd, some of whom have clearly been up all night and nod off for minutes at a time. In other circumstances, having a couple of sleeping students would be bothersome. But to find people interested in hearing about Hebrew Typography after being up all night seems a bit wondrous. And there seem to be several people who know from graphic design and typography—for some this is not so new territory. I’ll post more about the lecture separately, when it is prepared, but I did have a lot of fun. After all of the preparation, this was still the first time I have given a slide lecture about the subject that may matter more to me than just about any other, and is something with which I have worked for about 25 years. It was damn exciting to be talking and I had a lot of fun. We covered ancient Canaanite script, some of the legends and mysticism surrounding the letters, spent some time on Soncino and then dived into some wonderful Yiddish book and poster-work and thence to modern Israeli materials. I got to talk about some of the politics and sociology behind these things, as well.

I’m not sure I’ll do it again next year. I think that even if I returned (which I hope to do) and spoke about type, there will always be a new take and new things to talk about, but for this year, it felt good.

We zipped out of the Retreat Center and all of us staff members gathered for one last time in the main rec hall for photos and for some quick talk about things that had worked and things that hadn’t. Mostly, it was a good camp. There are areas where things may be different next year. And I felt very grateful that I had been invited to participate, and very happy to have spent time with (sometimes never having time to talk, sometimes we actually conversed) some of the people whose company I enjoy most in the world. This is where I get as maudlin as the next person, so enough for this year. Next week, after all, is Ashkenaz. Life goes on!

Here’s a closing tip for those who drive. Don’t go back to New York via 87. Do as we did—take 15 through Montreal to 10, then follow the signs to US 89 in Vermont and scootch right at the first exit. The border crossing is much, much less crowded and the drive more scenic. See me next year for directions.