Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City [1 ed.] 0190064439, 9780190064433

Table of contents :
Copyright
Dedication
Author's Note
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on translation, orthography, interviews, and recordings
About the companion website
Ch. 1 - Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?
Ch. 2 - The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks
Ch. 3 - The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places
Ch. 4 - Placing Berlin in the Music
Ch. 5 - Sounding Jewish in Berlin
Ch. 6 - Curating the Tradition: Dissemination, Learning, and Responsibility
Ch. 7 - Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City (Postlude)
Ch. 8 - Conclusion
Appendix 1 - A Brief Overview of Klezmer Music
Appendix 2 - Interview Information
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City Phil Alexander https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190064433.001.0001 Published: 2021

Online ISBN: 9780190064464

Print ISBN: 9780190064433

FRONT MATTER

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190064433.002.0003 Published: March 2021

Page iv

Subject: Ethnomusicology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

p. iv

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Copyright Page 

Names: Alexander, Phil, author. Title: Sounding Jewish in Berlin : klezmer music and the contemporary city / Phil Alexander. Description: [1.] | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi ers: LCCN 2020041420 (print) | LCCN 2020041421 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190064440 | ISBN 9780190064464 | ISBN 9780190064471 Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Germany—Berlin—Music—History and criticism. | Klezmer music—Germany—Berlin—21st century—History and criticism. | Music—Social aspects—Germany—Berlin—History—21st century. Classi cation: LCC ML3776.A44 2021 (print) | LCC ML3776 (ebook) | DDC 781.6292/40943155—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041420 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041421 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.001.0001 135798642 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

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ISBN 9780190064433 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190064457 (epub) |

To Gin and Mont—​what was

To Sammy—​what will be

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To Nicky—​what is

Author’s Note Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/39662/chapter/339640641 by University of Toronto user on 02 October 2023

The majority of this book was completed in 2019. The first half of 2020 has put a radically different context around the lively proximity and easy intimacy documented in what follows. There is little doubt that the global pandemic—​during which I  am writing this unplanned foreword—​has already altered many of the social and cultural landscapes that sustain certain forms of musical life (as well as much else), and will continue to do so for some while to come. I am neither qualified nor foolhardy enough to attempt to guess how, and for how long, the sorts of spaces and dialogues in these pages will change—​ although I  sincerely hope that few changes will be permanent. Therefore, I have decided to keep my text exactly as it was originally written, rather than try to incorporate an inevitably clumsy response to where we currently find ourselves. This means, for example, retaining the present tense—​even while right now the present looks very different from just a few months ago. It means holding onto claims about music and the city that rest on a version of the contemporary city to which, at this moment, we have very limited access. But it also means putting my faith in the conviction that, at some point in the not-​too-​distant future, we will see a return to the connectedness and physical liveness of music-​making celebrated here. Phil Alexander, June 2020

Illustrations 23

1.2. Buskers and crowd, Warschauerstraße U-​Bahn 

25

2.1. Transcription: Kasbek Ensemble, “Odessa Bulgar” excerpt 

54

2.2. Transcription: Grinstein’s Mischpoche, “Odessa Bulgarish” excerpt 

56

2.3. Album cover: You Shouldn’t Know from It, It’s Klezmer! 

62

2.4. “Rumanian Hora” excerpt (Kostakowsky, 2001) 

63

2.5. Transcription: You Shouldn’t Know from It, “Hora” excerpt 

64

2.6. Knoblauch Klezmer Band poster, Kreuzberg 

69

2.7. Transcription: ?Shmaltz!, “Levunesca” opening 

72

2.8. Transcription: ?Shmaltz!, “Levunesca” instrumental to end 

73

2.9. Forshpil’s Sasha Lurje and Roman Shinder, Gorki Theater 

80

2.10. Paul Brody, Schöneberg  3.1–​3. Sunday in Mauerpark 



83 102

3.4. Berlin bricolage (various locations) 

104

3.5. Transcription: Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, “The Klezmer Bund” chorus 

112

3.6. Klezmer Bund logo 

113

3.7. Kaffee Burger stage 

115

3.8. Daniel Kahn, Gorki Theater 

120

3.9. Tants in Gartn Eydn, Lübars 

127

3.10. Café Bleibergs, Charlottenburg 

131

3.11. Saytham’s Lounge (outdoors), Prenzlauer Berg 

138

3.12–​14. Neukölln Klezmer Sessions, Bar Oblomov 

149

4.1. Selected klezmer album covers of the last forty years 

161

4.2. Transcription: ?Shmaltz!, “Gran Bufet” opening 

166

4.3. Transcription: ?Shmaltz!, “Viva la Malwonia!” chorus 

169

4.4. Transcription: Daniel Kahn, “Görlitzer Park” first verse 

172

4.5. Transcription: Daniel Kahn, “Görlitzer Park” chorus 

173

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1.1. Nina Hynes and the Budapest Choir, Warschauerstraße 

xii  List of Illustrations 4.6. Transcription: Daniel Kahn, “Görlitzer Park” middle 8 

174



4.7. Transcription: Knoblauch Klezmer Band, “Das Modell” opening 

180



4.8. Transcription: Knoblauch Klezmer Band, “Das Modell” verse 

180



4.9. Transcription: Knoblauch Klezmer Band, “Das Modell” chorus 

180

4.10. Graffiti: “RIP Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird,” Neukölln 

188



5.1. Transcription: Semer Label Reloaded, “Kadish, der Yidisher Soldat” chorus 

205



5.2. Semer Label Reloaded, Gorki Theater 

213

5.3. Stolpersteine, Reichenberger Straße 

218



6.1. Transcription: Heterophony in Isaac Ohring’s freylekhs 

243



6.2. Transcription: Ilya’s dancing accordion 1 

247



6.3. Transcription: Ilya’s dancing accordion 2 

247



6.4. Transcription: Ilya’s dancing accordion 3 

248



6.5. Afternoon dancing, Yiddish Summer Weimar 

249



6.6. Michael Winograd, Yiddish Summer Weimar 

259



6.7. Klezmer cadence (solo) 

261



6.8. Klezmer cadence (ensemble) 

261

6.9–​10. OMA Cafe jam session and afternoon lecture, Yiddish Summer Weimar 

267

A1.1. Three common klezmer modes 

290

All photos taken by Phil Alexander between September 2013 and September 2014.  All other images reproduced with permission. 

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Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City Phil Alexander https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190064433.001.0001 Published: 2021

Online ISBN: 9780190064464

Print ISBN: 9780190064433

FRONT MATTER

Published: March 2021

Subject: Ethnomusicology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

The older I get, the more I realize that what I crave is community: communities of thought, of friendship, of family, of music, of localities (and trans-localities), and of daily life. Everything else is really just window dressing. Writing this at the end of 2019, as UK politics descends to a new low (who thought it had anywhere further to drop?), many of us are also increasingly seeking a community of hope, a community of joy and of khavershaft—a Yiddish word that embraces both friendship and comradeship—amid rampant self-interest and growing mistrust. The communities that I have met on my journey through playing and writing about music, as well as the ones that have accompanied me elsewhere in life, are who I would like to thank here. In these di erent musical and social worlds I have been lucky to discover a generosity of spirit, warmth of a ection, and openness of thought that continues to sustain me. The Berlin klezmer musical community (without whom there is no book!) made me feel welcome and included right from the start. Everybody who I met was unfailingly generous with their time, perceptive with their insights, and a lot of fun to be around. They made my time in Berlin full of friendship and music, and their breadth of experience, enthusiasm, and openness underpins this whole study. Full interview details are given in Appendix 2, but particular thanks go to Sasha Lurje, Ilya Shneyveys, Hampus Melin, Eli Fabrikant, Emil Goldschmidt, Stefan Litsche, Lenz Hüber, Franka Lampe, Tania Alon, Dan Kahn, Sanne Möricke, and Ursula Weigert, as well as the students and faculty at 2014’s Yiddish Summer Weimar, in particular Alan Bern, Paul Brody, Michael Winograd, and Patrick Farrell. I am deeply grateful for the wonderful music that these friendly and creative people make, for the engaged way that they talk about it, and for the advocacy and strength of feeling they continue to bring to Yiddish musical culture. They have also been encouragingly supportive of this book. I sincerely hope that everyone quoted and discussed feels that they have been well represented here. If not, the fault is wholly mine. I am also grateful to all those who kindly gave their permission to reproduce images. p. xiv

The SOAS scholarly community is where this project began for me, and it could not have come at a better time. After a decade and a half of professional musicking, stretched simultaneously between unbounded joy at the birth of our son and deep sadness at the loss of both parents, I was eager for the intellectual stimulation that awaited me when I embarked on my MMus in 2011. I wasn’t disappointed. Although the entire SOAS edi ce deserves deep thanks—for its aws as well as for its many wonders—my extra-special gratitude goes to my supervisors and friends Ilana Webster-Kogen and Angela Impey for their kind, intelligent, and focused stewardship of my work. I have no doubt at all that without their encouragement and support I would have stumbled and fallen long before now. I would also like to say a heartfelt thanks to

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Acknowledgments 

other teachers who greatly enlarged my narrow thinking: Lucy Duran, Rachel Harris, Catherine Heszer, Keith Howard, Richard Widdess, Rowan Pease, Caspar Melville, and others. This is also an opportunity to thank four teachers from my undergraduate days who, whether they were aware of it or not, had a profound in uence upon my musical thought, both theoretically and practically: John Tilbury, Benedict Sarnaker, Roger Redgate, and Nigel Bonard. I also thank clarinetist Gregori Schechter for getting me into this music in the rst place, many years ago, and for lots of laughs along the way. Within the warmly collegiate ethnomusicology community I’ve been delighted to get to know—and learn from—Cassandre Balosso-Bardin (thanks also for the music!), Chloe Alaghaband-Zadeh, Joe Browning, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Byron Dueck, and many others. I would also like to extend especial gratitude to my two PhD examiners, Joel Rubin and Eliot Bates. Their thoughtful, respectful but honest criticism of my original PhD thesis brought a deepened perspective and broadened context that improved my work immeasurably. I have been grateful for the ongoing Jewish musical camaraderie and advice of Abbi Wood, Rachel Adelstein, Joseph Toltz, Stephen Muir, and Lisa Peschel. Thanks also to Mark Slobin for his early support. More recently, my sincere thanks go to Hannah Holtschneider and Mia Spiro, who have been an invaluable part of my journey into Jewish studies. We need music in our lives, and I am very happy to be part of my own Scottish musical community. It’s a rare thing to have the opportunity to play with so many incredible musicians, but more important still to be able to count them as friends. I owe all these people deep thanks for their solidarity, their love, and what p. xv

they continue to teach me about music (and therefore

life). In no particular order, and doubtless missing

important people: Mario Caribé, Pete Garnett, Dave Keay, Greg Lawson, Guy Nicolson, Toby Shippey, Ewen Maclean, Rachel Walker, Dan Abrahams, Norman Mackay, Su-A Li, Éamonn Coyne, Steve Kettley, Gav Marwick, Ruth Morris, Davy Cattanach, Emma Smith, Valentina Montoya-Martinez, Michael Marra (RIP), Douglas Robertson, Jane-Ann Purdy, Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, Dave Donnelly, Dave Delarre, Neil Maccoll, Kate St John, Catriona McKay, Chris Stout, Mattie Foulds, Adam Holmes, Rick Standley, Willie Molleson, Marty Hailey. I’d like to thank them all for many many good times, and look forward to many more. This research was supported by a full AHRC studentship and also Jewish Music Institute Joe Loss scholarships (both 2013–15). I thank both organizations for this, and also the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society for the chance to present ongoing aspects of this research. Sincere thanks also to Suzanne Ryan (formerly of OUP) for taking on this project with enthusiasm and charm, Sean Decker (OUP) for his tireless and good-humored e

ciency, Richa Jobin and Felshiya Samuel (Newgen) for their help and

patience, and Ben Sadock for precision editing and a host of helpful suggestions. Finally, the most important community of all—my family: Gloria Brockbank for being my rst and ongoing musical mentor; her late husband Roger for parallel inspiration; Micaela Valentine for love and whisky; my sister Kathy Kilburn and her ever-expanding clan for always being there; my brother Paul; fellow travelers and boundless hosts Paul Bragman, Miri Usiskin, Simon and Sam Bragman, Phil Bragman, and Andy Pepe; Sarah Mac and family for a long-lived connection that began with our mothers; Moge Purtill and family, who I wish I saw more; Jojo Randall and family; Deborah Stent and family; and Steve Lewis (de nitely family) for wine, chat, and a ready place to stay. It is to my parents, Monty Alexander and Ginny Valentine, that I owe both my love of music and my belief in critical practice—also my Jewishness (whatever that means). They didn’t live to see me start this project, but I can see them raising a large glass as I nish it. And most of all, every bit of love that I have and all the thanks I can ever express go to my fellow adventurers, vegan explorers, and center of my life, my partner, Nicky, and our son, Sammy. Without you two, there’s p. xvi

just no point.

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Deidre Morgan, Ruardh Absaroka, Raquel Campos, Emily Granozio, Andrew Green, Simon McKerrell,

Unless indicated, all translations are my own. Exceptions are where lyrics have been reproduced from liner notes for the two Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird albums Lost Causes (RIEN 77) and Bad Old Songs (RIEN 84). In these cases, English, German, and Yiddish text are given in the original form and layout in which they appear in these liner notes. Yiddish vocabulary has been translated with reference to Weinreich’s Yiddish-​English, English-​Yiddish Dictionary (1977), German vocabulary with reference to Collins German Dictionary (2005). Where Yiddish lyrics have been reprinted from another source, I  have reproduced exactly that source. In other instances, I have adhered to YIVO Yiddish orthography (Weinreich 1977). Certain words common to both Hebrew and Yiddish appear in conventional Hebrew transliteration (e.g., Haskalah, Hanukkah). German and Yiddish words are italicized, with the exception of song titles (in quotes), band names, English words of Yiddish origin, and the word “klezmer.” Interview details, including dates of birth and short informal biographies, are given in Appendix 2.

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Note on translation, orthography, interviews, and recordings

About the companion website

Oxford has created a website to accompany Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Material that cannot be made available in a book, in particular audio recordings of much of the music discussed, is provided here. The reader is strongly encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction with the relevant chapter and musical examples—​music, after all, is for the hearing!

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www.oup.com/us/soundingjewishinberlin

1

If the city is a piece of music, it depends on who’s playing it, who’s listening; and you are not the person you were a week ago. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun

Introduction In December 2013, a new klezmer jam session began in Neukölln, Berlin. It wasn’t the first klezmer session in the city, and first impressions seemed to promise little that was unusual:  three or four musicians playing at one end of a long dimly lit room; a small audience half-​listening; the familiar slightly awkward pause after each tune, as players and listeners alike waited to see who would pick up the musical baton. The music was of a high quality, swooping clarinet lines offset with rich accordion chords, propelled continually forward by a drummer’s surprisingly funky take on traditional syncopated rhythms. But well-​played klezmer can be found in many places in Berlin, and so this too was in itself nothing special. By the end of the second hour, however, the mood had changed—​and not simply because the session was now fuller, livelier, and noisier. There was a feeling in the room of something new, or at least a new way of seeing and hearing the familiar. Musicians and non-​musicians had become more mobile, harder to tell apart. The crowd wasn’t just hipper than the usual session audience; it was more dynamic, fully involved in the unfolding of the event. People were dancing, clapping, humming along as half-​recognized tunes were stretched, morphed, and reimagined on the spot. Toward the end of the evening, one of the three organizers stood on his chair to offer an impromptu manifesto, an embarrassed yet heartfelt mission statement explaining why and how klezmer now belonged in this part of town, with this group of musicians. What the night was reflecting—​in fact was a formative part of—​was a new chapter in the revitalization of traditional Eastern European Jewish wedding music, hundreds of miles away from its place of inception several centuries Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0001.

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Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?

2  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

1 The debate between klezmer as contemporary folk music and the professional, albeit socially liminal, status of prewar Eastern European klezmorim (klezmer musicians) continues to run (Feldman 2016). These distinctions are, however, largely irrelevant to a contemporary context. Notwithstanding the fact that many practitioners discussed here earn a living from playing klezmer, the social processes of this music and the spaces within which it takes place make a definition of folk music wholly appropriate. Folk music as practice crosses freely between nonprofessional community roles and established spaces of paid performance—​in much the same way as contemporary Irish or Scottish traditional musicians might be regulars at pub sessions while also earning a decent living from performing and teaching. See Slobin (2000), Turino (2008).

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earlier. For more than twenty-​five years, Berlin has hosted the busiest and most dynamic klezmer scene outside of North America. Subject to the same ebbs and flow in creativity and fashion that accompany all musical scenes, it has often existed under the extra pressure of continually close, at times claustrophobic, ideological scrutiny. In this city, klezmer’s bent notes, crisp snare rolls, and offbeat stabs will always resonate with a surplus of meaning, enfolding and challenging histories old and new. And indeed, the resurgence of this Jewish folk music1 (initially by a majority of non-​Jews) in the nerve center of its planned destruction has at times provoked a heady and inevitably unsustainable mix of optimism, polemic, anxiety, and vitriol (Gruber 2002; Ottens and Rubin 2004; Morris 2001). But over the past decade, something has changed. That a far greater proportion of Jews are involved is only a part of the story. What has transformed at a deeper level is the relationship between this traditional ritual music—​now mostly divorced from its original ritual context—​and the contemporary city with which it is in continual dialogue. It is this fundamental change that my book explores. This ongoing transformation is evidence that if traditional music is to maintain significance amid the noise of the urban, if it is to be heard, it must stake its claim as a part of that noise—​in a dialogue that leaves neither side untouched. In line with much contemporary ethnomusicological thinking, and influenced in no small part by British cultural studies, this book therefore steps away from how a city frames musical practice toward a critical perspective that sees music as fundamental in producing a certain version of the city. For klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin, this illuminates responses that are notably distinct from the models of cultural takeover or accusatory absence that have previously dominated the field. This heterogeneous, transitory, fragmented yet undeniably creative city offers a bottom-​up fluidity and inventiveness that grounds musical identity—​and its participants—​in its performative environment. By engaging with the material and symbolic meanings of the city itself, klezmer in Berlin has found alternative musical practices beyond the overdetermined discourses of “revival”—​revealing how

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  3

2 Ashkenaz is the Hebrew word for Germany. The medieval Rhineland hosted some of the earliest northern European Jewish settlements, and Jewish life in medieval German lands is often referred to by scholars as Ashkenaz I. Following eastward migration from ca. the thirteenth century onward, the term Ashkenazi widened to include Jews in Poland. Ashkenazim is nowadays used to refer to Jews of Eastern European descent (very broadly defined), the majority of whom do not live in Germany or Eastern Europe.

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traditional culture can remain meaningful within a shifting, overlapping, avowedly modern, urban cosmopolitanism. This, then, is a book about music and place, but not “the music of a place” in any uncomplicated sense. The historical places of klezmer, its set of implicit geographies, are many miles east of the German capital. From 1796 onward, following the partitioning of Poland, Russian and Polish Jews began to be confined to the Pale of Settlement, a large rectangle of territory from the Baltic States in the north to the Black Sea in the south that persisted in modified form until the 1917 Revolution. Although professional Ashkenazi2 Jewish musicians had been in evidence since the mid-​sixteenth century (Feldman 2016), it was the concentration of Jewish life in the cities and shtetls (market towns) of the Pale and neighboring Austro-​Hungarian territories that gave rise to klezmer music as we now recognize it (Rubin 2020). In these areas of high Jewish population, dynastic klezmer ensembles known as kapelyes structured weeklong Jewish weddings, played for the balls of wealthy Polish landowners, and in some places sustained an ongoing interaction with Roma lautari (professional musicians). These buried geographies are understood as the historical heartland of klezmer, rooting a functional musical and social connection to place. And even as their twentieth-​century destruction is similarly conceived as signaling the almost total demise of the professional klezmer tradition in Eastern Europe—​or perhaps because of this destruction—​the connection remains deep and hard to shake from the music itself. Escaping violent pogroms and economic hardship, large numbers of Eastern European Jews migrated westward from the early 1880s onward, most significantly to the United States, where much of the traditional wedding repertoire now found itself increasingly irrelevant to the new needs of cramped, heterogeneous immigrant life in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities. At the same time, co-​territorial American jazz music promoted developments in repertoire and instrumentation, further distancing the Old World from the New. Klezmer had found a new geography, but one that would see it move further and further to the sidelines of mid-​century American Jewish identity (Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 2002). Energized by a combination of 1960s

4  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

3 Although “klezmer” is nowadays understood to refer to a type of music, this usage stems largely from the klezmer revival. The Hebrew compound kle-​zemer originally meant musical instruments, and from the 16th century until the mid-​20th century, the Yiddish term klezmer almost always referred to an instrumental musician. See Feldman (2016:62) and Appendix 1. 4 See later in this chapter and Appendix 1 for a discussion of the increasing overlaps between Yiddish song and klezmer music and how the two have now moved, post-​revival, into a shared cultural space. See also Wood (2013).

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identity politics and a popular music scene increasingly open to influences beyond rock ’n’ roll, second-​and third-​generation Jewish Americans coming of artistic age in the 1970s responded vigorously to klezmer’s threatened cultural submergence. The American klezmer revival of the 1970s enacted a renewed geographical significance, connecting American Ashkenazi Jews back to their European roots. Klezmer revivalists reimbued the increasingly neglected music of earlier generations with a newly muscular aesthetic sensibility, frequently allied to a radicalized politics that reinstated Yiddish language and culture as contemporary and vital (Svigals 2002). Spaces of music had largely moved to the concert stage, but a conception of place remained important: an ideological connection to immigrant forebears became a fundamental part of revival philosophy and practice. This was still American Jewish music (Slobin 1984), even as the perceptions of American Jews had changed around it. Many of the musicians at the head of these developments, such as Michael Alpert, Hankus Netsky, Henry Sapoznik, and Joel Rubin, remain central hubs of klezmer activity and important influences upon today’s younger musicians in all parts of the world.3 Germany has a long, if ambivalent, relationship with Yiddish culture. Jews began to populate the Rhineland more than a thousand years ago—​in the Middle Ages the Hebrew word Ashkenaz referred specifically to German lands. German and Yiddish share Mittelhochdeutsch linguistic roots, and Weimar Republic Berlin was a European center of transnational Yiddish literary culture (Kuznitz 2014). However, and unlike New York or the Pale of Settlement, the fact that Berlin’s prewar Jewish population was largely assimilated and westward looking means that the city offers little klezmer prehistory to uncover, and hence a less explicit and neat relationship between contemporary revival and historical geography. In East Germany from the late 1940s onward, the widespread concertizing of Dutch-​born Auschwitz survivor Lin Jaldati and her husband, Eberhard Rebling, offered a compelling narrative of Yiddish song as resistance,4 which the socialist state could paradoxically neither endorse (as Jewish life) nor condemn because of its anti-​fascist identity (Shneer 2015:13). Across the border, the West Berlin band Kasbek

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  5

5 As in many cases, the term revival is itself a contested one. Many of the musicians discussed here are at best ambivalent about the word, and some writers prefer revitalization (Feldman 2016) or resurgence (Netsky 2015). Rubin argues that it is also problematic to implicitly group multiple geographies and histories under a single banner (“the klezmer revival”): “Perhaps it would make more sense to look at the klezmer revival as a set of mini-​revivals” (Rubin 2005:154).

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began to include klezmer music from the 1960s onward as part of a broader Eastern European offering, pitting themselves explicitly against the tide of American and English pop music and implicitly against the partitioning of their city. At the same time Peter Rohland and later Zupfgeigenhansel popularized “Germanized” versions of Yiddish songs within a wider folksinger aesthetic, simultaneously challenging Holocaust silence. And in the early 1980s came the country’s first postwar Yiddish and klezmer musicians to actively mold their performance practice on what could be learned from the past: singers such as Karsten Troyke and bands like Aufwind, both still prominent members of the Berlin scene. These artists and others are discussed in detail in the next chapter. From the 1980s onward, Germany began to see visits from American Jewish klezmer ensembles—​Kapelye, the Epstein Brothers Orchestra, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band among them. Artists such as Brave Old World, the Klezmatics, the Argentinian-​Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman, and a number of German and Germany-​based groups became instrumental in driving the growth of a klezmer “boom” in the new Germany, albeit through very different narratives. A rapid increase in bands, performance spaces, and workshops—​helped along by enthusiastic headlines proclaiming things like “In Berlin, it’s hip to be klezmer”—​saw the music increasingly woven into the city’s musical fabric, simultaneously provoking a parallel level of ideological handwringing. And although, as in most “revival” centers,5 numbers have contracted over the past decade, the pages that follow illustrate that in Berlin’s case this represents a distillation and concentration of creativity and talent more than a decline in interest or enthusiasm—​as well as a greater proportion of Jews. Alongside the official discourse of Jewish culture days and “Open Synagogue” nights, Holocaust commemoration and centrally organized tours to smaller Jewish communities, klezmer has skillfully integrated itself into the capital’s vibrant street culture. Klezmer bands busk on street corners or at the unofficial weekly mini-​festival on the former death strip of Mauerpark, and some of the most up-​to-​date Jewish music is to be found in the city’s scruffy bars, urban festivals, and funky clubs. And although one of the hubs of the recent scene, the Hackesches Hoftheater, closed its doors over

6  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

6 The contrast between the absence of klezmer “history” in Berlin and its recent incorporation into the city’s musical networks is an assumed sacred cow repeatedly slain by critics of the German klezmer movement, such as Philip Bohlman (2008) and Michael Birnbaum (2009). Different musicians’ responses to these repeated geographical correctives are discussed throughout. 7 Although its roots are in Eastern Europe (Beregovski 2000; Feldman 2016), twentieth-​century mass migration, genocide, political persecution, and modern international musical networks mean that klezmer now exists across national borders, as well as within them. This is discussed at length throughout.

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a decade ago, the past five years have seen the birth of a renewed, ground-​ level complex of Yiddish cultural activities—​including a new dynamic jam session in Neukölln, a klezmer dance night, klezmer picnics, and a winter workshop series (http://​www.shtetlneukoelln.org). An established feature of the German musical landscape, klezmer has become a flexible resource through which to speak the city. If Berlin’s post-​reunification klezmer scene is a recreated one, on closer inspection the lack of cultural continuity offers something more interesting in its place:6 the chance to embed the music in the contemporary city, to make it relevant and resonant to the streets, parks, histories, and imaginations within which it now functions. For traditional musical forms to survive the heterogeneity of the urban—​beyond the limits of “heritage”—​they must find ways of engagement that are rooted within the city itself. What this book uncovers, therefore, is the ways that klezmer has been made meaningful to today’s Berlin—​how the city, its musicians, and their music have established new creative channels and signifying practices. This book is not the first to consider klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin, but it is the first to link the music directly to its particular urban environment, the first to explicitly view musical practice as both product and producer of the city (Smith 1997; Johansson and Bell 2009). As a piece of urban ethnomusicology, therefore, this is a study of the different ways that a transnational genre is rooted in the distinctive practices and meanings of the contemporary city within which it operates:7 through musical networks, performance space, textual and musical emplacement, and channels of education and dissemination, and as a living sonic embodiment that speaks against the silence of historical memory. Through its engagement with the performative culture of contemporary Berlin, klezmer has moved beyond discourses of revival and cultural ownership, multiply renewing itself as part of an ongoing and unpredictable dialogue.

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  7

Berlin and the “German klezmer” debate

8 This debate has reached a characteristic ideological tipping-​point in the past few years, with the growing refugee crisis played out daily across European borders. 9 “Berlin is always becoming, never complete.” This anonymous Berlin architect, quoted in Cochrane and Passmore (2001:351), was echoing art critic Karl Scheffler’s famous pronouncement of a century earlier, that Berlin is doomed always to “become” and never to “be.”

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Fulcrum, flashpoint, and much-​ contested symbol of twentieth-​ century European history, Berlin is a city in the midst of a continual process of self-​ examination and reinvention. Emerging from the dark legacies of wartime decimation and extended postwar division, the city barely had time to lick its own wounds before being enthusiastically (and optimistically) recast as symbol and arbiter of a reunited Europe.8 This process of re-​creation is not a new one for the city (Stangl 2008). Over the last hundred or so years, Berlin has been cast in a multitude of competing identities and representations, many of which have seen the city’s own agency relegated to that of supporting role in a larger geopolitical standoff. And more recently, a liberated Berlin has spent the last three decades trying on different versions of itself, constructing and reconstructing myriad identities and forms, both real and imagined: “Berlin wird, wird, wird, wird. Nie zu Ende.”9 Moving in from the grand sweep of historical narrative, this also means that parts of the city currently live day-​to-​day in a whirl of do-​it-​yourself energy and creativity. The Cold War legacy of subterfuge, concealment, and hidden meanings has endowed Berlin with a remnant sense of masquerade and cunning—​characteristics that in fact have been in place at least since the city’s early twentieth-​century modernist and subsequently expressionist outpourings (Jelavich 1996; Metzger 2007). It is also a city that has become expert at making do with whatever comes to hand: economic uncertainty, political polarization, and interrupted histories have on one level engendered a pragmatic, ground-​level, bricolage (Levi-​Strauss 1968) approach to cultural production at which the city still excels, despite the ongoing advance of commercial forces. Musically, this nowadays means a place that is happy to throw many things into a pot to see what comes out. Turkish hip-​hop, Balkan beats, industrial metal, Russian disco, and the city’s legendary 24-​ hour techno scene are just some of the ways in which Berlin noisily manifests its contemporary identity. And there is also Eastern European Jewish instrumental wedding music, better known as klezmer, which has been a notable part of Berlin’s musical life

8  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

10 Liner notes to the 1993 Brave Old World CD Beyond the Pale, Pinorrekk Records CD 5013. 11 Novelist and Wissenschaftskolleg fellow Claire Messud (2012:49) writes: “In Berlin, a sense of becoming trumps a sense of belatedness, and this makes it exciting.”

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for more than thirty years—​building on the cultural currency of its late 1970s American revival and subsequent international popularity (Slobin 2000). Although the proliferation of performers and spaces has been somewhat curtailed since the heady “klezmer boom” of the 1990s (Waligórska 2013), the music itself continues to develop in dynamic and provocative ways, often moving well beyond the traditionalist bounds of earlier incarnations. As we shall see, this has also been guided by networks of education and dissemination, in particular the long-​running Yiddish Summer Weimar workshop series. Equally important is the two-​way dialogue that has seen the sound of klezmer seep into the city’s wider world music environment—​as both live and recorded musical resource—​while parts of the klezmer discourse have become increasingly inflected with external influences both sympathetic and radical. Berlin has long hosted a significant number of internationally known immigrant North American klezmer musicians (many of whom feature here), but these days it is also home to increasing numbers of younger artists from the former Eastern bloc, making the city a central node in an international musical conversation. Indeed, the contemporary internationalism of the city itself lends a particular semiotic and cultural trajectory to the material that follows. In the early 1990s, the singer and fiddle player Michael Alpert noted with irony that Germany was one of the few places where a klezmer musician might actually make a living.10 While this may no longer quite so obviously be the case (if indeed it ever was), through active engagement with its distinctive urban environment klezmer in Berlin continues to transform and transgress—​in ways that would not be possible were it propelled solely by discourses of revivalist heritage (Livingston 1999) or historical mimesis. It is because of this relationship with the city that the music has developed the diversity that now warrants closer analysis. Berlin has an ambiguous attitude to its own history. The city continues to struggle under its historical weight (Silberman 2011:3) while also enjoying a certain post–​Cold War weightlessness.11 Berlin is thus both overdetermined by history and yet free to remake itself after so many years as the strategic pawn in a bigger global game. Similarly, klezmer carries the imagination and memories of a part of Jewish life all but wiped out by the Holocaust, but it is also a reinvented music: cut loose from an unbroken symbolic thread and free to adopt multiple—​even conflicting—​guises and incarnations (Netsky

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  9

Berlin remains impossible to grasp or keep in focus . . . a city of multiple temporalities and of diverse modalities:  virtual and actual, divided and united, built and destroyed, repaired and rebuilt, living in a perpetual mise en scène of its own history, a history it both needs and fears, both invents and disowns. A city of superimpositions and erasures. (Elsaesser 2009:37)

This tension between historical weight and contemporary playfulness is central to a narrative of klezmer music in Berlin, offering its own particular take on the familiar discourses of tradition and revival. What follows takes this further to explore how music illuminates and articulates a certain aspect of urban life (Krims 2007), but equally to understand how a city can play an active part in the creation and maintenance of a certain musical discourse.12 How, in other words, Berlin’s particular klezmer musical makeup acts as one of the elements that transforms and structures the space of the city itself—​through the mediation of social relationships, the channeling of musical communities, the renegotiation of public space, and the development of music as a symbolic language that takes the ever-​changing city as its discursive subject. My task is therefore to unpack the processes that characterize and make possible these particular transformations, but also to understand any symbiotic movement back the other way:  What specifically does the “Berlin” part bring to the narrative of “Berlin klezmer”? At the heart of this analysis are the points of intersection between music as a signifying practice (Hebdige 1979) and the urban environment, the overlapping spaces where music somehow “speaks” the city. In the last few decades, Berlin’s klezmer music has often found itself defined by absence:  of meaningful content (Ottens and Rubin 2004), of credible heritage (Bohlman 2008), and of Jews (Gruber 2002). As a result of these perceived absences, certain narratives have dominated the

12 See, for example, Lloyd Bradley’s brilliant survey of a hundred years of black music in London (2013).

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2015, Slobin 2002). Paradoxically, a city like Berlin approaches a music like klezmer with the heaviest of baggage but also the cleanest of slates. Klezmer is a meaningful match with Berlin’s contemporary mobile place-​ness—​the city is a powerful magnet for personal (and musical) rediscovery precisely because it is itself such an ambiguous place:

10  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

By retroactively orientalising and caricaturing the murdered population, German klezmer diminishes the shock of the Holocaust and distances the country from its victims, and precludes a meaningful dialogue with the Jews who continue to inhabit Germany. (Birnbaum 2009:298)

In a parallel move, klezmer and Yiddish music has been subject to a symbolic evocation that, paradoxically, fills an actual space of German Jewish life with an imagined, and therefore still absent, Eastern Other. For some, this combination of nostalgic desire and discursive absence overlays an irresistible set of preconceptions that obscure a real and heterogeneous contemporary Jewish presence: So what we have beneath all of that is, [sultry voice] “Oh, you are Jewish, how interesting! Oh, you are Jewish, your German is so good. Oh, you are Jewish, when are you going back home? Oh, you are Jewish, when will you stop writing with these old-​fashioned letters?” [laughs] Do you want more? “Oh, you are Jewish, aren’t you too young?”15

Writing of non-​Jewish klezmer musicians in Sweden, David Kaminsky (2014:272) argues that the Jewishness of klezmer mediates a sense of 13 These are, of course, not the only terms within which most of these writers approach German klezmer. Their wider contributions are an important part of the discussion, here and elsewhere. 14 Rubin (2014:45). The passage discussed is from Lewinsky (2005:94). 15 Berlin cantor Jalda Rebling, personal interview, Prenzlauer Berg, June 26, 2014.

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conversation:  appropriation, reparation, and guilt among them (Morris 2001; Birnbaum 2009).13 Frequently appearing as a default signifier of Jewishness (Waligórska 2013), German klezmer and Yiddish music has often been accused of serving the needs of the commemorators as much as those being remembered, leading to criticism, suspicion, and occasionally outright anger. The musician and scholar Joel Rubin, for example, points to an imagined tirade against a German klezmer band in Charles Lewinsky’s Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude (A completely ordinary Jew), where “any old band is standing on stage, the All-​Star-​Klezmer-​Thingamajigs or whatever they call themselves, and not a single one of them is a Jew.”14 Available on one level for this kind of parody, and having lost its novel dynamism as a metonym for “things Jewish,” klezmer’s imposed exoticism has also been the subject of criticism:

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  11

16 As in, for example, Yiddish Summer Weimar’s 2019 “Weimar Republic of Yiddishland” concert and workshop series, which celebrated the Weimar Republic and prewar Berlin’s centrality to European Yiddish cultural life. 17 Even the virtual Judaism theorist Ruth Ellen Gruber was by 2009 conceding that for klezmer in Germany “the attraction is deep and springs from many sources, partly, of course, but only partly (and less so as time moves on), from an underlying guilty legacy” (Gruber 2009:503).

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difference between the alien and the domestic, making it “just exotic enough.” Klezmer thus enables “a measure of control over a safe Oriental object,” and yet one that contains, because of perceived Jewish rootlessness, “eminent claimability” (272). As with previous commentators, Kaminsky’s concern is with “not simply the appropriation, but rather the language with which non-​Jews have justified their appropriation of klezmer” (255). And indeed, the early days of klezmer and Yiddish music’s resurgence in Berlin at times raised uncomfortable questions—​questions that many German klezmer musicians have worked hard to counter. However, as this book makes clear, Jewishness—​in multiple forms—​is now a fundamental part of Berlin klezmer. Many recent musical arrivals are Jews, and a sense of what it means to be making Jewish music in Germany’s capital is woven deeply into the work of several artists discussed here. At the same time, prewar Jewish-​ German musical links and the creative life of Ashkenazi Jews in Germany continue to be further explored.16 Accusations of ongoing cultural appropriation or the salving of guilty German consciences are ever harder to sustain.17 As sociologist Keith Kahn-​Harris convincingly argues in his 2019 discussion of antisemitism, pointing to the presence of (some) Jews to rebut an argument about Jews is dangerous and self-​defeating. And as this book shows, good klezmer and Yiddish music is everywhere made by Jews and non-​Jews. I am not using increased Jewish involvement in Berlin klezmer to say that everything is now magically balanced and automatically unproblematic. What I will make clear throughout, however, is that a considered, open-​ended exploration of the Jewishness (in fact multiple Jewishnesses) of klezmer and Yiddish music is now an unavoidable element of the musical and social conversation. And a significant part of this conversation is being driven by a diversity of Jewish experience that comes from both within and without Berlin. These earlier criticisms of the German klezmer movement will be addressed at various points throughout. However, in many of my interviews I became aware of a strong sense of resentment on the part of my interlocutors that the music they have chosen to take time and effort to learn continues occasionally to be framed in terms of a binary and antagonistic German/​Jewish

12  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

18 As several of my interviewees noted, the specific extramusical echoes of place cannot and should not be ignored. If this particular revitalization had happened somewhere more “neutral” (as far as Jewish history is concerned) it would likely have produced a very different set of musical responses. 19 Occasionally also perceived by some of my interviewees as either strait-​laced (Hampus Melin), opportunistic (Jossif Gofenberg), or exoticized (Jalda Rebling). On literary representations of Germans’ search for their “Jewish alterity,” see Schorsch (2003).

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paradigm. Spending any time within this vibrant scene makes it clear that “cultural necrophilia” anxieties have by now run their course (opinion is divided on how much energy they originally had). The multiple meanings of klezmer music have shifted their cultural charge, frequently moving to occupy a more dynamic, liminal, and temporal sense of contemporary Jewish culture and identity. Culturally and historically playful, this relocates traditional community processes (dance, music, theater, debate) within the material and ideological spaces of the city itself. This lively rediscovery has been driven in no small part by the enthusiasm and inclusivity of the Yiddish Summer Weimar workshops, discussed in ­chapter 6. Stepping further back, it points to a discourse of Jewishness unafraid to confront the dark history of the long twentieth century, but also a refusal to be defined by it.18 So while I am not simply discounting earlier debates in favor of an ahistorical celebratory narrative (Feld 2000)  or an overly hopeful faith in equality-​minded cultural dialogue, rehashing old arguments gets us nowhere. Although I intend to engage at some level with the troubled concept of “German klezmer,”19 I am nonetheless deliberately locating my contribution in terms of where things stand now rather than where they have come from—​in what ways they have moved on from these criticisms to forge new creative paths and ask different musical questions. The guilt/​appropriation dialectic that the music has faced over the past thirty years is not my focus, and I intend to dwell less on the ideological troubles of German klezmer than on how its contemporary manifestations form part of a twenty-​first-​century Berlin cultural politics of internationalism and bottom-​up creativity. How, in essence, things have moved from “revival” to a continued reinvention. Berlin is, famously, a constantly changing city. Several of the venues discussed here have now closed—​some bowing to increasingly irresistible global commercial pressures that are transforming the city for good, and some because their owners have simply gotten too tired and needed a rest. Others will doubtless spring up, again altering the musical landscape. Bands, too, come and go, switch personnel, and adjust musical direction. Inevitably, then, this book is a snapshot, a work in progress. But synchronic slices have diachronic implications, and what follows foregrounds a particular

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  13

Where I’m starting from My family and I lived in Berlin from September 2013 to September 2014, a year of fieldwork that combined participation, observation, critical cultural analysis, and the more nebulous—​but equally valuable—​osmotic process of getting under the city’s skin. We spent the first six months in Friedrichshain, watching as the autumn colors of Volkspark turned gradually to winter snow, and six months near the canal in Kreuzberg, enjoying growing hours of sunshine while strolling through the increasingly bustling Turkish market. During my time in Berlin I attended concerts and festivals, joined in jam sessions and dance workshops, played gigs, went busking, and took lessons. In August 2014 I  participated in a weeklong instrumental workshop at Yiddish Summer Weimar (see ­chapter 6). My partner, our son, and I were regular audiences at Berlin’s ongoing street music life, from the weekly free-​ for-​all Mauerpark musical extravaganza to impromptu street-​corner gigs at Boxhagener Platz flea market, Warschauerstraße station, Alexanderplatz, and many more.20 I also spent a large amount of time simply walking the city—​not exactly a paid-​up flâneur,21 but often with no clear destination—​ in order to get to know better the daily rhythms (Lefebvre 1996), sounds, and spaces that make up today’s Berlin. And of course, history is never far away in this city, so some of my time involved an exploration of the many monuments and commemorative spaces that mark out their own—​in this case unique—​urban topography and historiography (Ladd 2000; Till 2005). 20 Although conducting fieldwork while living in Berlin with my family inevitably brought its own responsibilities, I also found it a very grounding force: having a daily life in the city gave me a solid feeling of existence, balancing the “weightlessness” of being a researcher (cf. Titon 2008; also the panel session “Ethnomusicology and Parenting,” British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting, 2018). 21 Cf., for example, Walter Benjamin (1999) in Berlin and Guy Debord (1994) in Paris.

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conjunction of several significant elements: a multinational group of world-​ class Jewish and non-​Jewish musicians; an adventurous and aware audience; and a diversity of distinctive city spaces, all consolidated by an influential educative network. This shift in the relationship of klezmer to Berlin musical and spatial culture therefore marks a formative moment in an ongoing revitalization, a point when the group of artists and the spaces in which they operate changed in significant ways. It showcases both musical adaptability and the importance of the urban in its continued resilience.

14  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

22 Another pointed out that many of my interlocutors had been interviewed at some stage before and therefore were accustomed to giving opinions on this music. Avoiding asking anyone to simply repeat what they had already told previous researchers or journalists was another reason for letting them largely determine the flow of conversation. This was made sparklingly clear by the Yiddish singer Fabian Schnedler, who only agreed to an interview because I was asking specifically about his new project (see ­chapter 5).

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Although my attendance, participation, and observation were all largely dependent upon what was going on at the time, I endeavored to be systematic enough to cover a wide contextual spread. And on reflection, the particular moment was a serendipitous one. Several new klezmer spaces and networks took shape during this period, some of which have now flourished further to suggest challenging new directions—​such as the new grassroots series of concerts, jam session, workshops, and dance nights that has formed under the banner of Shtetl Neukölln. The physical location—​self-​ consciously inscribed in its title—​and personnel of this new annual event unites and makes geographically manifest several of the thematic strands discussed here. I also conducted thirty face-​to-​face interviews, mostly with musicians but also with journalists, record producers, event organizers, academics, and audience members, as well as many more informal conversations along the way. About half were Germans, the others American, Latvian, Swedish, Dutch, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, and Australian—​all fully involved in the city’s musical life. The majority of the interviews were in English, four in German, and one in an animated English-​German-​Yiddish composite. About half of these contacts were made through musical situations, the rest solicited via email or telephone. Some I had met before, sharing festival or concert stages. In all cases, I found people ready and willing to talk extensively about what they did and its relationship to a wider cultural context. I was, in fact, surprised by just how much people wanted to talk—​until one singer made the point that this is rarely a music where people accidentally “find” themselves, and consequently they are likely to have a lot to say.22 This meant that I was frequently provoked to turn my thinking in an unforeseen direction (or forced to reexamine my own incorrect assumptions), for which I am hugely grateful. All my interviewees were extremely generous with their time, knowledge, and opinions, and many have become friends. Dates of birth and informal biographical details are given in Appendix 2. While these interviews offer a wealth of rich data (and I have used them as such), they are not comprehensive. Others may make a case for different representatives, and inevitably not all actors are included here. The musicians

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  15

Identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and 23 Feidman does, however, appear regularly in this book. His stylistic and philosophical stance is inextricable from the music’s story in Germany and is examined in depth in later chapters.

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who interest me—​and who speak most directly to my argument—​belong largely to what might be termed Yiddish music’s “transnational” community (Rubin 2014:34; Anklewicz 2011). These artists, like many around the world, have worked hard to ground their music in a wider sense of cultural practice, often backed up by regular connections to international networks of learning and education. They are passionate about what they do, but they also understand their work within a historical context of tradition and traditional praxis, avoiding an overreliance on the hazy musical trope of “soul.” This means that I have not oriented my interview material toward the “klezmer as feeling” (Rubin 2014:42) disciples of the Israeli-​Argentinian clarinetist Giora Feidman, a strong early influence on klezmer in Germany.23 I feel that the self-​conscious ahistoricism of their work does not offer so much to a study based in the material and symbolic existence of the city. In other words, it is as a case study in the functions of urban folk music that I have structured my data gathering. This book is a single-​sited study of a largely autonomous genre, but both the site and the genre are subject to multiple interpretations and offer myriad routes and connections. What follows therefore differs from ethnomusicological studies based within ethnically or geographically bounded communities in that it deals instead with the heterogeneous discourses and shifting multilevel networks of the contemporary internationalized city (Reyes Schramm 1982; Stock 2008). The field in my case offers a plurality of entry points, processes, and degrees of affiliation for its participants, or even for the same participant at different points in time. The result is a rich and complex tapestry of engagement that functions in different ways and on different levels simultaneously—​indeed, each chapter ultimately forms part of a larger set of theoretical lenses through which to view these overlapping and at times contradictory practices. Working directly against the subtly pernicious near-​essentialism that has often lurked around the discursive edges of this charged scene, we would do well to heed Stuart Hall’s warning:

16  Sounding Jewish in Berlin positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation. (Hall 1996:4)

24 As, among other things, a long-​time klezmer musician, both within traditional repertoire (with Gregori Schechter in London) and through the work of my own (klezmer-​influenced though far from traditional) band Moishe’s Bagel.

