KlezKanada

Michael Alpert begins talking about the view from outside the former USSR: Those who stayed and those who left. But that isn't how the Russians and Ukrainians and former USSRnikim see themselves: We didn't stay here. We live here.

There is a tremendous revitalization of Jewish life in the former Soviet Union.

Different from Germany, say, where there is an interest in Jewish culture by non-Jews, in the former USSR, it is Jews who are interested in Jewish culture.

Michael's research here in the US as an ethnographer has been on people who have emigrated from the fomer USSR. And, of course, to work with those who live in the former USSR. Tonight we will hear from a group of musicians from the former Soviet Union. The person responsible for all of this is Alexander Frankl, dir. Of the Jewish Community Center in St. Petersburg in Russia, and in 1997 he began an event called "KlezFest", which is actually the first European festival called "KlezFest". He began to invite people like Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek, and then more.

Alex: In 1997 we realized that we had many well-developed musicians, but they didn't know Jewish culture. We knew "Tumbalalaika" and "7:40" [Me, to myself: so, could there possibly be anything wrong with "7:40"?]. So we had to do something. And that was the moment we organized our first KlezFest to bring klezmer music back to the countries where it was originated. Soon the slogan "east meets west" will be obsolete as we mix and there is one klezmer movement.

So, if you want to participate and see the famous white nights of St. Petersburg, and to sample the famous Russian vodka, come at the end of June to St. Petersburg [www.jewishmusic-asjm.org].

Michael: It culminates in a boat ride (klezboat) down the canals of St. Petersburg. An all night boat ride where we all play and have a good time and play music and celebrate with each other.

Last year people even came from Vladivostock. It was the same week a klezmer festival was happening in Calfornoia and that would have been several hours closer, but they chose St. Petersburg and the KlezFest and Klezboat.

Adrienne: In 1997 Nehama Lifshitz came home and taught students in her home country. Zalmen and I came the next year and had no idea what we would be facing. We felt that we could have been these people if our families hadn't left. [Segues quickly into singing.]

[Band is seated on stage in a semicircle, Adrienne does the first verse and then hands the mike to one of the Russians who belts out the next.]

Adrienne. The other way I measure this (she brings up a tiny kid, and there is Matvey towering above her), so when I started, Matvey was like this, and now he's like this (pointing to the more grown up Matvey, now the tallest person around at over 6 ft). Then he was 10 and a very serious boy. He is now teaching, himself, and is now a mathematics student at the university.

So, we'll be sitting in a room teaching this song (me and Zalmen), just like we do here, and there will be this waaaave of enormous joy that hits us square on and we began to weep, because we had never heard people sing like that. There was a sound in the voices that sounded Jewish even though they hadn't heard Jewish voices. It was like seeing a frayed thread that was being knit back together, and there was a joy to own a culture again that they had been cut off of.

One night these three guys from Sebastopol (which is a real place!) arrive. And they showed up and they performed and they left right after because they had a train to catch. So we asked the organizer why they weren't in the program and were told, "oh, they are too old." And they were old folks who had been severed from their community and from their ability to perform. But they came back, and helped transmit what they knew to us, and they were dying to learn new songs. So, for us, there was a bit of crazy "coals to Newcastle" because our families were from there, and there was the feeling of hearing an intact Jewish musicality and reconnecting it to Yiddishkeit. And we showed them new songs that had been written here and they started pouring out and creating new songs, themselves. Amazing new material that sounded absolutely old. Like something was pouring out of themselves that was completely connected to who they were and where they come from.

[a capella song sung by everyone. Sounds very Russian—reminds me of the Chasidic chant on the first Australian Klezmania album. Then one of the circle will sing a verse, all join in the chorus.]

Michael: A Jewish Russian song from the czar's army that I had the experience of teaching there—I thought everyone would know it—and not a single person raised their hand. It was amazing not just what had remained the same but what had changed.

In some ways this revitalization started off with American and Israeli models, but it has taken on a character of its own.

Jenny speaks in Yiddish, with a bisl English, "I am a bit nervous". [It's a brand new song that Jenya wrote the words in Krakov just a few weeks ago. This is the first public performance of the song.] Sort of cabaret-ish, art-songy. New Yiddish. Her voice is beautiful and strong. This is not a beginner's voice. That's the point, I guess.

Matvey gets up to sing. Michael tells a story: we were SMSing a few weeks ago and Michael apologized for writing in English, and his friend replies, sorry I write in English but it makes me feel important. Matye then introduces his song. He and Michael riff back and forth with some degree of private jokes. Very comfortable back and forth. He speaks in Yiddish and Michael translates. "In this whole company, I am the only person who doesn't love to be on the stage. Now I am going to switch to Russian and you'll hear why." (switches to Russian) "when I was 5 years old and it's hard to compare with now, and that's when I first heard Yiddish and Yiddish songs and it awoke in me the desire to speak and sing in this language. Since them some time has passed. I can't say that a lot of time has passed. And since that time Yiddish has become the language, if you will, that I would most like to speak in, and is the most important to me, and that I would like to be able to express myself in. So I was asked to say a few words about why I was here. The first reason is that I'm trying to sing in this language. The second is that, even though I have just graduated high school, I have already had the opportunity every Sunday to teach Sunday School at the St. Petersburg JCC. The third reason I'm hear is that I would say too much. This summer for the first time I have had the opportunity in a way as if I was going back, I had the opportunity to find myself and be in the company of traditional Yiddish singers, men and women, for the first time in my life. And for the first time I had in part the opportunity where the Baal Shem lived. One of the places. And I'd now like to sing a song that is rather well know, but because of the experience this summer. This is the song that gives, for us, that vision of the Hasidic world that was then, and as we would like it to be now.

