New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century by Joel E Rubin (The University of Rochester Press, £75)
By 1915, New York City was home to the largest single concentration of Jews in history. Klezmer, a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew — kle (vessel) and zmer (song) — was the traditional term for a musician who played the music the players brought with them. Clarinettists, favoured over violinists for their instrument’s wider, dynamic range, were the foremost exponents of the genre. Landsmanshaftn — organisations set up to help the new, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, helped provide employment for klezmorim, many of whom were members of musical dynasties.
It is believed that the better, more successful musicians remained in the old country and that only the less sought after, more impoverished players emigrated.
Joel Rubin, a first-class klezmer clarinettist with a classical training, was opened up to his instrument’s expressive possibilities by the pre-war recordings of Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein.
They are the heroes of a book that flits between colourful accounts of its protagonists’ world and clinical analyses of the music they played, a reflection of the author’s own double life as performer and academic.
One colleague of Rubin’s, Max Epstein, told him in 1991: “If you called me a klezmer 35 years ago, I’d’ve hit you with something!” As the generation who had imported klezmer music to America died out, their children became more interested in the culture of the land where they were born. “A klezmer”, writes Rubin, “was atavistic, an instrumentalist of limited abilities, who was unable or unwilling to learn new styles of music or, perhaps, even to read musical notation.”
Of Rubin’s two subjects, Tarras, with his solid musical education and superlative technique, was better equipped to survive changing musical fashions than Brandwein. But the latter, a hard-drinking womaniser, arrests the reader’s attention each time he appears.
According to Epstein, “Tarras played like a cold fish… but Brandwein would tear the heart out of you.” Brandwein’s Yiddish was as colourful as his playing. “Bays mikh oys di maridn!” (chew out my haemorrhoids), he would cry.
It was, arguably, the recordings of Brandwein rather than Tarras that kick-started the klezmer revival.
“It was when I heard Brandwein that I heard something that sounded, you know, like European Jewish music that I knew existed but I’d never heard,” claims one of Rubin’s interviewees.
Rubin, employing Yiddishist Benjamin Harshav’s linguistic model, treats klezmer music as a “full-fledged musical language and not a dialect of Moldavian or Ukrainian music,” just as “Yiddish is a full-fledged language and not simply a dialect or jargon.”
It is no coincidence that a revived fascination in the language of Eastern European Jewry has been accompanied by a similar renewed enthusiasm for its music. Rubin’s scholarly yet highly readable book is an important addition to the literature on the genre.
Mark Glanville is a writer and musician