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Such multiplicity of construction is also true of my own researcher subject position. In terms of my own musical knowledge and experience, this particular field is neither fully foreign nor completely known: it is an extension of my own musical practice,24 but in a different city and set of discourses. For these reasons, my work and the analysis of data is grounded liberally across a range of approaches. While many of these sources are not new, I would argue that their combination and application here is. Consequently, I draw simultaneously on the ethnomusicology of Mark Slobin (1993) and Martin Stokes (1994), but also the sociology of Howard Becker (1982), Mark Granovetter (1973, 1983), and Adam Krims (2007). In any discussion of “the city” the writings of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Henri Lefebvre (1996) are indispensable, and my case is no exception, although the sustained direction of these stylish texts toward traditional music in the city is a departure from their more common usage. I have also found inspiration in the work of Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift (2002). Combining these perspectives on the everyday life of the city with the sensory semiotics of Roland Barthes (1977, 1988, 1982)  and the British cultural studies of Raymond Williams (1977), Dick Hebdige (1979), and Stuart Hall (1980, 1988) has proved a fruitful route forward from the methodological boundaries of ethnomusicology, pointing instead to a dynamic engagement with music as a particular—​spatially and temporally unique—​signifying practice among the semiotic excesses that spring from the modern city. I have also incorporated significant amounts of my own fieldnotes into the text. These are frequently impressionistic and episodic, usually subjective, and occasionally journalistic. The outcome of a parochial perspective is inevitably an emphasis on the metaphorical and the symbolic, and I do not make any claims for objectivity or critical distance on the part of these notes. In fact, the reverse: my own reactions and emotions are included as a form of unmediated data/​auto-​ethnography. This is not reflexivity for the sake of it, but in order to locate my own thoughts and feelings (about music that I, too,

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  17

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of ”) a manuscript—​foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. (Geertz 1973:10)

It is also helpful to delineate what this study does not cover. My concern is contemporary practice in a particular European city, my area of study the music, its surrounding spaces, and the thoughts of the musicians who occupy them. As a result, although history forms an essential underpinning narrative, I am in no sense attempting to offer a “history.” I am also aware that certain issues other researchers might make more central, particularly those of gender and economics, are not addressed here. This is not to say that I consider these issues peripheral. Quite the opposite, in fact: they are too important to be merely touched upon. And it is essential to acknowledge the necessity of theoretical limits if we are to go beyond simple reproduction. I also do not cover specific instrumental practice in any depth. Contemporary klezmer practice is shared across the globe, and consequently is less relevant to a city-​based study.26 25 Cf. Barz (2008:209): “Fieldnotes often act as ongoing and changeable scripts for the mediation between experience and interpretation/​analyses.” Also Kisliuk (2008:183): “When we begin to participate in music and dance our very being merges with the ‘field’ through our bodies and voices, and another Self-​Other boundary is dissolved.” 26 For a detailed study of klezmer accordion practice, critical organology, and accordion network relations in Berlin, see Alexander (2020).

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love) within the overall argument.25 These self-​consciously affective forays are intended to bring an immediacy and expressivity to the discussion. This turn toward a freer, symbolic interpretation comes in some degree from an increasing awareness—​within cultural studies and elsewhere—​ that an attention to style and voice can take us beyond the decorative, into a productive balance of the evocative and the critical (Highmore 2018:251). In other words, alongside patterned behavior and ethnographic data, I am looking for the unexpected sparks and critical connections that musical events ignite. These fieldnotes were mostly written directly after the event that they describe, and so I also feel that they have value as an immediate response to a given stimulus. While they are embedded in analysis (or occasionally form part of it), their substantial unedited inclusion aims to validate their thick descriptive contribution:

18  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

27 This does not include several “party” bands who include klezmer alongside (usually) ska, punk, and Balkan music—​a mix bassist Carsten Wegener describes as a “cooking recipe” (personal interview, Friedrichshain, Berlin, May 2, 2014). 28 Despite springing from the same cultural milieu, klezmer and Yiddish song are not natural historical bedfellows. Klezmer is instrumental music, with its origins largely in ritual function (see Appendix 1). Yiddish song, on the other hand, embraces themes of family, work, love, childhood, politics, war, and more (Beregovski 2000), and historically was often sung without instrumental accompaniment (R. Rubin 2000). However, the presence of talented Yiddish singers (e.g., Michael Alpert, Adrienne Cooper, Lorin Sklamberg) at the forefront of the klezmer revival, alongside klezmer’s move to concert and club stage, has frequently brought the two into shared compositional and performance space, also allowing performers to address extramusical issues (Wood 2013). Notwithstanding formal and social differences, this nowadays means frequent overlaps—​outside of traditional wedding music—​in the social and cultural space they occupy. For these reasons, I have included Yiddish song (which also now largely exists as “performance” music) in my field of analysis throughout. Nevertheless, I also take care not to confuse the two, i.e., I do not at any point refer to a “klezmer song.” See Appendix 1; also Slobin (2002:8) for an alternative articulation of this dialectic. 29 The term “Yiddish music” (including klezmer) has been advocated by Alan Bern (1988) and Michael Alpert (2015), among others.

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Finally, we should note the difficulty of defining “klezmer” in the first place (Rubin 2020:7–​8). This discussion is taken up fully in Appendix 1, but here I need to stress that I am nowhere aiming to navigate the conceptual and taxonomic minefield of a precise and bounded definition. I have little doubt that “What is klezmer?” arguments will continue to rage, but it is not my goal to dive into them, and my approach is functional rather than analytical. In a deliberately broad sweep of musicians and musical discourse, my field of analysis takes in music that is clearly some way from traditional klezmer but is played by people who associate themselves directly with the klezmer scene in Berlin.27 Significantly, this also often includes Yiddish song, which is in fact historically distinct from klezmer in both function and form.28 Despite this historical separation, klezmer and Yiddish song nowadays coexist across almost all contemporary contexts—​including the music and spaces discussed here—​and to this end I frequently refer to “klezmer and Yiddish music”29 in order to reinforce this contemporary connection. Unless specified otherwise, therefore, I treat klezmer and Yiddish song in today’s Berlin as one culturally meaningful unit. These descriptive ambiguities find their resonance in musical style. What unites the artists discussed here is a commitment to both klezmer music and its practice in the city of Berlin, but the similarity often ends there. The heterogeneity of Berlin is paralleled by a strong musical diversity, one that is nevertheless linked through its continual dialogue with the city itself. Consequently, my study often includes musicians who number klezmer as one music within a far more expansive spectrum of performance and composition. Many of these musicians, despite the breadth of their interests, have

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  19

30 Where transcriptions are used, these are often simplified in order to focus clearly upon specific elements.

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taken considerable time to research and learn about what they do, through personal investigation and also at workshops such as Yiddish Summer Weimar, where most are now also teachers. Notwithstanding an avowed musical broad-​mindedness, then, all the musicians discussed here slip comfortably and confidently in and out of klezmer vocabulary and forms. At the same time, drawing on the multiplicity of the city itself, these contemporary practitioners are demonstrably free to (re)create their tradition from multiple musical perspectives—​bricolaging language, style, and sonority in surprising and sophisticated ways. Their artistic flexibility is framed within the generic fluidity of Berlin but rooted simultaneously in a deep commitment to Yiddish musical culture. I  have taken my cues from these players themselves and the creative path between traditional knowledge and artistic innovation that their work treads. And as we shall discover, while such light-​footed artistry is regularly revealed as a meaningful and grounded response to the geographies of European cosmopolitanism, it also occasionally throws up some uncomfortably thorny questions around history, identity, and ideology. To address these intriguing methodological and conceptual challenges, I  have organized my study along the following lines:  musical networks; spaces and places of music; the city in the music; music and Jewish identity; transmission and education. Each chapter is centered on a variety of case studies and musical examples30 that are both a diachronic snapshot of Berlin klezmer in the second decade of the twenty-​first century, and at the same time an opportunity to develop theoretical ground that continually returns to the relationship between this music and the city itself. In c­ hapter 2 I lay out the crisscrossing networks of musicians that structure different approaches to klezmer and Yiddish music in the city. In order to understand where these various artistic and philosophical standpoints diverge and intersect, I have divided up the musicians with whom I spoke into several different categories, taking Mark Slobin’s theory of micromusics (1993) as a creative starting point for this “stateless” music. Probing these intersecting musical networks also leads deeper into a more thorough analysis of musical style currently at play in Berlin—​although many of the musicians discussed happily and skillfully straddle several of these typologies simultaneously. The third chapter analyses in detail the particular spaces and places within which klezmer and

20  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

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Yiddish musical practice operates in the city. Using a range of cultural theory approaches, I unpack the different ways that the music both produces and is produced by the space that surrounds it, and in particular how klezmer adeptly navigates the gaps between official and unofficial public space. This chapter also foregrounds Berlin’s bricolage approach to cultural production, a central theme throughout. Chapter 4 analyzes in detail the ways that the city of Berlin is made manifest in the music itself—​how the city is interpellated sonically and textually in the work of several different artists. Particularly useful here is Adam Krims’s (2007) theory of the urban ethos, a flexible and wide-​ranging tool that encompasses the range of possible urban representations produced within culture at any given point. What I find is that in the absence of a historical klezmer “connection,” certain artists have recently begun to probe the rich resonances of Berlin itself to locate the city in their work. Ideas of escape or its impossibility, playful internationalism, and problematic borders come to the fore here. The next chapter looks at the relationship between history, memory, Jewish identity, and music, through two case studies that offer different versions of “hearing” the past. First is the fascinating Semer Ensemble project, a Berlin-​based ensemble of international klezmer and Yiddish musicians that reproduces the output of two 1930s Berlin Jewish record labels for a modern concert audience—​in the process probing powerful, disturbing, and occasionally redemptive resonances between prewar history and present-​day cultural and musical identity. Secondly, I discuss the singer Tania Alon, a German Jew for whom the past is never far from her work. As one of the few Berlin-​born Jews on the contemporary scene, Tania’s voice offers an important counter-​narrative to the dominant discourse of joyful internationalism, while also locating her own music within the rich and polysemous fields of personal and cultural memory. Chapter 6 explores musical transmission and education, underpinned by the complex and ambiguous meanings of tradition and the development of certain stylistic approaches and performance paradigms. The majority of this chapter is given over to a detailed discussion of one of klezmer and Yiddish music’s most important learning centers, Yiddish Summer Weimar—​my analysis thoughtfully supported by the provocative insights and deeply committed pedagogy of Yiddish Summer Weimar’s artistic director, Alan Bern. As a participant in 2014, I frame my own experiences within the wider context of the relationship between living musical transmission and historical

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  21

Performing Berlin: The Night of the Singing Balconies On a chilly Saturday evening in early November 2013, hundreds of people gathered under thirty-​six different tenement balconies in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain to listen to a series of performances by singers, poets, musicians, and actors. Organized by neighborhood collective pollyandbob. com, Die Nacht der Singenden Balkone (The Night of the Singing Balconies) was an event in many ways typical of contemporary Berlin culture—​ constituted by a grass-​roots inclusivity, a firm belief in the power of enthusiasm over the necessity of talent, and a structural and ideological integration into the fabric of the city itself. Here are some of my fieldnotes from the night: At Warschauerstraße 78 there is no sign of anything other than the usual Saturday night crowd. Closer inspection reveals an open door leading into an inner courtyard where a few people mill around waiting. A man appears on Warschauerstraße holding the Polly and Bob balloon with a good 150 people following and, soon after, the yard is full. From the top window appear two figures—​possibly a man and a woman, but it is deliberately difficult to tell. Their get-​up is somewhere between am-​dram Mikado and Moulin Rouge excess, and one smokes an extravagantly long cigarette. The window below is lit with a deep green light and from this window appears our singer Ines. She gestures to the crowd to shush and we are fully silent within ten seconds. And then she begins . . . three of the most sublime arias one could

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cultural knowledge. Leaving Weimar, we return to Berlin with a short reflexive “postlude” that takes us away from the music and into the city’s silent memorial spaces—​revealing how, within a quietened present, the past resounds in unexpected ways. Appendix 1 offers an overview of the history and formal makeup of klezmer music. This section is necessarily brief, and for greater detail readers are encouraged to go to the more in-​depth histories cited. The material here is given in order to allow those unfamiliar with klezmer history, social function, and musical form, to fill in background gaps and therefore gain a more complete picture of my own arguments. To get things started, I want to first turn to an event that has nothing to do with klezmer but much to do with Berlin. It is a sort of introductory case study, and I offer it as a lively street-​level articulation of some of the themes that structure the piece as a whole.

22  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

31 I learned later that ostPost (the window from which this performance took place) is an organization that provides books, translation services, and cultural events related to Eastern Europe. See the ostPost website, http://​www.ostpost-​berlin.de/​en/​.

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reasonably expect to hear on a Friedrichshain Saturday night. Her voice carries perfectly and we listen in stunned silence. The symbolic power of the solo soprano is enhanced here tenfold by the romance and incongruity of the situation. We sense ourselves communing, indirectly—​through her singing, the composers’ music, and the fact that we have all made the effort to be here, in this courtyard, tonight. We have hung around, we have stuck it out with our bottles of cold beer, and this is surely our reward. The next performance is billed as “ostPost mit Russischer Musik.” Here there is no balcony, but a shuttered ground floor window of a local shop or office. We block the street and pavement fully and wait. Shortly, the dark brown metal shutters of the storefront roll up and through the open window climbs a tall man with wild orange hair, saying nothing, barely acknowledging us. The crowd goes wild. The man plays a few overblown notes on his wooden flute and launches into Ochi Chornye, accompanying himself on guitar. He is not great, he has pitched the songs too low, and we can’t really hear the guitar. But it doesn’t matter—​his wit, his weirdness and the brilliance of performing from this shop/​office window (does he work there? has he broken in?)31 carries the whole thing. His last song over, he disappears to one side of the window, the shutters roll back down (to great laughter) and we disperse. We exit the courtyard for the final performance of the night: toga-​clad Nina Hynes and the Budapest Choir. This time the balcony is outside on the main street, facing the bustle of Warschauerstraße. Stopping traffic is not a possibility here, so we pack in underneath the balcony itself and across the road and tramlines, on the middle boulevard walkway. For the third and final number, Nina first teaches the crowd the chorus and outro. She waves hello to the cars and the passing trams, begins to sing, and we join in for the choruses. As we near the end, Nina begins to loop the simple refrain and we stay with her. The accompaniment gradually drops away, she picks up a megaphone for intermittent ad libs and encourages us to sing louder, which we do. It is a mini-​festival, we are singing to the accompaniment of the street, the trams and cars, to the sounds of the city at night—​we are together in the sound of our voices but also in the fact of the event itself. This is not a paid gig, it exists only because we have all taken the chance and turned up. Implicitly we realize this, and sing louder and longer because of it.

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  23

Figure 1.1  Nina Hynes and the Budapest Choir, the Night of the Singing Balconies. Warschauerstraße, November 2013.

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This night could not have taken the form that it did without the presence of a particular urban architectural ubiquity: the Berlin balcony. The city’s five-​ story tenement blocks—​centered on an inner courtyard—​make for ready-​ made zones of performance and encounter, although in practice the major use of the yards nowadays is to offer spaces for bike parking and recycling bins. On the Night of the Singing Balconies, however, these very functional public spaces became reimagined as collective areas of cultural exchange, the musical transaction explicitly reframed as a social event, communal and semi-​accidental (or at least unpredictable). The everyday courtyard space offered a moment of improvised street culture, foregrounding a deliberately fluid and temporary community created out of the collision of often very different participants. Hence the wonderful incongruity and yet absolute rightness of opera from a third-​floor window, while Friedrichshain bar-​hoppers did their usual Saturday night run just outside the courtyard (­figure 1.1). This, then, is the first theme that I wish to draw out: the recontextualization and subversion of space. Throughout this book, I  will argue centrally for

24  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

32 This is something that was played up by several of the performers, reframing their everyday homes as exaggeratedly burlesqued stages.

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the role of music in defining and interrogating the urban space, pointing also to music’s particular combination of emotional immediacy and metaphorical ambiguity as a singular medium for this process. The overlap between public and private arenas is one that the night relied upon and indeed exploited:  the spectators were infringing (ever so slightly and by invitation) on the performers’ home space, or at least entering into an ambiguously liminal transactional zone.32 Disassociated from specific structural or ritual function, music often migrates freely between official and unofficial discourse, echoing and reinforcing the necessary spill between the two that characterizes urban life more generally (Amin and Thrift 2002). But musical sound is not just a powerfully affective marker of this cultural flow; it is also one of its producers: music’s ability to jump over walls and sneak under doors makes it a uniquely ambivalent and subversive force. The Singing Balconies, therefore, were not simply making use of city spaces but creatively exploiting the unavoidable collision of public and private zones, playing in the gaps to frame each performance as a distinctly urban musical encounter. Klezmer in Berlin occasionally intersects with this kind of street theater. Klezmer bands busk in the Mauerpark on a Sunday afternoon; they appear at Kreuzberg’s Karneval der Kulturen and the citywide Fete de la Musique, or at Treptower Park’s Victory Day events. More generally, this slippage of public and private—​or official and unofficial—​space is fundamental to any study of Jewish folk music in the city. For while in the past Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish music has often been decoded as a vehicle of memorial and cultural reparation (Radano and Bohlman 2004), musicians have in recent years increasingly integrated their artistic work into the city’s bottom-​up creative ethos. This dialogue with the spaces and meanings of the city is a crucial move forward from residual discourses of revival and appropriation, encoding the music as both a product of and comment upon historical circumstance. In this way, klezmer and Yiddish music at times also comes to occupy a more equivocal symbolic function, one that accepts the contradictions and ambiguities of playing Jewish music in this city and uses musical material and performance space as a way of probing and subverting them. History makes Berlin a unique arena for this process. Nowadays, it is also fertile ground for the performative. The streets are canvases for all sorts of varied artistic imaginings, and a strong bricolage aesthetic links much of

Why Berlin? Why Klezmer?  25

the city’s ground-​level semiotics. This, too, is a central plank of my analysis. In Berlin’s case, the notion of using whatever materials come to hand has graduated to its own sort of glorious reveling in surprise visual and aural juxtapositions. The unpredictable narrative of urban life becomes not simply something to be dealt with but creative fodder to be explored, utilized, and celebrated. Seen in this context, the Singing Balconies are a one-​ night cross-​section of the enthusiasm, diversity, and egalitarian discourse that characterizes Berlin street music in general (­figure 1.2). Its privileging of the everyday (both artistic and architectural) resonates well with Berlin’s performative immediacy, where hanging out and sharing a musical moment for its own sake have evolved many and various spaces and contact zones—​ discussed in detail in c­ hapter  3. It is an attitude that privileges detail and moment over structure and clarity. Paradigm over syntagm, signifier over signified (Saussure 1992; Barthes 1988), and tactics over strategy (Certeau 1984). This becomes all the more pertinent when set against the overdetermined weight of the city’s top-​down historical narrative, against which perhaps the most appropriate response is indeed a healthily unjudgmental chaotic profusion: enthusiastically patchworked artistic responses become meaningful articulations of daily life (DeNora 2000).

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Figure 1.2  Buskers and crowd, Warschauerstraße U-​Bahn, June 2014.

26  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

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Bricolage, performative egalitarianism, joyfully chaotic profusion—​none of these would seem to be particularly front of mind when thinking of a traditional Jewish freylekhs, doina, or zhok. But far from existing as a separate, reified, and disjointed artistic endeavor, klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin—​the best of it at least—​is indeed fully grounded in and connected to the urban environment within which it operates. To begin with, let us look at the groupings and networks of musicians that characterize this fluidly creative scene.

2 Musical Networks

PA: Do you think there’s a klezmer community? Ilya Shneyveys: Yeah. I mean, there’s probably more than one. Or less than one.

Introduction Connected across the overlapping, complementary, contradictory, and confrontational networks of a twenty-​ first-​ century capital city, musical communities are unpredictable, heterogeneous, and frequently transient. Scenes come and go; what is beloved by one participant will be peripheral to another, and audiences and performers migrate cheerfully across different musical events with varying degrees of affiliation, identification, and commitment. At the same time, musical communities can bind musicians, spaces, audiences, repertoire, and practice in ways both radical and meaningful. They can structure complex sets of social relations and offer navigated routes into new—​or familiar—​discourses of identity and belonging. For anyone playing klezmer music in Germany, the ruptures of history can also never be excluded—​in this mix, even silence makes a statement. But while the past is never far away here, its dialogue with the music is not fixed. Where Berlin klezmer has historically been defined in relation to Jewish absence, its contemporary klezmer community is not only home to an increasing number of (largely non-​German) Jews but is also now fully tied into international Yiddish musical networks. The angst and appropriation debates of twenty years ago have been replaced—​by the material fact of far greater Jewish involvement and the cultural repositioning of Berlin as a local center of transnational Yiddish musical production. Clarinetist Christian

Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0002.

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The Music in Berlin

28  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Dawid, who has been at the heart of the city’s changing klezmer community for several decades, outlines these changes succinctly:

This shift marks a conjuncture—​ of dedicated musicians, sophisticated audiences, active education networks, a certain resilience in the music, and the spatial aesthetics of the city itself. The process has been a long one; contemporary klezmer musicians in Berlin are at the current end of an ongoing narrative that has developed over several decades. But these musicians are not simply following on. Through the different processes of klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-​first, their personal, ideological, and musicianly stamp foregrounds the routes and responsibilities taken in the re-​creation and re-​energizing of this particular traditional Jewish wedding music.2 Working with a shifting set of raw musical materials, the different artists, collaborations, and projects each tell a part of the same modernizing story, but from engagingly different perspectives. This chapter is therefore a parallel exploration of cultural identity and an exercise in fluidity and mobility, a dynamic illustration that as soon as things seem like they are settling down, something else happens to shake them up. Just like Berlin in general. Here is the American émigré and klezmer trumpeter Paul Brody: Pride can be crippling. Period. [laughs] And Berlin doesn’t really have that kind of pride . . . Berlin is more of an inclusive city than an exclusive city. And 1 Christian Dawid, personal communication, December 12, 2019. 2 It is worth noting that although the wedding is klezmer’s traditional home, very few of the musicians here play regularly for weddings. The re-​creation of klezmer in Germany has also moved it squarely onto the concert or nightclub stage (­chapter 3).

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That scene has grown in many ways, by number, by number of professionals in the scene, by number of Jews, by collective knowledge and expertise. And it has certainly become much more international, as Yiddish musicians from all over the world have moved to Berlin, or spend time here regularly. A significant part of these artists travel throughout the year, but understand Berlin as their home base. Through this network, the number of visiting artists has also grown—​klezmer sessions in Berlin have become a meeting point for the international Yiddish music scene. . . . Audience and supporters have also become more international, and younger again.1

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  29

The tradition of “not holding on” is at the heart of the most interesting Berlin klezmer moments of the last thirty years, a witty variation on the old mantra that to name a scene is to condemn it. And indeed throughout this book we will see that rather than a coherent progression, Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music is a continually renewing dialogue, an artistic discussion around tradition and transgression, musical transformation and cultural interrogation.4 It is a multilayered and self-​referential discourse that takes in early satellite pioneers, well-​schooled younger musicians, imaginative fantasy, and aggressive politics. What began as a blank slate, wiped uncomfortably clean by the Second World War, has now opened up into a collection of overlapping and occasionally disagreeing possibilities. This chapter, then, is not an imposition of finite categories but an analysis of shifting and transformative processes and connections. Mark Slobin’s theory of micromusics (1993) helps to give a sense of perspective across these subcultural, intercultural, and supercultural connections. Beginning as a subcultural music (in a city built on subculture),5 klezmer in Berlin has nevertheless benefitted—​albeit ambiguously—​from supercultural post-​reunification institutional support for “things Jewish” (Pinto 1996). At the same time, the increasingly international conversation between musicians, singers, poets, and writers around Yiddish culture points to the foundation of a sound yet flexible interculture, centered simultaneously on the poles of diaspora and affinity (Slobin 1993:64–​68). Over the course of a year spent meeting and playing with musicians, I encountered an urban subculture, a musical scene that is lively, exciting, and bottom-​up. But although local, it is also internationally connected—​an interculture linked through festivals and events, bolstered by networks formed at workshops or jam sessions that retain connections across geographies and chronologies. 3 Personal interview, Schöneberg, Berlin. September 2, 2014. 4 Much like the city itself, in fact. Here is filmmaker and writer Rory Maclean: “In this fractured capital, every citizen—​whether perfectionist or revolutionary, collaborator or dissident, resident or visitor—​can dare to imagine a place which no one else has ever seen. Its poets, scientists, performers, politicians and digital natives conjure up visions as potent as its actuality” (2014:394). 5 Cf. Sheridan (2007) on Berlin’s “indeterminate urban areas.”

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that is probably because what makes the city interesting is not this or that historic building—​we don’t have a Notre Dame, you know what I mean? We don’t have the ruins of Rome. I think Berlin’s pride comes in what goes through Berlin, in what is decaying or transforming in Berlin. So in that sense you can’t hold on to a tradition. The tradition is not holding on.3

30  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

It’s like people come to Berlin now to re-​enact their idea of the twenties. Before the bad stuff. Sex, smoking, booze, artistic freedom, you know? Different people from all over the place, artists, musicians.6 6 Hampus Melin, klezmer drummer, personal interview, Kreuzberg, Berlin July 21, 2014.

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In order to understand the multilevel links between the various performers, I  have at times imposed my own classification system. While the musicians involved may recognize my thought processes, these taxonomies are purely my own, constructed for the purposes of obtaining a useful overview. As in many local and even international musical environments, the relationships between projects, personnel, performers, commissioners, and programmers are very free ones. These categories are a set of shared approaches, across which many musicians overlap easily and frequently. Musical and social references, events, and histories are shared, making for a rich and multilayered collective experience. Speaking reflectively, this also helped me feel that I was indeed looking at a “scene”: a heterogeneous yet connected network of creative people and engaged audiences, rather than a disconnected and disparate group of performers accidentally doing the same sort of thing. Avoiding the temptations of neat sociocultural links, we must also bear in mind that musical groupings are fluid not just in their personnel but also in their degrees of affiliation (Driver and Bennett 2014). Musicians who start out as a loose collection of actors will begin to understand themselves as a group through the act of making music (Frith 1996). In other words, it is more helpful to look at the categories that follow not simply as groups of like-​ minded individuals who came together because they all independently felt the same way but as musicians who came to understand their ways of feeling (about klezmer music, at least) through the lived experience of playing it. This is particularly important given the intersecting musical and social networks within which this music functions. All these musicians operate within similar musical spaces: jam sessions, gigs, workshops. But they also all share the space of Berlin. The city’s particular blend of creative bricolage, enthusiasm, affordable space, and countercultural legacy makes it a fundamental part of the network. In marked contrast to the dangerously sharp and deathly clear lines with which postwar powers attempted to divide and rule, this active contribution of the city is understood by some as part of a longer historical narrative:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  31

Klezmer networks Within Berlin klezmer, as in most musical worlds, connectivity is crucial. Music making is a real-​time activity: its production and consumption constitute communicative acts, framed by shared or differing cultural codes and discourses, age cohorts, national and/​ or ethnic identities, gender perspectives, social classes, and more. Musical interactions—​forming the stuff of analysis—​are participative moments of cultural agreement or disagreement (Small 1998:13). Musical practice forms part of a network of relations that takes in musicians, performance, musical texts, venues, and in our case the city itself: “Social agents are never located in bodies and bodies alone. . . . An actor is also, always, a network” (Law 1992:384). Moreover, musicians, and audiences rarely sit still and are fully able to exist simultaneously across geographies, chronologies, styles, and allegiances. Any attempt to grasp a musical “scene” (Straw 1991)  must therefore also seek to understand that scene as a network (or several networks) of connections: moments and loci of fusion and collision given shape, form, and meaning through the music that frames them and of which they are a part. In his analysis of Israeli and Palestinian musicians, Benjamin Brinner maps out the specific nodes, hubs, and dynamic relationships at play within both interband networks and the wider ethnic music scene. While my approach is less scientific, it shares a similar sense of dynamism:

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The connective tissue of Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music reveals both artistic and (occasionally) ideological implications. Processes of continuity, revival, and transformation all have their effects, but they are also underpinned by particular political and social perspectives, either implicit or explicit. This chapter—​and indeed the book as a whole—​views these changing configurations of personnel and projects as an ongoing and mobile discussion around the possibilities of what klezmer is and can be: an open but by no means formless debate. I will argue that the contemporary Berlin scene is looking two ways at once: backward to a deeply informed historical rediscovery and forward to a more radical, often politically charged perspective. I also want to suggest that the breadth of artistic imagination shown here points to an adaptability and vitality in the music, made meaningful through the workings of the city itself.

32  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Networks are rarely static. They expand or contract as new members join and links are formed or people leave or break off connections. Networks change not only due to these internal dynamics, but also in relation to their sociocultural environments. (Brinner 2009:206)

The lines aren’t that drawn between generations, there’s a lot of cross-​ generational, intergenerational collaboration, and we’re all a big family. But the thing that turned me on was the depth of the conversation, and the kinds of people who were having it. And encountering, when I  first came here, groups like Brave Old World, and in New York the Klezmatics and groups like Veretsky Pass, and artists like Adrienne Cooper and what Michael Alpert was doing, and things that were going on in Russia. And at the same time German groups, people like Sanne Möricke, and Christian Dawid, and Fabian Schnedler, Franka Lampe. These are all my friends, but I was turned on by the music they were making. And so being here, and being a part of Yiddish Summer Weimar, going to Krakow, seeing what was happening in Vienna, Fürth, places like that. And then being able to make connections here, to collaborate with Russians and Ukrainians and Latvians and people from France and England. And feel like I’m sort of in the middle of it. So Berlin has been an important crossroads, an important meeting point. And as much as I live here, you see I have my books and my instruments here, it’s a crossroads for me too. I live at the crossroads [laughs].7

The engines of interaction are often at work some way beneath the artistic surface. Standing behind any individual moment of creativity is a network of cooperation—​a patterned group of actors, materials, and processes that sociologist Howard Becker terms “an established network of cooperative 7 Dan Kahn, personal interview, Neukölln, Berlin, December 6, 2013.

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Although musicians rarely describe or view what they do in terms of network theory, many will swiftly recognize the grounding of their everyday musical practice in these network processes, both within a given ensemble and the ways in which that grouping interacts with—​and affects—​its wider musical and sociocultural relations. Here, for example, is singer Daniel Kahn, Michigan-​born but a Berlin resident since 2005, describing his Yiddish musical life explicitly in these terms.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  33

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links” (Becker 1982:35). In what follows, different aspects and links will reveal certain actors as more dominant than others, certain connections and conventions as more established. Nonhuman objects and spaces may also play significant roles, and information can flow in both directions or one way only. The various nodes may be mutually interconnected across the whole network or almost exclusively connected to a central hub (although this is rare in our case). A band playing klezmer music, consisting of a small number of individuals all connected equally to each other and forming a close-​knit and mostly egalitarian group (this chapter), will function differently from a large, loosely connected jam session centered around one or two “leaders” (­chapter 3). The music that they produce may interact textually and musically with its wider urban environment (­chapters 4 and 5). This in turn is likely to operate in a different way to a formalized education environment such as Yiddish Summer Weimar (­chapter 6). Inevitably, some musicians will be seen to possess a greater number of connections and links than others: “In a network with high centrality a few nodes have far more connections than the rest. They are commonly known as hubs” (Brinner 2009:172–​73). Musicians such as Dan Kahn (­chapters 3 and 4) and Alan Bern (­chapters 5 and 6) are such hubs, and their centrality directly affects the ongoing development and internal processes of their given networks. Bern’s directorship of the Yiddish Summer Weimar workshop series, for example, endows him with what we might call maximum centrality: programming and logistical decisions flow through him, and his on-​the-​ground presence as loose coordinator and generous instructor makes him the central point of contact for students, performers, and venues. But more than this, Bern’s widespread connections to Yiddish musicians around the world (Michael Alpert, Zev Feldman, Joel Rubin, Ethel Raim, and many more) vastly enrich that network, offering students at Weimar access to sources of new musical knowledge and material. This, of course, is information that these students can internalize and input into their own local network. Similarly, Dan Kahn’s international presence as a performer not only increases his own profile and influence as an artist but also creates new transnational networks, for example, in his three-​way collaboration with Russia’s Psoy Korolenko and Israel’s Oy Division. Some of these collaborative links find their way back to Berlin, often through Kahn’s Klezmer Bund concert series. Berlin venues (­chapter 3) are centralized hubs from which emanate a constellation of connections. These offer the chance for previously unconnected

34  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

8 Hackesches Hoftheater website, http://​ www.hackesches-​ hoftheater.de/​ index2.htm, accessed September 30, 2019. 9 Seidemann was one of the theater’s founders. Following its closure, he continued to produce the successful twice-​yearly Klezmerfest series in the fairly unforgiving surroundings of the CEDIO Point conference center in Storkower Bogen. This series, which ran from 2006 until Seidemann’s death in 2016, included many previous Hackesches Hoftheater artists, as well as Jossif Gofenberg’s Klezmer Chidesch. 10 Personal interviews, 2014. 11 All Rebling’s quotes from a personal interview, Berlin, June 26, 2014.

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elements to meet, exchange knowledge, and develop new networks and groupings. These might be people (musicians, audiences, intermediaries) but also nonhuman materials such as recordings, printed music, or instruments (Alexander 2020). In a city with little historical connection to klezmer, the Hackesches Hoftheater—​open from 1992 to 2004—​provided a centralized physical space around which the early scene of the 1990s was able to coalesce. The theater’s website, which remained online until 2016, proudly declared (with some justification): “With almost 200 klezmer concerts and programs of Yiddish song per year, the Hackesches Hoftheater was unequalled in Europe.”8 Almost all of the older musicians still active in the city performed there regularly, and Waligórska (2013:47) notes that in 2006, two years after the theater’s closure, the number of klezmer concerts in the city had dropped by more than 50 percent. As a physical space, the theater offered itself as a recognizable contact zone between musicians and interested audiences—​ helped by the work of actor-​director Burkhart Seidemann and the theater’s location in the Scheunenviertel district, the prewar home to large numbers of Eastern European Jews.9 An even earlier network hub for initially disparate Yiddish musical groupings was the East German Tage der jiddischen Kultur (Yiddish Culture Days), which was organized by Lin Jaldati’s daughter Jalda Rebling, among others. This ran from 1987 to 1996 and included performers from the Soviet Union (Ottens 2006:225); it is acknowledged by older musicians such as singer Karsten Troyke and bass player Heiko Lehmann as one of the few recognizable spaces to offer the beginnings of a connected network of Yiddish music in East Berlin.10 In interview, Rebling acknowledged the importance of this transnational link in broadening the German scene, at the same time speaking candidly of the culture clashes of expectation this sometimes caused between Soviet-​raised Jews and non-​Jewish Germans: “And then in January 1995, we invited from Kiev Mila Polyakovska. . . . And she came onstage with a beautiful skirt and the band started to play, and German klezmer musicians left the hall and said this is not Jewish music.”11 The German

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  35

12 This was the case with my own involvement: before taking part in my first session, the only contact that had taken place between myself and Matthias was a couple of email exchanges. Playing in the session, however, I met two musicians whom I subsequently played with regularly, thus initiating our own (small) network.

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musicians’ objection, as related by Rebling, is that Polyakovska was singing art music arrangements of Yiddish songs (and presenting herself as a concert artist), and was therefore not “authentic.” More recently, the jam sessions and their leaders discussed in ­chapter 3 are each responsible for a slightly different articulation of a wider scene (or perhaps a “sub-​scene”). Until his migration to the United States in 2017, Ilya Shneyveys was an important hub across several Berlin klezmer networks. As the driving force in the Bar Oblomov jam sessions, Ilya was at the center of this particular network—​the point of contact for neophytes but also the de facto leader of the sessions themselves. At the same time, his extensive involvement in Yiddish Summer Weimar facilitated a new connection for Oblomov participants, their experience of the Oblomov sessions sometimes leading them directly on to Weimar. In these and other cases we should note the importance of what sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973, 1983) calls weak ties: contacts outside individuals’ immediate social or work groupings. While close-​knit circles may constitute important social identities, they are also more likely to reinforce similar information, opinions, and contacts. Weak ties—​loose-​knit and outside of any immediate circle—​on the other hand, offer access to entirely new groups of people, information, and sub-​networks. A weak tie thus promotes the possibility of different channels of communication, and at the same time opens up connections to other groupings and their associated strong (and perhaps weak) ties. The Saytham’s Lounge jam sessions discussed in c­ hapter 3 are a good example. Convened by violinist Matthias Groh, these sessions are organized via an online Doodle poll. While many of the musicians may already know each other through other musical contacts, the sessions also offer the possibility of multiple weak ties, in that players signing up for a session often have little or no connection to Matthias’s closer musical circle. His role is therefore also as something of a gatekeeper, albeit a fairly soft one. By coordinating disparate collections of musicians into ad hoc groups for each session, Matthias utilizes a series of weak ties to create an ongoing network of performers.12 Added to this, Groh provides an online database of sheet music, accessible via a password. This music forms an important part of the network, as a resource for session participants (and their own musical

36  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I can’t take too much credit, I just sit around with a biscuit and a cup of tea at the back. Pencil & notebook where necessary. But the performances are all theirs, and they had really prepared well, with tailored arrangements.14

Venue owners exert some control over musicians’ opportunities to perform their music. Here, however, the relationship is also ambiguous. Several promoters, such as Kaffee Burger’s Karl-​Heinz Heymann and Fuchs & Elster’s Dorle Martinek and Robin Schellenberg, maintained a close relationship with performers, to the extent that conventional promoter-​musician power relations were often blurred (both venues have sadly since closed). The same is true of the close ties between jam session conveners and the bar owners who host them—​in particular Franka Lampe and Ursula Weigert at the Klezmerstammtisch and Matthias Groh and Torsten Resag at Saytham’s Lounge. Several of the concerts discussed in later chapters took place at the Gorki Studio Я, curated by Daniel Kahn—​once again obscuring the relations between promoter, musician, gatekeeper, and venue (frequently to the benefit of the musicians concerned). This contrasts with the more clear-​cut 13 Schumann told me how closely Kahn works with Oriente on all these extramusical details, but also how much Kahn has been influential in boosting Oriente’s own online social network presence. Personal interview, Steglitz, Berlin, July 22, 2014. 14 Personal email communication, May 12, 2016. Semer Ensemble is discussed in c­ hapter 5.

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networks) that is also freely addable to. Connections that musicians make via physical participation in the session can thus be used to augment this online resource, in turn feeding back into the available repertoire of other session players. Within the networks of Berlin klezmer certain elements act as intermediaries, or gatekeepers, regulating access to wider spheres of exposure—​such as the Berlin-​based labels Oriente Musik, Piranha, and Raumer Records. These relationships, however, involve a great deal of two-​way dialogue, as in the close friendship of Oriente Musik’s Till Schumann with several artists on his label (Karsten Troyke, Dan Kahn, Hampus Melin). Schumann is a frequent and enthusiastic audience member at Kaffee Burger concerts and Oblomov jam sessions, inevitably tempering his “official” gatekeeper role. Dan Kahn’s personal involvement in the design and promotion of his albums on Oriente has a similar counter-​mediating effect.13 An equivalently equilateral network relationship can also be seen in the comments of Piranha Records’ Ben Mandelson, the producer of Semer Ensemble’s 2016 album Rescued Treasure:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  37 gatekeeping role played by larger venues such as the Berlin Philharmonie and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. While these venues continue to promote klezmer music, their concerts form part of a more official cultural network of events, including classical music and art exhibitions.

Before delving into more recent musical detail, it is important to get a sense of some of the earlier trajectories of klezmer and Yiddish music in postwar Germany, taking account of differences between East and West, as well as Berlin’s particular political and social upheavals of the last few decades. Prior to the 1980s, this is a narrative almost exclusively focused on Yiddish song rather than instrumental klezmer music. A wider international cultural submergence of klezmer postwar due to assimilation (Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 2002)  and the devastation of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe meant a scarcity of klezmer musicians outside of America in the decades following World War II.15 Yiddish song—​historically more visible via theater, radio, film, and printed music—​presented a more accessible resource. Moreover, European and North American folksong movements of the 1950s onward had set a precedent for mixing songs of different provenance within the same program—​often linked politically or philosophically rather than stylistically—​in a way that took far longer to reach instrumental music. Yiddish song could thus be more easily absorbed into a preexisting ethos of folk and protest song in the West and of official “art music” culture in the East. It was not until the klezmer revival gained prominence in America and began to spread to Europe in the 1980s that instrumental music would feature as a significant part of this story. While the central narrative of West German Yiddish music was characterized by a complex combination of postwar philosemitism (Stern 1992) and uneasy historical silence, Yiddish music in East Germany found its place—​ slightly uncomfortably—​as part of a predominant anti-​fascist narrative (Shneer 2015, Ottens 2008). In the East, the redemptive possibilities of Yiddish music were less important than its ideological potential: its implicit anti-​fascist stance (given the treatment of Jews at the hands of fascists), but also as a mediating force against claims of antisemitism directed at the GDR.

15 See Rubin (1998b) on the small but significant Meron tradition in Israel.

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The historical context

38  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

16 Seen, for example, in Rebling’s piano accompaniment to Mordechai Gebirtig’s 1938 “S’brent” (“It’s Burning”). Jaldati and Rebling recorded this song for Eterna in 1955, along with Hirsh Glik’s “Zog nit keynmol.”

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Consequently, Yiddish song managed to find a symbolic middle ground within the East German cultural radar. While a socialist state would not endorse cultural production marked by ethnic or religious origins, Yiddish music’s countercultural status and non-​ Western roots allowed it some leeway: “A paradoxical situation emerged: the State, which suppressed Jewish life, needed Yiddish song as a proof of its antifascist identity” (Eckstaedt 2010:41). Ottens (2008:220) notes that “Jews who moved to the GDR did so because of their identification with the goals of the young state: they went as Communists, not as Jews.” Nevertheless, several Jewish artists who returned or immigrated to the GDR in the decades following World War II would go on to incorporate Yiddish song in their repertoire. These included Wolf Biermann (Hamburg), Perry Friedman (Canada), and Sara Bialas-​Tenenberg (Poland). As in the West, Ottens (218) points to the importance of Yiddish song for these artists in militating against the “erasure” of the Holocaust in public memory. The artist who did most in the GDR to address this erasure was the Dutch-​born Holocaust survivor Rebekka Brilleslijper (1912–​88), whose stage name was Lin Jaldati. Like most postwar Yiddish music performers, Yiddish was not Jaldati’s native language. She had begun performing Yiddish art shows in her native Holland in the late 1930s, and after the war Jaldati and her musicologist husband Eberhard Rebling performed for displaced persons (DP) camps, Jewish Workers Committees, and communist organizations, moving to East Berlin in 1952. At a time when political diplomacy with the West was all but moribund, Jaldati, encouraged and guided by Rebling, became an East German cultural diplomat “and the state’s most visible Jew” (Shneer 2015:3). At the same time, Jaldati’s own story as a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-​Belsen, her and Rebling’s commitment to communism, and her close friendship with Anne and Margot Frank served symbolically to reject accusations of antisemitism frequently leveled at the East German state:  “Who better to become a spokesperson for East Germany’s anti-​West German campaign than a Yiddish-​singing Holocaust survivor?” (13). Rebling’s centrality to East German classical music, the couple’s close contacts with musicians such as Hans Eisler, and the socialist state’s own aesthetic tendencies meant that Jaldati and Rebling’s music retained a recognizable art music approach and sound.16 This is a notable difference from the later work of artists like Karsten

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  39

17 The exact authorship of this tune is unclear, although it was copyrighted by Abe Schwartz. See the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, http://​www.milkenarchive.org/​works/​view/​582, accessed September 30, 2019. 18 Hirsh Glik’s famous 1942 Jewish partisan song “Never say.” The spelling on the back cover of the Zupfgeigenhansel album is a Germanized one; the Yiddish transliteration would be Zog nit keynmol. 19 We should also note the German Jewish Hai Frankl and his Swedish wife, Topsy, who performed Yiddish songs in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Their 1981 compilation Jiddische Lieder included a booklet of music, chords, and transliterated lyrics, and also some ambiguous “Jewish” imagery. Hai Frankl had escaped to Sweden at the outbreak of the war. He never moved back to Germany permanently (Eckstadt 2003:26).

