Sounds of sensibility

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Jewish, he soon discovered, was also a"scene" and it is this scene that London and Svigals speak to in their accounts from the inside, as musicians who have been part of it, each in their own way, for almost two decades. It is telling that London speaks in the spatial terms of nowhere (and scene), not in the temporal terms of revival and heritage. David Krakauer also uses a spatial metaphor when he says of klezmer music that "I felt in a certain way that I had found a kind of musical home," though it is not the only place he lives.(67)

While he attributes the secret of the Klezmatics' success to their being "a great rock band - that is, they swing hard and get people emotionally," Michael Dorf, who owns the Knitting Factory, adds that "there is something in their music that reaches the Jewish part of me."(68) This statement marks the distance traveled from the sixties, when Milton Gordon in his study of assimilation in American life could still warn his readers that "the individual who engages in frequent and sustained primary contacts across ethnic group lines, particularly racial and religious, runs the risk of becoming what, in sociological parlance, has been called the 'marginal man'."(69) Gordon's marginal man, derived from Chicago sociologists working in the twenties and thirties (Robert E. Park and Everett V. Stonequist), was a "social deviant" on the verge of nervous breakdown. Nothing could be further from the sensibilities informing the klezmer music scene.

The Jewish part of Dorf is clearly not all of him. The other part, to which he attributes the Klezmatics' success, has helped the music travel far beyond the wedding circuit to which Jewish instrumental music had become confined. During the first half of this century, the music could be heard not only at simkhes, but also at banquets and social and political functions of various kinds, Jewish cafes and restaurants.(70) By the fifties, it was most likely to be heard at weddings and in the English-Yiddish comedy shows by performers like Mickey Katz.

Multiple Temporalities

Emphasizing a continuity they have worked hard to achieve in the wake of genocide and cultural obsolescence, pioneers of the klezmer revival repeatedly delineate the chronology of the music they have recuperated, a process that plays memory against history and autobiography against musical reconstruction. While the scene has a relatively short history, less than three decades, telling that history is integral to it. The founding figures not only tunneled to the past through archives, but also sought out living bridges to the music as it was once played. They apprenticed themselves to the last exponents of the tradition. Their acts of recuperation, preservation, documentation, and renewal affirmed Isaac Bashevis Singer's apothegm, "There's a big difference between 'dead' and 'dying'," the motto of the Boston radio program The Yiddish Voice (WUNR, Brookline, Massachusetts).(71)

The founders of the scene have a keen sense of the peculiar temporality of the revival. Unlike subsequent generations, which have grown up with neo-klezmer music, the founding cohort lived through the rupture and the recovery, an experience that heightened their historical awareness. Short and fast, the history of the scene is remembered in detail by those directly involved in it. Long and slow, the history of the music that inspires it has left spotty evidence. Those who have made the scene have also had to excavate the music. Their sense of one is infused with their sense of the other. While a history of klezmer music like the one provided by Hankus Netsky is narrated forward, from the "beginning" to the present, it is understood backwards, from now to then. Younger musicians are forming their own sense of the music's temporality, as can be seen from the claim by Vurma, which models itself on "the pioneer group Klezmorim," that they are part of the second renaissance of klezmer. In an interview about ten years ago, about the time they disbanded, Kevin Linscott of The Klezmorim discouraged new groups from using his band's music as a model and encouraged them to go back to historical recordings.(72)