KlezKanada

Tomorrow morning I will be disappearing right after breakfast to pick up my wife from the Montreal airport. It occurred to me that I should set as much of the newsletter up as possible, so I spent the afternoon putting in place articles that people had already given me: the page on Gilt Purishkevitsh, for instance, a couple of drawings, an article about being in the camp. I had hoped to put the daily schedule changes into the newsletter, but I wasn't seeing my way as to how it would fit, usefully, schedule-wise. Instead I looked through tomorrow afternoon/Thursday morning events and got Peysakh to translate into Yiddish at lunch so that I could have some support for the notion of Yiddish in the newsletter. A couple of Peysakh's students promised to write articles, as well, but it was just sinking in that (a) typing in Yiddish is a pain given the standard Microsoft keyboard, and (b) that nobody at camp who could write in Yiddish had a computer set up to do so in a way that I was likely to be able to use.

Actually, nobody had a computer set up to type Hebrew/Yiddish other than me, as near as I could tell. So, I spent what spare time I had talking with those folks who had computers about how to add Hebrew resources and handing out my synopses on how to do this on Mac, Windows, and Linux boxes. Maybe next year, or later this camp, this will yield results.

Tonight was the night of the "East-West" concert—I'll write more about it in the next article, but it has exhausted me totally. The 12 scholarship students from the former Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, are amazing musicians. Where they aren't classically trained (and most seem to be), they have street and music smarts that are just mind-blowing. And even while Jewish culture was so suppressed in the Soviet Union, many seemed to find it, anyway. And then, as you'll read, when Adrienne and Zalmen and the rest went over to tend to the seeds, things just sprouted. These musicians have not only mastered Jewish music, but are already creating new music based on those bones. I would mix more metaphors, but I should let my notes of the program suffice in the next article.

So, here's the way it came down in the end. There is this mind-blowing concert and by the end the whole cabaret audience is up and dancing, so the musicians just keep playing and this is where the evening's dance program takes place. While everyone is dancing, Kolya has dashed off an article in Yiddish about the concert, so he sits by me as I make sense of his handwriting. One of the students has written an article in Yiddish about her dance class, and Kolya stays with me until I have that transcribed, as well. By now we are both exhausted and very, very happy from the music.

I can't stay late for the cabaret. Sometime as things quieted down I called my wife to tell her to bring a couple of things from home that I had forgotten with her in the morning. That's when I was reminded that my cellphone (have I talked about the miserable cellphone coverage at camp?) doesn't show me that I have messages waiting when I am in the middle of nowhere. So, that late night call was the first time I found out that her flight has been rescheduled. She was arriving at 7:30am. In a sense that is good. It means that I can conceivably pick her up early and we'll both be back in time for breakfast, then I dod newsletter production and everything is ready for lunch. But it means that, excited as I am, I really, really need to go to sleep now.

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.