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Troyke and Aufwind (discussed shortly), who instead show more influence of the folk revival, cabaret, and singer-​songwriters such as Wolf Biermann. In the West, German folk singer Peter Rohland’s 1963 Yiddish song program Un as der Rebbe singt:  Jiddische Lieder made him “the first [West] German singer to break through the heavy postwar silence” (Holler 2007:102). Rohland’s exploration of Yiddish material formed part of an ongoing exploration of folk music from around the world, but his choice also reflected a consciously political address to German postwar identity. Musically, however, and despite the inclusion of Hanno Botsch’s violin, Rohland’s rich baritone and accompanying guitar index the unadorned clarity of protest song rather than anything recognizably or idiomatically “Yiddish.” Rohland was followed in the 1970s by the southern German folk duo Zupfgeigenhansel, whose Jiddische Lieder was released in 1979. This popular recording offered many Germans their first exposure to well-​known Yiddish songs such as “Di grine kusine”17 and “Sog nischt kejnmol,”18 but again we see little aesthetic or stylistic differentiation from, for example, Zupfgeigenhansel’s earlier Volkslieder albums, which aimed to bring a renewed sense of discovery and pride to historical German folk song. Also notable is the distinctly German pronunciation of parts of the Yiddish texts—​“ich” rather than “ikh,” and a frequent Germanizing of the letter s, where “sametenem” (velvety) becomes “zametenem.” Significant, too, is the ambiguous imagery that accompanied the recording, from the slightly grotesque smiling fiddler of the cover (who is playing while a building burns far in the background) to the uncontextualized, though clearly “wartime,” photographs of Jewish suffering—​ even though many of the songs are cheerful and come from before the war (Birnbaum 2009:305). These artists, then, offered “Germanized” versions of Yiddish material, presenting the songs through a folksinger-​collector ethos of discovery and preservation, occasionally also framing them within stereotypical codes of Jewish suffering/​resilience.19 In 1984, with the clarinetist Giora Feidman’s

40  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

20 Personal interview, Weißensee, Berlin, November 26, 2013. 21 For example, in 1998 the San Francisco Chronicle journalist Steve Kettmann, referring to Berlin’s Festival of Jewish Culture for that year, was moved to write: “If klezmer, once thought to be nearing extinction, can thrive and reinvent itself, it almost makes you buy some of the giddier hopes of Berlin’s Jewish community leaders, struggling to provide good news at a time when the legacies of the Holocaust remain so painfully unresolved in German public life.” Steve Kettmann, “In Today’s Berlin, It’s Hip to Be Klezmer,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1998, available online at http://​www.

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appearance in Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto, instrumental klezmer music “arrived” in West Germany (Rubin 2015a). As well as providing almost all West Germans’ first contact with klezmer and initiating a network of workshops, concerts, and ensembles, Feidman’s particular brand of nondenominational spirituality offered an easily accessed and potent combination of remorse and redemption, framed through a universalist-​ humanist musical discourse that nevertheless located itself—​at least initially—​as distinctly Jewish. For a German audience just beginning to uncover and come to terms with Holocaust history, the appeal of such togetherness-​through-​music was often irresistible, just as its jettisoning of context simultaneously raised problematic questions of cultural amnesia. This is discussed fully in c­ hapter 6. In 1983, shortly before Feidman brought his version of klezmer to West Germany, the East German band Aufwind came together, initially to sing Yiddish antiwar songs and subsequently incorporating instrumental music into their programs. Heiko Lehmann, the former Aufwind bassist, told me that where East Berlin audiences frequently asked questions and made suggestions, West Berliners generally “applauded everything”20—​what they heard was “Jewish” and therefore unquestionably worthy of serious and uncritical attention. While this dichotomy is perhaps a little simplistic, it nevertheless points to the double life that klezmer and Yiddish music has since led in the city. In the 1980s and 1990s a neat piece of semiotic transference saw klezmer begin to function as a musical symbol of a renewed German-​ Jewish dialogue: apparent musical inclusivity acting as metonym for wider incorporation. Despite the continued ambiguities of actual Jewish life in the country (Peck, Ash, and Lemke 1997:96–​98), on the metaphorical level this was a compelling narrative:  the resurrection of a near-​destroyed cultural expression, in the city at the heart of this destruction, symbolically offering a deepened empathy and perhaps even transfer of identity (Waligórska 2013). Klezmer simultaneously became a melodiously emotional signifier of Jewishness, its annihilation, and its redemption. As an easily accessed symbol of reparation,21 supercultural endorsement for things klezmer has included commemorative events and the

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  41

sfgate.com/​news/​article/​In-​Today-​s-​Berlin-​It-​s-​Hip-​to-​Be-​Klezmer-​The-​2972412.php, September 30, 2019.

accessed

22 Rebling, for example, told me that she was the only Jew to be involved in organizing the first Tage der jiddischen Kultur. 23 In other words, they wanted their Yiddish musicians palpably distanced from German culture. Personal interview, Neukölln, Berlin, September 5, 2014. This is particularly ironic, as Yiddish singer Kundish is also the first female cantor in the history of Lower Saxony’s Jewish community. Voices of Ashkenaz brings together Kundish, American Deborah Strauss, and Germans Andreas Schmitges and Thomas Fritze. 24 For example, bassist Carsten Wegener told me:  “In Germany we don’t have really a tradition, it was all murdered by the Second World War and everything which was connected with it.” Personal interview, Friedrichshain, Berlin, May 2, 2014. Against this we should set the work of Berlin musicians such as Vivien Zeller and Wolfgang Meyering, whose band Malbrook confidently and stylishly explores historical German folk music.

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long-​running Jüdische Kulturtage—​Berlin’s annual “Days of Jewish Culture” festival, launched in 1987—​in which many of my interviewees have over the years taken part. This keen German embrace of Jewish cultural production has trodden an ambiguous line, making manifest a process of historical reconciliation that ironically has at times foregrounded Europe’s virtual Jewish space (Pinto 1996, Gruber 2002).22 It also clouds history somewhat. Klezmer as we now know it did not come from Germany. And despite Berlin’s interwar centrality to transnational Yiddish cultural links (Kuznitz 2014), Eastern European resonances would not have been unambiguously favored by prewar assimilated German Jews, many of whom regarded their immigrant Eastern coreligionists with “disrespect mixed with a certain fascination” (Wurbs 2010:89). Despite this, a mythologized and distanced image of Eastern European Judaism, expressed through klezmer music, has at times functioned as an overarching metonym for “Jewish” in Germany—​ partially obscuring the closer, and therefore perhaps more problematic, Westernized German Jewish presence. This exoticizing and “primitivizing” has sometimes created uncomfortable tensions when explicitly countered by musicians. Ukrainian-​Israeli singer Sveta Kundish, for example, told me of some audiences’ initial discomfort at the suggestion of possible links between German and Yiddish folk music explored in her Voices of Ashkenaz project.23 Klezmer and Yiddish song also offered an alternative subcultural vernacular, as we shall see. If the taint of history has at times made (some) German folk music problematic,24 klezmer and Yiddish music promises an enticing combination of linguistic proximity (Yiddish sounds like German) and musical distance. And so into this culturally materialist mix we must therefore throw the many musicians who may have been deeply aware of political

42  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

This is a general feature of music from Eastern Europe, that it’s more lively, more energetic, more wild, more crazy. Which is something maybe we Western people like a little bit, because we are more controlled, more organized, more northern, which means more reserved, more distance. . . . And then there are the melodies. Which on one hand are very exotic for us. On the other, they are very melodic, so they touch some sort of, you know, human thing there inside. So it’s very attractive. And then you have also a mixture of instruments which are familiar and exotic at the same time, as

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and ideological implications but were (and remain) into the music for the sake of the music. This is not to be taken lightly. Klezmer is an exciting and challenging music to play. It offers a stylishly appealing balance of wit and heart-​on-​sleeve emotion, matching the conviviality of communal music making with the requirements and rewards of a high level of technique. For musicians familiar with a Western classical vocabulary, the musical language of klezmer re-​presents these materials in an apparently new and intriguing manner. And, in contrast to classical training, performer embodiment (as in jazz) is foregrounded and privileged in klezmer music: slides, sobs and other ornamentation—​the spaces between the notes—​become integral to stylistic competence. A final part of the mix is the vibrant “Balkan party” scene in the city. Thanks to the efforts of a group of DJs and musicians (Shantel, Robert Soko), a huge market for Balkan beats developed in Berlin from the late 1990s onward. The demographic is that of the dance floor, which knows what it likes but doesn’t like to draw lines: klezmer, Russian, and Eastern European folk music is incorporated into this soundworld—​with ambivalent cultural implications (Silverman 2015, Dimova 2007). This is allied to a rapid influx into the city of Russians, Poles, and people from the Balkans and former Soviet republics, who now mix with other Berlin partygoers (native, tourist, and Western incomers) to create a ready-​made audience for good-​time boom-​cha party music. Some Berlin klezmer exists in this world, especially in venues where the styles overlap, and occasionally this world plays back into the klezmer subculture. As a related though more sedate sideline, we might also point to Berlin’s growing bal-​folk scene, a loose network of folk dancers and musicians playing French, Balkan, Israeli, Swedish, and Central European repertoire, with which some klezmer music is a natural partner. Here is the promoter, DJ, and Eastbloc Records founder Armin Siebert outlining what he sees as some popular perceptions:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  43 you have clarinet, accordion, violin. So this makes this mixture of melodies, of exotic, of folk, of tradition. But on top, you can dance to it!25

I do not mean to offer closed categories, but rather to stress the importance of overlapping and intersecting planes and perspectives. . . . Terms are creatures of discourse, somewhere between stalking-​ horses and red-​herrings.

German pioneers and outsiders Raised in East Germany by a Jewish father and non-​Jewish mother, singer Karsten Troyke has been a tireless advocate for Jewish music and song for well over thirty years. Troyke’s father, Josh Selhorn, was a jazz concert promoter and artist manager. A devoted communist, he nevertheless struggled with the day-​to-​day realpolitik of the East German system and was frequently in trouble for his support of jazz music. His arguments for its role as the voice of an oppressed minority went some way to convincing the authorities, and despite censorship and working difficulties, Selhorn was permitted an unusual 25 Personal interview, Mitte, Berlin, June 24, 2014. We will return to klezmer and the exotic (Kaminsky 2014).

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The categories that follow began as a methodological tool, a quick sketch of the musical styles of different artists that I was starting to meet and hear. I soon realized that their value was not so much in an epistemological cross-​ section of musical life but as a way of theorizing different elements of an ongoing discussion—​around tradition, innovation, musical function, and cultural identity. The categories are partly defined by musical style, partly by political or philosophical orientation, and partly by chronology; and in each case, a handful of musicians stand in for an inevitably larger whole. These groupings do not tell a comprehensive story of Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music, and a significant proportion of the musicians discussed migrate rather freely across several categories, revealing mobile subjectivities rather than fixed affiliations. Instead, they are a flexible set of lenses through which to examine some of the different ways that klezmer unites particular musical and social elements, often from several perspectives simultaneously. As usual, Mark Slobin (1993:12) puts it much better:

44  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

PA: How did you find your material? KT: That came from old records and old people. And even before I was born, my father, who was a cultural manager—​it was not called like this in East Germany—​he supported and organized jazz evenings, and one of those was called “Jewish evening.” And later I replaced simply the records with me singing with a guitar. PA: Presumably there was lots of music. What drew you to the Yiddish? KT: No idea. Actually, I wanted to see myself as a singer-​songwriter, as you would say today. And I started writing songs, and I included some of the Yiddish songs I knew in my concerts and people never asked any questions about my songs! Only the Yiddish stuff, they said “That’s interesting.” And so I was pushed into that, and I always loved it.27

A small subcultural particle, then, linked interculturally through his father’s work to forgotten repertoire and hidden tradition and pushing frequently against the constraints of the superculture. This quote also points to the occasionally disconnected and at times accidental groupings of musical pioneers in any given subculture: individuals or small groups who, faced with limited resources or guidance, work hard to find their own version of a music that fascinates them (Eydmann 2018). This is in contrast to, or perhaps preceding, Tamara Livingston’s (1999:66) chronology of music revivals as stemming from an “overt cultural and political agenda.” However, even if music is the attraction, such ideologically resonant music as Yiddish song in Germany can never be completely free of implications and associations: What we used to have in Germany, some sort of schlechtes Gewissen. Bad feelings about the past. In the audience and even with the musicians sometimes. It’s gone now, I think. And so I remember concerts in the early ’90s 26 From Karsten Troyke’s website, http://​www.karsten-​troyke.de/​josh.html: “Against work prohibition (as publisher’s reader) and censorship (of his jazz projects), over the years he created for himself a niche as free agent and ‘jazz pope’ of the GDR,” accessed September 30, 2019. 27 All Troyke’s comments come from a personal interview, Mitte, Berlin, July 20, 2014.

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amount of travel to the West, from where he would frequently return with records unavailable in the East.26 Alongside jazz concerts and listening evenings, Selhorn organized “Jewish evenings,” presenting German translations of Yiddish literature and recordings of Yiddish song. As a young man, Karsten gravitated naturally toward the music that his father was promoting:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  45 where it was not important how good was that onstage, it was only good to be at a Jewish concert: “Look, I’m here, I’m one of the goodies.”28

28 Karsten Troyke, personal interview. 29 For example, Troyke performed traditional and original songs as part of Konrad-​Adenauer Stiftung’s Wilna—​Wilno—​Vilnius: Das jiddische Vilne, a lecture series exploring the history and cultural significance of Vilna in Jewish history, in October 2013.

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Troyke’s hard-​earned reputation, boyishly craggy face, and superbly gravelly voice mean that he is now approaching elder-​statesman status, although the twinkle in his eye and disarmingly friendly manner rapidly dispel any sense of self-​importance. Troyke has done much to keep alive a core repertoire of Yiddish song in the city, as well as acting as a teacher and ambassador for the material in Paris (Medem Bibliothèque), London (SOAS), and around the United States. He also presents introductory and explanatory Shabbat evenings and Jewish festival events around Germany, frequently in partnership with writers or poets. Through persistence and considerable talent Troyke has turned his early, individualized fascination into an active and ongoing network—​linking him through performance to concert series such as Burkhart Seidemann’s Klezmerfest and venues such as Dancehouse WABE and Panda Theater, academically to lecture events and research networks,29 and collaboratively to a wide range of musicians. His early connections to the Tage der jiddischen Kultur and subsequently the Hackesches Hoftheater, his tireless concertizing inside and outside the city, and his long recording relationship with Oriente Musik mean that he remains an important and respected figure in the contemporary scene. However, none of this is presented in a heavy-​handed or overly didactic way. Troyke is a master of inclusivity, and during my time in Berlin I had the chance to see him transform audiences in the driest of halls into lively, smiling, singing participants. He is also not afraid to take liberties with the tradition he upholds. One of the songs in his repertoire is the Yiddish classic “Margaritkelekh” (to reappear in a later chapter), which conventionally ends with a young girl deserted by her faithless lover. At one of the concerts I attended, Karsten asked the audience whether they wouldn’t prefer a happy ending. He then proceeded to rewrite the last verse on the spot, reuniting the two lovers, notching up the tempo to cabaret polka speed, and enlisting the entire audience in a far more joyful wordless sing-​along to round off the number. This sort of playfulness points to an artist completely at ease with his material and secure in his own interpretative perspective. It is a performance

46  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Zuntik bulbes, montik bulbes, Dinstik un mitvokh—​bulbes, Donershtik un fraytik—​bulbes, 30 This last choice also points up Karsten’s musical empathy with the world of Yiddish tango (see Czackis 2003, 2009), of which he has released two CDs: RIEN 59 (2006), RIEN 82 (2012). 31 Raumer Records, RR 12097.

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aesthetic deeply rooted in a knowledge of tradition and heritage, yet at the same time free enough to endow this malleable resource with modernity, elasticity, and even irony. Karsten’s style is warm and witty. His performances are designed to instill in his audiences a love for the music that has been such a central part of his life. He tends to work with small ensembles and is loyal in his collaborations: he has worked with the same pianist, Götz Lindenberg, for thirty years, and he has long-​standing associations with the singer Suzanna and the Russian Trio Scho. This creates a symbiotic mutual understanding that allows Troyke to treat his performances flexibly, stretching phrases ad lib, confident in his accompanists’ ability to follow. The ensemble textures that he prefers are conventional ones for Yiddish song: fiddle, accordion, piano, bass, and acoustic guitar over electric guitars, hip-​hop loops, or squealing saxophones. It is a polished, acoustic, cabaret-​esque soundworld that connotes a certain intimacy in performance. Similarly, the repertoire that Troyke explores is often a well-​trodden path: “Der Rebbe Elimelekh,” “Bei Mir Bistu Sheyn,” “Friling.”30 But by no means exclusively so—​in 1997 he recorded an album titled Jidische Vergessene Lieder (forgotten Jewish songs),31 consisting of material collected from his Yiddish teacher–​mentor Sara Bialas-​Tenenberg (Waligórska 2013:122–​23). Karsten also performs songs from the Vilna ghetto and has made several excellent Yiddish translation versions of more contemporary material, such as Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Troyke, then, has established a large repertoire base that allows him to adapt his performance to different circumstances, balancing historical enquiry, cabaret entertainment, and Jewish memory in varying degrees. Where his interpretations come into their own, however, is in their linguistic fluidity and playfulness. A native German who is also fluent in English and Yiddish, he is ideally placed to exploit inevitable linguistic overlaps when performing works that deal with an international, migratory, multilinguistic experience. A fine example is in his treatment of the traditional song “Bulbes,” a comic piece detailing the unchanging diet of a hard-​up family:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  47 Shabes in a novene a bulbe-​kugele! Zuntik—​vayter bulbes!

It is common to find singers performing both Yiddish and English lyrics to this simple song. Troyke, however, uses New York Yiddish comedian Benny Bell’s trilingual (Yiddish, Russian, English) version, which exploits the song’s repetitive structure in a more sophisticated way. Moving easily from “bulbes” to “kartofles” to “potatoes” and back again, he skips freely between languages line by line or word-​by-​word, exchanging the repeated words for their translated equivalents upon the next appearance. Troyke’s version also greatly expands the nursery rhyme limits of the single chorus given here, tempting us with “herring mit potatoes,” “lokshn mit potatoes,” and of course “latkes fun potatoes.”32 It is a linguistic tour de force, executed with skill and a smile. It also links Troyke’s music both to an immigrant experience and to the contemporary city, locating it within the multilingual norm that is a fundamental part of today’s Berlin—​and of Yiddish history. This language hopping is something that the younger singer Daniel Kahn has also picked up on, although often to more subversive ends. Fellow Berlin Yiddish singer Fabian Schnedler takes up the idea, while reminding us not to get too carried away with it. That’s right! Everybody gets a piece of it, unless you know all the languages . . . this whole idea that you do a musical performance where you look at things from different angles and different languages, is something not so foreign to an audience any more. And I think in Yiddish people have got used to it, because it’s on the stage. But in different contexts it’s maybe still foreign to people. So we have to educate the audience. Or find the audience. Or the audience finds you. Something in between that.33



32 Herring with potatoes, noodles with potatoes, and potato pancakes from potatoes. 33 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview, Berlin Jewish Museum, August 27, 2014.

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[Sunday spuds, Monday spuds, Tuesday and Wednesday—​spuds, Thursday and Friday—​spuds, On the Sabbath, a special treat—​a potato pudding! Sunday—​spuds again.]

48  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Firstly what interested us was Yiddish. Later, klezmer music came alongside. Yiddish was important because it was a part of the East and yet one learned nothing about it in school. Millions of Jews had been killed but nothing was said about who they actually were. What sort of culture they had had in Germany, and what was the difference between that and the culture of Eastern Europe. In the beginning we knew nothing about this. . . . There were no concerts yet, so we had to seek out recordings anywhere that anyone had them.37

Aufwind made contact with a record collector in Delmenhorst, named Hans Langer, who sent them recordings of American klezmer bands such as

34 Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Institute for Jewish Research), founded in Vilna in 1925 and relocated to New York in 1940. See the YIVO website, https://​www.yivo.org, accessed September 30, 2019. 35 For example, Feldman and Statman’s “alliance” with Dave Tarras (Slobin 2000:3). 36 See, for example, Ottens (2008:225): “Because of its small and marginal quality and the diversity of the individual performers and activists, Troyke was careful to point out that these few individuals and groups did not constitute a music scene at that time: ‘We were such a small group that one can’t speak of a Yiddish music scene. We also came from very different corners and only got together through the Days of Yiddish Culture.’ ” 37 All Jan Hermerschmidt’s comments are from a personal interview, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, May 19, 2014.

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Although in interview Karsten appears lightly offhand about his musical research, he has in fact worked extremely hard to build up the knowledge and technique that underpins such appealingly artless musical style. Detailed investigation is of course a feature of music revivals in general (Livingston 1999), but the difference between my German interviewees and their American revival counterparts is the lack of available resources. In the 1980s, Germany had no YIVO equivalent,34 no elder statesmen of klezmer to seek out,35 and very few spaces receptive to a rediscovery of Jewish music—​a notable absence of functional networks.36 Before the development of a more general workshop aesthetic (discussed later), earlier practitioners were very much discovering things for themselves, with whatever they could find. The result is a variety of approaches to the musical material, depending on the different discoveries and experiences of the protagonists. One of Troyke’s frequent musical partners is longtime Aufwind clarinetist Jan Hermerschmidt, an East Berliner raised in the East German music school system. He sets out some of the challenges:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  49 Kapelye. The band, however, were seeking to establish a stronger connection to Yiddish language and musical culture:

The band was, as Hermerschmidt put it, “rigorous”—​both in their research and also in the careful work each musician put in to develop a collective, coherent band sound. Clearly successful in their efforts, in November 2014 the group celebrated its thirtieth birthday with a concert at Berlin dance house WABE. As both Jan and Heiko Lehmann told me, Aufwind initially had to work hard to be accepted as a credible klezmer band on the international stage. As early, non-​Jewish ambassadors for German klezmer, these artists faced inevitable curiosity (and occasional hostility), and both men spoke of the difficult conversations they had encountered upon their first trips to KlezKamp40—​as well as their subsequent emphatic inclusion into the international klezmer community.41 This pioneer trail is one that others would follow, summed up nicely by the accordionist Franka Lampe: The first year was Heiko Lehmann, the second year was Heiko’s band Aufwind, and the third year was La’om, my band. Heiko and Aufwind, they had a lot to do there as Germans in KlezKamp. La’om had to do a lot too, but not so much. Now it’s starting to be “oh, a German band again!”42

38 Yiddish term for non-​Jews (sing. goy). 39 Jan Hermerschmidt, personal interview. 40 An annual Yiddish culture festival founded by Henry Sapoznik and Adrienne Cooper. KlezKamp ran for thirty years until 2014, returning in a more limited version in 2018. See Sapoznik (2002). 41 For more on Aufwind’s development and also on other Yiddish artists in pre-​reunification Germany, see Lehmann (2000). 42 Personal interview, Friedrichshain, Berlin, March 4, 2014.

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And so we listened to how it sounded, and at first we just tried to imitate. In order to get a better feel for the Yiddish, we realized that we had to look further. There was a Yiddish Theater in Warsaw, another in Bucharest, and that’s where we went—​with sleeping bags, clarinets under our arms. And we saw Yiddish productions, we spoke with the people. A playwright from the Bucharest Theatre asked us what we were doing there, why had we traveled all the way to Romania when there was a good Yiddish translator in Prenzlauer Berg? Didn’t we know him? No, we didn’t know him. So we contacted him. And at first he saw us as German goyim.38 We had to convince him we wanted to do Yiddish music.39

50  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Exactly. Apart. For us was always the question: we’ve been here since the early times, but we’re not so integrated. We don’t play a role in the sorts of things that others do, things like Klezmer Lounge [see c­hapter  3]

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Pieced together from limited resources, Aufwind’s artistic aesthetic is a distinct one within the Berlin klezmer soundworld. It is characterized by a lightness and folkiness that has largely been replaced by heavier, more driven and dance-​oriented performance practice. Hardy Reich’s mandolin and banjo chords and counterlines, while rhythmically tight and strong, are lighter, more “tinkly” sonorities than the forceful piano or accordion accompaniments characteristic of more recent klezmer dance bands. And instead of accordion, the band features Andreas Rohde’s bandoneon. This less-​heard (in klezmer) and richly textured instrument is one that references the subtler sound of the German bandoneon tradition more than the brasher counter-​rhythms of, for example, Knoblauch Klezmer Band or You Shouldn’t Know from It (both covered in subsequent sections). Singing duties are principally taken by Reich and fiddler Claudia Koch but are also shared between the whole band, again adding to the ensemble’s folkier sound. Aufwind shares similar early network connections to East Berlin’s Tage der jiddischen Kultur and the Hackesches Hoftheater. They have performed in Israel, Argentina, and the United States and throughout Europe, as well as appearing at the 2009 Berliner Philharmonie’s Klezmer Festival and klezmer festivals throughout Germany. Like Troyke, the band takes their responsibilities seriously: their website has in the past hosted links to YIVO, the digital Freedman Jewish Sound Archive, Paris’s Yiddish culture center (Medem Bibliothèque), and Iosif Vaisman’s Virtual Shtetl resource. Interestingly, they also performed in a 1990s Gorki Theater production of Sobol’s Ghetto. Although both Troyke and Aufwind have a busy concert schedule and are well respected in the musical community, theirs is something of an outsider status within the contemporary scene. Their predating of the workshop hegemony that underpinned the 1990s klezmer boom in the city means that they have retained their own, occasionally idiosyncratic, approach. Aufwind is in some ways a bridge between Zupfgeigenhansel’s guitar-​folk sound and the more gleeful profusion of the past couple of decades—​their distinctive aesthetic forged from the particularly local set of constraints under which they developed their sound in the years before reunification. Nowadays, this places them in a curious relationship to the city’s scene, both an intrinsic and unique part of it and yet somewhat distanced from the buzz of activity:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  51

Sharing similar outsider status but raised in West Berlin, Kasbek has almost twenty years on Aufwind. In the early 1960s, the trio of Andreas Karpen (balalaika and domra), Frieder Breitkreutz (violin), and Christian Müller (contrabass balalaika) formed a street band purveying Russian songs and folklore, pitting themselves explicitly against the tide of American and English pop music and implicitly against the partition of their city: “To the audience of the divided city, [Kasbek] must have seemed like creatures from another star.”45 The addition of guitarist Uwe Sauerwein in 1984 and his repertoire of Yiddish song and stories pushed the band strongly in a more klezmer-​ oriented direction, and these days their performances include klezmer, Yiddish song, Russian folk tunes and songs, Macedonian music, and even former Yugoslavian film tunes. Kasbek has always made a point of collaborating and appearing with a wide range of musicians, including Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and Greek musicians either based in the city or passing through. In fact, this keen openness to learning and collaboration links Kasbek directly to the contemporary scene, in that it is responsible for the continued and influential presence in Berlin of the American musician Alan Bern. Bern takes up the story: Well, I had stopped playing klezmer music before I came to Berlin, because actually I found to be not creative. The Klezmer Conservatory Band had reached a point where I didn’t feel that I was growing creatively in it. . . . So I came to Berlin in 1987. And I was supposed to be here for two months, to learn German. And I went to a concert of Greek music. It was a traditional Greek band and they were playing in Balkan rhythms, like zeibekiko and various things like that. And most of the people in the audience were just happily clapping away in two, but there was one guy I noticed on the other 43 Yiddish Summer Weimar is a four-​week-​long series of workshops and concerts curated by Alan Bern. It is discussed in depth in ­chapter 6. 44 Jan Hermerschmidt, personal interview, 2014. As Jan then pointed out, however, Berlin is “big enough” for all of its klezmer musicians. 45 The Kasbek website, http://​ www.kasbek-​ ensemble.de/​ geschichte.html, accessed September 30, 2019.

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for example. The others find us uninteresting. We prefer to play our own arrangements, in different keys. I’d be interested to go to Weimar,43 but I can’t go there as a student, that would be a step backwards. And as a teacher, I’d have to do something which is not me. And so, as you say, Aufwind is a little “outside.”44

52  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

In concert as well as conversation, Kasbek are unpretentious and unshowy. Although their standard is high, music is not their income (they are, in fact, a journalist, a clergyman, an architect, and a doctor). They still perform regularly, often in small venues such as Mitte’s Cafe Oberwasser or Moabit’s Kapitel 21, and largely for their own enjoyment. Like Troyke and Aufwind, the band has developed its own distinct sound and style. Lacking a star performer or dramatic stage presence, Kasbek continues to be respected as a quiet and persistent force in the city—​the first pioneers. The work of the pioneers and their contemporaries such as Ukrainian singer and actor Mark Aizikovitch (Ottens 2006:103), through network hubs such as the Hackesches Hoftheater and the Tage der jiddischen Kultur, created and maintained a space for the more established scene of the 1990s onward. To this we must also add the early presence of American klezmer musicians in the city, in particular Joel Rubin (a Berlin resident from 1989 to 2003), Alan Bern (from 1987 onward), and Michael Alpert, who was a regular visitor to the city. What followed them—​what musicians in the city now refer to with a wry smile as the “klezmer boom”—​would open up the possibilities of this pioneer path. Jan Hermerschmidt outlines the progression nicely:

46 Alan Bern, personal interview, 2019. Zeibekiko rhythm is a pattern of nine beats.

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side of the room, who was clapping a zeibekiko rhythm. And I  thought, OK, that’s kind of cool. So I went over to him afterwards, and before I even opened my mouth he said, “Aren’t you Alan Bern?” His name was Andreas Karpen. He had been part of a group that had been playing mostly Russian music for years and years. They called themselves Kasbek. And they had just gotten their first LP of Yiddish music, and it happened to be the Klezmer Conservatory Band, the album where we’re all in front of Lincoln Center. He recognized me from that, and he said hey, first of all would you like to give us a coaching? And second of all, we have about two dozen gigs over the next two months, would you like to play with us? . . . If I had not run into Andreas at that concert, I’m pretty sure I would not have been playing klezmer music that year. I would never have invited Joel [Rubin] or Michael [Alpert]. Brave Old World probably wouldn’t have come into existence. And Yiddish Summer Weimar probably would never have come into existence. Because I didn’t come here with the mission to make any of this happen. Not at all.46

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  53

This is not to say that the music of Aufwind, Kasbek, or Troyke is not “fun.” What it points to, however, is a broadening demographic—​a period in Berlin from the mid-​1990s to the early 2000s that saw a mushrooming of bands, performance spaces, and workshops, physical hubs around which the lively subculture could now coalesce. And with the increasing arrival of international musicians into the city—​drawn there by Berlin’s emergent post-​millennial cool or through transnational connections48—​the affinity interculture began to widen, linking increasingly to Berlin’s growing twenty-​first-​century cosmopolitan identity (Till 2005:5). We can see some of the musical changes that mark this shift by looking at two versions of the much-​played klezmer standard “Odessa Bulgarish.”49 Kasbek’s recording, from 1996,50 is marked by a steady rhythm, regular bassline, and subtle guitar countermelody and harmony line.51 It is played at about 170 bpm, giving the music a strong forward momentum while remaining steady and in control. The tune begins with a half-​time violin pickup, and thereafter the band plays head-​down all the way through to the end. Statement of the melody is shared between violin (Frieder Breitkreutz) and guitar (Uwe Sauerwein), with Andreas Karpen’s mandolin either providing

47 Jan Hermerschmidt, personal interview. 48 Daniel Kahn, for instance, studied with Alan Bern at KlezKanada in 2004. Bern then invited Kahn to Berlin and offered to sublet him his apartment. 49 On the inconsistencies and unreliability of klezmer titles, see Netsky (2002a:16). Ciaran Carson (1997:10), in his brilliantly meandering discussion of Irish music, comprehensively and convincingly undermines any consistent or verifiable connection between tune names and the places to which they refer. Here, however, I am referring to the tune as documented in Sapoznik and Sokolow (1987:39). 50 On Klezmer à la Russe, INEDIT W 260066. 51 As in many of the transcriptions in this book, some information is deliberately omitted (here, for example, dynamics and articulation) in order to convey most clearly the elements under discussion.

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It especially has to do with German history. This is a music which is in the first place very danceable, appealing, improvisational. Germans heard it and found it very exciting. But then in the background is Jewish history, which made people think they had to sit quietly and behave [when listening]. So when the boom came it was like a release: “This is also normal music!” You can dance to it, drink to it. You can enjoy it without feeling bad or evil. Party music to have fun with. For us it was always much more serious. A search for closeness to this culture. We have no claim—​we are outsiders, guests, we are not Jews. We try to cultivate a sense of respect. . . . The boom educated people about this music, but it also made it fun.47

54  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

strong and repetitive offbeat chords or high ostinati quavers to build tension and excitement (figure 2.1). The group Grinsteins Mischpoche52 was formed in the late 1990s by musicians who are still very active in the city’s musical life. The band’s live recording of “Odessa Bulgar,”53 nearly a decade after Kasbek’s and 10 bpm faster, shows some of the musical processes underpinning this newer 52 The Yiddish word for family, though here in a Germanized spelling. 53 Available on the Grinsteins Mischpoche website, http://​www.mischpoche.de/​musik/​live/​ Odessa_​Bulgarish.mp3, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Figure 2.1  Kasbek Ensemble, “Odessa Bulgar” (1996), excerpt.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  55

This was disturbing in those days. And it only changed when the musicians became better and did know what they were actually doing. And the space, I think the space just came because there was an audience. . . . After some years, people who come not honestly to such concerts would skip it later. And the people who stay—​and there are still enough today—​they get the feeling, and you have a sort of community like this.54

As many interviewees told me, the boom carried in its wake a large number of amateurs who brought enthusiasm and bodies to the scene but little else. But it also created a vibrant space for the music within Berlin itself, consolidating a growing network of dedicated musicians—​many of whom were also attracted by the city’s own rising cultural star. While some earlier boomers have fallen by the wayside or gone on to follow other musical paths, what

54 Karsten Troyke, interview, 2014.

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good-​time sound. Gone are the string textures of Kasbek or Aufwind, replaced with the harder edges of Stu Krause’s trumpet and Detlef Pegelow’s tuba. The performance begins with a long clarinet improvisation from Bert Hildebrandt, replete with shrieks, growls, and squeals. The first statement of the melody is slow and drawn out, each note interspersed with heavy sforzando hits from the rest of the band. This gradually accelerates up to speed through the first four bars, by which time a fast “boom-​cha” groove has been established, with fast accordion and electric guitar stabs from Sara Wang and Thomas Schudack combining to impel a more driving, dance-​floor-​oriented aesthetic. Figure 2.2 shows a transcription of the first-​part repeat, the melody this time taken by trumpet. Instead of Kasbek’s steady offbeat patterns, here we see electric guitar giving a spikier and sparser accompaniment, tuba moving with more freedom through the harmony, and the music’s dancey, “party” spirit underscored and reinforced by Attila Wiegand’s fast percussion patterns. While the so-​called boom opened the doors for new bands, recordings, and performance spaces, it was not without its problems. An increase in numbers brought a change in musical standards, as a small pool of conscientious and respectful advocates expanded into a happy, noisy group of party seekers. As newer homegrown bands began to settle and develop, this would soon reflect a refining of quality, but it also began to foreground the ideological stickiness of so many non-​Jewish Germans playing Jewish folk music:

56  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

remains is a distilled pool of world-​class players, covering a wide age range and significantly augmented by newer arrivals such as the Americans Patrick Farrell, Daniel Kahn, and Craig Judelman, Hampus Melin (Sweden), Eli Fabrikant (Israel), Emil Goldschmidt (Denmark), Sveta Kundish (Ukraine/​ Israel), and the Latvians Sasha Lurje and Ilya Shneyveys, many of whom figure prominently in this book.

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Figure 2.2  Grinstein’s Mischpoche, “Odessa Bulgarish” (2003), excerpt.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  57

Modernists

OK, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the hallmarks of the klezmer style. And now it’s just, hopefully, integrated into my own style. I would be the last person to claim that what I do is a traditional klezmer thing. But I do know about that stuff, and I can teach other people. So I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the traditional aspect while I’m actually doing it, but I also insist that people spend a lot of time thinking about it in their lives—​and then trying to forget it. With klezmer there’s this constant room for improvisation, you know? Never play the same melody the same way twice. Never. Even on the repeat of it, it needs to sound different. Always. Always, always, always.55

At the head of their field, they are also at times ironic about the perceived straitjacket of “correct” klezmer practice: But the interesting thing is, actually, I don’t know who the klezmer police are. If I think of actual people, I haven’t heard names or something. But I know that people are afraid of the klezmer police [laughs].56

In the 1990s, the transformation of the early and dispersed Yiddish-​interest subculture into a more coherent “scene”—​with an increased consistency of

55 Accordionist Patrick Farrell, personal interview, Neukölln, Berlin, March 22 2014. Farrell is echoing clarinetist Max Epstein (Slobin 2000:95). 56 Sanne Möricke, personal interview, March 17, 2014, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

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The continual refining of performance and repertoire is particularly evident in my next category, a group of performers who share what we might call a particularly “musicianly” approach. The name I have chosen has no direct connection to modernism, and I doubt it is a term that the players here would ascribe to themselves. I am using the word to suggest a sense of artistic clarity, single-​mindedness, and an express aim to rediscover and make relevant little-​known historical material. These musicians are some of the most in-​demand musicians on the international stage, connected regularly and widely through transnational projects, bands, and collaborations. In their command of idiomatic material, they are relaxed enough to be gently iconoclastic:

58  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

How I  come to klezmer? I  came to klezmer because I  wanted to play Bulgarian music. I found Alan Bern, who was giving one of the first klezmer workshops in about ’91 or ’92. And I  asked him if he was playing East European music as well, Bulgarian, etc., and where he is living and if I can have Unterricht [tuition]. And I remember the day, where I asked him—​ because it was all Serbish, Bulgarish, klezmer piece, something else, again a klezmer piece. And I asked him, “OK, would you like me to learn klezmer?” [laughs] So afterwards, I didn’t ask the question anymore. Because it was too late. I was involved!58

The modernists don’t wear waistcoats and neckerchiefs. Although Yiddish will often feature in their band names,59 these names are unlikely to be puns, “Yiddishisms,” or any kind of “klez-​” neologism. Unlike the pioneers, modernist musical research and resources are not starting from nowhere. Building on the work done by older musicians, their interest frequently focuses on lesser-​ known repertoire or genre areas. Accordion player Franka Lampe60 is a good example, standing as she does at a distinct set of 57 Accordionist and pianist Alan Bern, clarinetist Kurt Björling, singer and violinist Michael Alpert, and bassist Stuart Brotman. Clarinetist Joel Rubin was a founding member (playing with the band until 1992), but the workshops to which my interviewees referred all took place once Björling had joined. 58 Franka Lampe, personal interview, 2014. 59 For example: Sher on a Shier (dance without an end); Schikker wi Lot (drunk as Lot); Khupe (wedding canopy). This last was a long-​running duo of clarinetist Christian Dawid and accordionist Sanne Möricke. 60 While writing up some of this research in 2016, I learned the sad news that Franka had finally lost an ongoing battle with cancer. She passed away on the evening of January 6, 2016.

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approach and ideology—​was helped by a series of workshops held throughout Germany by American bands such as the Klezmatics and, particularly, Brave Old World (Gruber 2002:228–​30).57 Slightly younger than the pioneers, many of the modernists discussed here learned their klezmer through this historically informed and temporally rooted approach. They have all benefitted from a consistent klezmer pedagogy at KlezKamp, KlezKanada, or Yiddish Summer Weimar, and most are now teachers at these same workshops. In particular, their thoughtful and carefully built commitment to Yiddish musical cultural learning is often connected to Yiddish Summer Weimar and Alan Bern, whose deep and wide-​ranging teaching philosophy is the subject of c­ hapter 6. Here, for example, is accordionist Franka Lampe cheerfully acknowledging his influence on her early development:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  59

With klezmer music, you have to think about it! Because of the singing melody, serving the melody, or not. I love the singing way. In my lessons, I tell them if you cannot sing it, don’t do it. Or if you want to know where can I do some phrasings or some trills, then sing the melody. Most of the time you do it by yourself without recognizing it. If it doesn’t serve the melody or further the melody, you don’t do it in klezmer. . . . My favorite trill, every time I come back to it, I have to say “No! Think about it!”62

One version of the modernist approach is clean-​cut and professional, occasionally at the expense of more overt passion. Here are some fieldnotes written after a Sher on a Shier concert in Mitte’s Kaffee Burger:63 A good quartet with some fine and tight arrangements. The repertoire is consciously early 20th century—​the idea being to transport us back to the weddings and dance halls of that time. To this end, they also play acoustically. This is quite radical, and they use the space accordingly—​players moving in and out as they come into the limelight, the quartet breaking off into two duos /​trio plus one. This is an eye/​ear-​opener—​it makes one listen to the music in a different way, and allows them to explore it differently 61 Franka also boasted a weird and wonderfully twisted major-​key version of Naftule Brandwein’s “Firn di Mekhutonim Aheym” (Leading the in-​laws home). 62 Franka Lampe, personal interview. 63 Johannes Paul Gräßer (violin), Sabine Döll (double bass), Anja Günther (clarinet), Franka Lampe (accordion). All members of the band are closely tied to klezmer education networks in Germany. Following Franka’s death in 2016, Paula Sell took over the accordion chair.

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musical-​cultural interstices. Franka was a founder member of young East German klezmer band La’om in the early nineties, who cut their teeth playing a range of traditional and reasonably well-​known klezmer repertoire. She went on to form Modern Klezmer Quartet, one of whose recent projects included an uncovering of the folk music roots of Dmitri Shostakovich’s song cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry.” Franka also had a long-​standing collaboration with the German singer and fluent Yiddish-​speaker Fabian Schnedler. Their program included reharmonized versions from Shmuel Lehman’s 1928 collection Ganovim Lider (Yiddish: thieves’ songs). This sort of repertoire expansion typifies one side of the modernist aesthetic, namely, the utilization of a solid technical and musical understanding of the language of klezmer in order to shed new light on areas so far bypassed by the European revival.61 It is also a performance philosophy based on continual interrogation:

60  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

This example shows klezmer framed within what we might call a chamber music aesthetic. It is backed up by Sher on a Shier’s promotional photographs, which in their studied informality resemble above all orchestral musician portraits. Coming from the other direction, drummer Hampus Melin’s outfit You Shouldn’t Know from It (YSKFI) is a klezmer dance band with members from France, Sweden, Holland, and America66—​reflecting the internationalism of the city and the klezmer practice within it. Their expressed aim is to play “traditional Jewish dance music. . . . It’s not pretentious, it’s music like it is.”67 As part of Daniel Kahn’s Painted Bird, Melin worked for several years in the house jam session band at the Krakow Festival of Jewish Culture, building up a solid and unshowy technique alongside a love of the music’s core functional dance role. He has internalized the 3-​3-​2 patterns, press rolls, and subtle forward momentum of older klezmer drummers such as the Philadelphian Elaine Hoffman Watts; YSKFI is a conscious and clearheaded attempt to take that same spirit to the bars and clubs of Berlin and beyond, making no musical concessions along the way.

64 A Hasidic, or perhaps Hasidic-​style, song (here performed instrumentally): “A String of Pearls.” 65 Yiddish: strength, power (or in this case “oomph”). 66 Samuel Maquin (clarinet), Hampus Melin (drums), Sanne Möricke (accordion), Michael Tuttle (bass). Sasha Lurje guests on vocals. 67 From the YSKFI website, www.knowfromit.com (no longer online).

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as well. The tunes run from semi-​obscure to fairly well-​known (after two months in Berlin I had already heard most of them at least once, somewhere). They play with joy and obvious love for the music, but the overall impression is also quite straight, almost classical. If the aim is to recreate an earlier era of joyful and unbridled klezmer dancing, it feels more studied than that. A smaller acoustic club might suit them better. They do do one particularly lovely thing—​ performing “Shnirele Perele,”64 the quartet end with an acoustically-​created echo: each instrument playing the same phrase just slightly behind the last one, giving a four-​way stuttering reverb. It’s a powerful and mesmerizing effect. All the arrangements are very creative and very tight—​a high level of skill but noticeably controlled. One can’t help feeling that a dance band of a hundred years ago might have been a bit more raucous, let go a bit more. Here the focus is on musicianship and arrangements and repertoire, and less on koyekh.65 Modernist clarity?

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  61

Well, I come from a jazz background, where in a jam session or in any kind of concert situation, you’ve got to be prepared somehow. You’ve gotta have your shit together and you’ll be judged from it. And with klezmer I don’t feel it’s working like that. Sure, when you can be a leader you can lead, but that’s still something different.69

These musicians’ frequent appearances on the international Yiddish music stage give them a broad and flexible set of approaches to traditional repertoire, while their combined experience playing across a variety of styles and ensembles lends their music an attractively free and loose aesthetic. Hampus explains: One of the things is that everyone can play at the same time. It’s not like we go through the melody and there’s a bunch of solos. The whole band makes up for the machinery somehow, everyone plays together. Sure. The melody will be the same, but it will be played differently.  .  .  .  It’s not a straight-​ through German classical music kind of scenario.70

Magdalena Waligórska (2013) notes that several ensembles who came together in the early years of this century as klezmer bands have since widened their musical horizons, taking in Balkan, Turkish, and Greek music and at times changing their names to reflect this.71 By contrast, YSKFI are unapologetic in their return to a commitment to straight-​ahead klezmer music. Their 2015 debut album is entitled It’s Klezmer!,72 expressing both an artistic intention and simultaneously (via the exclamation mark) a certain ironic 68 For example, the Russian-​German party band Skazka Orchestra. See their website, http://​ skazka-​orchestra.de, accessed September 30, 2019. 69 Hampus Melin, interview, 2014. 70 Ibid. 71 Grinsteins Mischpoche, for example, is now the Bakshish Brass Band. 72 Oriente Musik, DANZ107.

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In the context of the large number of bands who include klezmer as one ingredient among many in a self-​consciously eclectic folk/​jazz/​ska/​gypsy mix,68 the good-​time traditionalism of YSKFI in fact becomes quite radical, and their gigs are often lively, dancey, highly charged affairs. They tread the line between learning and excitement deliberately lightly, with arrangements less foregrounded, technique worn less heavily, and greater emphasis placed on collectivity:

62  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

detachment. The album cover (figure 2.3) features a hand-​painted green and yellow image—​a map stripped of national borders or city names, its broad brushstrokes blurring distinctions between land and sea.73 The title is pieced together from newsprint, ransom-​note-​style, a visual reference to the heterogeneity of the group’s background and sound that also retains a nice amount of self-​deprecating humor. The result manages to be both honest and self-​ aware, fresh but not naïve. In their treatment of musical material, the modernists occupy an interesting space. They play mostly traditional repertoire, gleaned from intercultural transmission networks (workshops, jam sessions, CD and MP3 swaps), recordings, and written sources such as Beregovski and Kostakowsky (see Appendix 1). As students of—​and now teachers at—​Weimar and KlezKamp,

73 The picture was painted by a four-​year-​old friend of the band, Luci Cataldo.

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Figure 2.3  You Shouldn’t Know from It, It’s Klezmer! album cover (2015). Reproduced with permission.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  63

Figure 2.4  “Rumanian Hora” (Kostakowsky, 2001:6), excerpt.

