Re: [Fwd: klezmer = yiddish?]

[Solidarity Foundation <svzandt...>]

Ernie Gruner / Cathy Dowden wrote:
>
> Please could someone explain to me the relationship between klezmer and
> yiddish?
On Mon, 16 Mar 1998 23:43:20 -0500, Wolf Krakowski replied:

Much like swimming  is to  water.
While a case could indeed  be made that one can  swim in other liquids,
 it would be a specious argument.
>
Are they / Were they always linked ?

They are no longer  linked, as many  musicians playing this music have
never spoken the language or have  an "arrested development"
relationship to it .   While some have made  some commitment and effort
to learn,  many have not.   Among the post-WW II generations,  Jewish
people usually speak the language of the country they live in as a first
language.

 Not only was Yiddish disparaged in modern Israel, it  was  suppressed,
both through "language of the ghetto" negative propaganda as well as by
the official government starvation of Yiddish education and culture.

This effects of this  negative propaganda were felt in the US and Canada
throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s as Yiddish fell into ever greater
desuetude.
This  created a great void in certain sectors of Yiddish intellectual
and cultural life, the repercussions of which are being  felt today.

Yiddish was all but abandoned and started to be spoken of as a "dying
language", etc.  Isaac Singer writes that, when he would tell people he
was a Yiddish writer,  it was like  saying he was a grave-digger.  That
is to say,  not only was there not a lot of prestige in it, it was a
suspect occupation for an otherwise normal and intelligent person.
.....

Reply: Velvel, I agree with every word of this. (Itzik-Leyb)
_____

The question was then asked:
 Were there klezmer musicians in Europe who did not speak yiddish?
where?

>Doubt it.  A well-seasoned and well-travelled musician of any origin could hav
e picked up some licks or copped some style, or even played a gig with a Jewish
 klezmer band,  but it would have been rare.   The interrelationship between mu
sicians and  their "clients" would dictate that Jewish and  Yiddish-speaking  <
klezmers> would be engaged for Jewish <simkhes>.

In some areas (adds Itzik-Leyb), it was not unusual for some non-Jewish
musicians (especially, in Romania, Gypsies) to take part in klezmer bands.
Even these spoke Yiddish. Here is an example from ethnomusicologist
Moshe Beregovski (_Old Jewish Folk Music_, ed. Slobin, p.526, note 19):

In the summer of 1933, I transcribed tunes from a fiddler who played Jewish 
dance-tunes in the courtyards of Kiev. I transcribed several tunes of his reper-
toire, then saw that he was not a Jew, but a Pole (Felix Svitelski, age 31). As
he told me, he had played with Jewish musicians for fifteen years in the
town of Korostishev (Kiev region). He picked up the klezmer manner of playing
so accurately that I was sure I had a typical small-otown klezmer before me.
Joel Engle mentions a similar fact. in his report on the An-ski expedition
of 1912, he tells of how a non-Jew (a Russian or Moldavian) was at the head
of a klezmer band in Ruzhina. This musician even composed his own pieces for
the band. "He tried to get me to buy a sparkling 'mayofis' which he wrote
himself," writes Engel.
____

While it is not actually stated that these non_jewish klezmers spoke Yiddish,
I am sure they did, because there are innumerable example s showing that, in
multi-lingual Eastern Europe, non-Jews who worked in predominantly Jewish
environments learned to speak Yiddish -- they had to.

What is the significance for us today, of the link between klezmer music
and Yiddish, which, as Wolf says, is like that of a swimmer to water? 
Certainly it is not tht it is impossible for a non-Yiddish-speaking
individual to play the music well. Rather, it is that klezmer music, as
a living tradition, in the sense I've been trying to get at in previous
messages, makes sense in a Yiddish-speaking environment because of the
sense of identification, cultural identification. At one time this link
was so strong that even non-Jews could take part in it. As a communal
experience, the playing and enjoyment of this music in a Yiddish-speaking
environemnt is simply a continuation, and requires no great alterations
to "bring it up to date." Converesely, if some innovations are made, 
they will be judged appropriate, inappropriate, or perhaps understood
as a joke, within a _Yiddish_ frane of reference.

Itzik-Leyb