[sings]

Michael: I call this guy "An-sky, Jr." there is a song, for instance, that we have dug up about 7 verses of, and he came up with 16 verses.

Speaking of the Baal Shem Tov, I'd like to introduce Markov Kovnatskiy of Moscow. He's been living in Germany the last few years. Doing some Jewish studying and making a living. Graduating from every place you can graduate from. [Markov gets up with violin, joined by another of the troupe and Michael, all with violins.]

Michael: That piece traveled a long way, from my old teaching Leon Schwartz from Bukovina, and then back around back to Russia. Not sure how we follow that. I'd like to introduce Anna Smirnitskaya From Moscow.

[Anna has a guitar. Speaks in slow English.] I now sing in a klezmer band in Moscow and now I do some translation from Yhiddish and I make a mailing list about klezmer concerts in Moscow and some other activities. It is a long way for me to this. When I was a child I heard Yiddish songs that were song by one woman a friend of my aunt who impressed me very much and then she moved to Israel and I didn't hear these songs any more. And afterwards I sang in Russian theatre Russian songs, and afterwards I returned to Yiddish and I looked for this woman who had moved to Israel and I found her sister and learned some songs from her and afterwards went to conservatory. So, it was a very long way for me. I think I should say a few words about the festival in Moscow. It was the first time that a klezmer festival was held in Moscow this year.

[sings a Yiddish folk song, sounds more ballad-like than I am used to]. Is this Yiddish or Russian—I think Russian?

Michael: All the way from Kharkov, Ukraine, I give you the Kharkov Klezmer Band. [Yuriy Khainson on clarinet, backed by accordion, violin, with Michael on violin and Stu Brotman on bass.] This guy on clarinet directs two Jewish ensembles and is creating some techno Yiddish music which is not what we're going to hear right now. [Instead the band begins with a very traditional sounding slow dance, clarinet soloing.]

Michael: I'd like to invite to the stage right now Tatiana Gutova?

Tatiana: I don't think I need to tell the whole story about how I came to sing Yiddish, my bobes and zeydes. I just sing.

Michael: [after song] well, actually there is a lot more to say about people never having heard (but they have heard) Jewish voices. Usually, in fact, we are not as formal as tonight. Our experience can be summed up in the word, "tuslavka" which means "hanging out".

What is interesting is that klezmer has a place in the "world music" scene in Russia, where it is known and played with Balkan music and other world folk musics.

[Follows band led by St. Petersburg fiddler who is also a member of a local world music fusion band.]

Michael: [the person with the amazing name?] Ivon Zhuk?

Zhuk: I got into klezmer music 3 years ago. Now I have my own klezmer band. I sing too. I will sing a song that Michael likes. So the song is about a tour of Birobidjan where we did about 6 concerts and came back with about $50 each. Two things amazed us on the way—none of the Jewish communities came to our concerts at all. The other thing was that on the way, maybe 1300 km. We were stopped about 6 times by policemen looking for drugs. We were going from north to south where, basically, drugs are situated. We tried to tell them that. So, on the way back we wrote this song in Yiddish, but it is our own Yiddish. [Michael: No dictionaries were harmed in the writing of these songs.] We had to use all our own vocabulary and then some more. So, I don't think you'll understand anything.

[the following song, is perhaps the best example of the weaving on new songs and the fun that these klezmorim are having with this folklore. No stale readers of cheat sheets here—they have swallowed tradition and moved on to something new.

So, I'll tell you, "Kosyak" means—where is Michael Wex [the joint distribution committee]—[the following verse does not sound reverential. There could be a touch of anti-kahal feeling surviving here.]

It's a wild cross between a talking blues and something that is sung outrageously, with fun. It's the best reason for learning Yiddish I have heard, well, since I least heard a Michael Wex original.

Michael: Let's wrap up with a song we can all sing together that Jenya wrote.

[the words to the song are distributed around to everyone, and we all sing together, then the band keeps playing and keeps playing and by now everyone is dancing and we keep dancing for quite some time. this is the sort of concert and dance for which we come to KlezKanada—it isn't just the we learn klezmer, it's that we hear music that shakes us to our bones and reminds us why we love this music and this culture and tells us that it continues and that there are still new shoots.]

Photos on this page are from Bob Blacksberg's wonderful archive of KlezKanada photos. You can browse the entire archive starting from rblacksberg.com/page3.html.