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these are the musicians most likely to be well versed in what has by now become a widely accepted “traditional” klezmer vocabulary, taking their musical cues from the recorded works of Dave Tarras, Naftule Brandwein, Belf ’s Romanian Orchestra, and others. A consciousness of musical legacy is therefore fundamental. However, because of the high level of skill and the ease with which they speak this klezmer language, the traditional soundworld that they inhabit in fact comes to sound surprisingly new—​in some ways more radical and more inventive than the raucous party sound of a band such as Grinsteins Mischpoche or the folky freshness of the pioneers already discussed. As an example, let us look at sixteen bars of a hora as played by YSKFI. This is a piece from the 1916 Kostakowsky collection, as seen in figure 2.4. It is a simple, pretty tune, marked by a repeated rising sixth phrase that moves from E minor in the first section to G major in the fourth part, from where this excerpt is taken. What we find in Sanne Möricke and Samuel Maquin’s interpretation, however, is only the barest echo of this original melody. Instead, the material is used as a basis for spontaneous recomposition, resulting in a melodic line clearly related to the Kostakowsky original that nevertheless firmly establishes its own fluid identity. Although rhythmically secure, the performance manages to “float” around a sense of pulse rather than stating it explicitly. Möricke is also much freer with her left-​hand statements of beats 1 and 3 than this transcription suggests, at times verging on a subdivision of five equal parts (with the chords /​ bass notes falling on quaver beats 1 and 4). Sections from the Kostakowsky are hinted at, phrases transposed, stretched, and contracted, and often heavily decorated with characteristic klezmer krekhtsn, trills, and slides (see Appendix 1). Also

64  Sounding Jewish in Berlin notable, and clearly visible, is the degree of melodic interplay between the two instruments:  building on the heterophonic ensemble playing of their early twentieth-​century klezmer models and influences, these two musicians enact a complex and contrapuntal musical dialogue (figure 2.5). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/39662/chapter/339641006 by University of Toronto user on 02 October 2023

Figure 2.5  “Hora” (excerpt), from It’s Klezmer! (You Shouldn’t Know from It, 2015).

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  65 As Sanne Möricke makes clear, such sophistication is underlined by a deep knowledge of the instrumental tradition upon which it draws:

For some musicians, an updating of traditional repertoire has also led to a more radical creativity. Singer Fabian Schnedler was born in Berlin and studied Yiddish and German literature at university, later learning from Yiddish writers and artists such as Beyle Schaechter-​Gottesman (Wurbs 2010) and Michael Alpert. Seeking to move beyond the traditional repertoire of Schikker wi Lot (his duo with Franka Lampe), Schnedler turned to original composition in Yiddish. In the process, he discovered unexpected resistance: Rearranging new songs with Yiddish poetry gave me the idea to found Fayvish. And later it became a band. Then in 2010 we had a CD called Yiddpop, you know like Yiddish music with pop. And actually my expectation was that this is THE idea. All my projects were OK but I never had financial success—​now I’m gonna have financial success. Wow! I felt like people should be more interested in that than traditional music. But it was exactly the opposite! Especially in Germany, it’s difficult—​this is pop music with Yiddish lyrics, why should we bring that? This is what people told me a lot.75

Despite its lack of financial reward, Fayvish allowed Schnedler to address the relationship between his identity as a Berlin native and a Yiddish singer, and in particular the past-​present dialogue at play:

74 Sanne Möricke, personal interview.

75 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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To me, this [right hand] is my other fiddle player, sometimes it’s also my trombone player, depending on the genre or sometimes also on the tune. I mean, I will not, like, a hundred percent decide for one or the other—​I can of course swap, change roles. But I really like to play what I call trombone style with my right hand. Also I will take a deeper register or single reed and play the triads and the different passing notes, slip into second voicing, maybe even join a little bit in the melody—​because it’s so, I think the word is versatile? . . . And, for example, with my right hand trying to—​well, it’s just my version—​sort of imitate the tsimbl [cimbalom].74

66  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

We will meet many such rich, textured geographical and historical resonances throughout the book. For now, let us turn instead to a group of musicians who create and play with self-​consciously alternative places and times.

Fantasists I want to begin this section with another—​unapologetically subjective—​ fieldnote excerpt, written in a bar in Moabit shortly after a concert of Yiddish material, a duo project of voice and accordion entitled Zwischen Welten.77 Björn is an excellent singer but his style here feels a little overcooked. Roman, by contrast, plays very minimally—​a lovely, classical bajan sound from a clearly schooled player. But also very clean, as if he has found this material in a book without any historical or idiomatic reference point (perhaps that’s the case). The contrast between the two of them is what really stands out. Björn is a little like a Bee Gee—​tall, elegant, longish fair hair. Roman looks like Vladimir Putin, and gives about as much away. When talking to the audience, Björn is polite, slightly shy, careful and well-​spoken. When he starts to sing, his eyes half-​close, his face twists into a grimace/​smile. It is as if he has gone into a trance. His long thin arms float out to either side, or he holds his fingertips up and closed as if meditating.

76 Ibid. 77 “Between worlds.” The concert took place in Zimmer 16 in Pankow, performed by German singer Björn Carel Klein and Ukrainian accordionist Roman Yusipey.

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In Yiddish resonates Yiddish history, that’s what’s there. Like Moyshe Kulbak lived in Berlin for a couple of years. And also a lot of writers who later became very famous. He wrote some poems in Berlin, and later on about Berlin, and I used both. It’s a long poem about the city with all its places—​Kurfürstendamm, Bellevue. And it’s really interesting because you can read that all the culture is in there, and he’s critical. And he writes about Wedding, which is where I live. And so I wrote this Yiddish hymn, made up a new chorus, and there you have the contemporary Wedding, and then there’s this original Yiddish from the 1920s. So it’s referring to where I am now and my life now, and what’s the history of this place. That’s how these things resonate. But you know, I also write a love song in Yiddish.76

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  67

Over the course of several concerts from various artists, I came to recognize this symbolic entering into “Yiddish-​land”—​an imaginary and largely stereotypical construct, built on a standard hegemonic trope of “Jewish” ways of being.78 I began to question this particular version of performative Jewishness more and more. It seemed affected almost to the point of parody, reminding me of Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato Papers, the tale of a future society’s attempts to reconstruct contemporary Western civilization on the basis of a few found nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century fragments. Yiddishness is here being invoked as iconic of a particular set of behavioral and belief systems, but in the signifying process what is actually revealed is their constructed nature.

78 Madgalena Waligórska analyses contemporary Polish representations of the “romanticised, magical Jew on the klezmer scene [who] is both familiar and otherworldly,” both “vividly recognizable” and “miraculous” (2008:128).

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He makes circular rabbinical gestures with his hands, visualizing the ya-​ba-​ boy of the music. To me this feels affected. But it gets me thinking . . . “Yiddish-​land.” A place where you can go when you sing this material. A  place of the imagination, full of young maidens courting, wise rabbis dancing, sadness and memory but also joy and life. Daily problems, political pressure, social divisions . . . Sholem Aleichem territory. What is interesting is that it comes with an instant set of ways of behaving and cultural assumptions, accessed through the language but most of all through the music. It is as if all you need to do is sing a Yiddish song and immediately you can change into a magic-​Yiddish-​person. The transformation with Björn is striking, which is perhaps why it rings a little false. Are the most believable performers those who need to do the least obvious “transforming”? How would it have been if Björn had walked on with a big smile and a big spliff, leaning back and saying (in bad Jamaican accent), “Yeah mannn” before launching into “Redemption Song”? Or if he’d bounced on with his mandolin and a green hat, wishing everyone top o’ the mornin’? This is all taken quite seriously here tonight—​Yiddishland has been turned into art music and yet the whole thing is also verging on cliché. It is as if the texts and songs have been discovered a couple of hundred years later, along with a few pointers about how they were performed (perhaps they had an old copy of Fiddler on the Roof). And from this has been reconstructed an imagined authenticity that is now uncritically high art.

68  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

79 This was reinforced by Zwischen Welten’s finale, “Hasidic Suite,” which consisted of recomposed versions of Hasidic songs. 80 The self-​consciousness of these two names fits well with the playful fantasist aesthetic. For more on ?Shmaltz!’s naming process, see c­ hapter 4. Knoblauch is German for garlic, and foodie metaphors of sharpness and strong tastes featured heavily in the band’s promotional discourse. 81 Knoblauch Klezmer Band in fact disbanded at the end of 2016, triumphantly releasing their latest album at the same time.

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Yiddishland is posited as a sublimation of self, when in fact it references a wholly conventional hegemonic discourse, an exoticizing philosemitism of the Eastern European Hasid as unknowable Other.79 Apparent spirituality deconstructs itself through cliché and kitsch. Of course, the concept of communing with an imagined past is not new for Yiddish culture. Indeed, an ambiguous relationship to history characterizes much of the music under discussion here. What is interesting about my next category, the fantasists, is that they have chosen to take this idea to its (il) logical extreme, in order to enact a musical dialogue between the diversity of today’s Berlin and the language of tradition. Instead of attempting to magically recapture an imagined historical “reality,” these musicians utilize the jumping-​off point of the imaginary shtetl to construct bizarre and yet curiously coherent parallel worlds. These worlds are marked by a degree of musical and linguistic exploration and a large amount of visual play—​both elements characteristic of their city environment. The two bands that I concentrate on briefly here are ?Shmaltz! and Knoblauch Klezmer Band.80 The first is made up of Berlin natives; the second is a younger and more international outfit.81 The philosophies and associated imagined communities/​ geographies of both groups are critiqued extensively in ­chapter 4, so here I will outline some elements of their musical approach. While their music remains within a soundworld of acoustic instruments and retains strong (though far from exclusive) ties to klezmer musical language, the fantasists have learned from the promotional tactics of pop music. Band images tend to feature costumes and poses: pirate hats, shiny waistcoats, extreme camera angles, and inscrutable expressions (figure 2.6). This is klezmer music at its most fun, its most self-​consciously oddball. In contrast to the “classical” modernists, fantasist klezmer takes its visual cues from the lush and exaggerated cabaret semiotics that are still so much a part of Berlin cultural life. The post-​hippy musical community with which these bands implicitly align themselves has echoes in cities such as San Francisco, Brighton (UK), and Barcelona, and in this respect it is far from unique to Berlin. But the city’s recent internationalism, high proportion of artists/​musicians, low

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  69

living costs, and post-​reunification multicolored stylistic palette are a particularly good fit for the fantasists. This sort of cabaret-​tinged image finds its performance space in clubs such as Badehaus Szimpla and Kaffee Burger (the subject of the next chapter), as well as the city’s outdoor festivals such as Fête de la Musique, Karneval der Kulturen, and local summer community events, where this appealing brand of comfortable zaniness provides instantly accessible yet musically interesting (and crowd-​pleasing) entertainment. It is little surprise that the fantasists share most cultural, musical, and performance space with the city’s Balkan beats scene,82 frequently appearing at the same venues and festivals, and with similarly lively onstage dancing and energetic crowd-​performer interaction. Musically, these groups mix up influences from klezmer, Balkan music, German folk and pop music, Turkish and Greek elements, and occasional nods to South America in the form of cumbia or milonga. For the fantasists,

82 Bands such as Il Civetto and Gankino Circus (both of whom share a similar dress sense), club nights like Balkan Beats and Balkanarama. See Silverman (2015) for some of the ideological issues around this scene.

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Figure 2.6  Knoblauch Klezmer Band in stage gear, flyposted onto their city environment. Kreuzberg, June 2014.

70  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

But I would say, something very Dadaistic, a lot of surrealism, not taking ourselves seriously in the sense of “playing klezmer, or playing such music,” but on the other hand taking us very seriously, like “OK, we’re clowns but we’re giving one hell of a show.” So trying to hold both.84

This knowingly ambiguous territory aligns directly with contemporary Berlin’s colorfully varied visual and fashion codes, while at the same time expressing an avowed thoughtfulness of musical intention. It is an eclectic/​ serious mix that extends to instrumental choices, in particular those with strange and unusual connotations. Here is ?Shmaltz!’s Carsten Wegener talking through the textural decisions underpinning the beautiful and haunting ballad that finishes off the band’s recording Gran Bufet.85 This is “Es iz shoyn shpet,”86 which you might know, in a different arrangement. That’s a saw. So here for me the thing which made the song special was the idea of this banjo lick with the toy piano, this is the fundament of the song. And that was the point we said, OK, we have the parts. Sounds beautiful whatever you play it on, but this is what made it special. And the violin, she’s a baroque violinist, she has this beautiful sound. And it’s not klezmer, it’s new. And in the background comes an instrument, a baroque instrument but a bit like a saxophone: a dulcian, sounds like a mixture of an oboe and saxophone.87 83 On the band’s website, for example, accordionist Chris Lyons was named only as “mystery man,” and represented by an image of a cow in a field. 84 Personal interview, Kreuzberg, Berlin, June 9, 2014. 85 Singapore, AYCE02 (2011). 86 Yiddish: “It’s already late.” ?Shmaltz! have given the song a new title: “Levunesca.” 87 Personal interview, Friedrichshain, Berlin, May 2, 2014.

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heterogeneous musical influence is not a barrier to clarity of musical intention. What ties these groups together, however, is not simply eclecticism but a self-​conscious playfulness with regard to the tradition of which they are (at times tangentially) a part. One area where this playfulness is manifest is in the fantasized origin myths that these groups exploit. In ?Shmaltz!’s case this involves the creation of an entire country, a language, and a collection of suitably idiosyncratic characters—​discussed at length in ­chapter 4. Knoblauch Klezmer Band are content with a looser and more obscure biography,83 but for violinist Eli Fabrikant, this apparent lack of seriousness has an important counterpart:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  71

88 Sakina’s repertoire also included the well-​known Yiddish ballad “Di Sapozhkelekh” (The little shoes), subsequently recorded by The Klezmatics, Forshpil, and many others. On Sakina and Alpert, see Wood (2016). 89 Pinorrekk Records, PRCD 3405027. It is this arrangement that Wegener is referring to above. 90 A  slow,  processional dance with a characteristic pulse on beats 1 and 3 (see Appendix 1). Note that the klezmer hora is distinct—​in meter, tempo, mood, and steps—​from the Israeli hora folk dance.

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?Shmaltz!’s version of this song is revealing on several levels. The song is from the repertoire of Ukrainian-​born Bronya Sakina88 and was also recorded by Michael Alpert on the 1997 Brave Old World album Blood Oranges under the title “Daybreak.”89 Already, then, networks of old and new, near and far, are making themselves felt, connecting historical performers and their repertoire, revival-​era musicians and the contemporary Berlin scene. Alpert’s personal connection with Bronya Sakina (from whom he learned the song), his own reworking of the piece with Brave Old World, and his central place in present-​day networks of dissemination such as Yiddish Summer Weimar act as a bridge between the song’s historical roots and its contemporary existence. In a nod to Brave Old World’s cimbalom opening, ?Shmaltz!’s recording begins with a creeping  banjo line, outlining a stepwise harmonic movement. It is accompanied by ghostly toy piano minims, to which Detlef Pegelow adds his growling vocal. Pegelow’s delivery is free with timing and pitch, almost spoken at times; his “old man’s” voice treads a fine line between knowing cliché and the impression of not simply having lived through this night but a whole life. The feeling is otherwordly, sparse in its sound but rich in a certain sort of stripped-​back nostalgia (figure 2.7). This curiously yearning mood is augmented by the appearance of musical saw and then violin, which adds discreet counterlines before stating the tune itself. For the first half of the recording, the whole arrangement remains in this state of quiet intensity. With the reappearance of the vocal, banjo and toy piano drop out, the banjo’s lilting attack now replaced by long string chords whose overlapping notes cloud the harmonic movement and meter. The banjo returns, this time with accordion and bowed bass, but as it does, the time signature changes to a slow and dark , the rhythm marked with heavy chords on beats 1 and 3. At the end of Detlef ’s wordless refrain, a raspy dulcian begins an extravagant solo (played by Adrian Rovatkay), matched by contrapuntal string lines from Claudia Mende. The mood has shifted, subtly but dramatically, to a full and rich klezmer hora,90 revealing

72  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

a loping pulse and a new level of emotional and textural density—​stark romanticism matched now by a more powerful and committed vocalese (figure 2.8). The musical impression achieved through the overlap from  ballad to  hora creates a sense that this level of intensity was in fact latent right from the opening banjo line, but required the whole journey thus far in order to gather enough momentum to be convincing (and develop the necessary emotional punch). The sonic movement from the other-​world texture of the banjo /​ toy piano /​ saw opening to the lolloping, ponderous, and yet deeply moving full-​band hora is powerful and affective—​a sort of simultaneous past/​future longing. Rooted in Berlin’s musical eclecticism, the “shoyn shpet” of the title becomes the emotion of a whole life, lived both joyfully and harshly.

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Figure 2.7  “Levunesca” (opening bars), from Gran Bufet (?Shmaltz!, 2011).

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Figure 2.8  “Levunesca” (instrumental to end), from Gran Bufet (?Shmaltz!, 2011).

74  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I came to Berlin because my sister was living here. I didn’t know what Berlin was but I just didn’t want to return to Israel. . . . And then for me the switch was there, and I  thought, OK, I  have to start playing klezmer seriously. Honestly saying, I don’t want to lie at all, this is really real for me. I’ve been playing gypsy and Balkan music for nine, ten years now. But specifically klezmer and also really going into depth, listening, transcribing, slowing down and understanding exactly, how did he do this krekhts91—​this is really recent years. And so I’m not an expert and I don’t want to feel as an expert, but I think that I define myself as an enthusiast and someone that really cares. I don’t care that they do this particular ornament instead of this one, but I do care that they understand the difference between them.92

Equally important to all the fantasist bands is the diversity of their musical makeup, and musicians will frequently point out the breadth of experience and sound this brings to the ensemble. The Jewish Ukrainian violinist Marina Bondas explains how each member of her German-​Russian-​Ukrainian klezmer band Di Meschugeles understands their ensemble role in more than purely instrumental terms: Somehow everybody from the band has different backgrounds. Accordion had also classical education but he plays a lot of swing and Balkan. And our saxophone/​clarinet, he’s a jazzer. When he came to us he didn’t know nothing about klezmer, but he brings this modern jazz. . . . But the one thing that we take care very much about is the sound of klezmer. This is especially my homework!93



91 A characteristic klezmer ornament consisting of an échappé grace note. See Appendix 1. 92 Personal interview, 2014.

93 Personal interview, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, August 18, 2014.

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As we can see, this is more than simply dressing up and throwing lots of instruments at a piece of music. For the fantasists discussed here, such self-​aware flamboyance often belies a deeper artistic intention. Knoblauch Klezmer Band’s violinist Eli Fabrikant is a Riga-​born Israeli citizen who has made Berlin his home for the past decade. A classically trained musician who came to klezmer through Irish music, tango, and subsequently Balkan music, he has worked hard to develop a personal relationship to the klezmer that he discovered since moving to the city:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  75

But saying, OK, it’s Berlin, those guys have nothing to do with Jewish culture or klezmer per se, but they love the vibe and this is how they express it. And also, seeing what happens in performances, and slowly understanding the Knoblauch meaning of the Knoblauch Klezmer Band, and we’re still defining it. . . . And I think the bottom line, it’s so much fun. When you play onstage with a drummer who wears a tiger costume and I’m wearing this ridiculous hat, it just frees something, it’s so much more fun to play.95

Instead of musical or performative conclusions, these groups are happy to live with incongruity and contradiction—​in Eli’s words, “trying to hold both.” Their freedom is a deliberately ambiguous one. It fits well with the wider ambiguity and in-​the-​moment aesthetic of Berlin, and is also one of the reasons why these bands overlap a great deal with the city’s Balkan and Latin music club scene. This is also a musical response that deliberately opens up a space for questioning (discussed in c­ hapter  4), and it is here that the fantasists overlap most closely with my next category.

Transformers This final category explores a complex set of paradigms, centered more directly on Jewish identity and its social and political context. All the musicians that make up this category are Jewish, most have come from somewhere else, and almost all make at least some part of their artistic mission the self-​aware deconstruction of conventional oppositions:  between here and there, between Jewish and non-​Jewish, and between history and modernity.

94 We might also note a link to the topsy-​turvy stage costumes of historical Purimshpilers (see Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, 1980:6). 95 Personal interview.

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A level of fantasy can also open up a certain intensity of personal connection. It is as if a lighthearted and deliberately playful aesthetic in fact makes more room for an explicit and deep emotional link, the childlike ludic dimension more successfully eliciting an honest and uncluttered response. For some, to dress up and explore a self-​consciously fantastical world is therefore to tap certain feelings perceived as absent from the clichés of “traditional” klezmer semiotics.94 Eli Fabrikant refers this directly back to the city itself:

76  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I think on a superficial level when you’re making mediocre klezmer or Yiddish music, yeah, it relies heavily on a lot of un-​deconstructed clichés, a lot of stereotypes and stuff. But the same is true of any mediocre music, you can either go deep or not. And I don’t think that all kitsch is bad; I think we can play with the kitsch. We can play with levels of irony and levels of recontextualization, you know. Free exchange of signs and signifiers. I don’t know, sure there are clichés with klezmer, but I try to own them as much as I fight them.96

We will hear from this speaker again throughout. In this section I am going to concentrate on two other artists. Trumpeter Paul Brody was born in California but in the early 1990s “left the beautiful hills of California to live in Berlin to do artsy stuff.”97 A jazz and classical musician by training, he has taught klezmer in Berlin and Germany and written music for radio, the stage, and his bands Tango Toy and Sadawi, as well as composing a number of highly sophisticated sound installations. Several things go into Brody’s creative pot: relentless improvisation, a network of collaborators each with a strongly individual voice, a connection to a sense of Jewishness, and a reluctance to stay still: Playing klezmer music in a band under my name feels funny when I don’t transform the music into something else. I have a tic. I have to play it in some other way. When I’m with a group of klezmer musicians playing traditional, I enjoy that thoroughly, and I enjoy listening. But there’s a thing

96 Dan Kahn, personal interview.

97 Paul Brody, personal interview.

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This group shares the fantasists’ playful approach and their aesthetic of mixing styles, genres, and languages, but they differ in the musical result. Where the fantasists remain within a recognizable “folk” aesthetic, the transformers could equally be filed under rock, jazz, pop, or singer-​ songwriter. And although transformers also embrace the bizarre and the mythical, they frequently use fluidity and ambiguity in a more provocative and politically charged way. Where their artistic methods may nod toward the postmodern (formal juxtaposition, stylistic and linguistic interplay), these methods are often underpinned by a self-​conscious engagement with some of the stickier issues of musical identity:

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  77 about me being onstage with those melodies that makes me do something with those melodies.98

So I would play these concerts and the band would be booked as a klezmer band. . . . Many of the audience would want to hear some semblance of klezmer music and even traditional. So here’s the second part. In order to bring those people into the music, I found stories to talk about the music, to bring them into the music. I found when I told people stories, their ears opened up to my style of music. It was very interesting. That’s sort of a human nature thing: if you get to know somebody, you’re more likely to tolerate their bullshit [laughs].99

Brody’s stories often intersect with his own deeply held connection to Judaism, a connection initially activated through music. And so we were playing at Jewish festivals and world music festivals. Alan was asking me to play the free klezmer duos in Krakow. And then I thought, wow, I’m so involved in Jewish culture, in music—​for hours I sat at home learning klezmer tunes, transcribing from recordings, you know, doing that kind of homework, scribbling the ornaments, and really learning, just swimming in that sound. And then, it was at that time, also, that my kids were starting to talk and walk. Wow, OK, I’m actually from a Jewish family and I have a son now, what are we going to do? So at the same time, having kids awoke that consciousness. And then the two came together and I  started going to the synagogue and I  was taking Hebrew lessons. Not Hebrew lessons to go to Israel and speak Hebrew, but Hebrew lessons to learn about the tradition. And my goal was to learn about the culture

98 Ibid. 99 Ibid.

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While many artists imaginatively combine influences and genres, these musicians foreground the transformation of their material. In Brody’s case this often means a strong connection to the freer end of jazz improvisation in performance, allied with some of jazz’s formal structures in much of his compositional output. Yet through this transformative process, surprising connections to tradition can be made. As with the fantasists, innovation suggests a deeper link:

78  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

The musicians in this category do indeed lead something of a double musical life. Like the modernists, most are deeply involved with the performance and dissemination of klezmer and Yiddish music in its traditional form, whether in Weimar (where many also learned their klezmer), KlezKanada, or Krakow. But all are also creative drivers in pushing forward new projects that deliberately take this repertoire in radically new directions. Riga-​born singer Sasha Lurje and accordionist Ilya Shneyveys’s Yiddish rock band Forshpil, founded over ten years ago, is based in Berlin but comprises Russian and Latvian musicians. Forshpil play traditional klezmer melodies and sing traditional Yiddish songs, but accompany them with synthesizers, electric guitar, and drum patterns that bear more resemblance to Jon Bonham than Ben Bazyler.102 Ilya plays a range of electronic keyboards, utilizing both his klezmer accordion technique (Alexander 2020) and his love of modal jazz progressions.103 Singer Sasha (­figure 2.9) has spent, and continues to spend, a long time researching Yiddish song and Hasidic nigunim104—​knowledge and experience that for her is fully transferable to a rock band context: There is a combination of knowledge and gut [laughs]. With Forshpil it’s a very interesting thing, because I believe that I have developed a certain vocal style for Forshpil, a lot of it is very close to this unaccompanied ballad style. . . . But I don’t want to sound like old folk, and of course I take something from this and I take something from that, and later I started to develop an understanding of this style in general. When you copy everything one to one, then more and more you kind of have an understanding of what it all could be. And then I started adding to it what I felt is appropriate, 100 A duple-​meter klezmer dance popularized in the United States by Dave Tarras (Feldman 2002). 101 Personal interview. 102 Jon Bonham was the drummer with Led Zeppelin; Ben Bazyler was a klezmer drummer born in 1922 (see Alpert 2002). 103 Appropriately, Shneyveys got his first accordion (in 2003) in order to do an acoustic gig with his punk rock bank, with whom he usually played keyboards. 104 Sung melodies (with or without texts), based in communal Hasidic music-​making practice (singular nigun). On Hasidic music’s influence upon klezmer, see Wood (2007a), Feldman (2016), and Beregovski (2000:299).

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and not just do it on stage—​that felt really weird and shallow. Especially in Germany. In America, it’s like [heavy West Coast surfer accent], “Yeah cool, klezmer, woah duuuude! DUUUDE! I fucking love a bulgar!100 Play a backbeat on that bulgar!” You know what I mean? But in Germany, it’s a funny feeling.101

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  79 and that’s how the Forshpil style developed. Also, when you have a rock band going DJ-​DJ-​DJ-​DAA-​DAA, you can’t go “ah, dee-​dli-​dee”! You have to find this in that energy.105

105 Sasha Lurje, personal interview, Kreuzberg, Berlin, January 21, 2014. 106 Forshpil (CD Baby, 887516009440, 2012). 107 Joel Rubin Jewish Music Ensemble, Beregovski’s Khasene (Beregovski’s Wedding):  Forgotten Instrumental Treasures from the Ukraine (Weltmusik, SM 1614-​2). 108 The Doors’ keyboard and guitar player, both notable for their layered accompaniment and solo patterns, which gave the band its characteristically dark sound.

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A nice example of Forshpil’s “knowledge and gut,” and of their urge to transform, comes in the form of their recording of “Volekhl.”106 This is a piece from Beregovski and Fefer’s 1938 Yidishe folks-​lider collection, made popular in klezmer circles through clarinetist Joel Rubin’s 1997 recording (where former Forshpil guitarist Sasha Aleksandrov learned the tune).107 In Rubin’s version “Volekhl” is a gentle and lyrical  D-​minor melody, accompanied subtly by cimbalom and accordion. Rubin’s interpretation is a freely personal one that nevertheless keeps track of the melodic line, stretching and contracting note durations subtly and expressively. In Forshpil’s recording, however, we see a dramatic change in the sonic texture. Acoustic cimbalom and accordion give way to synth bass and Fender Rhodes electric piano, and legato clarinet is replaced by the edgier sound of Aleksandrov’s electric guitar. But the group do more than simply alter instrumentation. Here the stately  has been turned into a bubbling , notched up several bpm in the process. The recording begins with a distorted electronic glissando that settles rapidly into an ostinato bassline. In a clear nod to the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” cymbal fills, sparse Rhodes chords, and guitar atmospherics set up a dark and brooding groove, over which the guitar picks out the volekhl melody tightly and without ornamentation. Straddling an ambiguous rhythmic pulse, the  backbeat is only made explicit in the tune’s third section, at which point lighter Rhodes chords and counterlines join with the guitar to shore up the melodic line. The tune is stated just once straight through before giving way to an extended improvised middle section twice as long as the melodic statement itself—​once again highly reminiscent of Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger’s fluid combination of motivic repetition and atmospheric “noise.”108 As things settle down, the volekhl tune snakes its way back in for one complete reprise, this time voiced by Ilya Shneyveys on a sinewy melodica.

80  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

The transformer klezmer aesthetic is one of constant questioning, a series of “what-​ifs” applied to traditional music. It is an aesthetics of hybridity, a juxtaposition of modernity and history that in the process reveals the music’s continued connectedness. Another of Forshpil’s tracks, “Fraytik,” superimposes a 1920s doina109 recording by violinist Abe Schwartz over the contemporary (self-​consciously retro) sound of the band’s Hendrix-​esque

109

See Appendix 1.

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Figure 2.9  Forshpil’s Sasha Lurje and Roman Shinder, Gorki Theater, February 2014.

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  81 backing—​once again highlighting a creative tension between relentless probing and musical legacy. For the transformers, to continually innovate is in fact to be true to the music’s roots; to repeat Paul Brody, the tradition is very much “not holding on.”

Clearly, then, this also includes a level of fantasy, or at least a confrontation of history. For this group, history and location are rarely neutral: the continued presence of Yiddish music and klezmer in Berlin inevitably enfolds an ideological dimension. This is reinforced by geography, in that the musicians here all originate from somewhere else—​America, Russia, Latvia. Consequently, at least part of what underpins their art is a discussion of what it means to choose to make Jewish music in Germany—​taking in questions of nation, identity, belonging, and estrangement. Paul Brody’s 2010 Sadawi recording was ironically titled Far from Moldova, a reference to his time spent working with Roma musicians as part of Alan Bern’s Other Europeans project (and feeling “awkward and out of place in the group”).112 In 2011, Brody (­figure  2.10) created a five-​part sound installation entitled Voice Melody Portraits for the Jewish Museum Berlin, foregrounding the intersections of storytelling and Jewish migration, and in 2019 he completed a sound installation at Toronto’s Canadian Language Museum. The Music of Yiddish Blessings 110 The former music editor of the long-​running Yiddish newspaper Forverts. Notwithstanding Sasha’s apprehensions, Gottesman has often been a champion of new Yiddish music. In his review of Forshpil’s eponymous first album, he writes: “The Riga group ‘Forshpil’ has decided to fit old Yiddish songs to the new sounds of world music and rock ’n’ roll. The group is not the first to go in this direction. But, in my opinion, they are the best of the crop of recent years.” From “Yiddish Music in the 21st Century, Forshpil: Rock ‘n’ Roll klezmer from Riga,” January 11, 2013, available online at https://​ yiddish2.forward.com/​node/​4893, accessed September 30, 2019. 111 Sasha Lurje, personal interview. 112 Liner notes to the CD (ML7001).

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[Forshpil] is another way of dealing with what this repertoire can be. For many people what we do will sound not “traditional,” but when we played this to Itzik Gottesman,110 who, you know, I was kind of like a little—​he comes across as such a traditionalist—​that I had even a little bit of a fear. He loved it! Because he could hear that it’s traditional, just played with different instruments, you know, and that’s what is important, we’re imagining—​it’s like this fantasy, this is what we can do with it. We can fantasize, what would have happened if? If history was different? Or, you know, if we hadn’t, I don’t want to say lost it, but had this downfall. And what if we were playing this music with these instruments, what if Pink Floyd was playing this music?111

82  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I made a CD in German, as part of a dedication to living in Berlin, and to working with the German language, although my German needs improvement. And it also has something to do with my own family history, because my grandfather from my father’s side is from Kiev in the Ukraine, and I  also like Rosa Ausländer, her Viennese roots, and Romanian roots. . . . In addition, her poems spoke to me with a sense of questioning place. Do I belong here, or do I belong somewhere else? Is this the language that I’m speaking? That’s what she asks in her poetry often. And actually, my home is in my words, my home is in the sound of my breath, it’s all I have.115

Here the context of modern Berlin strikingly overlaps with musical practice. The recent internationalism of the city and its longer twentieth-​century cultural sediment of under-​the-​surface outsider status endow the city with a particular urban ethos (Krims 2007). Contemporary Berlin is a welcoming city and yet a place that retains a certain strangeness—​a sense of secrets to be uncovered, stories to be unlocked: This city-​text has been written, erased, and rewritten throughout this violent century. . . . The goal is nothing less than to create the capital of the twenty-​first century, but this vision finds itself persistently haunted by the past. (Huyssen 1997:59–​60)

This makes the city a unique node on the klezmer intercultural network, a home to subcultural innovation backed up by a complex and ambiguous national and international history. And alongside an avowed and progressive



113

http://​paulbrody.net/​news/​lorem-​ipsum-​dolor-​sit-​amet-​consectetur-​adipiscing-​elit-​3/​. Hinter Allen Worten /​Behind All Worlds: ENJA 7737 (2013). 115 Paul Brody, personal interview. 114

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and Curses project brought together an international group of musicians on the “Berlin-​Vienna-​Toronto klezmer scene” with two generations of Toronto Yiddish speakers, to explore the shift from a “conversational to a melodic, almost singing voice, through the uttering of a [Yiddish] blessing or a curse.”113 Connections across voice, music, and place run deeply through much of Brody’s work, perhaps most clearly in his 2013 CD, a series of pieces set to the poems of Rosa Ausländer:114

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  83

internationalism, an exploration of Jewishness is more important to the transformer project than any of the other categories. This lends these works a distinctively political edge, although with significantly varied articulations. Where Forshpil posits an ongoing hypothetical trajectory of Yiddish music, Paul Brody addresses his own liminal sense of insider/​outsider in a more oblique way. And Daniel Kahn, as ­chapter  4 illustrates, confronts in a far more direct and provocative manner his identity as a Jewish musician in Germany.

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Figure 2.10  Californian Berliner Paul Brody in his local Schöneberg bar, September 2014.

84  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Deliberately eschewing any sort of Jewish essentialism, this is a contingent and cosmopolitan search, comfortably embracing an inevitable hybridity and sense of the in-​between:

Where she has frequently been a part of various Klezmertage and Kulturtage performances, Sasha’s occasional lack of access to certain grants because of her non-​halakhic Jewish status also points to the interference of supercultural restrictions on artistic practice (and ethnic identity).117 At the same time, the sense of “not belonging” has its subcultural resonances, reflected in the heterogeneity of the Yiddish creative networks of which she and many of the artists covered here form a fundamental part. Watching Lurje and Dan Kahn in an ad hoc performance at Mitte’s Kaffee Burger, I was struck by how skillfully they straddle this parallel sense of the familiar and the strange, to deploy what Homi Bhabha (1996:58) calls “the partial culture . . . to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory”: Dan looks like a 1960s Brooklyn hustler:  pork pie hat, waistcoat over (expanding) belly, full beard and quick eyes. One original song solo, two Yiddish ones with Sasha (one workers’ song, one ganef118 love song). It is curious to see younger people performing Yiddish material unselfconsciously. They are at home with the language and the idiom, and yet there is still something foreign about it, perhaps because they are not singing to a community of Yiddish speakers—​or at least not native ones. It is both

116

Sasha Lurje, personal interview. In all forms of orthodox Judaism, lineage is passed down through the maternal line. 118 Yiddish: thief. 117

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For me it’s not exactly that way. I feel a belonging to Latvia, obviously—​I was born in the country, I’m a citizen of Latvia. But I’m a citizen of it also by chance. My mother didn’t get citizenship when Latvia became independent again in the early ’90s, because her family wasn’t from Latvia—​my father’s family was. My first language was Russian, so even though I spoke Latvian quite well, I still had an accent, I could never completely belong. But I wasn’t always completely Russian, because I was also a little bit Jewish. And I also wasn’t enough Jewish, because my mother isn’t Jewish. You know, I always was, like, on some level, not belonging completely to a certain group, and I always thought it shouldn’t be that important. . . . It’s a relief to be in a place where I don’t have to be any of these things.116

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  85

Berlin in relation to the wider scene Where networks may be patterned by strong or weak ties, hubs, and intermediaries, musicians themselves often operate freely across all of these. Wider inter-​band networks are facilitated by shared performance spaces, mutual information exchange, and overlapping musical contexts. Moreover, many of the musicians interviewed and discussed are tied in important ways to wider transnational networks—​structured by international workshops, artistic collaborations, recording projects, and festival appearances. Daniel Kahn, for example, is part of a fully internationalized Yiddish network that includes musical performers, composers, actors, poets and playwrights, scholars and researchers, journalists, and teachers. He is a regular collaborator with musicians around the world, including Americans Michael Winograd, Jake Shulman-​Ment, and Michael Alpert; Russians Psoy Korolenko and Vanya Zhuk; and Israel’s Oy Division. Kahn has shared stages with Yiddish singers such as Theodore Bikel and Adrienne Cooper, led workshops in Oxford and New York, and in 2016 appeared as Biff in the New Yiddish Rep’s production of Toyt fun a seylsman (Luba Kadison’s Yiddish-​ language version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman). These intercultural networks find their resonances in prewar Yiddish cultural production (Katz 2004), but in light of today’s decline in native Yiddish constituencies (outside of ultra-​Orthodox communities),119 they assume a particular cultural and social value. 119 On Yiddish’s growing nonnative constituency, see Kahn (2016); also Shandler’s (2006) “postvernacular” Yiddish.

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familiar (a youngish couple singing folky songs with a guitar) and unfamiliar: a language in which they are at home even though it is not their own or part of their immediate daily life. Perhaps this canny/​uncanny alienation is part of the point. And they are very hip. Sasha looks modern and funky, Dan looks like he should be in the Strokes. No sense of Yiddish kitsch, but also no sense of classical “properness.” More trendy East Village duo than heritage performance. Moves Yiddish music into alt-​folk. And it fits. Their singing style too is modern folky: not too much hand-​wringing, not too many jokes to camera. But also enough Yiddishisms to keep it feeling credible, and cool.

86  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

120 Slepovitch and Lurje’s multi-​language 2018 project Goyfriend explored the historical image of Jews as seen by their co-​territorial Eastern European neighbours. 121 Fürth’s biennial Klezmer Festival (founded 1988), Insul’s Open Klezmer Scales, and Yiddish Summer Weimar, for example. Also important here are international festivals such as London’s KlezFest, Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, KlezKanada, and KlezKamp. 122 Sher on a Shier, for example, includes musicians from Berlin, Erfurt, Bad Endbach, and Würzburg.

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Other artists exhibit correspondingly wide-​ reaching connectivity. Trumpeter Paul Brody is an important side figure in the Berlin klezmer scene, but his musical and artistic networks reach far beyond it, into theater music, radio programs, and occasional poetry—​and arguably it is as a jazz musician that he would principally define himself. Singer Sasha Lurje teaches workshops and gives conference presentations around the world. Like Kahn, she works regularly with musicians from America, Russia, and elsewhere, including clarinetist and ethnomusicologist Zisl Slepovitch’s Brooklyn-​based Litvakus ensemble.120 Similarly, Karsten Troyke’s creative output extends beyond Yiddish song to chanson, “Sinti swing,” and mixed programs of readings with music. He also collaborates regularly with Australian violinist Daniel Weltlinger. And a musician such as Alan Bern operates across the whole German and international scene, often working at the center of several overlapping networks (Yiddish Summer Weimar, Semer Ensemble, the klezmer accordion, and historically Brave Old World and their workshops in Germany). Ever since the 1980s, Germany has been developing an extensive network of klezmer workshops and festivals,121 featuring many of the performers covered in this book. Aside from an important income stream, these events facilitate both national and international connections—​some of which develop into ongoing ensembles.122 Singer Andrea Pancur and Ilya Shneyveys’s Alpen Klezmer project, a recording and concert program based loosely in Pancur’s home city of Munich, brings together Bavarian musicians with many of the finest klezmer players on the German scene, as well as international performers such as the London-​based drummer Guy Schalom and Americans Lorin Sklamberg and Joel Rubin. The ongoing Yiddish music connections of Pancur and Shneyveys—​forged through workshops, festivals, and concerts—​are thus tied into the very different network of Bavarian musicians from Pancur’s own local scene. Most of the musicians discussed here do not make their living from performing in Berlin. In fact, Berlin is nowadays a notoriously difficult city in which to make a living as a musician of any sort, let  alone a klezmer

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So, yeah, I mean the musicians who are playing klezmer now, they don’t perform so much in Berlin, because there is this paradox, you know there is no money really in Berlin. So nobody performs here for money, which is, you know, like, you might as well play a concert or do a session, it can be pretty much the same.123

As the most regular opportunity for musicians to actually play in their hometown, non-​or poorly paying musical events in Berlin therefore assume a greater significance. This goes some way to explaining the increased musical and social importance of the city’s three klezmer jam sessions discussed in ­chapter 3. Until the 1970s revival, the word “klezmer” referred almost exclusively to a musician, rather than a type of music. As a related aside, then, we might also note here a semantic—​and cultural—​shift from the historical klezmer’s original role as a professional musician to the generally accepted definition of contemporary klezmer as folk music.124 This linguistic movement parallels 123 Personal interview. 124 This extends beyond liner notes and journalism. The back cover of Mark Slobin’s 2002 edited volume American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots describes klezmer as “the Yiddish word for folk instrumental musician,” and the English language editions of Beregovski’s collected work (2000,

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musician. Creativity, social-​artistic networks, and enthusiasm run high, and for a European capital city it remains a relatively cheap place to live—​ hence the large numbers of artistic residents and new arrivals. Actual performance fees, however, are largely low (or nonexistent). Consequently, many musicians who, in clarinetist Christian Dawid’s formulation, “call Berlin their home, or their base, or at least one of their homes” in fact travel away from this home regularly and for long periods, earning their keep from performances and teaching outside their city. Dawid, for example, has played for many years with the Bremen Clarinet Quartet, while his ex-​partner, accordionist Sanne Möricke, plays with the Bremen band Klezgoyim (although both still live in Berlin). Both musicians tour widely and often—​frequently with multinational ensembles—​and they are regular participants at Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival and klezmer festivals throughout Europe and North America, along with many of the musicians covered here. Of course, numerous musicians around the world tour regularly or travel long distances to work. But as Ilya Shneyveys points out, this lack of well-​ paid gigs has a distinctive effect on the Berlin scene:

88  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

2001) refer repeatedly to klezmer as “folk music.” See Appendix 1 on the changing meanings of the word “klezmer.”

125

An exception is the Jewish Museum Berlin (see c­ hapters 3 and 5).

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an economic one:  klezmer’s transition from established profession (and clear sociocultural function) to a looser, socially oriented, less job-​based, identity—​manifested in jam sessions, workshops, and perhaps philosophical approach. However, while it will become clear that klezmer in Berlin (and elsewhere) often fits within a more communal, less professional, structure, this is not an inevitable consequence of becoming a “folk musician.” If the distinction between “professional” and “folk” (i.e., amateur) has historically been invoked by folk revivalists to signify a less explicitly materialistic approach to music making, these lines by now have become far more blurred. All the musicians here migrate easily between community-​based musical events and more formalized professional environments, and contextualize their musical identities with reference to both. The same overlaps can be seen in much contemporary European folk music, such as Scottish, Irish, Breton, or flamenco music. Contemporary klezmer is an international and transnational phenomenon, and Berlin’s klezmer spaces and communities have their equivalents in other major cities, most notably New York. Several differences between the two cities are worth noting, however. While New York is a much more expensive place to live, there also exists within the city considerable economic opportunity for klezmer musicians, in the form of weddings and other functions for the city’s large (orthodox and non-​orthodox) Jewish community—​ an opportunity which is far smaller for Berlin’s klezmer players. Possessed of a sense of coherence and continuity that contemporary Berlin lacks, New York’s Jewish cultural network is also home to institutions such as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a global hub of Yiddish scholarship, performance, and education. While the Central Council (Zentralrat) of Jews in Germany regularly organizes concerts in Jewish communities throughout the country and also maintains a database of artists working in Jewish culture, it neither hosts performances nor holds a central position in the German klezmer and Yiddish music network. A lack of contact with—​or support from—​parts of the city’s established Jewish community (and its official bodies) was occasionally mentioned by some of my interviewees.125 Returning to a comparison with New York, we should note that that city’s klezmer revival grew directly out of Jewish networks

The Music in Berlin: Musical Networks  89

I had an idea for a (Zentralrat touring) program and I wanted to engage a friend of mine. He is an Israeli Arab who plays oud, and I thought that would be amazing if we could do something together. He’s living in Berlin now, and I met him. And he, immediately and directly, and I have a lot of respect for that, immediately and directly he said, “If we do this, what am I actually doing here?” And one of the first things he said was, “I don’t want to say yes to you now and then get to a place and have to play music on a stage where behind me is an Israeli flag. I don’t want to be doing that!” And I totally get that, and that’s exactly the point. Because you don’t know. The fact that you’re going to a Jewish community doesn’t mean that you’re going to a Zionist community! But I can’t rule it out.127

The Feidman legacy This book would not be complete without some discussion of the students and disciples of the Argentinian-​Israeli clarinetist and musical-​spiritual ambassador Giora Feidman. Rubin (2015a) and Gruber (2002) have both written extensively about Feidman and his influence, and this is taken up fully in c­ hapter 6. Although Feidman’s musical legacy in Germany is still felt, 126 Zev Feldman, an organizer of (and performer in) the 1978 Tribute to Dave Tarras concert, described the event as “a major cultural catharsis for New York Jews” (Feldman 2016:xvii). 127 Tom Dayan, Israeli jazz drummer living in Berlin. Personal interview, August 12, 2014, Pankow, Berlin.

