Klezmer on Fish Street

[mashke <mashke...>]

Yesterday at Kerem Shalom in Concord, MA, I attended the preview of the movie 
"Klezmer on Fish Street", Yale Strom's documentary of the Klezmaniac's trip to 
Poland in the summer of 2000. According to Cantor Ken Richmond, leader of the 
Klezmaniacs, the movie will be released in the next few months.

The movie was wonderful, beautifully done, yet full of paradoxes. There is a 
square in the old Jewish quarter of Krackow where Jewish cultural events are 
held, where there are Jewish restaurants serving Jewish food with signs in, 
among other laguages, Yiddish, yet there are at the most 10,000 Jews in all of 
Poland. As the movie said "who's doing the cooking?".

Our European list members are probably a lot more familiar witht the concept of 
"Jewish Culture without Jews" and the various opinions of that phenomenon, but 
here in the states we (or at least I) has been very insulated from it, and it 
is a major theme of the movie. 

Another theme was the presence of Alta Frohman, grandmother of Shira Shazeer, 
vocalist of the Klezmaniacs. Alta was born in Bedzin, Poland and was there 
until she got out at age 19. She was a constant and inspiring presence in the 
movie, negotiating with Polish gemdarmes who were trying to quiet the 
spontaneous rejoicing that broke out in the square in Krackow by the many 
Jewish young people who were there, visiting Bedzin and discovering her 
childhood home was still intact, and visitng Auschwitz.

This is a powerful movie and should be seen and enjoyed by everyone who shares 
out interest in Jewish music. Further infomation can be found at 
www.klezmaniacs.org.

Dick Rosenberg

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+