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and institutions (YIVO, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance) and thus involved members of the New York Jewish community from the start.126 This kind of effusive and confident Jewish cultural presence is in marked contrast to West Berlin’s more fragile and insular postwar Jewish community (Weiss 2004), and the contradictions of Jewish life in East Berlin have already been noted. The fact that klezmer in Germany was initially performed and consumed by a majority of non-​Jewish Germans may also have contributed to a certain distance on the part of official Jewish organizations. There are guarded hopes among some of Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish musicians that this will (gradually) change, and many of the artists in this book have taken part in concert tours to smaller Jewish communities around Germany, organized by the Zentralrat. At the same time, some musicians point knowingly to potential conflicts of ideology:

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Because elements of traditional style were not important to Feidman, his followers felt empowered to each seek their own path with the music. (Rubin 2015a:220–​11)

One interesting network effect is discernible in Feidman’s legacy. The Klezmer-​Gesellschaft e.V. (Klezmer Society) was founded in Berlin in 1990

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critical opinion has frequently been negative (Birnbaum 2009). His loose humanism is also decidedly less popular among the Berlin musicians whom I interviewed, its easy-​going spirituality and inclusiveness deconstructed as heavy on guru-​like platitudes but lacking in musical substance. At Yiddish Summer Weimar 2014, Feidman’s name was occasionally invoked as a subtle(ish) shorthand for shallow and clichéd musical thought. Nevertheless, his pre-​millennial popularity is undeniable, and several musicians I met at Yiddish Summer Weimar had been part of trips that Feidman organized for young German musicians to play at Israel’s Safed klezmer festival, an experience that had left them with a lifelong love of the music. Although I do not wish to enter deeply into pro-​/​anti-​debates, my stance is that the ahistoricism of Feidman and his followers offers little to a study based on the interaction between music and the city. Here, therefore, I will point up why I feel that they do not speak to this same material and symbolic relationship. Currently the most successful Feidman-​influenced musician is the clarinetist Dawid Orlowsky (b. 1981), an artist who Feidman himself dubbed the “next Giora Feidman” (Rubin 2015a:218). Orlowsky is a versatile musician, and klezmer makes up only a part of his output, which includes chamber music collaborations, jazz, and world music. His klezmer trio (Jens-​Uwe Popp on guitar and Florian Dohrmann on bass) includes a large number of original compositions influenced by Balkan meters, jazz, and contemporary art music. Despite recordings of the work of Brandwein, Tarras, and others, Orlowsky’s playing often shows more of Feidman’s influence than anything else. His booking agency, Opus 3, includes in its roster chamber ensembles and conductors, as well as a large number of successful world music projects such as cellist Yo-​Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, banjo player Bela Fleck, and guitar duo Sérgio and Odair Assad. This is clearly a very different performance network from those outlined above. Although Orlowsky is based in Berlin, there is thus little about his music to root him to the city, either in terms of performance space or musical approach—​a fact very much in keeping with the Feidman aesthetic and philosophy:

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These musicians, the Klezmorim, performed at Jewish weddings, Bar-​ Mitzvahs and other celebrations. They usually were Jewish, but not necessarily. They usually played at Jewish celebrations—​but not only. . . . The style of playing and the repertoire are characterized by both the tradition, vivid modifications and new perceptions. That is exactly, what we now call klezmer music.129

Although its website remains online, the Klezmer-​Gesellschaft is no longer operational as an organization. Arguably, the scene has now overtaken the need for this kind of formalized structure, developing instead its own more organic internal processes. One of the society’s main figures, clarinetist Helmut Eisel, remains highly active as a performer and composer. Eisel led the society’s Klezmer Orchestra and has given workshops throughout Germany. His approach synthesizes elements of jazz and klezmer, but his philosophy is explicitly derived from Feidman. In a 2002 online article, Eisel sets his ideological orientation directly against a more technical/​functional definition: As musicians we are seekers all our lives, and klezmer music can bring us answers that we have not found in our own culture. Seen in this light our definition might look something like this: “Whoever plays from an inner attitude of passing on music (instead of producing music), whoever sees themselves as a “vessel of song” (= Kli Zemer), is a Klezmer.”130 128 Klezmer-​Gesellschaft website, http://​www.ta-​deti.de/​klezmer/​english/​dkg_​e.html, accessed September 30, 2019. 129 Ibid. Italics mine. 130 “Klezmermusik—​Neue Impulse für die Musik durch Kli Zemer,” Virtual Klezmer website, http://​www.klezmer.de/​D_​Klezmer/​D_​aufsatz/​Eisel.html, accessed September 30,  2019.

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as a union of amateur and professional musicians, friends and patrons, with the aim of “support[ing] actual and traditional musical styles of different cultures . . . to allow a communication between different cultures and to meet and to become acquainted with each other.”128 The society included Feidman himself among its membership and promoted workshops, concerts at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and meetings for information exchange. As both Birnbaum (2009) and Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett (2002) have pointed out, the society took some care to distance itself from the Jewishness of the music that it represented:

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Conclusion While overlap, adaptability, and restless development characterize much of my discussion, this chapter has nevertheless highlighted several distinct positions—​points on a map of what klezmer music is (or might be). None makes an exclusive claim on “correct” klezmer practice. Instead, they are 131 Harry’s Freilach’s live 1998 recording from the Hackesches Hoftheater, for example, consists mostly of tunes composed or popularized by Feidman, such as “The Sounds of Safed,” “Ballade for a Klezmer,” and “The Blessing Nigun.”

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This separation of klezmer from Jewishness connects many of the Feidman cohort, with its associated musical distancing from any functional social roots. A slightly different example is clarinetist Harry Timmermann (born 1952), who has been playing klezmer since the early 1990s, including regular private functions. Timmermann is German, but his flexible band, Harry’s Freilach, is notable for its international makeup: accordion players from the former Soviet Union, guitarists from Greece and France, a bassist born in Zagreb and raised in Canada, and a Syrian oud and percussion player. Timmermann’s many public concerts around Germany often take place in small churches in towns and cities, although he was also a frequent performer at the Hackesches Hoftheater and the subsequent CEDIO Point Klezmerfests. In concert, Timmermann references Feidman regularly, explicitly acknowledging Feidman’s influence on his own playing style and choice of repertoire.131 Timmermann is a likeable figure in performance, his frequent smiles and occasional mugging dispelling any sense of taking himself too seriously. But while his band makeup speaks to the internationalism of the city and his appealing performance persona creates a comfortable route into the music, Timmermann is very much a follower rather than an innovator. As a German ambassador for an immediately accessible version of Yiddish culture, Timmermann fulfills a clear but limited role. These musicians, then, position themselves outside of the scene explored in this book. This is not to discount their music, but it is to recognize that this music (and its associated scenes) does not engage in the same sort of dynamic dialogue with the city. The music and spaces in the following chapters are not simply a product of their city; through an engagement with material space and symbolic representation, they are instrumental in producing Berlin.

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prisms through which to view the changing and occasionally contradictory concepts of Jewish folk music in the city of Berlin. For pioneers, the impulse has been to follow an urge, a musical journey ignited by cultural concerns and often struggling with limited and hard-​to-​access resources. Modernists are expressly about the music, their performance practice informed by what we might call a modern authenticity, with differing musical results. The fantasist project takes the performance experience to the extremes of friendly weirdness. This often has the knock-​on effect of an increased personal connection with the meanings and significance of the music, linking at the same time to Berlin’s contemporary and historical cabaret performativity. Where fantasists are on the edge of the political, transformers are avowedly so. Their musical aesthetic is in constant flux, bound together by an engagement with ideological ambiguity and a complex discussion of contemporary Jewishness. These different approaches reflect and effect an evolving exchange, foregrounding the centrality of the connection between klezmer and the city’s musical networks: the continuing relevance of the music and the versatility of its practitioners is rooted in a relationship to the city. Where the pioneer path addressed a perceived German silence about Yiddish culture, the high level of modernist learning points to the consolidation of a strong educative network that links back to the Berlin scene. Fantasists and transformers reveal a looser, more heterogeneous musical perspective that nevertheless connects directly with their city—​through the technicolor of Berlin’s historical and contemporary performance culture, or in an explicit address to the meanings of Jewish music in the German capital. What began as a disparate subculture has, over recent decades, been structured by a set of intercultural forces, framed by (occasionally limiting) endorsement from the superculture. Nowadays, the flexible networks that have coalesced around Yiddish music in the city draw participants into ever more changeable and dynamic groupings. This is all contextualized by a city that thrives on subcultural activity and specializes in the sort of making-​do spaces integral to ongoing artistic innovation. The next chapter will look in depth at the musical space of the city—​its performance zones in the form of clubs, bars, concert halls, and jam sessions, and how the city’s particular post-​reunification creative buzz encourages and makes possible these continued explorations.

3 Spaces and Places

I’m just now in a period where I’m really thankful to live in the city. There’s one thing, maybe this can explain what I  mean. Studio Я concert, Psoy Korolenko, Daniel, and Marina. And they have this wonderful, funny, and delightful concert. And their aim was to sing the songs in as many languages as possible. And during this evening I had a flash—​Berlin in the ’20s of the twentieth century. . . . And then on the other hand, Neukölln Klezmer Sessions. It’s not only Neukölln klezmer, also Maison Courage. It’s just the music, for everybody, for the people who play there, who come there to dance, to listen also. And I feel it as a privilege, to do something and to be part of it, of course, but also that it exists. It can only exist in a city like Berlin now, I think. Till Schumann, Oriente Musik

Introduction We have seen how the criss-​crossing networks of Berlin klezmer structure shifting and overlapping stylistic and ideological approaches, recontextualizing musical function, and re-​presenting traditional forms as source material for very contemporary creative movements.1 But musical 1 Much has been made of the discrepancy between klezmer’s Eastern European roots and Berlin’s largely assimilated and progressive Jewish history (Morris 2001; Birnbaum 2009). And although the sound of Bessarabian or Galician instrumental klezmer was unlikely to be heard much in Germany, the debate is far more nuanced. The output of prewar record labels Semer and Lukraphon (see ­chapter 5) testifies to a market for Yiddish song, while Wurbs (2010) and Nemtsov (2009) point to performances of Yiddish music that found popularity with Berlin audiences between 1902 and 1919, although such events centered on the concert hall rather than community life. Interwar Berlin was one of the world centers of Yiddish literary culture, and the city was in fact the original preferred location for YIVO. The Yiddish language itself, of course, shares strong roots with German, and indeed Ashkenazi Jewish life has its medieval roots in the Rhineland.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0003.

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The Music in Berlin

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  95

Music is socially meaningful not entirely but largely because it provides means by which people recognise identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them. . . . Music does not then simply provide a marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed. (Stokes 1994:4–​5)

These two important and related ideas—​boundary and transformation—​are of course central to Berlin’s recent history (Ward 2011a). During the war and after, we see a city exploited by the extremes of spatial control, from the grotesque imaginings of Hitler and Speer’s Germania through the East/​West frontier of a failed Soviet dream and—​on the other side of the border—​the Western bubble of consumer culture promising an enforced freedom paradoxically hemmed in on all sides. Nowadays the city continues to explore the outer reaches of spatial enforcement and transgression and to argue very publicly about how the future urban environment should look and for whom. Alongside the “big talk” of social policy, this debate is also regularly and imaginatively enacted within a more unofficial subjective space, itself subject to continual and contested transformation (Till 2005). While these arguments are common across the twenty-​first-​century globe, Berlin’s particular twentieth-​century legacy has marked it with a creatively subversive spatial politics—​such as we have already met in the recontextualization of

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configurations do not happen in vacuums:  music is both constrained and freed by the spaces within which it operates. This chapter, therefore, presents a complementary perspective, that of the physical and social arenas that create and sustain these musical dialogues. It is an analysis of the ways in which certain spaces root an internationalized music within a particular urban context, and how that music in turn connects with a certain spatial ideology. Klezmer music forms the agreed cultural canon, but its operations within different environments reveal changing assumptions and social processes. What is exploratory in one arena becomes controlled in another; where one space initiates a discussion, another subtly closes it down. And the process is iterative: as musical vernaculars and groupings take ever more complex form and shape, they in turn exert different degrees of influence upon the spaces in which they resound. In response to such liberative or limiting effects, music can act back as a transformative mechanism upon its surroundings, delineating edges and altering perceptions:

96  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

2 Subject to multiple geographical revisions, the Pale of Settlement is the name given to the territories of the Russian Empire in which Jews were allowed permanent settlement. Between 1791 and its formal abolishment in 1917, the Pale included parts of current-​day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova. The southern region of Bessarabia retained a powerfully romantic cultural symbolism for émigré Jews (Feldman 2002). On the Pale itself see Klier (2010). On klezmer in the Pale see Feldman (2016) and Rubin (2020:21–​29). 3 See Helas (2010); Wurbs (2010). On tensions (and their overrepresentation) between Western intellectuals and the Ostjuden, see Wertheimer (1987). 4 In the city’s Jewish Museum, for example, the Eastern Hasidic cultural presence within the city is notably glossed (in an eponymous 2012 exhibition and publication) as “Berlin Transit,” in reference to the city as staging post between the old world and the new.

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public space, transitory community, and bricolage tactics of the Night of the Singing Balconies. My focus therefore is on the material and discursive contributions klezmer and Yiddish music makes to these urban spatial relationships. How does the city root the music, and how does the music reinforce or transgress social and ideological borders? These questions are particularly pertinent to klezmer’s contemporary manifestation. Over the past forty years, what was once a functional music grounded in Eastern European Jewish weddings and dynastic family kapelyes has been reimagined on the world stage as music for concerts, jam sessions, street performance, and club nights. With shifts in function, changed historical circumstances, and altered demographics, other social and cultural meanings have had to be created in other spaces. We will also see how klezmer music has been used to delineate (or transform) certain “Jewish” practices—​paralleling the city’s ongoing dialogue with its historical and contemporary Jewish identity. The discussion that follows, therefore, takes in ideas of official and unofficial space (Weimann 1978), performance versus participation (Turino 2008b), notions of “Jewish space” (Pinto 1996), and also the wider ideological and cultural space of Berlin itself—​how the city’s bricolage semiotics interact with this traditional musical form, and the effects upon both. This is especially interesting in Berlin, a city that lays no claim to an “authentic” klezmer history. The freylekhsn, horas, and bulgars played in the city today were not born there but a few hundred miles further east and south, chiefly in what became known as the Pale of Settlement.2 Despite a vibrant late nineteenth-​century Eastern European immigrant Yiddish culture centered around Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district,3 and notwithstanding Berlin’s historical status as an interwar center of transnational Yiddish literary production, the strong Jewish influence upon the city most celebrated today is that of Moses Mendelssohn and the haskalah, the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and the medical research of Paul Ehrlich.4 The spaces that characterize the

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And that’s an important point, that I constantly have to make, which is: I’m not into this music for all of this intellectual acrobatics that it puts you through, I’m into it because it’s good. Like, because when it’s good, it’s really good. It’s an amazing music, it’s funky, you can dance to it, the songs are full of great stories, there’s an emotional world that the songs evoke that is foreign and not foreign but inherently interesting and beautiful.8

These “intellectual acrobatics” and their accompanying debates have dogged the German klezmer discourse for the last twenty years, and they are not my focus here. I argue instead that this musical practice can be understood 5 In 1963, Nikita Khrushchev graphically stated: “Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin” (Taylor 2006:103). 6 Many U-​Bahn stations (such as Frankfurter Tor) and thoroughfares (such as nearby Karl Marx Allee) are also sites of historical narrative, told through pre-​and postwar photographs, murals, and information points. 7 Here I am using Raymond Williams’s concept of dominant, residual, and emergent elements of cultural practice. Williams distinguishes between the residual and the “archaic”: “The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process . . . as an effective element of the present” (1977:122). 8 Personal interview.

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performance and consumption of klezmer music in Berlin today are newly assigned in this role, making them something of a blank canvas for the music’s possible meanings. This is in marked contrast to some other sites of Jewish renewal, in particular the weighty symbolic klezmer presence documented by Saxonberg and Waligórska (2006:436) in the Polish city of Krakow. Which is not to say that playing Jewish music in Berlin comes ideology-​ free. In a city at the epicenter of the Nazi vision and subsequently poised at the fulcrum of Cold War tension,5 history is inevitably never very far away. The monuments, plaques, and Denkmäler that dot the city6 are a constant reminder of a past with which Berlin is still coming to terms (Ladd 2000), physical sites of continually contested historiographies. But as this book makes clear, within the most interesting currents of Berlin klezmer music, this history plays less and less as a symbolic presence to be addressed (with a few notable exceptions, discussed in the next chapter). It has become a residual code,7 and the heavily laden Jewish space that framed it (Gruber 2002) has now opened up into a fluid and dynamic discussion, retaken by a younger group of (often Jewish) international musicians who are more interested in engaging with the city’s bottom-​up, materials-​to-​hand creative aesthetic. Here is singer Daniel Kahn explicitly addressing these issues:

98  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Music, space, and bricolage culture Poised at the junction of anthropology and musicology, ethnomusicological analysis foregrounds the musical act in the physicality of its environment—​ contextualizing performance in a sense of external social “reality”10 and locating music within culture (Merriam 1964:15). But things heard rarely accord with spatial markers, and an attention to sound in space also foregrounds a fluidity that is not always so easy to “see.” Where the eye is directional and precise, the ear receives data more liberally and from all around; it is an organ of creative combination. Music can, in a special and specific way, “evoke the subtleties of existence, its unspoken spaces” (Smith 9 See Turino’s treatment of Peircean semiotics: “As indexical connections become habitual, they come to be perceived as natural—​part of one’s common sense conceptions of reality” (Turino 2012:n.p.). 10 More accurately, it positions music as a meaningful component within the social construction of reality. Here we should note the work of Berger and Luckmann (1991), Levi-​Strauss (1968), Bourdieu (1984), and Giddens (1984) as key theoretical contexts.

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through its relationship to the modern city—​from the carnivalesque to the confrontational, the traditional to the radical (“foreign and not foreign”). The musical spaces of this chapter move beyond memorial, heritage, or simulacra into the unpredictable and living wider cultural processes of the city itself. Their analysis thus brings something new to an understanding of urban musical practice. Ethnomusicology, of course, has often been rooted in a careful linking of geography, history, and music. In what follows, the city space and the music it creates are indeed codependent, but the relationship is subtler and more nuanced than any direct connection to “the music of a place.” Tied to multiple historical roots, contemporary klezmer’s international musical praxis also renders it paradoxically rootless. The material and cultural links forged with Berlin are therefore crucial, providing the local urban counterpart to klezmer’s international dialogue and grounding the music in a way that its transnational discourse cannot. By interacting with the specific spaces of the city itself, klezmer music becomes a part of Berlin cultural production. As a result, these forms link indexically with ways of being-​in-​the-​world that are new for klezmer.9 The effect is two-​way: the music becomes part of the city’s subcultural meanings, and some city spaces become to an extent Jewish, at least temporarily (Brauch et al. 2008).

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11 Although this term has by now gained widespread traction, I am sticking fairly closely to Claude Levi-​Strauss’s original formulation from The Savage Mind (1968:17), which discusses the way that myth-​making societies build cultural meaning from the bric-​a-​brac of discourse available to them at any particular point, in contrast to a top-​down, all-​encompassing grand narrative. This is nicely summed up by Matt Rogers as follows: “Meaning-​making bricoleurs (inversely to engineers) do not approach knowledge-​production activities with concrete plans, methods, tools, or checklists of criterion. Rather, their processes are much more flexible, fluid, and open-​ended” (Rogers 2012:3). 12 For example, the city’s plethora of single-​interest festivals (Occultofest, Punk Film Fest), Kreuzberg’s Markthalle Neun’s “Street Food Thursday,” and Hans-​Georg Lindenau’s “revolutionary” thrift store and swap shop in Mateuffelstraße, which in January 2016 brought out over one thousand people to protest against its removal—​indicating simultaneously the city’s changing personality and also significant resistance to this change. See Johannes Laubmeier, Tagesspiegel, “Szeneladen ‘M99’ in Kreuzberg:  Ein Überbleibsel eines wilden Berlins,” January 20, 2016, http://​www.tagesspiegel. de/​t hemen/​reportage/​szeneladen-​m99-​in-​kreuzberg-​ein-​ueberbleibsel-​eines-​wilden-​b erlins/​ 12812980.html, accessed September 30, 2019.

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1997). In the case studies that follow, we will see how klezmer music acts as a transformative power upon certain Berlin spaces to undermine or subvert more established behavior—​at times connecting with the city’s sites of controlled transgression, elsewhere reinforcing a more entrenched sense of spatial order. In particular, we can take account of the (in)appropriateness of certain behavior as expressed through sound: music as a part of an implicit “ ‘moral geography,’ whereby certain forms of conduct belong and others do not” (Leyshon et al. 1998:23). Bombed, divided, stuck back together, perpetually “becoming,” Berlin is a city of bricolage,11 its residents experts at adapting materials to hand. Not so surprising, perhaps, for a city that has moved from global realpolitik to post-​reunification fragmentation within a few short decades: the repeated redrawing of physical borders generating a parallel, artful, local resistance. Berlin’s love of flea markets, pop-​up bars, reclaimed industrial space (Till 2010), and transient yet celebrated community street culture12 all speak to this particular characteristic, evincing an appealingly inventive and witty commitment to patching together from what is available rather than starting with the “correct” materials for the job. Terence Hawkes (1977) emphasizes the fleet-​footed, real-​time creativity of bricolage when he talks of “structures, improvised or made up as ad hoc responses to an environment,” while John Clarke (1976) relates the process back to its syntagmatic and paradigmatic possibilities:  “When the bricoleur relocates the significant object in a different position within that discourse . . . or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted.” In his seminal study of postwar youth subcultures in Britain, Dick Hebdige (1979) theorizes certain acts of bricolage (the punk safety pin, the mod sharp suit) as inherently subcultural. He

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13 Plenty of historical examples from the city of Berlin would also present themselves:  transgender cabaret of the late Weimar /​early National Socialist era, Kreuzberg in the 1970s and 1980s, or Prenzlauer Berg in the 1990s. Although it is by now also a tourist draw (and therefore somewhat less subversive), I have chosen Mauerpark because it is a space I came to know well and because its subcultural meanings are intimately connected to its musical processes. See also Ward (2011a:128). 14 A  genre for which Berlin has now become famous. While on the U-​Bahn, my son one day pointed out a guitar belonging to the man sitting opposite us. The instrument’s owner smiled at Sammy and said, “You’ll see a lot of people with guitars in this city.”

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argues that the appropriation of symbols from mainstream culture and their relocation as part of a chain of deliberately ambiguous signifying practices constitute a type of counter-​discourse, one that overturns dominant ideological ways of thinking in favor of the playful joy of signification itself, thereby subverting conventional narratives of order and meaning. We might take a moment to apply these ideas to one of Berlin’s now famously countercultural spaces.13 Built on the former death strip of the Wall in the north of the city, Mauerpark is for the most part a bleak, flat, dirty rectangle of scrub and grass. Bottle tops and broken glass take the place of flowers, the sole respite a well-​used rainbow-​hued playground at the park’s northern edge. This drab space, however, is also the venue for one of Berlin’s most colorful and diverse musical happenings, an opportunistic and lively combination of urban space, contemporary demographics, and historical narrative. Every Sunday, weather permitting, Mauerpark transforms into a mini-​festival. The graffiti-​covered amphitheater plays host to Joe Hatchiban’s infamous bearpit karaoke, while a twenty-​yard stroll in any direction takes in solo ukulele hopefuls, digital dub reggae duos, and loop-​patterned ambient-​ noise merchants. People dance to three-​or four-​piece Latin percussion sections or sit on the steps flanking the cobbled path to listen to a regularly rotating crop of singer-​songwriters.14 An aural kaleidoscope of Berlin’s cash-​ poor, ideas-​rich creative aesthetic, the music brought here every week does more than simply transform the physical space of the park: it becomes the vehicle for a noisily public dialogue. The musical takeover of this uninspiringly bleak historical reminder is a joyful undermining of bordered spatial practice, an improvised aesthetics of mix and match that encourages juxtaposition, meandering, and temporariness. The same musical events laid on in the city’s decorous and historic Tiergarten or one of the landscaped Volksparks would have a very different, far more official resonance. Mauerpark’s lack of determining “features” is precisely what allows its functional space to act with such dynamism: the park becomes a heterogeneous, carnivalesque contact zone within which the

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This younger generation of artist-​activists approaches the “emptiness” of space in the city less in terms of uncovering evidence of the “forgetfulness” of a nation and its leaders. . . . They distinguish themselves from their predecessors in their critique of neoliberal planning and development strategies that fill in these so-​called empty spaces, when in fact they see them as vibrant, alive, already full. (Till 2011:116)

It is important, of course, to contextualize this vibrancy and avoid the temptations of over-​congratulation. Mauerpark is now a celebrated stop on the cooler end of the Berlin tourist circuit, speaking to a widely disseminated version of the countercultural city whose very adoption into “brand Berlin” undermines much of the oppositional potential it might retain. The same could be said of the city’s alternative tours that take in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain squats. As a space of systemic or economic change, Mauerpark has little transformative energy left. However, as a statement of the value of musical bricolage and juxtaposition, as a vote for tactical moment over strategic planning, and as a comparatively unregulated claim for the immediacy of music in the urban space, Mauerpark speaks with a joyful, noisy, multilingual, yet distinctively Berlin accent. Less well-​known, we might also point to the Friday night Mauerpark Folkwiese, a gathering of twenty or more people who meet regularly to

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profusion of competing and temporary musical encounters triumphs over any one cultural or spatial narrative. There is no quality control, and there is no selection panel other than the public itself. The sonic responses to this particular environment are indeed ad hoc and improvised, just as the relocation of conventional performer-​audience relations into a gleefully chaotic noise constitutes a new and vibrant discourse, subverting the park’s negative historical weight (as a former death strip) and lack of conventional visual appeal (­figures 3.1–​3). Mauerpark is thus the lively meeting point of several characteristically “Berlin” urban threads: an influx of enthusiasm and creativity, a latent anarchy (diminishing and over-​hyped, but nevertheless still there), a surfeit of post-​unification “dead space,” and a symbolic challenge to history. As Karen E. Till notes, writing about the city’s empty spaces and their takeover by artist collectives in the 1960s and 1970s, this is a more playfully covert agenda than that of previous generations:

102  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

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Figures 3.1–​3.3  Sunday in Mauerpark. Three colorful examples from the weekly mini-​festival, August 2014.

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  103

play and dance to folk music from around the world—​part of Europe’s burgeoning bal-​folk15 scene, but a part which chooses to set itself in one of Berlin’s least idyllic locations (almost any other Berlin park would be prettier and more conducive). Once again, the relocation of paradigmatic elements is constitutive of a new set of syntagmatic meanings: in its choice of grubby venue, the bal-​folk itself becomes “urbanized,” while the space of Mauerpark is re-​energized with a new set of contemporary “folky” meanings. Although Mauerpark is one of the city’s most visible manifestations of bricolage-​in-​process, it is by no means the only one. The disused space of Kreuzberg’s Cuvrystraße on the south side of the Spree river

15 Bal-​folk is a folk dance movement that has gained increased popularity in Northern Europe over the past few decades. It covers a wide variety of traditional dance forms and varies considerably in terms of structure and expertise. Distinct from more formal, heritage-​based exhibitions of traditional dance, bal-​folk tends to place emphasis on transnational inclusivity, rarely allying itself with traditional dress, for example. Festivals notable for their development of the bal-​folk scene include Rudolstadt’s Tanz und Folk Fest (Germany) and Saint-​Chartier’s long-​running festival of instrument makers, Rencontres de Luthiers et Maitres Sonneurs.

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Figures 3.1–​3.3  Continued

104  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

was until recently home to a self-​sufficient community of yurts and improvised living shacks, complete with a children’s sandpit and a stylishly mismatched open-​air bar (see figure 3.4).16 Similarly, Friedrichshain 16 At the time of writing (September 2019), the internet fashion company Zalando’s plans to build on this now cleared land appear to have been dropped. Similar smaller riverside communities survive further east into Mitte, and also along the Landwehrkanal.

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Figure 3.4  Berlin bricolage. Clockwise from top left: Cuvrystraße community bar; miniature crook, Reichenberger Straße; culture clash on Ohlauer Straße; alternative living at the former Bethanien hospital; diminutively defiant mannequin on Wiener Straße; M99 thrift store, Mateuffelstraße. All May 2014.

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17 Although Berliners continually mourn the decline of these and other spaces, they still proliferate in comparison to other European capital cities. 18 Semiotician Ginny Valentine (1993, 2002)  adapted Weimann’s ideas for more practical use within social and market research contexts, and it is her reframing of the concepts as official and unofficial space that I will use here. I also have a declarable interest in including Ginny’s work in my own—​she was my mother.

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squatter art collectives still hold out against increasing gentrification,17 while Berlin’s DIY e-​music scene and Neukölln bar culture continue to push the aesthetics of montage and bric-​a-​brac. All this may seem some way from Eastern European Jewish wedding music, but I will go on to suggest that many of Berlin’s klezmer spaces, in their lack of proscribed behavior, fluidity of process, and musical practice, do indeed connect this music with the city’s characteristically bottom-​up approach to cultural production. Through repeated situation within certain spaces, klezmer becomes indexically linked with a set of (sometimes challenging) assumptions about the role and function of music in social life. More than this, however, the improvised structures and repositionings of certain music spaces offer up the possibility of new cultural discourses and musical responses—​new versions of “Jewish music” and “Jewish space.” Each of my case studies is therefore understood in terms of a music-​space dynamic that is either controlling or transgressive, radical or traditional, presentational or participatory, and often several of these at the same time. I want to put forward one other useful analytical tool, a concept that nuances the visual through the embodiment of physical space. In his discussion of the physical Elizabethan stage, East German scholar Robert Weimann (1978) distinguishes between locus, a raised scaffold area from which kings and Gods speak, and platea, a generalized acting space at the front or edge of the stage area, closer to the audience and from which lower-​ranking dramatic characters interact more freely with the crowd, at times subverting pronouncements from the locus above. We can see, then, two distinct transactional positions:  one a high-​up and formalized speaking space of gods, rulers, and “big talk” grand narrative, the other intermingling with the audience in their own communal area, speaking their language “at ground level” (Weimann 1978:79). In short, official and unofficial space.18 Berlin’s klezmer music not only reflects official-​unofficial dichotomies in cultural and physical space but is instrumental in the transition from one to the other. A city develops layers, sediment, associations, and embodied ways of being: street theater, bar culture, public versus private space are all contested and implicated in this transaction, and music is one of its liveliest channels. Shortly,

106  Sounding Jewish in Berlin I will begin to apply some of these ideas to specific venues. First, however, we need to address the elusive notion of Jewish space.

Emerging from postwar decades that had seen varying degrees of repression and marginalization of Jewish populations and many other minorities, post-​Communist Europe (particularly Eastern Europe) saw a rapid growth of what historian Diana Pinto in 1996 termed “Jewish Space.” Reconstructed synagogues (Meng 2011), heritage tours, university course units, interdisciplinary artistic celebrations, museums, and hotly contested memorials (Young 2002) coalesced in local, national, and international combinations to create a context of interaction, exploration, and dialogue around historical and contemporary manifestations of European Jewishness, regardless of whether or not these zones were populated by actual Jews. If this rapid growth of interest was making up for lost time (and lost numbers), it was also to initiate a process of intense self-​questioning about the place and possible function of Jewish culture in a reunified Europe. For Pinto, this newly identified and developing space took two parts, beginning with the incorporation of the Holocaust back into national histories. From this, she argued, followed the more problematic corollary of “positive Judaism,” including civic, social, and cultural promotion of “things Jewish.” It is important to stress that a rich “Jewish space,” containing a multitude of “things Jewish,” is not dependent on the size or even presence of a living Jewish community. . . . Germany—​where the Jewish community is small by pre-​war standards, and is not composed of descendants of the old German Jewish community—​has without doubt the most impressive “Jewish space” in Europe. (Pinto 1996:7)

This impressiveness raised troubling questions. The inescapable contradic­ tions, ambiguity, and irony of what Ruth Ellen Gruber (2002) famously dubbed “virtual” Jewishness invoked overlapping specters of antisemitism, philosemitism, Orientalism,19 fetishism, reparation, appropriation, and more. 19 Although Said’s (2003) concept refers to the Arab-​Islamic Middle East, I am here referring to Western European exoticizing attitudes to Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden). See Mendes-​Flohr (1984).

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Jewish space

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20 Pinto’s neat Russian doll analogy of Jewish cultural visibility, where the tiny European Jewish doll sits within the British Jewish doll, the British within the French, the French within the American, and all are concealed from view by the “gigantic, triumphant Israeli matryoshka” (Pinto 1996:15). 21 Ibid.

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How to respond to a cultural and civic turn apparently modeled around unity and optimism, yet which still appeared to have a gaping aporia at its center? For Pinto, the breaching of this gap through the development of a strong and credible European Jewish identity would not only strengthen the European Jewish space but also “help to bring about the end of this paternalistic matryoshka.20 [European Jews] should no longer be considered the weakened remnant, the potential defectors” (Pinto 1996:15). Pinto concludes on the upbeat note that “Europe is not Australia. . . . It is up to us, as Europeans and Jews, to turn Europe into the third pillar of a world Jewish identity.”21 Compelling though this vision is, history has not been so kind to its optimism. The growth of far-​right nationalism in Europe and Russia, the collapse of the Oslo peace process, anti-​Israeli discourse and its knock-​on effect of wider antisemitism (Kahn-​Harris 2019), and the problems of integration faced by Russian Jews in their adopted European homes (Weiss 2004) have problematized both the real social conditions of Jewish life in Europe and also the conceptual focus of “Jewish space.” In an attempt to take account of a more flexible version of Jewishness, Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke’s 2008 Jewish “topographies” turned to spaces that, instead of framing a more fixed idea of Jewish history or textual representation, focused on “ ‘doing Jewish space’ or ‘lived Jewish spaces,’ on Jewish spatial practices and experiences” (2008:2). This turn also includes an idea of temporariness, a more plastic and less proscribed alternative to the officialdom of synagogues, memorials, and civic initiatives. In this context, spaces are no longer dependent upon sanctification, consecration, or textual emplacement, but rather can become Jewish for the time that Jewish activities occur within them: “spatial environments in which Jewish things happen, where Jewish activities are performed, and which in turn are shaped and defined by those Jewish activities” (Brauch et al. 2008:4). This dialogic process is crucial in the case studies that follow, a shifting real-​time adaptation of spaces that don’t “look Jewish” (although they often sound Jewish). In Berlin, one of the ongoing sites of this debate has been the city’s enthusiastic take-​up of klezmer and Yiddish music, until recently by an overwhelming majority of non-​Jews. The discursive and ideological ambiguities were not lost on players at the time. La’om, for example, a largely East Berlin

108  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I don’t like being in Germany, and the sooner we leave, the better. Every person on the street that’s elderly, I think where were they, and what were they doing. . . . How much blood is on your hands? (Slobin 2000:57)

This is an articulation of German Jewish space as inherently problematic: an uneasy ideological site of concealment and locus of unresolved conflict. Not all American musicians felt this way, however. Alan Bern puts forward a very different set of reactions when discussing his residency with Joel Rubin and Michael Alpert at Berlin’s Café Einstein in the late 1980s: There was intense interest in what we were doing, coming from a very wide range of society, at a hot point of German politics. We were being taken seriously. One could say, and by the ’90s people were saying, well, that was all some kind of not really authentic dialogue, of Germans with guilty consciences overidentifying with Jewishness and all that kind of stuff. That may be, to some extent. But in those early encounters, I didn’t have the antenna for that at all. And what it felt like to me, and to Joel and to Michael, and I stand by this, is that we were being listened to, and we were being approached and asked to be in dialogue with people who realized that their parents’ generation was responsible for the annihilation of this culture and of millions of people along with it, and who had a deeply rooted interest in working that through—​with a lot of integrity and a lot of generosity and a lot of modesty. So, to be invited into a dialogue with people who I grew up terrified of was also a very deep existential process for me too.23

22 Raumer Records, RR13299. 23 Personal interview, 2019.

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(non-​Jewish) band that brought together several musicians still active on the scene today, stated succinctly in the liner notes to their 1998 album Riffkele: “We don’t see it as a sign of perfectly normalized German-​Jewish relations that many Germans are playing klezmer music. . . . As a means of dealing with German history klezmer music is simply inappropriate.”22 More recently, Magdalena Waligórska (2013) has pointed to the music as a zone of contact and learning between cultures, a subtle form of mediation that is neither appropriation nor surrender, but instead a sort of uneven dialogue. Touring American musicians have at times felt a little less mutually inclined. Here is Judy Bressler of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band, interviewed by Mark Slobin in the late 1990s:

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It’s interesting, I  don’t feel very much connected to the Jewish culture. . . . I don’t want to be part of this community. I want to be part of 24 Singer Fabian Schnedler, for example, began our interview with the specific request that I didn’t ask him about non-​Jews playing klezmer (“We’ve had that discussion”). Dan Kahn told me: “Listen, this issue has been put to bed and there is plenty of literature to read about it. Those battles have been fought, and we have won, and we don’t need to talk about them any more.” And Kasbek’s Uwe Sauerwein bemoaned the fact that previous interviewers had been almost exclusively concerned with his ideological motivation, rather than his music (personal interview, Schöneberg, Berlin September 2, 2014). 25 Personal interview, 2014. 26 Ilya is Jewish but was raised in a secular Soviet and post-​Soviet environment. His connections to the Riga Jewish community came about as he began to play Jewish music as a teenager.

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For Bern, klezmer music was in this case structuring a Jewish space of discussion and exchange, albeit a temporary one. And while historical tensions cannot and should not be ignored, there is among musicians active in Berlin now a strong sense that the more binary arguments have been talked out—​if not conclusively decided, then at least part of a debate that has moved on.24 In contrast to more well-​worn paradigms of cultural conflict or symbolic redemption, therefore, what follows show how many of Berlin’s klezmer musical spaces have now become naturalized and normalized to an extent where explicit or performative “Jewishness” is only one reading among several. Others, conversely, confidently explore ambiguous Jewish identity through music, initiating a discussion rather than reaching a conclusion. At times, the sublimation of overt markers of Jewishness points to a process of inclusivity for klezmer music within the wider urban musical fabric. At others, the presence of these markers foregrounds a separation that reinforces historical ideas of Jewish “Otherness.” It is at these points that the perceived Jewishness of klezmer slips into a signifier of exoticized Eastern difference—​one of the reasons that the Berlin klezmer scene has often not been greeted with much enthusiasm by parts of the Jewish community, who have at times felt that this imposed and idealized Jewish Otherness militates against dialogue with actual Jewish German lives. As the Berlin cantor Jalda Rebling pithily observes: “And then we have till today many klezmer musicians who are putting on a hat and telling a non-​Jewish audience how Jews are.”25 This separation from an explicit sense of Jewishness—​or at least a connection to German Jewish life—​also comes from within the klezmer scene. Here is Riga-​born keyboardist and accordionist Ilya Shneyveys pointing up some of these discrepancies:26

110  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

As an important figure in contemporary klezmer, Ilya does not erase the Jewishness of the music that he plays, but he is nevertheless able to translate what he sees as a restrictive ethnic connection into an open-​ended musical one. And indeed, in the spaces and places of this chapter, music does not simply correspond to community but is constitutive of its construction: “Making music isn’t a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them” (Frith 1996:111). What follows, therefore, moves forward to where and how new klezmer communities have been created and in what ways participation grounds the material practice of klezmer music in the city as a functional space of social and cultural exchange. Throughout, it is the processes of music that makes these spaces “mean” in particular ways.

The Klezmer Bund: Kaffee Burger and Gorki Theater A few years ago, the American Yiddish singer Daniel Kahn and German klezmer accordionist Franka Lampe founded a loose promotional vehicle for the music they play and love:  the Klezmer Bund. In 2011 Kahn and Muscovites Psoy Korolenko and Vanya Zhuk had imagined this same organization as ironic fodder for a glorious Yiddish march, in the style of Mordechai Gebirtig:28 Far yedn yid vos shpilt dem bas s’iz vi kedin un vi kedas, u nas? dray hundert bucks un far a goy vos shpilt dem poyk s’iz vi me’darf un vi es toyg, a tax? eyn hundert bucks—​tsvey hundert bucks vot tak, un ot azey a klezmer far der khasene deserves a decent pay 27 Personal interview. 28 Gebirtig (1877–​1942) was a Krakow-​born Yiddish poet and songwriter. On the same album (Lost Causes), Kahn offers a contemporary version of Gebirtig’s “March of the Jobless Corps” (Oriente Musik, 2011, RIEN 77).

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a community of my musician friends. Because they’re mostly young and sane, and they’re fun to hang out with. You know, I like religious music, I really like cantorial music and I really like nigunim. But for, you know, nonreligious purposes. I mean, it does elevate me spiritually. So I just want to keep that part.27

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  111 oy vey, zayt undzer kund lebn zol der klezmer bund

Containing spirited contributions from Michael Alpert, Adrienne Cooper, Lorin Sklamberg, and Pete Sokolow, Kahn’s recording is truly a Bund in its own right.30 Joyful, cooperative, stirring, and slightly drunken in equal measure, the tune is both a call to arms and a self-​mocking subversion of the intricacies of trade union shenanigans. Musically, the song pays homage to a witty mix of Broadway musical,31 Russian marches, and Yiddish workers anthems, with each verse sung call-​and-​response and the whole backed up by a virtuosic yet deliberately free-​sounding klezmer ensemble. The impression is of a gang one would like to join, a noisy and friendly group who believe in what they do yet manage to avoid taking themselves too seriously. The song’s chorus acts as the musical high point for this appealing ideology, its rising melody and block chord movement self-​consciously anthemic, yet delivered in a loosely collective, heterophonic voice. Figure 3.5 shows this chorus in piano reduction. In his 1934 study “Jewish Folk Music,” Moshe Beregovski notes that revolutionary hymns and marches represented the arrival of material from outside the traditional Yiddish song framework: “In the heroic genre of song-​hymns, we meet for the first time (in Jewish secular folklore) a lively rhythm and the confident stride of the masses” (Beregovski 2000:34–​35). Kahn’s song is therefore a knowing part of Yiddish tradition that simultaneously references 29 Lyrics and translation from the Painted Bird website, http://www.paintedbird.de/images/stories/ kahn/pdf/R77_Booklet-1.pdf. 30 Bundism was a left-​ wing, pro-​ Yiddish, Jewish social movement with its roots in pre-​ revolutionary Russia. Postwar, it became the New  York–​based International Jewish Labor Bund. Although Bundism is no longer an effective political entity, its symbolic legacy as a touchstone of secular Jewish political thought survives. On the Bund’s origins, see Tobias (1972); on the postwar Bund, see Slucki (2012). 31 Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (“Follow the Fold”) and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (“Grand Old Ivy”) in particular come to mind—​these melodies themselves of course draw much from the Americana of Stephen Foster and John Philip Sousa.

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[For every Jew who plays the bass: $300 For a Goy on poyk: $100 $200 That’s the way, that’s the way . . . for the wedding . . . Oh, be our client Long live the Klezmer Bund]29

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a historical political awakening and new musical openness. The Klezmer Bund as expressed through this song is a space of the imagination, a comic yet heartfelt appeal to musical solidarity, described by Kahn thus: “this kind of union, or organization, I don’t know what you’d call it, mutual aid association, free association of klezmer musicians.”32 It is reinforced by the bund’s logo (figure 3.6), which itself creatively migrates between several layers of allegiance. Designed by Kahn and distributed as stickers or pinned on the wall behind Klezmer Bund concerts, the logo features a quasi-​masonic triangle of fiddle, clarinet, and trumpet that encloses the Hebrew letters kof and bet. Set in front of the inverse triangle of an open-​bellowed accordion, the four instruments make up a Star of David (the logo’s monochrome, however,

32 Personal interview.

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Figure 3.5  “The Klezmer Bund” (chorus, piano reduction), from Lost Causes (Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, 2011).

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  113

makes this symbol significantly devoid of any Israeli blue), the whole encased within a bass drum.33 The Jewishness of the enterprise is present, therefore, but indirectly so: a symbol of a symbol. Cultural allegiance in this case is a witty allusion rather than an essential fact, inscribed through the materiality of musical production. In terms of physical space, Klezmer Bund concerts began at Mitte’s Kaffee Burger Tanzwirtschaft at the beginning of 2012 with Kahn’s Painted Bird and a duo of Lampe and clarinetist Anja Günther.34 Since then, Klezmer Bund in Kaffee Burger (dubbed “KB in KB”) has hosted many of the musicians covered in this book, as well as visiting artists from Russia, North America, and across Europe. As a venue, Kaffee Burger fits nicely into the faded alt-​Berliner

33 At the time of writing, one more “Klezmer Bund” currently exists: the Austiner Klezmer Bund. See their Facebook page at https://​www.facebook.com/​austinklezmer/​, accessed September 30, 2019. 34 The name is a combination of two German words and translates as “dance pub.”

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Figure 3.6  Klezmer Bund logo, designed by Daniel Kahn (reproduced with permission).

114  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

35 The following detail comes from the venue’s website: http://​kaffeeburger.de/​club-​kaffee-​burger-​ die-​geschichte (no longer online). 36 “Scene pub.” 37 At the time, Prenzlauer Berg was a center of Berlin radicalism and loosely regulated alternative culture. The area has since become wholly gentrified, with something of its radical spirit reappearing in the heterogeneous, arty, and largely Turkish working-​class Neukölln. 38 On Russendisko and Berlin, see Wickström (2008).

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chic one might easily imagine as characteristic of a large number of slightly seedy, once subversive twentieth-​ century Eastern European cabaret bars: tatty dark velvet drapes, retained Gothic signage, slightly peeling deep red paint on the walls, and low-​level yellow globe lighting all offering a particular shabby charm. In Kaffee Burger’s case, this appeal is well deserved; the Lokal’s history encapsulates and reflects that of the city itself.35 Beginning life as a restaurant at the end of the nineteenth century, the premises were taken over by the Burger family in 1936. During the Stasi era, the empty upstairs floors were used as an observation post for nearby Schönhauser Tor. In the 1970s, the bar began to develop a reputation as a Szene-​Kneipe,36 attracting actors, musicians, and writers from the Volksbühne down the road, and by the end of the decade it had established itself as a meeting point for political dissidents and East German malcontents. Although by the 1980s the subversives had moved north to nearby Prenzlauer Berg (which would remain a hotbed of cultural and political agitation well into reunification), Kaffee Burger eventually caught up, and in 1999 the bar was taken over by two writers and a local restaurateur. The velvet wallpaper and Muschebubu lights were restored, and Kaffee Burger Tanzwirtschaft was reopened under the tagline “Prenzlauer Berg is also now in Mitte.”37 Since reopening, the bar’s cultural program has included a huge variety of music, some poetry, and perhaps most famously Wladimir Kaminer and Yuriy Gurzhy’s long-​running Russendisko club night.38 The Kaffee Burger stage is small, a tight squeeze for any more than five musicians plus drumkit. It is only a couple of feet off the ground and leads straight onto the dance floor (figure 3.7). When performing here, bands are up close and personal with their fans, who are likely to be as close to the singer as he or she is to their fellow musicians—​very much in the unofficial space. The stage lighting is basic and spills easily into the crowd, further undermining any sense of separation between performer and audience. To reach the restroom, it is necessary to walk along the side of the stage, often bumping into musicians drinking, smoking, or just hanging out in the cramped side room just behind the stage’s rear. The effect of all of this

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  115

is to erode any sense of distance: between artist and listener, between professional and amateur, and between performance and participation—​especially given the enthusiastic dancing/​shouting/​group-​hugging that is a regular feature of the small, sweaty dance floor. And the fact that Kaffee Burger makes little staging concession to musical “difference” (all bands get pretty much the same lighting and decor) has the parallel effect of collapsing taken-​for-​ granted—​or imposed—​stylistic or genre assumptions. The result is klezmer music firmly embedded within Berlin’s alternative music scene—​its appearance at this venue naturalizes and normalizes the music’s legitimate presence within the city’s wider subcultural environment. Consequently, klezmer, Balkan, and Russian bands will often share concerts; and if this means a loss of specificity, it also promotes a parallel privileging of musical convening and enjoyment. In 2013 and 2014, I saw several Kaffee Burger klezmer performances: Sher on a Shier, Knoblauch Klezmer Band, New Orleans Klezmer All Stars Duo, and You Shouldn’t Know from It among them. What stood out repeatedly was

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Figure 3.7  Kaffee Burger stage, awaiting the arrival of Knoblauch Klezmer Band. Note violinist Eli Fabrikant’s feather-​edged tricorn. November 2013.

116  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

If anything, being in a group like Rotfront taught me that, on a popular level, and guys like Shantel and things like that,39 they have in a way normalized, there’s a certain kind of presence of Jewishness that isn’t laden with all of this neurotic, historical, all this politics, all this weight. And it’s a European folk music and so it can sort of be freely used in a pop sense, and 39 Along with fellow DJs Robert Soko and Vienna’s Dunkelbunt, Shantel has been a driving force in the incorporation of Balkan and Roma sounds into dance floor and club music. For a critical analysis, see Silverman (2015:169–​71); also Dimova (2007).

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the degree of dialogue between band and audience, the conscious physical and performative overlap across this assumed boundary. When Knoblauch Klezmer Band’s drummer Max had to leave the stage halfway through their set to answer the call of nature, the rest of the band encouraged the audience to count how many seconds it took him to reappear (Max, of course, could hear all this, as the restrooms are right next to the stage). New Orleans accordionist Glenn Hartman, feeling that the performer/​crowd space had not been adequately breached, jumped down from the stage for an impromptu acoustic solo accordion spot in the middle of the dance floor. And during You Shouldn’t Know from It’s gig, singer Sasha Lurje repeatedly migrated between stage and audience to lead the dancing while the remaining onstage band played bulgars to keep them going. This kind of conscious interactivity and fluidity is not simply an enjoyable add-​on but a fundamental part of the venue’s spatial aesthetics. It is one of the means by which klezmer is rooted in contemporary urban social relationships, and through which the music takes its place in a certain paradigm of “world” music consumption in Berlin. We might question, therefore, the relationship to “Jewish space.” Clearly, there are few overt or conventional markers of Jewish spatial practice: the only iconography is that of Kahn’s Klezmer Bund poster, and dancing is often loose-​limbed on-​the-​ spot bouncing as opposed to a choreographed Romanian hora. This kind of interactivity points to a transformation of notions of Jewish space, effected and maintained through the music itself. Although the music played and danced to here is often Jewish music, and played by Jews at least some of the time, its Jewishness is not what is foregrounded—​any more than the venue becomes Russian or Balkan when that is the music on offer. Dan Kahn, who was a member of Yuriy Gurzhy’s German-​Hungarian band Rotfront for five years, summed up this relaxed integration of Jewish cultural production in his usual direct manner:

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  117 people just sort of accept. Their ears are used to it, and it doesn’t sound only like some sort of exotic quoting, it’s just, like, funky.40

40 Personal interview. 41 Dan Kahn, Ilya Shneyveys, Sasha Lurje, Emil Goldschmidt, Sveta Kundish, and Eli Fabrikant, among others. As mentioned before, an increased number of Jews on the scene does not magically balance everything out, but it is a strong counterweight to ideas of ethnic appropriation. 42 The ties can be strong (such as YSKFI, where all members are well connected to many other musicians in the scene) or weaker (of the Knoblauch Klezmer Band, only violinist Eli is tied to other musicians discussed here). Also, of course, a musician’s link to Kahn or Lampe enables possible weak ties to other new musical networks—​as was my own case upon arriving in Berlin.

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Normalized into an accepted “funky” vernacular, klezmer here is liberated from any perceived weight and neurosis. Kaminsky and Silverman (both 2015)  have argued that this loosening of historical and ethnic ties may not be quite as ideologically free as it seems. Kaminsky shows how the ethnic Swedish band Räfven’s use of klezmer musical language is “characteristic of New Old Europe’s typical blurring of ethnic specificity.” This “dissipation of proprietorship” conceals the fact that the “dark irony behind these practices is that both the attractiveness and the accessibility of much of their cultural source material are a direct result of the persecution and genocide of the people who originally produced it” (Kaminsky 2015b:182–​83). This kind of analysis is an important counter to world music’s more self-​congratulatory “celebratory narratives” (Feld 2000:151–​54). However, it progresses from a standpoint of “white ethnic” appropriation of klezmer music, whereas in Berlin we need to note the active presence of Jews at the heart of these spaces,41 and also—​as seen in ­chapter 2 and further explored in ­chapter 6—​a conscious process of cultural rooting (via research and performance practice) that often underlies even the zaniest music. This is, in effect, klezmer music being both proudly Jewish and wholly contemporary. Without the active participation of musicians and audiences, the Klezmer Bund is no more than Kahn’s original imaginary presence. Musician links—​to curator hubs Kahn and Lampe, but also among themselves42—​thus give coherence and structure to the KB network. And while audiences’ connections to klezmer music may frequently be nonexistent, a weak tie to the KB network (or Kahn, Lampe, or a KB band) allows them access to a range of bands and musical style. Audiences may also be connected to Kaffee Burger itself through ties either strong or weak, the venue mediating both a sense of legitimacy and a set of expectations. The performance space, in this way, acts as

118  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

The Gorki is for the whole city, and that includes everyone who has arrived in the city in the last few decades, whether in search of asylum, whether in exile, whether they be immigrants or simply people who grew up in Berlin. We invite you all to a public space in which today’s human condition and our conflict of identity will be reflected through the art of making theatre and watching theatre. . . . In short: who is “we”?43

Historically tied to the GDR administration as a home for German and Soviet social realist theater, the Gorki played an ideological role as part of the socialist state’s cultural apparatus that puts it historically within an “official” space. However, East German theater, backed by large state subsidies, has also functioned as a perhaps surprising arena for public debate. David Hughes (2007:134) notes the “staggering” number of outstanding actors, directors, and designers at work in the East German theater, suggesting that: “The reason for this lay in the tension between a state that was eager to invest in theatre for ideological reasons (using socialist realism to promote its communist goals) and playwrights who, paradoxically, increasingly used the stage as a place to criticize the regime.” Moreover, dramatic funding cuts from the 1990s onward have seen the Gorki, through a wide-​ranging and radical theatrical offering, open itself up more directly to the ambiguous identities of contemporary Berlin. In this sense, the theater is a bridge between the East German state’s historical top-​ down cultural processes and the far more ground-​level, self-​questioning, and multiple identities at play in the twenty-​first-​century city. Operating within an unofficial space, such liminality is in notable contrast to other, more “official” spaces of cultural production in the city that have historically played 43 Maxim Gorki Theatre website, http://​english.gorki.de/​the-​theatre/​(no longer online). The theater’s new website is at https://​www.gorki.de/​index.php/​en.

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the connecting point of these different networks—​of venue, Klezmer Bund, musicians, and audience. Since the end of 2013, however, the Klezmer Bund has had a second home, one more directly concerned with probing cultural resonances and ambiguities. South of Torstraße (Kaffee Burger is at number 60), heading toward Unter den Linden, is the Maxim Gorki Theater. Opened in 1952, the theater has acted as a provocative and socially minded commentator on the city ever since:

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  119

44 With the exception of the Philharmonie, very little klezmer still takes place in these more official spaces. As this chapter demonstrates, the scene now operates at a much more grassroots level. 45 On Beyle’s work and influence, see Wurbs (2010). 46 The studio’s name is a nice pun on the Russian ya and the German ja. In some Gorki promotions this slippage also incorporates American English, signing off with “SEEЯ!”

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host to klezmer music, such as the Berliner Philharmonie’s annual Klezmer Festival series or the 1992 Klezmer-​Gesellschaft’s concert series at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.44 In the flexible sparse black zone of the theater’s Studio Я, Kahn, along with the studio’s Moscow-​raised curator Marianna Salzmann, has mounted a series of concerts and events that use klezmer and Yiddish music to explore some of these issues—​who is the “we” who plays, listens to, and dances to Jewish music in today’s Berlin? These have included Kahn and Lurje’s Strange Love Songs; Psoy Korolenko’s Unternationale: A Post-​Dialectical Cabaret; an evening dedicated to the memory of New  York Yiddish songwriter, poet, artist, and matriarch Beyle Schaechter-​Gottesman;45 trumpeter Paul Brody’s setting of texts by Viennese Jewish poet Rosa Ausländer; and Alan Bern and Fabian Schnedler’s Semer Label Reloaded, a project that brings to life the forgotten output of Berlin-​based Jewish record labels of the 1930s (see chapter five). This is a very different agenda from the anything-​goes dance party happening up the road in Kaffee Burger, addressing ideas of Jewish identity and Jewish space in a much more direct and provocative way. The focus finds a physical resonance too. Unlike the easy overlap of bar/​stage/​smoking room found in Kaffee Burger, Gorki Studio Я46 is marked as a distinct performance space, away from the pleasantly noisy and sociable foyer bar that acts as its entrance and interval hangout. Where the bar is lighted and cozy, the studio is dark: black floors and walls, a raked series of benches covered in black fabric (figure 3.8). But the effect is neither censorious nor spartan:  a lack of overt “décor” opens up instead a fluid space of the imagination. Where Kaffee Burger conforms stylishly to the charming yet predictable semiotics of a faded-​glory cabaret bar, Studio Я is an uncarved block. Its simplicity and unformedness allow performer and audience alike to use the space as an experimental zone, an area of creative dialogue. Like Kaffee Burger, then, Gorki’s spatial dynamics work to include audience and performer as part of the same journey, although in a very different way. Many concerts here eschew a stage altogether in favor of a loose middle performance area against the longer wall, allowing both sides of the

120  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

communicative act to bleed into each other. And Kahn is a fan of PowerPoint presentation accompaniments, offering supertitles (Yiddish into German into English into Russian), cartoons, and short film excerpts that both illustrate and comment upon the musical action. More than sideshow props, these staging devices in fact mirror the diverse and multilayered levels of performer-​audience interaction, reflecting Kahn and Salzmann’s deep commitment to discourses of diversity and a conscious rejection of cultural essentialism: To quote from one of my Yiddish teachers Avrom Lichtenbaum, he said “Es iz nit tolke eyn yidishe kultur, es zenen nor do yidishe kulturn.”47 There is no such thing as Jewish culture; the idea that there is one Jewish culture is a 47 “There is not just one Jewish culture, there are only Jewish cultures” (my emphasis, based on the way Dan himself phrased the quote). On this same idea for culture in general, see Friedman (1994:73) and his discussion of Geertz (1984).

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Figure 3.8  Daniel Kahn, Gorki Theater, April 2014.

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  121 myth and it’s a politicized myth, it didn’t just happen, it’s not an accidental myth. It was a fabricated myth, and it’s utilized for various ideologies. Often by non-​Jews, and often by Jews.48

Organized by Janina Wurbs,50 this event brings together most of Berlin’s younger (international) Yiddish musicians along with guests from Holland, Paris, Hamburg, Munich, Toronto. . . . Each singer sings one or two songs, and all performers sit in the front row of the audience, so the travel between stage and seats is easy and comfortable. The night is many things: celebration, memorial, tribute, appraisal, collective gathering. All performers have personal memories of Beyle and share them freely. This brings everyone else in—​the concert as a collective and communal event. From a core of fifteen or so performers, at least as many different groupings are created, the whole cast coming together at the finale of each half. The songs are interspersed with excerpts from Josh Waletzky’s documentary, featuring interviews and historical footage. Thoughts that come to me at various points: family, generosity, warmth, migration, sadness, a poet’s irony and distance, integrity, neighborhood (much mention made of the Schaechter-​Gottesman’s Bainbridge Avenue Yiddish community). There is also a strong sense of an international network present here, celebrating one of their heroes, but also someone who taught each of them a great deal. Beyle’s son51 and granddaughter are in the audience, front and center, although they do not appear on stage. The material is almost all Beyle’s own, or songs that she made known and passed on to others. The performance of “Harbstlid” is striking.52 It begins with Beyle singing on film (in Yiddish). 48 Daniel Kahn, personal interview. 49 Yiddish: “Because of Beyle.” 50 Wurbs is a Yiddish scholar who over the past few years has also been a regular part of the Berlin klezmer scene. 51 Itzik Gottesman, folklorist, former associate editor of Yiddish newspaper Forverts, and now lecturer at the University of Texas. 52 “Autumn song,” perhaps Beyle’s best-​known song.

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This probing of the different meanings of Jewish culture is a fundamental part of the Gorki Studio performances. Jewishness becomes a text to be “read,” analyzed, and debated—​by performer, audience, and the space itself. A good example is the evening dedicated to the work of Beyle Schaechter-​Gottesman:  Tsulib Beylen,49 on April 12, 2014. Here are my fieldnotes from that concert:

122  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Paramount in the structuring of this concert was a deliberate sense of flux, a refusal to draw lines or agree borders. This was achieved across multiple levels:  physically in the continual migration of performers between their places in the audience and the stage area; textually in the interplay of music, poetry, painting, and film; linguistically in the program’s easy slippage between English, German, and Yiddish; generationally in the implicit three-​ way dialogue between Beyle, her roots, and her legacy; formally in the media overlap between stage and screen and the regrouping of ensembles; ethnically in the diversity of performers. Clearly, this liminality is of a different kind than the carnivalesque space of Kaffee Burger. Studio Я’s space of alternative fluidity is also an intellectual space of discussion and debate, deliberately open in its conclusions. Where Kaffee Burger joyfully breaches conventional

53 “So long.” See Wurbs (2010:93) for full lyrics.

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Gradually Ilya Shneyveys joins in live with Debussy-​like piano figures and, as the film fades out, Andrea Pancur takes over the song in German (Ilya continuing to play). After a full run-​through from Andrea—​Alan Bern adding melodica—​Dan Kahn takes over on guitar and harmonica, in English, à la Tom Waits /​Nick Cave. The screen above the performers shows German translations of the lyrics along with Beyle’s own drawings and paintings, plus photos (many of which include tonight’s participants). The semiotics are of continuity, integrity, and multi-​dimensional creativity—​a world where painting, poetry, song and music blend with family, friends and generations. Many of the singers join in from the audience with Beyle onscreen as she reminisces about singing “Bleter” [“Leaves”] with groups of children. For the finale, Alan Bern sits alone. He makes reference to recent personal sadness and to the warmth and friendship he felt as he returned to Berlin. He then plays “Azoy Lang,”53 beautifully. He plays simply and sparsely, singing quietly and occasionally rather than fully and clearly. Sporadic accordion flourishes dot the performance, but the overall mood is intimate and reflective, impressionistic rather than “performed.” As he finishes, the entire cast stand up slowly and approach the stage, singing as they go. They line up to perform the full song in a cappella choral arrangement, conducted by Sasha Lurje. Alan’s meditative, pointalist rendition has become an elegy, its gradual transformation carrying the whole audience along.

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  123

54 For a succinct explanation of Saussure’s original distinction, see Selden (1989:52). 55 This multilevel exploration of cultural identity is of course not limited to Jewishness. Contemporary and historical articulations of Russian, Turkish, or pan-​European identities are also frequently the basis for Studio Я performances and events, such as the ongoing Postheimat program. 56 E.g., Badehaus Szimpla (located in the heavily graffitied, multiuse former railroad site of Friedrichshain’s RAW-​Gelände), the basement collective Fuchs & Elster, or the postindustrial chic of Hangar 49. 57 I am using carnival in the Bakhtinian sense, as a subversive privileging of the low, the bawdy, and the excessive: “Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. . . . It is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits” (Bakhtin 1984:26).

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audience-​performer boundaries, Studio Я concerts deconstruct ideas of Jewishness themselves. Jewish space is self-​consciously reframed as a writerly text, a multiplicity of meanings accessed by “several entrances” (Barthes 2002:5). The stylish merging of layers of musical experience foregrounds not “one” Jewish culture (langue) but rather alternative, sometimes competing expressions (paroles) of Jewishness.54 And the varied levels across which these expressions take place—​musical, visual, physical, linguistic—​make them simultaneously readable in different ways by different musicians and audience members.55 Although they share performers, audiences, the relentless efforts of Dan Kahn, and the Klezmer Bund name, these two venues frame musical praxis in markedly different ways; Yiddish music becomes the vehicle for two complementary yet distinct dialogues. Kaffee Burger’s cheerful, dancey inclusivity is paralleled by several of the city’s other venues,56 spaces that specialize in a comfortably nonthreatening sort of carnival.57 Far from a fully subversive Lord of Misrule topsy-​turvy, these party spaces nevertheless enable a collective gathering where external norms of behavior and propriety can be easily suspended in favor of temporary wildness: both a gentle challenge to the status quo and—​contained within a safe and bounded space—​a paradoxically simultaneous reinforcement of wider social norms. The two types of venue therefore link klezmer music into these respective dynamics: one reveling in klezmer’s functional and expressive role as collective vehicle of social engagement, sensuality, and personal freedom (Amin and Thrift 2002:119); the other turning the contemporary performance of Jewish folk music into an ongoing dialogue around questions of ethnicity, identity, and cultural production. One offers fast, small-​scale transgression, the other a more complex and unpredictable grappling with some deliberately big ideas. These complementary themes will be explored further as we look at performance and participation in the contexts of community dance, “Jewish” evenings, and jam sessions.

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Tants in Gartn Eydn: Klezmer in the village dancehall

In the pretty village of Lübars, where the very northern edge of Berlin meets the state of Brandenburg, people have been dancing to klezmer music for nearly twenty years. A  little more structured than the klezmer commune Carsten Wegener originally envisioned, the event nevertheless retains an easy-​going informality and friendliness. Here is how Tants in Gartn Eydn (which is both the band name and the colloquial name for the “klezmer Schwof”58 dance evening) describes what they do: The dance master introduces the dances, the band plays a good klezmer tune, the singer attacks the public’s heart. Everybody dances how he/​she feels—​in perfect klezmer-​style or more contemporary . . . old and young, dancer and non-​dancer are dancing together! And it’s fun!59

It is a half hour’s drive straight north from the Mitte of Kaffee Burger and Gorki Theater, or double this if you take the S-​Bahn and bus. Although it is still in Berlin, a visit to Lübars feels like one is going somewhere else—​the Labsaal dance hall sits in the middle of a genteel village square, facing green fields and an old church. The band’s clarinet player Martin Borbonus told me that while the Wall was still up, west Berliners would bring their children to Lübars in order to experience something as close to countryside life as possible. Whether this is apocryphal or not, the sense of being attached to and yet outside the city is palpable. Once inside the large hall, the feeling of distance and difference remains, though not in an unpleasant way. The band plays on a high stage at one end of the hall, the dancers dance below. All is well lit and well-​ordered, small tables with bowls of chips and slices of apple

58 “Klezmer-​hop.” 59 From the Tants in Gartn-​Eydn website, http://​www.gartn-​eydn.de/​Download/​Gartn-​Eydn-​ Info_​eng.pdf, accessed September 30, 2019.

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I think in about 2000 we made this project, called Tants in Gartn Eydn. Because what I didn’t understand was that this music is party music, mostly, and in all the shows people were sitting and just watching. And so we have to bring the aspect of party back into the performance. It’s much more communicative if people dance. Carsten Wegener, personal interview

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  125

Participatory music is defined here as a particular type of music making in which there are no artist-​audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants. . . . Participatory music is for doing rather than listening. (Turino 2008a:21)

The “doing” in this case includes dancing as much as playing, and the participatory rationale of Tants in Gartn Eydn frames klezmer clearly as social dance music: the reason for being there is to be directly involved (as a dancer or as a musician). And yet it is also functional music wholly removed from its original context:60 no brides are dancing; no in-​laws acting out their rivalries through ritual steps.61 The effect is therefore of a paradoxically simultaneous intimacy and distance. Through the joyful physicality and emotional sociability of communal dance, klezmer music becomes fully rooted in the

60 This is also of course the case in the Klezmer Bund concerts discussed earlier. I would argue, however, that their inclusion as part of Berlin’s nightlife integrates them into a new functional role, whereas the dancing discussed here is maintained as a separate space. 61 Historically, these rituals (and many more) were clearly marked by music: mitsve tants (Rubin 2020:31) and broyges tants (Strom 2002:94). Cantors still sing specific melodies for the sheve brokhes (seven blessings) under the khupe (wedding canopy). It is also common to play particular tunes for the seven circles the bride makes around her groom, although these days (in the United Kingdom, at least) these are as likely to be “Sunrise, Sunset” or Naomi Shemer’s “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” as anything more “traditional.”

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lining the walls. The format for the evening is simple and effective: the dance master Thomas Römer calls the name of each dance, the band plays a short excerpt, the steps are explained, and then we dance for between five and ten minutes, before the whole process repeats itself. Set dances are also occasionally interspersed with instrumental showpiece numbers, during which there is the chance to freestyle on the dance floor. The klezmer Schwof forms part of a growing network of bal-​folk events and evenings in the city. I stood in for accordionist Franka Lampe at similar nights of Balkan dancing in Prenzlauer Berg, and also played several times in the grubby but atmospheric open space of Mauerpark, where accordionist Bodo Schiefke and dancer Ralf Müller organize weekly Folkwiese Friday night open-​air dances. At all these events, I found the atmosphere to be always easygoing and inclusive, a group of like-​minded enthusiasts who take care to privilege collectivity and communion over personal flair and precision. Thomas Turino describes the process as follows:

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62 Personal interview, 2014.

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immediate pleasure of participation, and yet the need for detailed explanation (plus the fact that almost all participants have to make a lengthy journey to reach it) foregrounds the constructed nature of the entire enterprise. The musical context here does not reinforce broader community structures or values; rather, it is the community, brought together for the few hours that the dance takes place and then dispersed until the next time. It is therefore on the one hand a grounded social phenomenon, culturally connected and intimate, and on the other separated and distanced—​an enjoyable curio, a hobby. It has also been carefully framed and highly organized, which acts to maintain a certain intellectual distance. In interview, the aspirations that Carsten Wegener spoke of for Tants in Gartn Eydn were reminiscent of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow: a spontaneously free and joyful state of presentness that involves a parallel sublimation of self (Turino 2008b:4). However, Carsten’s acknowledgment that “people just have too much business in their lives”62 is also an implicit recognition of the inevitable infringement of the mundane and the everyday. For in practice, the “how he/​she feels,” “more contemporary” dancing options proposed by the band’s website rarely happen—​the dancers are too well behaved, the dance instruction too strong a mediating force. If the initial dream of Tants in Gartn Eydn was to create a space for impulsive and spontaneous physical response, an intuitive reaction unfettered by correct dance practice, in reality the evening has brought the unpredictability of embodied emotional connectedness under well-​choreographed control (figure 3.9). This choreography and control, however, should not necessarily be interpreted negatively. Many of the participants with whom I spoke agreed that the order and structure of the evening in fact made it easy to take part, with behavior and norms made explicit and no in-​group to penetrate. Traditional Jewish wedding music has here been largely divorced from any specific Jewish meanings, but whereas in Kaffee Burger these ritual community meanings have been replaced with an unaffected and pseudo-​hedonistic bar/​club culture, with Tants in Gartn Eydn the aspect of “community” results in a wholesale removal into a clearly bounded context of “elsewhere.” And yet despite this, Jewish associations persist, and Jews and non-​Jews may react and respond differently. One German Jewish participant told me that the

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  127

dancing offered her a chance to reconnect—​in a secular and voluntary way—​ with childhood memories of family gatherings and parties. By contrast, a group of young non-​Jewish Germans spoke enthusiastically of their joy in learning dances of a different culture (I did not probe how far their perception of difference stretched). These various responses acknowledge that in the process of formalization and reinvention, certain residues and sediments will inevitably be shaken off in newer formations—​as no longer relevant or necessary: “What makes [these spaces] Jewish is no longer unambiguous. What is ‘Jewish’ about them, and who determines what qualifies as Jewish?” (Gantner and Oppenheim 2014:3). The difference between Kaffee Burger’s version of klezmer as dance music and Tants in Gartn Eydn is thus that of explicit mediation. Where one incorporates klezmer music into the city’s contemporary bottom-​up bar/​ club paradigm, the other reinforces it as a separate, ordered space: at a distance both physically and ideologically from the messy discourses of the city. This version of space roots the music as participatory and egalitarian yet formalized. It marks out klezmer as a found object of community music: functional in one sense and yet simultaneously “outside” community life.

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Figure 3.9  Klezmer “Schwof ” Tants in Gartn Eydn, Lübars, June 2014.

128  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

A night at the kosher cafe

63 Yiddish: party. 64 Yiddish: groom and bride. 65 See the Tele Aviv Documentaries web page, https://​www.teleaviv.com/​documentaries/​, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Of all the spaces and places discussed here, the one most clearly delineated as unambiguously Jewish is Bleibergs kosher cafe, long-​established just off the main shopping artery of the Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. This location is not accidental:  the cafe is in the middle of Berlin’s older postwar Jewish community, close to the Jüdisches Gemeindehaus (the city’s central Jewish community and religious administrative center) and also Charlottenburg’s large and busy orthodox synagogue. By day, Bleibergs is a quiet and friendly kosher and vegetarian eatery. For one night, more or less every month, the small, brightly lit, two-​roomed space transforms into a noisy, lively, and joyful simkhe63—​a Jewish wedding minus the khosn and kale.64 At the center of the action sits accordion and keyboard player Jossif Gofenberg. A  thickset and heavy man with an immediately friendly face, Gofenberg plays from the middle of the band. Rooted to his seat, his accordion strapped tightly to his frame, he is a solid, semi-​static hub from which the entire musical event emanates. Jossif grew up in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi) in Ukraine, a city that has played an important role in Jewish and Yiddish history, but has lived and raised a Jewish family in Berlin for the last forty years. He is heavily involved with the Jewish community center in the area, running an adult choir, a small klezmer ensemble, and children’s music groups from the Gemeindehaus. He also runs a “Klezmer Center” at the Fanny Hensel music school in Mitte, making him the point of klezmer contact for students of all ages and backgrounds. A singer, pianist, accordionist, musical arranger, and cheerful advocate for the soulful power of Jewish music, this self-​styled “Klezmer King of Berlin” has featured in a Tele Aviv documentary (as has Bleibergs itself)65 and with his band Klezmer Chidesch works regularly around Germany, performing for both Jewish and—​more usually—​non-​Jewish functions and audiences. From the end of the nineteenth century onward, Berlin has hosted significant numbers of Russian Jewish immigrants. Refugees from pogroms of the early twentieth century made a new home in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, and in the 1920s the Charlottenburg district in the west of the city earned

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  129



66 All Jossif ’s comments come from an interview at the Gemeindehaus on August 27, 2014.

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the nickname “Charlottengrad” due to the high proportion of Russian Jews who settled there. This migration was to see another significant wave in 1991, with the German federal government’s approval of refugee status to Jews from the former Soviet Union. Although figures are debated, it is likely that the number of Jews in Germany increased during this period from around twenty thousand to a little over one hundred thousand (Peck 2006:40). While many of these post-​perestroika arrivals have only loose religious or cultural ties to Judaism and Jewishness, the sheer weight of numbers has transformed many of Germany’s Jewish communities in profound ways (Weiss 2004), and there remains in Berlin a significant subgroup of musicians from the former Soviet Union (Ottens 2006). Some of these musicians are an important part of official Jewish community life in the city, the physical hub of which is the Jüdisches Gemeindehaus. Of Gofenberg’s regular collaborators in the band Klezmer Chidesch, clarinetist Igor Sverdlov and percussion and cimbalom player Pan Marek both emigrated from Belarus in the 1990s, and bassist Eugen Miller from Kazakhstan in 2002. For Jossif, the space of the Gemeindehaus is fundamentally connected to his music: “The whole atmosphere, when you come into the Gemeinde, you have the feeling that you are at home. For me as a Jew . . . you feel at home, among friends.”66 This also marks a notable contrast with most of the other musicians discussed in this book, who have very few ties to the city’s Jewish community. Through his close links to the Gemeindehaus, his immediate circle of musicians and wider circle of students, and the space of Bleibergs itself, Gofenberg is located at the center of several overlapping and interconnected networks. The Gemeindehaus and “Klezmer Center” ensure an ongoing supply of new students, many of whom will come to hear Klezmer Chidesch in concert at Bleibergs, thus helping to maintain the venue’s network of customers but also this particular scene’s network of audience-​participants. The repertoire performed in Bleibergs is what one might describe as Jewish party music. Klezmer standards (“Araber Tants,” “Shtiler Bulgar”), Yiddish favorites (“Papirosn,” “Di Grine Kuzine”), songs from Fiddler on the Roof, childhood songs (“Rozhinkes mit Mandlen”) all figure, along with occasional liturgical borrowings (“Oseh Shalom”). At least some of the audience is usually made up of members of Yossif ’s adult choir—​the majority of whom are non-​Jews—​and so the atmosphere is always helped along by enthusiastic

130  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Yesterday he was an antisemite, and today he plays klezmer music. There are some people who use it as a business, because they know that everyone asks for klezmer music. . . . They buy a CD, they hear how Giora Feidman plays, or how I play or how another plays. They play a bit like it, make sure it’s high and loud [laughs].68

Gofenberg also makes an important physical distinction between the spaces of klezmer that he, his audience, students, and fellow musicians populate and those of the wider world: Sure you can hear groups out in the streets playing it, but most of them are not klezmer groups; they are folk groups who play different music. I call it a borsht, you know what borsht is? The groups out there, they play some Yiddish music, some Romanian music, some Bulgarian, Yugoslavian, Ukrainian, Russian . . . Borsht music! [laughs]69

Well-​defined and clearly demarcated, not “in the streets” or “out there,” an evening at Bleibergs is Jewish space reinforced. It is not Jewishness 67 Gruber (2002:212): “Feidman, in fact, goes so far as to reject a use of the term klezmer to indicate music with specific historical Jewish roots or repertoire or specific musical language. . . . For Feidman, even the songs that mothers sing to their babies are klezmer.” 68 Jossif Gofenberg, personal interview. 69 Ibid.

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sing-​alongs from the floor. Although the cafe is primarily taken up with tables and chairs, the crowd willingly adapts itself to the space in order to dance. This kind of spontaneous, uncoordinated, and personal response makes an interesting contrast to the orderliness and planning of the Lübars klezmer Schwof and arguably gets closer to the “flow” of which Turino and Csikszentmihalyi speak. Where one represents the wider community’s keen yet well-​behaved take-​up of Jewish folk music for its own aims, Bleibergs is the world coming into Jewish culture, which happily opens its doors to receive all comers, initiated or not. Jossif is a warm and friendly avuncular figure. He advocates the need for an internal “felt”-​ness of playing klezmer, but unlike Giora Feidman, he is insistent that not everything is klezmer,67 and furthermore that this “felt” dimension is not immediately available on demand. He is also critical of the recent appropriation of this feeling:

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reimagined, subverted, ironized, or questioned, but rather a celebration of tradition as rooted continuity—​existing within the contemporary urban environment but making few concessions to it. The raised arms and audience “oy-​oy-​oy”s signify a benchmark, a bedrock end of an idea of Jewish culture, Jewish (secular) practice, and Jewish space (figure 3.10). Bleibergs’s self-​definition as a kosher cafe, its use of Israeli and Jewish iconography, and the programming of Jewish calendrical events mark its Jewishness as fixed, rather than temporary or contingent.70 Consequently, this establishment and framing of Jewish space works to root the music in a similar way—​something that is reinforced by Jossif ’s own comments: You can’t say that klezmer is a music just for Jews. It’s a music for everyone, first and foremost. [But] I don’t believe that the melodies sound the same

70 For example, Klezmer Chidesch and KlezBanda (Klezmer Chidesch plus singer Anna Metaxa) play for Hanukkah and Purim celebrations in Bleibergs. The cafe also hosts Shabbat and Lag Ba’omer (a Jewish holiday occurring on the thirty-​third day between Passover and Shavuot) evenings.

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Figure 3.10  Dancing at Charlottenburg’s Café Bleibergs, music courtesy of Jossif Gofenberg and band, October 2013.

132  Sounding Jewish in Berlin when a musician is Jewish than when they’re not Jewish. You must have a feeling inside, you understand? Above all with songs. How can a non-​Jew sing “My Yiddishe Mama” when they have no Yiddishe mama? What sort of feeling can they have?71

Jam sessions 1: Klezmerstammtisch But yeah, I mean, most of them or many of them, they used to live in Prenzlauer Berg, I think they still live in Prenzlauer Berg—​it’s just that the context has changed. Because back then it was what this part is now. Ilya Shneyveys, personal interview



71 Jossif Gofenberg, personal interview.

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In my visits to Bleibergs, I compared it mentally to similar overtly performative “Jewish” spaces that I  know in London—​cafes and restaurants in Golders Green or Hendon in which I  have played music. My own—​ admittedly anecdotal—​experience would lead me to expect an almost totally Jewish clientele at similar London venues, which is not the case here. But at the same time, Bleibergs klezmer nights are a far cry from the uncomfortable pretense of Krakow’s infamous Jewish-​themed restaurants (Gruber 2009). And although the musical material is well worn, there is nothing artificial or constructed about the atmosphere or the audience response. All audience members with whom I spoke agreed wholeheartedly that they were taking part in an authentic Jewish evening (which they were)—​perhaps the most Jewish evening to be had in the city. All felt strongly that their non-​ Jewish background was irrelevant (which it was) and that their participation was valued just as highly regardless of their ethnicity (again, they were correct). And while many visitors will be tourists and one-​off diners, the cafe also supports a local community, within which it is firmly integrated. This version of Jewish culture, however, offers no surprises or ambiguities. Loud and messy though it may be, it speaks from an accepted, taken-​for-​granted, official narrative of “laughter through tears” Jewish celebration. Fun but not carnivalesque, smiling but not boundary-​pushing, this articulation of Jewish music keeps wider cultural relations firmly intact.

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Placing the unofficial space of Studio Я and Kaffee Burger at one end of a continuum and the avowedly participative (yet formalized) Tants in Gartn Eydn at the other, in between exist several variations on an analytically fruitful theme: the jam session. Until 2018, Berlin boasted three klezmer jam sessions, each one exploring a different balance of official versus unofficial practice, propriety versus carnival, and planning versus improvisation. The next three sections will talk at length about these different sessions and their relationships to Jewish music and German and Jewish identity, drawing on interviews I conducted in 2013–​14 with participants and organizers. Sessions are useful musical spaces to explore precisely because of their liminality—​far from polished performance but more than rehearsal, spanning both public and private space, pleasantly loose but never randomly free, and ostensibly inclusive yet often pervaded by hidden rules. In his discussion of the English session scene, Niall Mackinnon (1993) uses the concept of “structured informality” to allude to the often subtle power relations at play between session participants, particularly between established and newer players. My three sessions here have all found different ways around these dynamics, as I will discuss. More than simply tapping into preexisting connections, these three sessions have become points around which new musical networks cohere, reconfiguring existing network elements in the creation of new (sub-​) scenes. Physical spaces, session leaders (hubs), disseminated musical material, and the semiotics of the wider city all work together in different ways for each session. Session leaders’ centrality is often responsible for maintaining relations with the venue (strong ties), negotiating with other session players (strong and weak ties), and drumming up an audience (weak ties). And for session novices, these musicians will frequently act as first point of contact, thereby also fulfilling a mediating—​though not always gatekeeping—​role. It is not only the liminality of sessions that are of value to a researcher; such encounters may also point to new ways of thinking about music itself. In her work on Irish sessions in Galway, social geographer Frances Morton emphasizes the value of performance research in finding ways around conventional theory/​practice oppositions, particularly in the fluid environment of the jam session. For Morton, the immediacy of the session context opens up a particular in-​the-​moment interface of experience, expression, and embodiment, albeit a fleeting one:

134  Sounding Jewish in Berlin By addressing the sense of the now, and the liveness and richness of real time, it is possible to negotiate access to the spaces which are created in the “now”—​for example, embodied and expressive ways of knowing, being and communicating in situ. (Morton 2005:662–​64)

72 Boyer (2006:327) defines a Stammtisch as a “regulars’ table,” an “intimate fraternal space” of social exchange (often at a bar or restaurant). 73 With help from his La’om colleagues Franka Lampe and Stefan Litsche.

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Jam sessions are long established within the Berlin klezmer scene. The most enduring—​ the Klezmerstammtisch,72 founded by accordionist Jenny Wieneke and fiddlers Petra Kirstein and Matthias Groh73—​began in November 1995. More recently, Groh has inaugurated a changing roster of loosely performative sessions at Maison Courage in Prenzlauer Berg, where his list of irregularly rotating participants reads like a who’s who of klezmer music in the city. Finally, the newest and most dynamic gathering is the six-​ year-​old Neukölln Klezmer Sessions, in the arty/​working-​class Neukölln district south of the canal. These three gatherings offer strikingly different interpretations of the potential and possibilities of MacKinnon’s “structured informality” and also of Morton’s “embodied and expressive ways of knowing.” For almost all of its existence, Klezmerstammtisch took place on the fifteenth of the month in Café Oberwasser in Mitte. Oberwasser was a fine and characteristic example of a Berlin neighborhood Kneipe: wood-​paneled walls, solid oak tables, a lively bar in the center of the room, and a well-​ prepared and generous menu. A large part of the bar’s appeal was the warm and friendly presence of its owner, Ursula Weigert, who in March 2019 finally closed Oberwasser’s doors for the last time. Alongside overseeing a generous food offering, Ursula was responsible for the bar’s enthusiastic support of musical events, frequently with an Eastern European or Russian flavor. A friend to musicians across the city, she consistently kept two or three tables clear on the fifteenth of every month to provide space for as many participants of the Stammtisch as wished to attend. Although by the time of the bar’s closure numbers were down to an average of four or five, past monthly get-​ togethers boasted upwards of ten or fifteen musicians, singers, dancers, and general klezmerphiles—​often brought into the Stammtisch orbit through the connections of accordionist and frequent session leader Franka Lampe. Pretty much anyone who has ever played klezmer and visited Berlin, famous or unknown, has at some point shown their face at Oberwasser. If the night

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  135

Nice evening-​long illustration of how music can spread across a whole space. Starts small, just with three or four at the corner table. Gradually this table expands. Then the next table along suddenly reveal themselves as musicians—​they are a community band called Frau Winkelmann and they are here to play but also to recruit. At one point Sybil and Susi start a song at the other end of the bar, Susi plonking away at the piano. We join in from our end—​the entire room linked by music. Polite at first, but as the evening progresses barriers break down more and more. People shift places, create small narrative groups—​tunes begin and are broken off or flow into other larger sounds. You don’t know where a tune will start next, or who will join in (or how they’ll do so). The whole room is responsible for sound, but not all at the same time, or in the same way. Friendly and open session, if occasionally restrained. Pretty much anything goes as long as it’s sort-​of klezmer. On the Facebook page there is a suggestion that other material is allowed, but only past midnight. Balkan and Greek tunes make an appearance in the small hours, and I try out an air and reel. Sheet music is permitted but not really used. Tonight, though, the Frau Winkelman people have carefully arranged their music and stands.

What I found in Oberwasser, on the good nights, was a strong sense of musical community, an unpretentious group of happy people keen to chat, play, sing, and renew friendships. The sessions did, however, have their boundaries, as hinted at previously. It could at times be hard to get past a sense of politeness between the players, the particular self-​conscious silence cropping up at the end of every tune, revealing perhaps that social norms had not quite been breached in the way one might have thought. In terms of repertoire, the Stammtisch was also clearly bordered:  well-​worn klezmer standards the almost exclusive norm.74 Each piece would tend to be played through 74 In fact, this lack of variety in the material was one of the chief complaints about the session from some of Berlin’s more established musicians.

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was a slow one, Ursula was also happy to sit down and chat with musicians, eager to put them at their ease before they began to play. Between 2013 and 2015, I attended many Oberwasser klezmer jams. Some sported only a handful of players; others were much more lively, full-​blown affairs. Below are a few (deliberately episodic and impressionistic) fieldnotes from the second session I attended, in late 2013:

136  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I stopped going because it’s just, on one hand it was great because they were playing so many great tunes, but on the other hand sometimes I was sitting around this table and just feeling very very—​it’s very hard for me to put it into words, but [pause] maybe I’ll be direct about it. Well, I keep meeting Germans that have a fascination with Israel-​slash-​Jewish culture. And it ranges from “Oh, klezmer, I LOVE klezmer music! I have all the CDs of Giora Feidman at my house!,” which you meet a lot, to, like just in life: “Oh, you’re Jewish, you come from Israel? I love Giora Feidman.” Well, thank you very much. I  mean, seriously, it’s like “Oh, you’re American? I  love Madonna!”77

Eli was not alone here. For some newer musician arrivals to Berlin, the sense that the Stammtisch was providing a controlled and somewhat anaesthetized environment within which to “sample” the “safely domestic and thus manageable” (Kaminsky 2015a:152) Jewish musical exoticism of klezmer not only brought a feeling of discomfort but also hinted at an official, delineating discourse, at odds with the perceived joyful overspill of klezmer and Yiddish music. Similarly, the respectful, even conservative treatment of the music itself points to a more limiting perception of the structural mechanics and social possibilities of folk music in the contemporary city. 75 Mackinnon (1993:107) makes a similar point with some English sessions, finding himself “inadvertently breaking the mores of the event.” 76 Here and in what follows I’m using this distinction as a formal rather than ethnic differentiator—​ just as Jewish space doesn’t need Jews, so “German” klezmer doesn’t have to be played by Germans. 77 Personal interview, 2014.

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two or three times and then relinquished; it was rare to find a song or tune transformed in any way through the particular interpretation given to it that night at Café Oberwasser. While not value judgments, these observations nevertheless point to a certain propriety and order lurking at the margins of the Klezmerstammtisch.75 As we shall see, in contrast to the city’s other two sessions, it was as if this particular evening relied on a sense of orderliness and correct practice in order to maintain its identity: to break this down would have threatened the basis upon which the Stammtisch operated. For some musicians, behind these hidden assumptions lay a particularly “German”76 approach to communal music making, one that at times sat uneasily with the looser collectivity of klezmer. Israeli fiddle player Eli from Knoblauch Klezmer Band set out his feelings with disarming honesty:

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Jam sessions 2: The Lounge On the scene what evolved is the quality of music played during the sessions. This increased dramatically. People learned a lot from each other. It’s probably also related because a lot of different bands played and they exchanged musicians and they played in different constellations. People listened much more carefully, and established some standards. So there should be a proper ending of the tune during the session, which was not happening at the beginning! Stefan Litsche, personal interview

In 2008 one of the Klezmerstammtisch’s founders, violinist Matthias Groh, moved his operations a few streets east and north into the now-​gentrified Prenzlauer Berg, to bar-​restaurant Maison Courage on Senefelderplatz. In the back alcove of this large room (or outside in the summertime), Matthias hosted a fortnightly meeting of klezmer musicians under the banner Saytham’s Lounge.78 Saytham’s is not quite an open jam session in that the players are all arranged and invited beforehand, but neither is it exclusive, as anyone can join Matthias’s list and sign up for a session. And in the fluidity of the afternoon itself, the Lounge—​as it is known—​retains an appealing sense of flow and informality (figure 3.11). 78 Having hosted Saytham’s for five years, Maison Courage closed in early 2016; the grand final session included members of Kasbek, ?Shmaltz!, Tants in Gartn Eydn, and more. Saytham’s moved to Cafe Butter in Pappelallee. Since then, the sessions have tried out a number of different venues, most recently the long-​established Speiches Rock and Blues Kneipe in Raumerstraße (also Prenzlauer Berg).

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The Stammtisch’s regulars were in fact well aware of the fine balance between organized creativity and excessive rule making. Clarinetist Stefan Litsche, a core Klezmerstammtisch member throughout its entire lifespan, showed me a printed list of “rules” compiled by him, Franka Lampe, and others in the late 1990s. Partly tongue-​in-​cheek (“No more than 3 trumpets allowed at any one time”) and partly good session sense (“If you can’t hear what’s going on, you’re playing too loud”), they point to a friendly struggle between a yearning for unbridled collective musicking and the desire to maintain order. Partly as a reaction to these tensions, two alternative models have developed, to which I now turn.

138  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Here are my notes from a chilly November Sunday in 2013: Saytham’s is a loose grouping of about 40 musicians, most of whom have been involved with klezmer music in the city for several years. The gigs take place every other Sunday (roughly) at 5pm in the back of Maison Courage. They involve about 5 people, typically fiddle, clarinet, bass, accordion and percussion, but this varies according to who’s available. Repertoire is standard klezmer, but with several structural features that make the event different.

—​no rehearsal —​no set list —​no pre-​arrangements —​a jam session ethos —​an audience that embraces all the above

The result is a freewheeling afternoon within which the boundaries between audience and performer overlap considerably. The tunes are well-​ known (they have to be), but the flexibility of the performance allows them to grow, with plenty of open sections in between. New medleys are created (and dropped), tunes are mixed and matched, sections swapped over. Klezmer here is a malleable form—​there are set melodies that everyone knows, but the performers are playing klezmer music in general as much as specific tunes. The fluidity is physical too—​players stand and move

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Figure 3.11  Outdoors summer session at Saytham’s Lounge, Senefelderplatz. Matthias Groh (fiddle), Stefan Litsche (clarinet), Phil Alexander (accordion), Detlef Pegelow (tuba), Hampus Melin (percussion). May 2014.

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In organizing each session, Matthias sends out a Doodle link for the upcoming two months, and interested musicians input their availability. From this, he assembles different lineups, loosely themed around things like “Funky old-​time klezmer” and “Romanian and Macedonian music”—​ careful planning that then allows the accidental and the improvisatory to develop. In its use of online organization and real-​time embodiment, Saytham’s straddles the local and the virtual (Peterson and Bennett 2004), producing a set of possibilities and variables with broadly the same outcome but never the same thing twice. It’s a session but with some gatekeeping control at work: an acknowledgment that not “anything” is allowed, an explicit recognition that not “everything” is good. Saytham’s presents a dynamic network model: established online, centralized around Matthias, and combining strongly and weakly tied musicians and a shared general repertoire. In addition, Matthias’s online music resource offers weakly tied session players access to a large range of musical material, which can then be fed back into their own local networks (or added to). Groh also organizes occasional Saytham’s refugee benefits, linking musically to wider social concerns and again positioning the Lounge and its activities directly within the contemporary city. Cultural sociologists Christopher 79 Georg Potzies is a guitarist, an observant Jew, and a huge music fan. His is a demonstrative and highly performative Jewish presence at many of the city’s klezmer events, including Saytham’s, Oblomov, and Bleibergs.

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in and out of center stage, audiences spill into the performers’ space and vice versa. The looseness is reflected in the audience: friends and family, tourists, fellow musicians, Sunday afternoon groups—​a wide spread of age and background. And because it is not a “gig” as such, there is a free movement in and out of the space. Hat passed around at the end, as usual. How “Jewish” is this afternoon’s music? There is one Jew playing, and Georg and his friends are busy with their Yiddish-​isms and Jewish dancing.79 But the overriding theme is communality, friendship and relaxed musical enjoyment, rather than affiliation or generic behavior/​expectation. Is this the klezmer musician in wider society, or wider society coming to the klezmer musician? This could easily happen with other sorts of folk music, but in this instance klezmer is the form that can provide a big enough base of musicians and material. It could be that klezmer here carries just the right amount of folkie-​ness without so many of the issues (surprisingly!). Here today it’s definitely a music of open possibilities.

140  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Driver and Andy Bennett (2014) frame this shifting sense of musical community specifically in terms of local articulation and globalized cultural practice:

For a reinvented, internationalized music that continues to develop ever stronger local relevances and affiliations, this is an appealing theoretical hook. Moreover, a connection between the aesthetic and the social also links the three sessions under discussion here. If we take Oberwasser as indeed “locked into a particular cultural aesthetic” (of friendly but bordered musical practice), then we can see that Saytham’s “scene”-​ness begins to move this into a locally specific articulation of a global musical vocabulary and a looser idiomatic awareness. Based on the players that live and work in Berlin, the liberal inclusivity of the Lounge positions it as a musical meeting ground, while the easygoing nature of the event itself creates the necessary “shifting aesthetic orientations.” This is a continuum that moves Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish music from official to unofficial, from bounded structure to informal praxis, and from clearly defined musical terms to a more general idiomatic vernacular. This newer and more ambiguous articulation of Jewish musical space resounds most dramatically in the third of the city’s jam sessions, to which we now turn.

Jam sessions 3: Bar Oblomov and new klezmer space So I moved to Berlin in ’12 or ’13. And I knew Christian from before and I hung out with him, and he kind of introduced me to Hampus. And Hampus and I just started to jam, in the parks. And he knew Ilya and Sasha, and Dan of course. And so we started jamming, the three of us—​me, Ilya, and Hampus. And we were like, you know what, Berlin is missing an open jam session for klezmer music. Because at that time you had Courage, but the concert there was a fixed band, it wasn’t a jam session. And then you had the Klezmerstammtisch,

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Rather than reading musical communities—​as earlier writers did—​as locked into a particular cultural aesthetic, the aim here is to develop a sense in which shifting aesthetic orientations are made relevant by a locally-​ specific relational positionality within a globalized field of cultural consumption. (Driver and Bennett 2014:6)

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  141 which was a regular thing also, but it had to be very quiet because of the place. So, for instance, drums weren’t allowed. So our thought was to have this open jam session. Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview

For me, this seems to be a shift of the generations. Ours was built up in the ’90s, and most of the people joined there. But the new people arriving, they built their own community. Maybe also related to geography. I’ve felt it for myself. It’s much more professional, what they are doing. All the people which are carrying this new scene, most of them are professional musicians. We [La’om] were mostly not professionals, only Franka. Also Tants in Gartn Eydn, everyone had other jobs. It makes a difference. And they organize it very well, which also makes a scene that people can join.80

Bar Oblomov is on the corner of Lenaustraße and Holbrechtstraße, running parallel to the busy Kottbusser Damm. Where Kottbusser Damm overflows with Turkish supermarkets, bargain stores, falafel joints, and clothes shops, every Holbrechtstraße block sports two or three bars or restaurants that buzz pleasantly with a mix of locals and visitors. Oblomov is run by a sociable young Italian called Vincenzo and is decked out in the stylish mismatch that characterizes the more relaxed side of Berlin’s bar culture. Of the bar’s two

80 Stefan Litsche, personal interview.

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Away from the leafy streets and restored façades of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte, a group of younger international musicians have over the last six years created a new space for klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin. This is the roughly triweekly Neukölln Klezmer Sessions at Bar Oblomov, south of the Landwehrkanal in Neukölln. I  want to look at how this newer session is understood by its participants as a more liminal, nuanced, and emotionally unpredictable site, one that takes in an avowed commitment to new Yiddish music, but also to contemporary Berlin. As always—​and as a caveat against any sense of theoretical triumphalism—​it is essential to remember that most participants within this small network of past and present are well connected with each other, although some more than others. These three musical spaces detail points along a spectrum, rather than seismic shifts in the urban sonic landscape. At the same time, they outline a certain sense of development, as explained by La’om clarinetist Stefan Litsche, a frequent attendee at all three sessions:

142  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

A wailing clarinet, rolling snare drum and chugging accordion spill out onto the cold street and it sounds good. It fits. Like hearing the strains of Charlie Parker coming up from a 52nd St cellar sometime around the late 1940s. Except this is not jazz, or punk, or reggae. It is klezmer music, traditional dance music for Jewish weddings. And it is not a re-​worked, modernized klezmer either:  beats, loops, and cross-​genre mash-​ups are only noticeable by their absence. Yet it sounds like it means business. The musicians are mostly arranged at one end of the room, but there is no clear border or stage. Players spill into the audience, boundaries overlap and are continually redrawn as people move around the room, or in and out of the music-​makers to say hello or join in. Several singers and players have opted to stay within the bulk of the crowd, and by the end of the evening we will all have become performers in a lusty gute nakht singalong. Musicians come and go from the “stage” end, slipping into the bar to buy drinks, into the audience to chat to friends. Places change, fiddle players stand and their seats are taken by accordionists, a darbuka player moves into the middle of the room, a trumpeter shyly appears on the couch to the left. The leader Ilya stands, sits, jigs around, whilst playing. And as people join in, they mostly do so from their audience position: along the walls, at tables, strolling with a guitar . . . plus we are all singing and dancing, at least some of the time. At half time we congregate in the noisy, smoky and lighter main bar. Hugs and handshakes, quick chats and catch-​ups, drinks ordered and cigarettes smoked. Then everyone messily heads back to the dark red room next door. There are now many more people, and the second half begins with an introduction from Ilya and Hampus. A manifesto about bringing klezmer to where younger musicians now live (someone cheers “first we take

81 Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview.

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large spaces, it is in the darker, red-​hued, candlelit side room that the jam session takes place. Where other jam sessions in the city operate within the main space of a single large-​roomed bar, the separateness of Oblomov’s space puts it somewhere at the intersection of gig, jam session, club night, and social get-​together: “We really wanted just to have the feeling that the audience would be like, ‘We’re sitting in a living room, we’re sharing songs, we’re sharing tunes.’ ”81 As before, here are some fieldnotes to set the scene. These are an amalgam of the first and second sessions (December 2013 and January 2014).

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  143

The Oblomov sessions are the brainchild of accordionist Ilya Shneyveys, clarinetist Emil Goldschmidt, and drummer Hampus Melin. Between 2012 and 2017, Ilya made his home in Neukölln, most of the time.84 Highly active in the worldwide klezmer education network, he also jointly leads the Yiddish rock band Forshpil and in 2014 won a Rudolstadt Festival Ruth Prize for his star-​studded Alpen Klezmer project. Emil, a classically trained musician who developed a love of klezmer in his teens, is from Copenhagen and currently migrates between the two cities—​although in the early days of the Oblomov sessions he was based largely in Berlin. When in Denmark, he is frontman for the klezmer six-​piece Mames Babegenush. By contrast, 82 Russian: “If you have,” from the 1975 film The Irony of Fate (or Enjoy Your Bath!). See Fedina (2013). 83 Yiddish: “I will explain to you.” See Mlotek and Slobin (2007:96). 84 In 2017, Shneyveys moved to the United States. His central role in the Oblomov sessions was ably filled by accordionist Patrick Farrell, a brand-​new Berlin resident but a leading figure in New Yiddish musical circles for several years before his arrival. Here I am concentrating on Shneyveys, as without his formative presence the Oblomov sessions would very likely not have taken root.

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Neukölln!”). A little awkward, a little self-​conscious, but its sentiment and intention are active and inclusive. This night reminds me of what so many people have told me, that most people who are into the klezmer scene here are also participants. Here there are singers, musicians, Weimar alumni, and the line between performer and audience is impossible to draw. Every other conversation is about how great this first night has turned out. Sasha and Dan sing a couple of songs from their upcoming Gorki Theater gig—​a concert performance around a bar table. They sing “Yesli U Vas”82—​a Soviet New Year favorite sung in Russian and Yiddish by a 30-​ something Latvian and American to a bunch of Berlin musicians, 20 years after the fall of Communism. Olaf and Tania follow with “Ikh vel aykh gebn tsu derklern”83 and we all join in with the “ya-​ba-​boys.” There is dancing, clapping, glasses banged on tables, lots of shouting. It is a noisy and happy party of new and old friends. It is also very cool! Not sunglasses, casinos and celebs cool, but relaxed—​ enjoyment over image. A  crowd of youngish, hip (but not achingly so) Berliners all singing and dancing to klezmer and Yiddish music, without a trace of self-​consciousness or awkwardness, or “learnt” behavior. At one point I step outside for some fresh air. Looking through the steamed-​up window, I realize that if I couldn’t hear, perhaps the last thing that I would expect the soundtrack to be is early twentieth-​century Yiddish folk music.

144  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

85 Personal interview, 2014. 86 Clarinetists Jan Hermerschmidt, Stefan Litsche, and Christian Dawid and accordionist Franka Lampe (1969–​2016), for example. 87 See, for example, Die Mutter vom Kollwitzplatz, a Berliner Zeitung strip cartoon that chronicles the armies of well-​to-​do young families who now populate these former spaces of resistance. The issue of gentrification is a highly charged one all over the city. See for example a map of displacement prepared by the Bizim Kiez initiative, http://​www.bizim-​kiez.de/​map-​of-​displacement-​in-​so36-​en/​, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Malmö-​born Hampus is a Berlin veteran with fifteen years’ Neukölln residency under his belt. A jazz musician by training, he is a mainstay of Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird and a number of other Berlin jazz ensembles. This, then, is the first point of difference between Oblomov and the older sessions. Its three leaders do not come from the city, or even the country, and at the time of the first session (December 2013) two had only recently made Berlin their home. This international provenance speaks to a contemporary coming and going, a flow in and out of the city of short-​term visitors (frequently artists or musicians) that chimes well with the creative energy and DIY aesthetic of post-​reunification culture. In interviews, both Hampus Melin and Oriente Records’ Till Schumann paralleled this incarnation with that of the 1920s, a historical reference that for them positioned Berlin for the first time in a long time as driver of its own cosmopolitan internationalism (Ward 2001). It also foregrounds Berlin’s current place as a central node in the global klezmer and Yiddish music dialogue. As Daniel Kahn puts it, “Most of what concerns us, I think, as creative people, has to do with contributing to a conversation between generations and between artists.”85 In Bar Oblomov, this temporal conversation can also be traced along geographical axes, as the network connections (forged at workshops and festivals and through transnational ties) of the three main protagonists ensure an ongoing and changing supply of guests from elsewhere in Germany and from abroad—​in Berlin for a gig or simply to hang out. Jewish musical space is free here to migrate between the local, the national, and the international, often in the course of the same night. These sessions were set up in direct relation to the city’s other klezmer music spaces, both musically and geographically. In the 1990s, the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg offered cheap bohemian living for a vibrant young community of artists, musicians, and writers. Thanks to the city’s fixed-​ rents, many older long-​time klezmer musicians are still based here.86 But Prenzlauer Berg’s rampant gentrification has long since pushed up prices and pushed out newer artistic arrivals87—​often southward to Neukölln, which,

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  145

88 Berliners are proud of and loyal to their Kiez (neighborhood). It is an important part of self-​ identification: shops make “kiez” part of a compound name, products use “kiez” as a local descriptor, and Kiez festivals are common. I even saw a Neukölln poster protesting the hipster influx of “Kiez killers.” Although the term Kiez has been in existence since the Middle Ages, it has only gained wide use since the rapid social changes of reunification. See Huyssen (1997:68). 89 Franka Lampe, personal interview, 2014. 90 Personal interview, 2014.

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while by no means safe from the gentrifying sword of Damocles, still also offers relatively cheap accommodation. A  working-​class area with a large Turkish population and thriving outdoor street culture, this part of Berlin is also of late the most politically charged district, the inheritor of Kreuzberg’s 1970s and 1980s squatter-​scene ethos and the site of heated debates around ownership of urban space (Holm 2014).88 In the background to this jam session, then, we have a meeting of several related elements, spanning geography, history, musical discourse, and practice. A group of young, innovative international musicians at the center of the European klezmer scene, an explicit aim to bring klezmer music to their part of town, a proliferation of rapidly changing bar/​performance spaces, an environment of transformation with traces of radicalism, and an enthusiastic and surprisingly hip audience. Locating these sessions within this unofficial, street-​level cultural and physical space has implications for the Jewish music played within and offers a nicely contingent and nuanced version of Jewish topography: Jewish music is being created here, but the Jewish identity at play is a shifting and temporary one. The physical and musical fluidity of the Oblomov nights is often read by participants in direct relation to the straight-​edged “properness” of older klezmer sessions. For Sasha Lurje, the (at that time) eighteen-​year-​old Klezmerstammtisch at Café Oberwasser had lately been “dying on its feet,” in fact echoing a view related to me by one of the Stammtisch’s founders (who wryly added “although it has been dead before”).89 Oblomov, conversely, pointed to the potential play of multiple subjectivities. Speaking specifically of the session’s relationship to a sense of Jewish cultural identity, Sasha pointed to a flexibility of choice rather than an imposition of boundaries: “Through that [cultural freedom] we can actually be more free to develop a certain one culture . . . because we’re not forced to be certain things—​we choose to be, and also we see reflections of this one thing, which makes us understand it so much better.”90 Coming at the same argument from the other direction, Knoblauch Klezmer Band fiddler Eli Fabrikant—​born in Riga, raised in Israel, and living

146  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

[In Oberwasser] we played one or two tunes, and we kind of forced some improvisation inside. And then we stood up and we started dancing, and I felt that was foreign, something like “Oh, it’s a little bit too much! We want to sing emotional songs in Yiddish, but why are you doing this mess now?” And this mess is exactly what I found in Oblomov and I loved it from the first second.91

Fabrikant is a highly politicized and thoughtful musician, and his refusal to be neutral is both provocative and revealing. By characterizing his response as “foreign” (from the point of view of the Stammtisch), Eli positions both the Germanness of the older session and his own place outside of it. Similarly, the proscribed emotional performativity of singing moving Yiddish songs is acceptable in the more formal and established space of Café Oberwasser, whereas an instantaneous (and hence unpredictable) physical emotional connection is frowned upon; such connections (“this mess”), however, are actively encouraged in Oblomov. And for Eli this capacity for embodied, messy release is intimately bound up with affective responses to the music, illuminating implicit borders and also the possibilities of their transgression: Enclosures and façades serve to define both a scene (where something takes place) and an obscene area to which everything that cannot or may not happen on the scene is relegated. (Lefebvre 1991:36)

The decision to incorporate unpredictability, emotion, and fluidity as a structural feature in Bar Oblomov is an acknowledgment of the multiple voices at play in an urban musical environment, an implicit acceptance of the flaws in narrative control. It is hard not to think of Certeau’s tactics here, the on-​ the-​ground effect of “things extra and other, [which] insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order” (1984:107). Here is drummer Hampus talking about the setup of the room at Oblomov:

91 Personal interview, 2014.

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in Berlin for the last ten years—​found that the openness of the Oblomov sessions militated specifically against a distinct and visceral unease he still felt in the differing but limiting expectations around Jewishness of longer-​running, “German”-​led sessions. Here he is talking about his own affective response to the two contexts and the reactions he felt it provoked:

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  147

Such “melting” is especially important when we place it against earlier discourses of absence and control that have at times framed klezmer in the city. It moves this particular Jewish musical space into a robust and malleable part of the everyday urban fabric. It confronts Berlin’s legacy of borders and division (Ward 2011a) with the unofficial space between performance and participation, a more carnivalesque zone operating within the darker and more ambiguous world of bar culture and dancing bodies. Scene is one way of speaking of the theatricality of the city. . . . The excesses of sociability that surround the pursuit of interests, or which fuel ongoing innovation and experimentation within the cultural life of cities. . . . Scenes are one of the city’s infrastructures for exchange, interaction and instruction. (Straw 2004:412–​13)

The multilevel participatory possibilities of “exchange, interaction and instruction” find a resonance in the musical progress through the night. Rather than the conventional “tune-​chat-​tune” rubric that structures most jam sessions (Mackinnon 1993), in Oblomov everything happens at once. People applaud at the end of tunes, but they also clap, whoop, and talk during them (­figures 3.12–​14). Although the repertoire is largely traditional klezmer, a hora or freylekhs will be stretched ad hoc through different keys, time signatures, and instrumentations, morphing in and out of other pieces along the way. But this is no endless D-​minor noodling: in discussion, Ilya, Hampus, and Emil all acknowledged that as a strong trio they have the capacity to move the music along wherever necessary, neatly avoiding the pitfalls of the “groove” jam session. And while many of the session’s participants are distinctly mobile, it is in particular Ilya Shneyveys’s wandering embodiment of space—​ the dance-​like way that he moves through the material space of the session with his accordion—​that acts as a tangibly cohering force. Shneyveys is also not afraid to act as musical director, producing on-​the-​spot arrangements

92 Personal interview, 2014.

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We talked about the effect of having a stage, or not having a stage. . . . And of course, as soon as you step up onto a stage, you’re “on” in a different way. And maybe that’s something that we weren’t really going for. But that it would be something where you could kind of melt in, and it would be “Is that person playing? Does it matter? Maybe a little bit?”92

148  Sounding Jewish in Berlin to keep everyone involved in a continual and surprising unfolding musical statement that includes even the most timid of participants.

Although there is often explicit virtuosity at play, its manifestation is frequently collaborative and collective rather than soloistic. Unlike the Klezmerstammtisch, which was heavily dependent on whoever turned up, the Oblomov core trio covers rhythm, harmony, and melody—​even though actual personnel are flexible. And the fact that two-​thirds of the house band can form a powerhouse rhythm section eliminates the lurking session fear of starting a tune that no one joins in with. Eli Fabrikant characterizes the session’s inclusivity in musical terms: It’s like, yes we’re playing Jewish music, but this is not a “Jewish event” with all the symbolism. . . . Sasha is singing a lot of Yiddish, but she and Sveta were singing Russian folk songs, and suddenly you know the terkishe is turning into a Romanian sirba. Everybody knows the tune and everybody’s “OK, cool.” It’s still very very much klezmer, but I don’t think that’s because it’s “supposed” to be.94

Oriente Musik’s Till Schumann made this point more explicitly: One time, one of these guys, he stood up and said it’s a special day because it’s Israeli Independence Day. And I’m sure that some people in the audience feel not so comfortable with it, let’s say. But this is part of it, and this

93 Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview. 94 Personal interview, 2014.

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The thing about jamming in klezmer music is that you have to know a lot of tunes. And if you don’t, you can easily sit for half an hour and you don’t really know what to play, right? So we also thought a lot about how to include everyone, even those people who didn’t really know any klezmer tunes. We were concerned about picking the right tunes, and we wanted to sit on that tune for a long time, rather than just the jam thing—​all the time new tunes. And I think that’s the reason why it became so popular, because it attracted a lot of different musicians—​not only klezmer musicians but also musicians interested in Greek and Turkish music, and jazz also. Even Latin musicians as well [laughs].93

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Figures 3.12–​3.14  Neukölln Klezmer Sessions in Bar Oblomov. Top: singers Sasha Lurje and Sveta Kundish celebrate. Middle: Emil Goldschmidt (clarinet), Ryan Purchase (trombone), and Ilya Shneyveys (accordion). Bottom: Irina Steinbrecher (front right) and fellow audience/​participants show their appreciation. All 2014.

150  Sounding Jewish in Berlin gives me a lot of hope, that there is a different, diverse audience. . . . It can hold that, because it’s not a political event. It’s just music.95

So it was this weird environment of very creative people from all kinds of places. And also the audience was very diverse. There would be young people, elderly people, people from the Turkish community, from the Yiddish music community, people from all around. And I think that’s just because we were very aware to include people, and have it very informal. And we have people coming now from all of Germany to be a part of it, and we have people traveling also from abroad—​from England, from Holland, from Belgium, even from Switzerland. And I think that’s why the community vibe is so important, because it’s like we’re having a community there and there’s space for everyone to join in.97

Neukölln Klezmer Sessions celebrated its seventy-​fifth night in September 2019. It remains lively and busy and continues to attract new musicians and audiences. Through an easy mobility of practice, renewed sense of geography, self-​conscious diversity, and lack of proscription, the Oblomov nights locate klezmer music and its associated ways of being firmly within the wider DIY 95 Personal interview, 2014. 96 Just as jazz musician and cheerful carnivore Anthony Braxton once said: “If I write an opera, then of course it’s a jazz opera. If I go have a hamburger, it’s a jazz hamburger” (in Bivins 2015:261). 97 Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview.

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Fluid, unofficial, playful, carnivalesque, embodied, and real-​time—​the space and scene of Bar Oblomov is, in the context of Jewish traditional music, a radical one. What, then, might this jam session contribute to an idea of “Jewish space”? Firstly, it is here by extension: all the leading players in this session are heavily involved in the ongoing performance, education, and advocacy of what has come to be called New Yiddish Music. They are at the European center of a global network, and by implication so is Oblomov.96 The musical content of the night is also explicitly Jewish, taking in Hasidic nigunim and folk dance. At the same time, the conscious liminality of the Oblomov jam session merges klezmer with a modern, subcultural urban space—​a temporary zone that is as much part of a paradigm of “nights out” in Berlin as it is of “things Jewish.” Jewish space here migrates toward the more cutting edges of Berlin cool, and in parallel this cool Berlin club night emerges at the cutting edge of transnational klezmer networks.

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A shtetl in Berlin And we also wanted the same community feel, we wanted to be a bit heymish [homey]. And so I mean it was not like a really professional organized festival. It was a happening created by artists that have a deep love for this kind of music. And I think that shines through. It’s people that love this music, that also put in a lot of work—​not only teaching but also organizing. Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview

In 2016, following two successful years of Oblomov sessions and several Tantshoys dance nights based on the same inclusive paradigm, the shtetl team (as they had begun referring to themselves in email communications) decided to take their “community feel” one step further and inaugurate a winter Yiddish music festival in Berlin. Drawing on the extensive administrative experience of Oriente Records’ Till Schumann (one of the few Germans in the shtetl team lineup), Goldschmidt, Lurje, Melin, clarinetist Christian Dawid, and others launched Shtetl Neukölln: a three-​day festival of 98 Tempelhof, the historic site of the 1948–​49 allied airlifts, finally ceased operations in 2008. In a referendum in summer 2014, Berliners voted to block new (and expensive) housing and development plans and instead to keep the huge open space as a 100 percent free-​for-​all public site of barbecues, kite-​flying, guerrilla gardening, and all manner of outdoor leisure activity.

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culture that is such an intrinsic and appealing part of creative life in the city. And alongside its “messy” embodiment, the open-​endedness of the musical process itself highlights the contingency here of Jewish space, capable of multiple cultural resonances and interactions. This contingency and connection has in fact been extended by moving the session to an annual outdoor summer “Klezmer Picnic” on the former airfield at Tempelhof, one of Berlin’s famously freeform open spaces and itself a site of much recent civic debate.98 Noisy, spontaneous, and self-​ consciously boundary-​blurring, the Neukölln sessions confront assumptions of performance and participation, powerfully subverting what some musicians have at times seen as an overly “proper” (and hence historically unconnected) approach to klezmer music in the city. In its combination of modern internationalism, unofficial platea, bricolage culture, and rooted commitment to contemporary Yiddish music, the Oblomov sessions are one of the first pieces of radical Jewish space to infiltrate—​and now spearhead—​Berlin klezmer.

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Shtetl Neukölln has come out of that new international Berlin Yiddish culture scene. It’s created by this group of traveling artists who call Berlin their 99 From the WdK website, http://​www.werkstatt-​der-​kulturen.de/​en/​about/​(no longer online). At the time of writing, however, WdK’s future looks sadly uncertain.

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klezmer music, Yiddish song, dancing, and jamming. The festival ran again the following year and in 2018 was extended to five days. Shtetl Neukölln’s choice of venue resonates closely with the heymish feel of the festival, as does its emphasis on cultural inclusivity. Since 1993, the Werkstatt der Kulturen (WdK), located just a few streets south from Oblomov, has served “as a platform for art, culture and advocacy . . . one of the few cultural institutions in Germany, which consistently focusses on transculturality and diversity.”99 Making use of WdK’s concert hall, meeting rooms, lobby space, downstairs club and cafe, Shtetl Neukölln offered dance balls, open jam sessions, instrumental and vocal workshops, and public concerts—​featuring many of the musicians discussed in this book (Kahn, Troyke, Bern, Lurje), along with other international artists such as Michael Alpert and Michael Winograd. Many of the ticketed events sold out, and jam sessions and dance parties were all extremely well-​attended—​by an impressively diverse mix of ages and affiliations. The 2018 festival also saw a significant number of international participants, making the journey from Denmark, the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden (among other places) specifically in order to take part. While the musical and social offering of Shtetl Neukölln fits very much within the expected fare of most international Yiddish culture gatherings, the festival also speaks directly to klezmer and Yiddish music’s continued integration into the city itself. The festival’s name, of course, is a direct comment upon the shifting geography of klezmer revitalization in the city, and at the same time a self-​conscious nod both to Berliners’ strong sense of Kiez identification and also to Yiddish culture’s insider-​outsider status within the city. Klezmer and Yiddish music and dance are here marked as a “shtetl” in themselves, while their lively practice is one of the things that makes Neukölln a shtetl, just as contemporary Neukölln radically updates historical perceptions of shtetl life. The festival also resonates clearly with the fluid local-​international balance that characterizes contemporary klezmer practice, summed up nicely by Christian Dawid:

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  153

For such an avowedly grassroots event, funding is inevitably an ongoing issue, and most of those involved are largely working pro bono. Despite approaches to official Jewish community bodies, neither financial support nor promotional interest has so far been forthcoming. This is symptomatic of a more general lack of involvement from the administrative organs of German Jewry that is at times felt by some musicians—​and expressed in less guarded moments—​to indicate a resistance to initiatives that will in practice be attended by a majority of non-​Jews. (The Zentralrat and Jüdische Gemeinde rigorously deny such partisanship, pointing also to the tours and concerts that they organize in Jewish communities throughout Germany—​in which many of the musicians in this book have taken part.) Through the efforts of Sasha Lurje, however, the festival has linked with the Jewish Museum Berlin more effectively. Shtetl Neukölln 2017 and 2018 took place over Hanukkah, and the shtetl team organized a Hanukkah party and daily performances in the Museum to tie in with the lighting of Hanukkah candles. In return, JMB has offered financial and promotional support for the festival. Shtetl Neukölln marks a greater formalization of the attractively inclusive, DIY ethos of the Oblomov sessions. It broadens the reach, widens the audience, and roots this particular group of Berlin klezmer musicians ever more firmly to their city—​all the while remaining, as Dawid puts it, “the potluck party” rather than the formal dinner. Its increased level of administration and officialdom also raises questions, however. And it’s going to be very exciting to see what happens, because suddenly if we do that it’s going to be—​I wouldn’t say mainstream or commercial—​ but we have to think in those kinds of ways. Because right now we have, I would say, gonzo marketing. Word-​of-​mouth, pop-​up things, flyers—​that kind of do-​it-​yourself all the way. And if we have to do it on a bigger scale,



100

Personal communication, December 12, 2019.

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home, or their base, or at least one of their homes. . . . Since the community around this scene has grown, the idea popped up to create a new festival that’s handmade, grassroots Yiddish, folky, and, in contrast to established institutions, also simply a good hang and meeting point in Yiddishland. It’s community-​based, it’s international and intergenerational, it’s open to everybody. It’s fun and cheap.100

154  Sounding Jewish in Berlin we need to use more mainstream channels to promote, to reach a broader audience.101

And it’s a hard balance, because we don’t want to be, like, an elite thing, right? It would still focus on community, and we want to treasure that, so we want to have everybody included in it. But if it’s not evolving, and it’s like we’re not going anywhere with the music, I think it will die out.102

Conclusion While Scheffler103 may have identified Berlin’s genetic code, he vastly underestimated its advantages. Imperfection, incompleteness—​not to say ugliness—​afford a sense of freedom that compact beauty never can. Peter Schneider, Berlin Now

Thanks to a powerful mix of dynamic musicians and historical circumstance, klezmer music has taken root in Berlin. Although it may not be historically from the city, it is authentically of the contemporary urban environment. But it is not static. Where an older generation of largely German-​born musicians continues to use the music as an important participative tool of group 101 Sasha Lurje, personal interview. 102 Emil Goldschmidt, personal interview. 103 In 1910, the writer Karl Scheffler memorably wrote in Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal that the city was “condemned forever to becoming and never to being.”

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At the time of writing (September 2019), plans are being discussed that would see Shtetl Neukölln evolve, in 2020 or 2021, into Shtetl Berlin. In practice this may not mean a huge difference—​it would likely remain mostly in one venue and still retain an avowed Berlinesque “community feel.” At the same time, the expressed shift from district-​to citywide marks an implicit recognition that this particular Yiddish cultural scene may be migrating, in one sense at least, from the funky periphery to the more mainstreamed center. Indeed, this widened emphasis is partly a calculated move in order to increase the possible involvement of Berlin’s Jewish community—​very few of whom have either strong or weak ties to Neukölln. Oblomov clarinetist Emil Goldschmidt points to the tensions and opportunities at play:

The Music in Berlin: Spaces and Places  155

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cohesion and exchange, a younger cohort of international, often Jewish, musicians has recently embedded the music within a very contemporary Berlin paradigm, one that taps directly into the subcultural bricolage of the city. In this way, klezmer music is both reflective and constitutive of the city’s changing musical personae. Through musical activity and extra-​musical life—​and its inextricable emotional and cultural resonances—​Jewish space in the city acquires a more contingent, relative, and thoroughly modern identity. The next chapter will explore the ways in which the city of Berlin is embedded within the sounds and texts of the music itself, the musical strategies and responses through which certain artists ground their work in the city of its production, by locating the city directly within their music.

4

You know we had this klezmer revival about twenty years ago and that was quite traditional. It was usually instrumental, Eastern European tunes, the same fifteen tunes played all over again. Usually violin, clarinet, some accordion maybe. Then Yiddish vocals came into it, Karsten Troyke for instance. That was new. You also had some Eastern European immigrants singing in Russian or Ukrainian. Some klezmer tunes. Then you had Daniel Kahn coming over, singing in English, and also trying Yiddish and German, and putting the political point into it, which was very new, because up to that it was all, you know, sad, romantic, melancholy, whatever, all freylekhs dancing joy. And Daniel put this Trotsky, Marxist, and, you know, “You have killed the Jews, I’m here now in Germany and I like you, but I don’t like you” thing into it. So that was new, yeah! Armin Siebert, Eastbloc Musik

Introduction Chapter 3 explored the relationship of physical space to klezmer and Yiddish musical practice in contemporary Berlin, in the process revealing how this traditional Eastern European Jewish music offers dynamic and unexpected points of intersection with the twenty-​first-​century city’s creative enthusiasm and mix-​and-​match aesthetics. Coming from the other direction, this chapter uncovers some of the ways that Berlin exists symbolically in its klezmer music. My focus therefore moves at this point from how the city grounds the music to how the music makes manifest the city. I will argue that Berlin, in the absence of a klezmer “past,”1 offers compelling alternatives of emplacement upon which to draw—​musically and linguistically embedded 1 In contrast to cities further east, such as Lodz (Poland), Kishinev (Chișinău, Moldova) or Czernowitz (Chernivitsi, Ukraine). See Strom (2002:134).

Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0004.

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Placing Berlin in the Music

Placing Berlin in the Music  157

Hearing the city Classic ethnomusicological theory has inevitably been closely linked to an idea of place. Attention to this relationship and its accompanying social structures has been fundamental in marking ethnomusicology’s challenge to the autonomy of the musical text.2 This kind of socially rooted music analysis, from Merriam’s (1964:32) tripartite model on, illustrates powerfully how the particular interaction of social and geographical context is made meaningful through the aesthetic and ritual function of a society’s music (e.g., Seeger 1987; Feld 1988). But while the direct linking of social geography to cultural production promises a tantalizingly intact and coherent circle of meaning and worldview, it leans inevitably on assumptions of a manageably homogenous social identity, or at least an agreed set of relationships. The multiplicity of viewpoints, experiences, and interactions that characterize a city require a different frame of analysis. Even for distinct ethnic groups within a city, the 2 See, for example, Stone (2008:49) on the discipline’s development:  “As ethnomusicology embraced this interconnection between music and other aspects of life, it took the rather radical step of acknowledging the connection to, rather than separation from, social life. Music was not just so many sounds but was now anchored to politics, kinship, religion and economics.”

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narratives that engage with both the city’s troubled Jewish history and its cheerful contemporary pluralism. As the music has developed its own tone of voice, so Berlin itself has begun to appear within certain musical texts as a significant part of the story, offering both a meaningful sociocultural context and a characteristic historical point of view. This has in turn promoted a musical dialogue, a creative channel through which Berlin can be understood and re-​presented—​as site of ideological struggle, place of escape, or nagging reminder of insurmountable history. As a means of imagining and re-​presenting the politics of place, music here becomes a site of cultural dialogue where historical and contemporary geographies can be articulated, negotiated, and reframed (Hall 1998:453). Hearing Berlin in this way does more than simply open up new analytical pathways. It offers a lived address to the complexities and contradictions of the urban—​especially pertinent in a city subject to multiple internal and external transformations since the early twentieth century. Furthermore, it is a critical route forward from the philosophical ambiguities, overoptimistic hopes, and occasional hysteria that have too often accompanied the reunified city’s klezmer scene.

158  Sounding Jewish in Berlin complex web of cultural meshing (or lack of it) means that to search for a unified musical understanding can be problematic:

This is especially significant in our case: contemporary klezmer is an almost wholly revived and recreated form, but more specifically an urban musical form that allows and even encourages a plurality of cultural backgrounds, musical experiences, and political standpoints. As the networks of c­ hapter 2 and the spaces of ­chapter  3 illustrated, musical groupings and their associated geographies exhibit a diversity that makes consensus wholly beside the point. If, however, we take such heterogeneity as a starting point, what presents itself is a chance to explore musical production less as a force for social cohesion and more as a response to and exploration of the clashes and contradictions of the idea of the city itself. A city, as the material and social environment within which musical experience takes place, can also function—​ within music itself—​as the locus of emotions, ideas, and relationships that structure it: “a mutant, undisciplined creativity that is worked out through the properties of existence” (Amin and Thrift 2002:94–​95). Often, musics become so geographically, temporally, and discursively linked to a city that they begin to act as autonomous signifiers of that place. We might think of Kingston and rocksteady, tango in Buenos Aires, Bulat Okudzhava’s Moscow, the Proclaimers’ Edinburgh, or any number of other articulations. Culturally rooted music criticism, the geographic divisions of world music marketing, and canny tourist discourse help keep these connections in circulation, but things are clearly more complex.3 Afrika Bambaataa and George Gershwin both “mean” New York, but the New Yorks in question share little more than a subway system: one born out of a distinctly African American subcultural alterity, the other adopted as a global icon for early twentieth-​ century Empire State sophistication (although Gershwin, like Bambaataa, was born to immigrant parents).4 And did the South African jazzers Dudu Pukwana and the other Blue Notes belong 3 See, e.g., Tangotrips (https://​tangotrips.com/​#intro), one of a plethora of Buenos Aires tango tours to offer an “authentic” experience. 4 The opening scene from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) being just one of many examples.

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An urban ethnomusicology  .  .  .  will have to cope with the heterogeneity of the city, where multiple, overlapping musical communities are intermingled, and musical networks criss-​cross one another temporally, socially, physically and electronically. (Stock 2008:201)

Placing Berlin in the Music  159

Klezmer, vu bistu? (where are you?) The examples above are given in order to understand possible contexts for the complex two-​way dialogue of sound and city, the relationship of music to its surrounding urban environment. In the case of klezmer music, however, this relationship is multiple and clouded—​by early twentieth-​century migration; by the gaping cultural, personal, and epistemological hole of the Holocaust and Stalinism; and also by a historiography occasionally subject to revision or omission.5 Klezmer is a genre beset with ambiguities and problems of definition, right down to the word itself (Rubin 2020:7–​8). As the deliberately broad sweep of this book indicates, musicians who are well schooled in klezmer’s formal structures and performance vocabularies will often create material that moves well beyond these frames. And in contrast to 5 Problems of provenance are of course attendant upon many folk musics, often marked by a tension between a search for origin myths and an acknowledgment of the syncretic, additive nature of musical development. Cf. Harker’s (1985) analysis of the constructed (“fakesong”) nature of the English folksong revival. In a study of 492 pages, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (1944:455–​60) devotes just six pages to klezmer, the thrust of which is to show how it has informed subsequent developments in Western art music.

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musically to the Cape Town of their birth or to the London of their exile (Bradley 2013)? As within culture as a whole, the meanings of a city within music reveal shifting points of view, perspectives, and power relations—​as we shall see in the following examples. Accepting the multiplicity and subjectivity that surround both musical style and the city it signifies, we might also begin to unpack precisely what it is that we hear when we “hear” a city. What is there in the music itself that deepens these long-​standing cultural connections? On a denotative level, Edith Piaf conjures up Parisian courtyards, but connotatively Piaf ’s vocal power and rawness of delivery make audible her resolve and sexual empowerment, while knowledge of the world from which she sprang combines with a 1930s French big band sound to underscore a particular interwar Parisian combination of seediness and glamour. The Stone Roses are undeniably Mancunian. But it is the combination of layered production, trippy guitar solos, iconoclastic yet understated lyrics, and late 1980s dance music drumming that also locate the band’s meanings in the world of drug culture, warehouse parties, and the point where UK postindustrial Northwestern blokeish swagger met the second summer of love.

160  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

6 Referring to an engagement with the Yiddish language not based primarily on linguistic competence, Shandler (2006:4) explains his term thus: “In semiotic terms, the language’s primary level of signification—​that is, its instrumental value as a vehicle for communicating information, opinions, feelings, ideas—​is narrowing in scope. At the same time its secondary, or meta-​level of signification—​ the symbolic value invested in the language . . . is expanding. This privileging of the secondary level of signification of Yiddish over its primary level constitutes a distinctive mode of engagement with the language that I term postvernacular.” 7 I am here invoking the concept of shtetl somewhat ironically. Klezmer has always located itself wider than the mythical shtetl (Slobin 2000). It is cultural as much as historical memory to which I am alluding (see c­ hapter 6). 8 Fiddler on the Roof stands in a curious relationship to the Yiddish imaginary. An acknowledged invention (in the tales of Sholem Aleichem), it is nevertheless an ironically knowing source of folk memory for UK and American Jews. See c­ hapter 6 and also Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett (2001). 9 Alongside the wandering Jew as antisemitic trope, it has also been invoked ironically by musicians, e.g. Gregori Schechter and the Wandering Few (ARC Music). Rubin and Ottens (2004:296) point out that European klezmorim were “by and large sedentary,” noting that they traveled “out of economic

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the social strictures and hierarchical pedagogy of prewar klezmer’s Eastern European dynastic, caste structure (Feldman 2016), practitioners nowadays span an avowedly wide range of artistic influences and aesthetic orientations. For many—​including all the musicians discussed here—​“klezmer” often works in tandem with other musics in the construction of an engagingly fluid soundworld that is intentionally hard to pin down. Yet despite its slippery modern internationalism and porous boundaries, klezmer retains an implicit sense of geography, linked as it is to a certain part of Jewish history. As a continually popular and accessible manifestation of Yiddish culture and life (yidishkeyt), musical discourse is instrumental in constituting a symbolic and imagined relationship to certain forms of historical identities. And while this history has little to do with the everyday lives of today’s musicians, it continues to act as a symbolic counterweight to the music’s modern transnationalism, as well as offering an epistemological root of performance practice (particularly in centers of learning such as Yiddish Summer Weimar and KlezKanada). For just as Yiddish developed different versions and dialects defined through patterns of migration and local linguistic interaction (Katz 2004; Weinreich 1949), so klezmer in its geographical spread has come to speak with accents more or less influenced by the surrounding musical environment (Feldman 2002). And in the same way as Yiddish has developed what Jeffrey Shandler (2006) calls a “postvernacular” identity,6 the separation of klezmer music from the particularities of origin and function, in one sense at least, opens up other possibilities—​what we might call a “post-​shtetl” identity.7 This symbolic imaginary inevitably delineates implicit boundaries, or at least certain paradigmatic repetitions. Sketches of the Fiddler-​esque8 shtetl or a liminally “wandering” kapelye,9 for example, continue to dog

Placing Berlin in the Music  161

representations of klezmer and Yiddish music in general. And indeed, the more hackneyed, residual images that continue to inform some promotion and presentation of the music have frequently been a site of criticism (Ottens and Rubin 2004)—​as the comments of some musicians in this book indicate. But while often subject to cliché (Slobin 2000:23), registers and modalities of humor, authenticity, and fantasy can also point to negotiated and sometimes oppositional representations and readings. As the album cover images below show, these can range freely between the playful (the Klezmorim), the phantasmagoric (Michael Winograd), the self-​consciously contemporary (Paul Brody), the polemic (the Klezmatics), the pastoral (Khevrisa), the neo-​ traditional (Feldman and Statman), and more (figure 4.1). Klezmer music, then, offers one way in which different versions of a collective “Yiddishland” imaginary are articulated and discussed:  the means necessity, just like today’s musicians and singers go on tour” (Ottens and Rubin 2001:29, cited in Rubin and Ottens 2004:296).

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Figure 4.1  Album covers of the last forty years, showing how far traditional or residual imagery can be stretched, and what might replace it. Clockwise from top left: Walter Zev Feldman and Andy Statman’s Jewish Klezmer Music (1979), Paul Brody’s Far From Moldova (2010), Michael Winograd’s Storm Game (2013), the Klezmorim’s Streets of Gold (1978), the Klezmatics’ Shvaygn = Toyt (Silence = Death, 1988), and Khevrisa’s European Klezmer Music (2000).

162  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

10 Although, as Silverman notes, this relationship has taken on a radically different dynamic in the two groups: “Whereas Jews are over-​determined in the realm of the Holocaust, Roma are over-​ determined in the realm of music. . . . Jews are thus positioned as Europe’s historical ‘Other’ and Roma as Europe’s current ‘Other’ ” (Silverman 2015:162–​63). 11 The panoply of punning band names is broad, at times inventive, and occasionally excruciating. It encompasses the witty (Isle of Klezbos), the political (Klezgoyim), the vernacular (Klezmer Local 42), the extraterrestrial (KlingonKlez), and frequently the gastronomic (Hot Pstromi, Mames Babegenush, Monsieur Camembert), among many others.

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by which a post-​assimilation culture reclaims its history, and also the filters through which a dominant culture views its minorities (Waligórska 2010). But dynamic though these processes can sometimes be, their focus is often a rearguard one, their materials those of absence and memory. What follows argues instead for a fuller examination of how klezmer music becomes one of the ways that places can project aspects of their contemporary selves, a site within which to explore the contradictions and ambiguities of their own placeness. And because this is often an act of imagination, it can at times be freer than some other music/​place dialogues. To put it another way, it is almost impossible for a reggae band to avoid some sort of relationship—​be it close, distant, explicit, opaque, ironic, or uncritical—​to Jamaica, even if none of its members have any direct connection with the island. A contemporary klezmer band, however, need not exist specifically in relation to anywhere (not anywhere that still exists, at least). This liberates the music to act as a free-​floating signifier of the place itself (Berlin, New York, Odessa . . . ). Klezmer and Roma music share this untethered semiotic evocation:  the ambiguity of home nation means that place and desire frequently enter the imaginary.10 This absence of geographical specificity is perhaps a reason for the proliferation of actual locations (frequently a band’s hometown) in the names of klezmer ensembles: Budapester Klezmer Band, Pressburger Klezmer Band, Kroke (Yiddish for Krakow), Kharkov Klezmer Band, Kasbek Ensemble, Hamburg Klezmer Band, Odessa Klezmer Band, Veretski Pass, Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, Vienna Klezmer Band, Alaska Klezmer Band, Shtetl Band Amsterdam, London Klezmer Quartet . . . Klezmer’s cultural homelessness makes it nominally up for grabs—​anyone, anywhere, can “have” a klezmer band, through the qualifier of a known place, or perhaps an (often jokey) Jewish sounding name.11 Faced with a historically ruptured geography (Kirshenblatt-​ Gimblett 2002) and a modern transnational, syncretic slipperiness, klezmer must find other ways of making place significant. This lack of specificity, this absence

Placing Berlin in the Music  163

It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the urban ethos. The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities, always having discernible limits as well as common practices. It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distills publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally. (Krims 2007:7)

Krims’s scope is broad. I want to narrow it down somewhat, by looking at the particularities of the urban ethos as seen in this one small corner of Berlin musical production. The widespread presence of klezmer music itself in Berlin has much to say about the city’s changing urban ethos over the past twenty-​five years, but my focus is on several specific responses in the work of a handful of bands. Although all three share friends, venues, and the continuum of a scene, their work and its framing of the city are remarkably different. One 12 Berlin klezmer musicians also engage directly with current issues of migration, through participation in benefit concerts (organized, for example, by Saytham’s Matthias Groh) and performances that probe narratives of urban multiculturalism, such as Gorki Theater’s 2014 Voicing Resistance Festival.

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of inherent placeness, means that in the ambiguous, cosmopolitan context of Berlin, the city must be inserted into the music if it is to have meaning or resonance. And here Berlin’s sociopolitical past offers a rich constellation of contemporary, city-​specific connections from which several artists have recently begun to draw in order to convincingly manifest the city within their music. It is this symbolic insertion, this twin process of meaning making from the materials of Eastern European Jewish wedding music and the city of Berlin, that forms the basis of my discussion. In spite of—​or perhaps because of—​the lack of a distinctive Yiddish musical cultural history, Berlin’s liminality, its historical and contemporary existence as a site of mobility and immigration, of borders and their transgression, is fundamental to this narrative of emplacement.12 The examples that follow explore ways that the particular placeness of Berlin has begun to function as a significant unit of klezmer musical meaning: how the city has been emplaced within the music and what kinds of interpretations this opens up. The central plank of theory from which I have drawn here is Adam Krims’s concept of urban ethos. This is a complex and robust idea encompassing the range of ways the city is imagined through and in dialogue with expressive culture:

164  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Berlin as gateway: ?Shmaltz!’s Malwonia The band ?Shmaltz! is led by two Berliners: Detlef Pegelow, a graduate of the East Berlin underground art rock scene, and Carsten Wegener, raised in the Americana of the West.13 Both are relentless instrument collectors and builders; both have played central roles in Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music since the early 1990s, with bands like Yardniks, Tants in Gartn Eydn and Grinstein’s Mischpoche, and both—​like their fellow band members—​ are centrally located in the klezmer and Yiddish educative network that has grown up across Germany over the last twenty years. Wegener was also a 13 Bassist Carsten Wegener explained the band name’s curious punctuation to me as representing a question followed by an emphatic answer (“What is Shmaltz? This is Shmaltz!”). Interestingly, he was unaware of the word’s Yiddish meaning (chicken fat).

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group locates the city’s urban ethos as a site of fantastic escape; another sees a Berlin that cannot avoid the dark shadows of history; while the third engages cheerfully with the city’s multilingual persona. Certain themes coalesce here around an idea of “Berlin,” semiotic resources with which to emplace the city. Particularly fertile in this context are those that can be contained within a conceptual umbrella of dual identity, of looking two ways at once—​manifested through ideas of elsewhere, of below-​ surface histories (literal and metaphorical) and linguistic ambiguity. Such liminality as a fundamental aspect of Berlin’s urban ethos is perhaps not so surprising. Even before the city’s physical thirty-​year split (the starkest embodiment of two simultaneous worlds), it had long straddled a cultural and geographical fault line (Ward 2011). In the Cold War East, subterfuge and concealment became a way of life for both official and unofficial relationships (Funder 2003), while West Berlin’s bubble of subsidized freedom also inevitably represented a world where everything might not have been quite as it seemed—​seen, for example in the manifest parallel worlds of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire. Post-​reunification, the city’s ongoing debate with history continues to produce a multiplicity of conflicting demands, expectations, and revelations, “ghosts” that Brian Ladd (1997:234) uncovers in the city’s very landscape. This simultaneous sense of borders and their porosity is not confined to the spatial: the multiple temporalities at play in the city allow klezmer to enact a parallel chronological back-​and-​forth between different Berlin histories (Till 2005:196).

Placing Berlin in the Music  165

It has to be a link to the modern times, because I’m living in this century, not another. . . . One of my favorite songs is “Yolanda,” which starts with a slide guitar for the ocean—​it’s a song about a female pirate—​and then comes a klezmer Greek theme, but with a more laid-​back beat; it’s not traditional; and then comes the words, which sounds like Brecht/​Weill. But I hope and I think it’s not only here [touches his head]. It becomes something organic, which is a must for me—​I don’t want to construct things.14

There are several strategies that ?Shmaltz! uses to embed the city in their music. Perhaps most noticeably, they often sing in Berlinerisch, Berlin’s clipped, edgier-​sounding dialect, where “Wass ist das?” becomes “Wat iss’n dit?” and “eine kleine Klavier” is sharpened to “’ne kleenet Klavier.” But this is employed selectively, an artistic choice that roots a certain part of their sound in a good-​timey, Weimar-​era, anything-​goes version of Berlin (Jelavich 1993). This particular Berlin is also located by instrumentation—​an artful combination of medium-​size cabaret ensemble and steampunk imaginary in the form of musical saws, toy pianos (“kleenet Klavier”), horn-​violins, and more than a nod to the circus. Stylistically, the band glides between polka, waltz, and torch

14 Personal interview.

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long-​term member of Berlin’s joyfully freewheeling 17 Hippies, whose loose multilingual folk/​jazz/​palm-​court mix he has carried across into this project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this pedigree, ?Shmaltz!’s musical resources are broad and often lie some distance from klezmer vocabulary, as the following examples show. This, however, should be understood with reference to the self-​conscious fluidity of the Berlin scene as a whole. Notwithstanding their eclecticism, ?Shmaltz! moves in and out of klezmer repertoire and idioms with ease. Their own compositions make good use of klezmer modes, rhythms, and breaks, heard especially in the playing of accordionist Paula Sell, and their set includes Yiddish vocal material from, for example, the repertoire of Ukrainian-​born singer Bronya Sakina (Yiddish is one language among several between which they slip easily). The pieces discussed here thus exist comfortably alongside the band’s malleable klezmer influences, even while they evidence a self-​consciously diverse artistic imagination. Set against this background, ?Shmaltz!’s music is an acknowledged yet coherent invention, rooted in a loosely imagined central European soundworld, as outlined here by bassist and singer Carsten Wegener:

166  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Figure 4.2  “Gran Bufet” (opening theme, accordion), from Gran Bufet (?Shmaltz!, 2011). Komm, schnapp dir ’ne Limonade ’n Hurki Purki oder ’n Bier, Manche fragen, wat iss’n dit? Dit is so’n kleenet Klavier. [Come on, grab a lemonade a Hurki Purki or a beer, Someone asks, wassat? It’s a toy piano.] Klingt doch knorke und macht och jut’ Laune, und allet schwoft gleich ran. Rosi schiebt ihr’n Menne hin, wo man richtich jut essen kann.16 15 See, for example, Jelavich on the early twentieth-​century cabaret singer Claire Waldoff and her “harsh, guttural voice” (1993:102–​3). 16 German lyrics from liner notes (AYCE02, 2011); my translation.

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song, incorporating elements of klezmer, cumbia, and Balkan and Turkish music en route. Detlef ’s guttural ringmaster growl, Carsten’s laid-​back drawl, and accordionist Paula’s clear unadorned delivery again reference a particular prewar Berlin soundworld, a music of winks and gestures delivered in an exaggeratedly un-​prettified style.15 Below are the opening lines of “Gran Bufet,” from their 2011 album of the same name, along with a transcription of the accordion’s descending circus-​like opening theme (figure 4.2):

Placing Berlin in the Music  167 [Sounds cool and makes you feel good, and everyone’s getting down. Rosi shoves her fella in, where you can eat real good.]

The idea came that what we’re doing is exactly what klezmer musicians were doing. They have their own point of view, and then they collect music—​wherever they are, they put this view on the tunes. In a way,

17 Here are some of the band’s instruments, given in Malwonian in their liner notes: Vajolena (violin), Bradzbudjamon (accordion), Bubosh (bass), Quitosh Bum (banjo), and Dubobat (trombone).

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These examples set out the band’s store well. A  knowingly comic, well-​constructed musical line, a self-​confessed delight in the playful and the sensory, framed by a Berlinerisch tone of voice and a selectively eclectic soundworld. Thus far, ?Shmaltz! might best be understood as a retro cabaret outfit. A party band, perhaps, of fedoras and feather boas, postmodernly mining a modernist seam and not uncommon in Berlin. What marks ?Shmaltz! out, however, is the part of the music that is not Berlin, although it relies upon an implicit relationship to the city. The appealing mise en scène of Berlin itself is also a gateway, a launchpad for a fabricated yet strangely coherent parallel world, the imaginary land of Malwonia—​ enacted through song titles and lyrics, album graphics, website mythology, and a cast of fairy-​t ale extras. A richly imaginative creation of Carsten and Detlef, Malwonia is the fantasy alternative locus of their musical visions and aspirations. Set against the exaggerated reality of Berlin, Malwonia is a country of pirate brides and weeping angels, where taxi drivers sing love songs to donkeys. The band has created a language (Malwonian) and an implied, if playfully ambiguous, geography. 17 An early ?Shmaltz! song, “Yorgi Ba,” describes—​ in Malwonian—​t he journey of taxi driver Yorgi, who leaves Greece for unknown reasons and heads north. Along the way he picks up an elderly lady with a basket of chickens and a large bearded man. Further along, the chickens escape, and one of the tires bursts. Yorgi gets out and finds himself in the land of Malwonia, where his adventure begins. But while the absence of “native” speakers is part of the point (and the joke), for Carsten Wegener Malwonia’s creation also plays out a musical philosophy:

168  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Berlin, then, is the starting point. It’s where the band members grew up, where they accumulated their influences, where they live. But Berlin is also the anchor for a dialectical relationship with the open-​ended imaginary space of Malwonia. Without the symbolic “leaving” of Berlin, Malwonia would itself be rootless—​a spatial refiguring whose ideological implications will be discussed later. And without the creatively subversive presence of Malwonia, the band’s relationship to Berlin would be far less dynamic and fluid. Through musical gesture and linguistic slippage, the band creates a historical narrative loop running between old Berlin and new Malwonia—​a connection reinforced by album and website graphics that offer Berlin and Malwonia as linked destinations on an imaginary train journey. The dialectic is nicely brought to life in another Gran Bufet song, “Viva la Malwonia!” (figure 4.3), which Wegener describes as a Malwonian Schlager, a particularly German genre of light pop song. In ?Shmaltz!’s case, however, a quasi-​ symbolist dreamlike text implores us: Vergiss die welken Rosen, die Zeit ist reif für Neues. Bald sind wieder Blüten da. Und selbst im tiefsten Winter, schläft die Saat im Boden, Viva la Malwonia! [Forget the dying roses, time is ripe for the new. Soon blooms will return. And even in deepest winter, seeds sleep in the ground, Viva la Malwonia!]

18 Personal interview.

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Malwonia is trying to define a tradition and place, our own. And the tradition is a mixture of all the influences that I’ve collected. The way we are working is like the Yiddish language. It’s creole, it mixes words from its own particular language and from the environment. And the music as well. So we thought, “Why don’t we develop our own language, our own shtetl, our own world?”18

Placing Berlin in the Music  169

Part anthem to freedom, part love song, set within a consciously Germanic polkaesque aesthetic (exoticized with occasional flattened second and sixth), the song is an ode to an imagined land, heard through a familiar Berlin soundworld. ?Shmaltz!’s parallel worlds are united here through lyrics, musical style, instrumentation, and Schlager melody. Again, the rootedness of Berlin mitigates Malwonia’s historical and cultural obscurantism (of which more later). In other words, ?Shmaltz! remains a Berlin band, despite—​or perhaps as a result of—​their other-​world craziness.

“My lover, my murderer’s daughter”: Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird Daniel Kahn is a singer, composer, and multi-​instrumentalist who has been based in Berlin since 2005. He studied theater and creative writing at the University of Michigan, subsequently moving to New Orleans—​where both his songwriting craft and love of klezmer took root. Although Kahn spoke no German or Yiddish on his arrival in Berlin, the fluency he went on to develop in both languages has become an integral part of his songwriting and performance style. Kahn has released five albums with his band the Painted Bird, as well as curating a challenging series of “Klezmer Bund” concerts around the city—​discussed at length in the previous chapter. He is a regular teacher and performer at klezmer and Yiddish workshops across Europe and North America, and Painted Bird alumni include several central younger figures of the international klezmer scene. Like ?Shmaltz!, Kahn and the Painted Bird draw from a broad musical palette, migrating freely between historical klezmer repertoire, Weimar cabaret, the Yiddish song canon, and a mid-​twentieth-​century American folksinger

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Figure 4.3  “Viva la Malwonia!” (chorus), from Gran Bufet (?Shmaltz!, 2011).

170  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

19 A “klezmerized” version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt: “[an] intention to show the action in the process of being made . . . to confront an audience with a performance” (Williams 1969:279). Kahn’s affinity for Brecht was one of the factors that influenced his decision to move to Berlin.

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ethos, all informed by a radical socialist politics. What is markedly different between the two bands, however, is their approach to the city. Where ?Shmaltz!, the native Berliners, are liberated adventurers, starting from the musical and linguistic vernacular of their own city, Daniel Kahn, the American Jewish incomer, finds the constraints of the city insurmountable, echoing all around him. To return to Krims: “The urban ethos thus poses a set of basic stances concerning the relationship of subjects to their urban setting: Who can go where? Who is constrained by the city, and who is freed by it?” (2007:13). In a city that for large parts of the twentieth century has been a piece in someone else’s global chess game, a contemporary zeitgeist of the city as a gateway to freedom is not very surprising (Ward 2011; Schneider 2014). For Kahn, however, Berlin is also a site of unresolved questions, of disturbing resonances. Although his artistic imagination remains unbounded, Kahn specifically chooses a vision of Berlin that never allows us to forget history. Drawing on his love of Brecht, Kahn’s self-​dubbed Verfremdungsklezmer (“alienation klezmer”)19 demands that we actively avoid closure and continuity as ideological constructs. Lyrically, musically and performatively, his work makes frequent use of interrogative strategies (Belsey 1980:92), distancing its audience through “devices to undermine the illusion, to draw attention to its own textuality” (92). Kahn’s distancing strategies are multiple. The band frequently wears bird masks and sings through megaphones, effects that render them anonymous while simultaneously drawing attention to the materiality of voice and face by the very act of disguising them (Bakhtin 1984:40). Kahn will slip from Yiddish to German to English, often in the course of a couple of verses. This linguistic ambiguity self-​consciously erases any sense of narrative hegemony, highlighting textual construction and artifice while also comically distancing different listeners at different points—​in a multilingual city, no two audience members are likely to “get” exactly the same thing. It is an instance of temporal and spatial duality on which I want to concentrate: Kahn’s 2011 song “Görlitzer Park.” Görlitzer Park is a broad strip of green running west from the canal in Kreuzberg. A popular hangout in a hip (perhaps overly hip) neighborhood, it is known for Mayday marches, funky musical gatherings, and widespread dope dealing. From this liveliest of Berlin spaces, however, Kahn conjures a symbolic wasteland, a scene of

Placing Berlin in the Music  171

in the garden of frozen desire on the derelict couch we sat down wie die Stadt hier wir brauchten ein Feuer [like this town we needed fire] um uns aufzuwecken vom Traum [to wake us from our dream] und du mit den blutigen Haaren [and you with your bloody hair] ich seh’ deine Augen sind zu [I see that your eyes are closed] so I’ll be the Wilhelmine Baron & you can be the ewiger Jew [. . . eternal Jew] & the trains of Berlin /​they run her and hin [back & forth] through tunnels below in the dark /​but the station is gone so I’ll wait for you on /​the ruins of Görlitzer Park from the ivy at Grunewald station to the Treptower Soviet blade you built your triumphant narration out of stones from the Mendelssohn grave where the sun is as gold as the names on the ground & the walls grow up over the trees & the tower antenna is haunting the town & the past is a quiet disease20

20 Lyrics and translation from the Painted Bird website, http://www.paintedbird.de/images/stories/ kahn/pdf/R77_Booklet-1.pdf.

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tragic love, but more importantly a space that, rather than transcending the city’s history, symbolically catapults us right back into it. This temporal shift is paralleled by the song’s musical references, drawn here from well outside the Painted Bird’s klezmer gravitational center—​texturally evoking 1950s American folk ballads while harmonically referencing the romance of 1920s French and German chanson. Again, however, this should be contextualized against the centrality of klezmer and Yiddish song within the band’s wider repertoire: the song’s manifold points of musical departure remain framed by the multiple references that Kahn’s work overall makes to Yiddish musical tradition. The site of the park was originally Görlitzer Bahnhof, a mainline terminus. Badly hit by wartime bombing and languishing unused during the Cold War, the park has more recently become one of Kreuzberg’s well-​known “do what you like” spaces, as well as a site of refugee protest. This contemporary manifestation figures little, however, in Kahn’s treatment, which instead uses the park as a spatial embodiment of wartime and postwar unease:

172  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Figure 4.4  “Görlitzer Park” (first verse), from Lost Causes (Daniel Kahn, 2011).

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The city is emphatically placed in the song text:  Grunewald station, the Treptower Soviet war memorial, the famous Fernsehturm, and the more recent Stolpersteine. But none of these placements is mere atmosphere. All relate directly to the city in war and postwar, and most evoke a specifically Jewish history: trains bound for Auschwitz and Theresienstadt departed from Grunewald; the small gold-​colored Stolpersteine (“stumble stones”) found all over Berlin mark the names and former residences of victims of Nazi deportations. Set within the potent similes and metaphors that dot the text, these sharply resonant geographies create a semiotic slippage between subject, object, time, and Berlin itself, a back and forth of perspective and identity that finds its echo in the disinterested and endless journey of the trains below. Musically, the song is unadorned, a steady three-​four ballad set to ukulele, bass, strings, and toy piano—​a stripped-​down echo of ?Shmaltz!’s otherworldly sound. The melodic compass of the verse is small, the harmonic progression subtle and unshowy, underscoring the song’s pathos rather than playing up its lurid drama (figure 4.4).

Placing Berlin in the Music  173

Figure 4.5  “Görlitzer Park” (first half of chorus), from Lost Causes (Daniel Kahn, 2011).

This expansion, however, is quickly reined in with the second half of the chorus, returning to its familiar four-​note range. Where the song steps out musically is in the middle eight. The lyrical D major becomes an angry D minor, and a series of minor 1–​5 cadences ratchets up the harmonic rhythm. This is intensified by a more strident violin part from Jake Shulman-​Ment, bassist Michael Tuttle switching to arco, and the first

21 This transcription is an amalgam of the first and second choruses.

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The rising major seventh then minor sixth of the chorus vocal line opens things up slightly, offering a melodic high point from which the tune descends to an octave below (figure 4.5)21—​this relatively dramatic musical moment poignantly juxtaposed against the monotony of the trains running in darkness beneath.

174  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Figure 4.6  “Görlitzer Park” (middle 8), from Lost Causes (Daniel Kahn, 2011).

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entrance of drummer Hampus Melin’s sinister take on the slow klezmer  hora rhythm, here played heavily and ruthlessly on the first beat of each bar. Fittingly, here the lyrics are most accusatory and pointed—​National Socialist and Cold War legacy explicitly named and implicated, along with the city’s silence (figure 4.6).

Placing Berlin in the Music  175

where the air is filled up with sparrows when once it was clouded with crows & the Sleepwalker shot his last arrow then he buried himself with his bow oh my lover, my murderer’s daughter accomplice to all of my sins our city of love & of slaughter wird immer noch heißen Berlin. . . . [will always be called Berlin]

In talking with Kahn in 2013, he told me, “I embrace Jewishness as a historical identity, but I like to choose what history I am engaging with.”22 This historical choice seems to be at the heart of the song, confronting not only a relationship to Jewishness but also the role of history in a Jew’s present-​day relationship to his adopted city. Kahn’s urban ethos is one that must acknowledge the worst parts of Berlin’s history as fundamental to his place in the city, as well as the city’s place in his music. A similar dual viewpoint can be seen in the more recent (2012) song “Good Old Bad Old Days.”23 Part Bierkeller waltz, part Russian sing-​along, intricately balanced between romantic Ostalgie and an acute historical reality, the song is both a recognition of the absurdity of normalized Wall-​era life (Moran 2004:218) and an ironic yearning for its return in the light of the shortcomings of reunification. Kahn’s lolloping accordion and Paul Brody’s barroom trumpet nod clearly to a bygone soundworld, while their paralleling

22 Personal interview.

23 Bad Old Songs, Oriente Musik, RIEN 84.

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Textually, the song is structured around a sense of debasement and reversal. This is a world where walls grow higher than trees, where lovers are murderers and identities are transient. It is a place marked by silence, subterfuge, boundaries, and transgressions: in short, Berlin as it once was. And indeed most interesting in this song is its willful refusal to “move on,” its avowed recognition that everyone is in some sense implicated. The “ruins” of the text are nowadays a vibrant Sunday hangout—​children visit the urban farm, couples and vagrants rest on the rocks, and sound systems vie with djembes in the large grass-​covered crater that was once a linking tunnel. But Kahn forces us to reexamine the site, pointedly reminding us that one thing cannot exist without the other, that all our dark pasts are never far from the surface. The tenderest of lover’s gazes, framed by Berlin’s most sociable of spaces, must nevertheless face what lies beneath:

176  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

all the streetlights were waltzing together, crimson & green & your dress was as gray as the weather, oh what a dream we built up a city of whispers & classified war dossiers I gave you control of my papers & soul in the good old bad old days ah yes wasn’t it miserable, wasn’t it grand? when the world had an iron divide & people could take a political stand just by singing a song for the opposite side now nobody cares who you are anymore & nobody cares what you say it’s liberty’s curse, but was it really much worse in the good old bad old days?25

The many languages of Yiddish From the beginnings of its revival in Germany, klezmer and Yiddish music has often spoken with an international accent. In the 1980s and 1990s, Giora Feidman and American musicians led workshops in the country, and the effects of their teaching are still keenly felt today.26 At the time, however, this was largely a unidirectional transaction:  international musicians “teaching” Germans how to play klezmer, with more (Brave Old World) or less (Feidman) emphasis on the music’s cultural roots—​a perceptual dichotomy discussed fully in the next chapter. Since then, the traffic has increasingly flowed both ways, and the renewed internationalism of the city itself has begun to make 24 Frequently, though not exclusively, Roma musicians from Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The version with trumpet is from a demo recording, released prior to the album version. 25 The song’s full lyrics (and the rest of the album) are available on the Painted Bird Website, http://​ www.paintedbird.de/​images/​stories/​kahn/​pdf/​RIEN84_​Booklet.pdf, accessed September 30,  2019. 26 In particular, the influence of Brave Old World was acknowledged by bassists Heiko Lehmann and Carsten Wegener, clarinetist Jan Hermerschmidt, and accordionists Sanne Möricke and Franka Lampe (personal interviews, 2013 and 2014).

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of the wandering duos heard frequently on today’s Berlin streets also acts as a contemporary reference to post-​Communist migration.24 Kahn’s vocal delivery moves gradually from cabaret crooner to impassioned and angry soapbox, nicely echoing the song’s ironic lyrical transformation from clandestine love song to enraged and deserted ideologue:

Placing Berlin in the Music  177

This place where it’s quite easy to find your place. Just humanly . . . You can do certain things, but you don’t have to be. Like you can choose to be Russian, Jewish, Turkish, American, whatever. But you don’t have to. And it makes life much easier, compared to other places where, whatever you do there’s a kind of stamp on your forehead. And I think that creates a lot of space for people to try things and to be here, you know?29

As a way of exploring this, I  want to look at two examples of emplacement of this ambiguously free-​floating “Berlin-​ness” within Jewish music making in the city. The first is playful, the second problematic. Knoblauch Klezmer Band is a five-​piece that played klezmer in and around Berlin (and beyond) for five years, before disbanding in 2016. The personnel typify the current internationalism of the city’s music scene, consisting 27 Alongside its linguistic liberation, this internationalism ironically also has one parallel homogenizing effect: amid the profusion of performance/​performer languages, the lingua franca of communication, rehearsals, etc. among klezmer networks in the city is often (though by no means always) English. 28 Frith (1996:114) makes the point that postmodern musical fluidity in fact frequently ensures that genre divisions and hierarchies remain intact. 29 Personal interview.

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itself felt in its music and musical networks. Of the thirty-​odd musicians who I interviewed in depth, Germans made up less than half. Other nationalities included American, Latvian, Swedish, Dutch, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, and Australian, all resident in the city and fully involved in its musical life. To find a multinational group of musicians in any large capital city is of course not unusual. What I  want to explore is the effect of this multinationalism on the music itself, and in particular how this has begun to promote a distinctive polylinguality within the city’s klezmer and Yiddish music scene.27 In other words, how Berlin klezmer’s international makeup is given musical presence and substance, in what ways the music marks this particular Berlin discourse. Once more, an idea of the city as something of a blank canvas for the music is important here: in the absence of an unbroken link, contemporary klezmer practitioners are arguably freer to adapt tradition, language, and style to their musical needs. Again, however, this is not simply mere postmodern genre crossing28 but an appropriate musical and linguistic response to the cosmopolitanism of their city. Here is Forshpil singer and Yiddish song teacher Sasha Lurje talking about the resonances of Berlin’s open-​ended internationality for her:

178  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I found myself in the beginning really trying to break this and saying “Guys, it’s really easy to dress up funny and play funny circus music, but we know a hundred bands that are doing that.” But the moment that I realized, wait, wait, wait, it’s not instead of making good music; it’s in addition to making clever, beautiful interesting music. And I said, yeah! You can go crazy and not be like the traditional German klezmer, all buttoned-​up, wearing what 30 For example, Naftule Brandwein’s “Der Heyser Bulgar” and “Firn di Mekhutonim Aheym” and Shloimke Beckermann’s “Ot Azoi,” all of which can be found in Sapoznik and Sokolow (1987). 31 Chris began his career as a jazz pianist in Edinburgh. He graduated in piano and composition from the Royal Academy, relocated to the suburban Berlin neighborhood of Wedding, and is now back in Edinburgh. 32 See Appendix 1.

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of an Israeli fiddle player, a French clarinetist, a Scottish accordion player, and a Berlin-​born bassist and drummer. Knoblauch began by playing well-​ known klezmer tunes,30 supplemented by coceks and rebetika, more recently incorporating original compositions based on traditional klezmer forms and modes (imaginatively reconstructed) into their repertoire, largely under the influence of their ambitious and dynamic accordionist, Chris Lyons.31 Of the band members, only fiddle player Eli Fabrikant is tied in any significant sense to other musicians and networks discussed in this book—​he has been a regular participant at Bar Oblomov and in 2014 attended Yiddish Summer Weimar’s instrumental workshop week. This is significant, as Fabrikant is also, by his own admission, the band member who has taken most time and effort to learn and internalize an idiomatic klezmer vocabulary. He is also the band’s only Jew. Several aspects make Knoblauch an interesting topic for discussion and distinctly locate the city and its urban ethos. The first is extramusical: their onstage outfits. Where the band’s soundworld rarely departs far from a conventional klezmer aesthetic,32 beefed up with heavier drums and plenty of onstage testosterone, their visual impact is anything but:  tricorn hats, sequined waistcoats, pink feather boas, purple veils, skin-​tight PVC trousers, and bare feet are common fare. As mentioned before, wardrobes like this are not unusual on the Berlin stage. What is noticeably different with Knoblauch Klezmer Band is the apparent disjuncture between the traditional sound and roots of their music and the fantastical performance attire. For violinist Eli, this juxtaposition also describes a transformation in his own perception of what the band is doing and their relationship to the place in which they are doing it:

Placing Berlin in the Music  179 they think klezmorim wore, trying to produce something that states it out loud. But saying, OK, it’s Berlin, those guys have nothing to do with Jewish culture or klezmer per se, but they love the vibe and this is how they express it.33

I don’t know, I was always thinking about at least some descriptions of klezmorim. Not everybody agrees what was exactly going on there. But one of the descriptions that I read about was really about this, a little bit outcasts. It wasn’t the respected members of the community, they were always like the troublemakers and so on. . . . So for me, I said, OK, this is how I feel klezmer, actually.34

From the more bordered structures of the German klezmer revival, Knoblauch’s inclusive zaniness offers an alternative functional reading, one that opens up the music’s countercultural meanings in a nonconfrontational, distinctly Berlin-​rooted way. A  good illustration is their cover of the German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk’s famous “Das Modell”—​a source unexpectedly sympathetic to a klezmer treatment. Introduced at gigs by clarinetist Arnaud Duvoux, in a heavily pastiched Eastern European accent, as “an old song from the women of the shtetl,” the tune is a smart and witty reworking of 1970s electronica into an acoustic klezmer dance anthem, complete with a newly composed Moldovanesque instrumental break. Structurally, Knoblauch’s version is surprisingly faithful, the opening motif here turned by accordionist Chris Lyons into a left-​ hand pattern, while his right hand becomes an acoustic drum machine (figure 4.7).



33 Personal interview. 34 Ibid.

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In other words, what began for Fabrikant as a semi-​accidental collision of Berlin cabaret codes and Ashkenazi Jewish wedding music has come to embody a particular performative response. It locates the band’s intentions within a contemporary discourse of Berlin performance, consciously distanced from the perceived artificiality and cliché of “recreated” klezmer semiotics. And more than this, the band’s visual statement in fact articulates what is for him a closer, more authentic relationship to his musical forebears:

180  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

As part of the “klezmerizing” process, fiddle player Fabrikant offers counterlines to the vocal melody, moved up a minor third and altered to fit the sharpened fourth of the Jewish misheberakh (Idelsohn 1944:185) mode (figure 4.8).

Figure 4.8  “Das Modell” (verse excerpt), from Fruit of Life EP (Knoblauch Klezmer Band, 2013).

For a final tour de force, the band transforms the iconic arpeggiated synth line of the original into a boisterous wordless sing-​along (figure 4.9). Referencing Hasidic traditions of wordless communal nigun singing (Wood 2013:137), Knoblauch’s version begins slowly and accelerates back up to speed, with plenty of tongue-​in-​cheek shouts and ad libs in the process. Part bottle dance, part football chant, it is a nicely irreverent nod to both Jewish wedding musical traditions and the pogoing tendencies of their dance-​ floor demographic—​a piece of motivic and stylistic elision that bridges the German techno scene (of which Kraftwerk are acknowledged pioneers) and the Berlin klezmer discourse.

Figure 4.9  “Das Modell” (chorus), from Fruit of Life EP (Knoblauch Klezmer Band, 2013).

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Figure 4.7  “Das Modell” (opening), from Fruit of Life EP (Knoblauch Klezmer Band, 2013).

Placing Berlin in the Music  181

Fantasist geography and the New Old Europe Sound

Cities and regions come with no automatic promise of territorial or systemic integrity, since they are made through the spatiality of flow, juxtaposition, porosity and relational connectivity . . . “hauntings” of things. (Amin 2004:34)

In other words, we can read the deliberately ambiguous territoriality of these bands as a direct response to the city itself, a set of musical and contextual juxtapositions (and coherences) to set against the absence of “territorial or

35 Schneider (2014:8), for example, writes of “Cinderella Berlin.” See also Elsaesser (2009).

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Daniel Kahn addresses Berlin from the outside in, viewing the city through a deliberately provocative and politicized lens that problematizes the smooth ideological incorporation of klezmer and Yiddish music into the contemporary city by making it part of a performance approach. Conversely, as we have seen, ?Shmaltz! and Knoblauch Klezmer Band explore a “fantasist” klezmer aesthetic:  a self-​conscious musical eclecticism marked by a large degree of playfulness in presentation that in turn frames a particularly personal engagement with klezmer musical identity. They have taken a historical romanticizing of the shtetl to its semi-​absurd conclusion, embracing the weirdly coherent imaginary land of Malwonia and a re-​creation of German electronic dance music as a deconstructed version of Yiddish tradition. We might, however, probe this fantasist tendency a little more—​examining geography, Kaminsky’s (2015a) “New Old Europe Sound,” and how this can be theorized back into the contemporary city. The fantasists’ playful version of provenance taps directly into the paradigm of Berlin’s finely tuned bricolage approach to cultural production, discussed in ­chapter 3. In a city that has spent the last few decades reinventing itself,35 such self-​conscious parallel klezmer worlds are a good fit. Emplaced within networks of performers, venues, and recordings, these imaginary territories gain a material foothold in the day-​to-​day cultural operations of the city itself. But there is also an inevitable and willful sense of escapism in these creations, a nonspecific sense of “elsewhere.” Amin and Thrift (2002:119) suggest that the city offers “spaces of escape,” which allow subjects to “unfold in various ways.” These are spaces of the imagination, but the network operations of a city give them form:

182  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I was always interested in traditional styles, this is a big thing for me. . . . Pretty soon, I found what I need in music for myself is some root, and in the beginning it was American roots, because all this world music was just not on the market, you couldn’t really find it. And then, I was almost searching for styles—​I like Cajun and zydeco, I like the roughness. And it’s the same with cumbia. . . . Later I went on to explore other territories, like playing a hora with a musical saw or with blues harmonica, but in the beginning it was very traditional, I just wanted to learn the traditions.36

Although ?Shmaltz!’s stylistic palette is wide, Wegener—​as noted earlier—​ is careful not to erase the origins of these musics, while at the same time defending in creative terms his right as a musician to adapt them. And although ?Shmaltz! exhibits clear “blurring” of sonic markers (Kaminsky 2015a:144), Wegener and Pegelow’s strong network ties to the city’s klezmer scene also place them in a much more direct relation to klezmer as (originally) Jewish music.

36 Personal interview.

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systemic integrity.” In this way, the worlds of fantasist klezmer become less concerned with specific geographic imaginaries and more with articulating the spatial fluidity and indeterminacy of the urban itself. While they might not all be fantasizing about the same thing, a positioning of their music as an imagined geographic response points up interesting similarities. Tajbakhsh (2001:83) writes that the “promise of the city” lies in “the freedom to glimpse our own hybridity, our own contingency.” A  gleeful profusion of competing identities and a creative probing of hybridity are, of course, hardly specific to klezmer. But in the context of the “virtual Jewishness” debates that have surrounded klezmer music in the last two decades, we might ask if one can also detect an ideological layer at work here. Kaminsky (2015:144) argues that the erasure of specific ethnic origins allows contemporary practitioners of the “New Old Europe Sound,” often with no ethnic ties, to claim this East European musical “bricolage” (143), at the same time denying Roma, Jewish, and Balkan identities further agency in their music. How much can we apply this critique to the music of the fantasists? ?Shmaltz!’s Carsten Wegener is quick to point up the traditional roots of the music he plays, while also identifying his own musical journey as a continuously developing one.

Placing Berlin in the Music  183

I define myself by Zionism, but I also placed myself against all the Jewish culture that I knew. And I think that coming here really mixed up everything, because suddenly I was not a majority. . . . And then I started asking myself, am I a Jew? What does it mean, actually to be a Jew? Because in Israel it’s a default, it was just kind of external rules. Here suddenly I felt it really strong. And I started asking myself also what it means, what my parents and my grandparents went through, what Jewish identity meant to them. And it was also strange, because my parents were not listening to klezmer music, and they did not know Yiddish, they barely knew anything about Jewish culture. . . . What is this tag, what does it mean, and why do I feel it so strongly?37

Such expressions of the ambiguities of young Jewish identity are by no means specific to Berlin, but they have in this case been brought into focus by that city’s particular combination of contested history, longtime liminality, and contemporary open-​ended creativity. If free-​floating “Berlin-​ ness” has prompted these questions for Eli, it is the musical processes of klezmer—​its privileging of social over sacred and its distance from Zionism—​that have allowed him to unpack them further. And the fantasist indeterminacy of Knoblauch Klezmer Band offers an effectively fluid environment within which to do this: keenly felt tactical “shadows and ambiguities” (Certeau 1984:100) to set against the grander historical narrative of Jewish identity.



37 Personal interview; my italics.

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In dealing with questions of appropriation, however, we must also engage with the musicians’ sense of their own ethnic identity, although—​as the comments of many of the musicians in this book demonstrate—​a musician’s Jewishness does not give them any more or less “right” per se to klezmer music than anyone else. Nevertheless, several artists draw explicit links between their own constantly evolving Jewish identity and the music they play. By his own admission, Knoblauch’s Eli Fabrikant sees his musical role (in good-​natured conflict with the rest of the band) as continuing to define the “klezmer” part of Knoblauch Klezmer Band—​in contrast to other forces in the group who are happy to blur the lines more readily. For Fabrikant, this dialectic is intimately connected to his life as an Israeli in Berlin:

184  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Marina Bondas, a Kiev-​born Jew who has lived in Berlin since she was a teenager, sees her mediating of the eclecticism of her klezmer band Di Meschugeles in specific instrumental terms:

These musicians, then, understand their roles, at least partially, as “anchors”—​ their musical approach (informed by issues of personal identity) acts to place some boundaries around the fantasist enterprise. At the same time, their explicit engagement with the breadth of signifying practices and diffuse identities contained within “klezmer” acknowledges a creative dialogue between groundedness and liberation. The result, I would argue, nuances the “New Old Europe” paradigm, creating a bridge between the rootless tendencies critiqued by Kaminsky and a more sophisticated consideration of musical tradition.

Berlin as borderland A final and powerful example of the tying of music to place, or specifically to musically emplaced heritage, comes again from Daniel Kahn, this time in collaboration with singer Sasha Lurje. For their performance at the Gorki Theater in January 2014, the duo put together a program of Strangelovesongs—​fremde Liebe, fremde Lieder, fremde Sprachen (“Strange love, strange songs, strange languages”). In an evening that leapt gleefully between German, English, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, one of the most striking moments came with the pair’s rendition of the Yiddish chestnut “Margaritkelekh.” Originally a 1909 poem by Zalman Shneour, subsequently published in Menachem Kipnis’s 1918 folkslider collection and recorded many times, the song tells the story of Khavele, a young girl who heads dreamily into the forest to pick flowers. There she meets a man with whom she has falls (briefly) in love. The

38 Personal interview.

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I’m responsible for this original klezmer sound, because if you put for example violin and another instrument, another instrument can play in a completely different style, but when there is a klezmer violin, it makes something. . . . And yeah actually, in the band everybody is important and has their role. It’s not like I’m the boss and they are just—​no no, it’s just when we are talking about klezmer, the real klezmer, this is my job.38

Placing Berlin in the Music  185

—​O, loz mikh, men tor nit; di mame zogt m’tor nit Mayn mame iz alt un iz beyz. —​Vu mame? vos mame? do zaynen nor beymer, Nor beymelekh, tra-​la-​la-​la. [O, let me go, I mustn’t; mama said I mustn’t My mama is old and wicked. —​Where’s mama? What mama? There’s only trees here, only young trees, tra-​la-​la-​la.] —​Du libst mikh? —​Ikh lib dikh! —​Du shemst dikh? —​Ikh shem mikh! —​O lib mikh un shem dikh un shvayg. Un ze vi es mishn zikh pekh-​shvartse kroyzn Mit goldene . . . tra-​la-​la-​la.39 [—​Do you love me? —​I love you! —​Are you ashamed? —​I’m ashamed! —​O love me and be ashamed and keep quiet. And see how pitch black curls mix With golden ones. . . tra-​la-​la-​la.]

39 Mlotek (1987:40).

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setting sun finds the man gone and Khavele once again alone in the woods. Conventional interpretations of the song play it as a coy coming-​of-​age fairytale, the gently comic commingling of the man’s black hair and flaming eyes with Khavele’s (“the prettiest daisy of all”) blond curls, lost in a dream and far away from her elderly mother’s beady eye, underscored by a soothing  lilt. Kahn and Lurje’s version, however, found a much darker heart to the song, foregrounded by a closer inspection of the lyrics:

186  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Und der wilde Knabe brach ’s Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach, Half ihr doch kein Weh und Ach, Mußt’ es eben leiden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.41 [And the savage boy picked the little rose on the heath; The little rose fought and pricked, Still no pain or cry could help her, She had to suffer all the same. Little rose, little red rose, Little rose on the heath.]

Just in case anyone that evening might have missed the significance of reframing a much-​loved German song (with words by one of Germany’s favorite poets) as a metaphor for rape and abuse, the duo stopped their performance partway through for this brief commentary from Kahn: Ok, this is a fucked-​up song [“Margaritkelekh” at this point]. I really hate this song, and actually I wanted to somehow create an entire program in which I could sing this song that I fucking hate. And I hate “Röslein auf der 40 Kahn and Lurje are not the first to offer this interpretation. The subtext of “Margaritkelekh” is apparent in earlier renditions by Theodore Bikel (1958) and Chava Alberstein (1969). 41 Goethe (1882:12).

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In order to further push the point home, Kahn and Lurje’s rendition arrested the musical accompaniment (up to this point motoring along jollily) at “Vu mame?” above. Kahn spat out his questions with menace, Lurje answered them with eyes averted, in a whisper. The music again halted at “shvayg,” delivered now as a venomous shout. That the sweet pastoral had turned sourly into sexual abuse was clear,40 but this is not all that the pair found in the song. This particular rendition was smoothly spliced with Heinrich Werner’s setting of Goethe’s “Heidenröslein,” a well-​known German song telling a similar tale:

Placing Berlin in the Music  187 Heide” too. And you shouldn’t ever sing it [laughter]. It’s not pretty. And look, yeah, ok, a bokher, a shvartse,42 it doesn’t mean that he’s dark, it means that he has black hair. Which is also fucked up too! It’s a cliché and it’s racist and it’s sexist and it’s gewalttätig [violent].

Conclusion John Shepherd (1991:214) suggests that music, existing within the “cracks and margins,” beyond “what passes for ‘reality’,” can act as mediator between “the acceptable and the unacceptable, that which is powerful and that which is dangerous.” Perhaps best placed, then, to articulate the complex dimensions of Berlin’s urban ethos—​in this case a continuum that runs between dialogic escapism and an inescapable historical complicity. Through the twentieth and into the twenty-​first century, Berlin has been cosmopolitan hotspot, National Socialist epicenter, Cold War frontier, beacon of new Europeanism, 42 The description of the man who Khavele meets in the forest. In this case it means “a guy with black hair.”

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That folk songs and tales might reveal and challenge cultural ground rules of sexuality and deviance is nowadays a commonplace (Lévi-​ Strauss 1968). But to bookend a Goethe poem with a Yiddish folksong and to implicate both in a chilling tale of rape and subjugation is to confront the “unpresentable in presentation itself ” (Lyotard 1993:46), an explicit refusal to close the semiotic gap and to deny “the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste” (46). And given the context of an evening of “strange love songs,” music of alterity and difference, the historical framing of German-​Jewish power relations is of course unavoidable. But importantly, Kahn and Lurje upset the norms of this dialectic:  both sides are collusive, the parochial Yiddish lullaby as guilty as the nineteenth-​century German pastoral. Once again, the particularly Berlin urban ethos foregrounded is one where sides are never clear and frontiers are porous, ambiguous, and unreliable (Silberman, Till, and Ward 2012:5). Somewhere between Yiddish song tradition and radical singer-​songwriter politics, Berlin is emphatically (re)framed as a borderland: “a constant state of transition [where] the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Anzaldúa 1987:3–​4).

188  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

and Europe’s coolest “poor but sexy” city.43 That its soundworld should reflect this is not surprising—​the various historical manifestations of Berlin are inseparable from the city’s cultural production; they become points of reference in the city’s urban ethos (­figure 4.10). Through these processes, klezmer music in Berlin steps beyond the revitalization of Jewish cultural forms and enters into meaningful dialogue with the complexities of the contemporary city: the urban ethos becomes a way of working through contradictions and ambiguities. Traditional music, born elsewhere, is here revealed as a richly

43 Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s famous characterization of Berlin (“arm, aber sexy”), reproduced on tourist T-​shirts and postcards, has by now arguably become something of a branding millstone around the civic neck.

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Figure 4.10  Neukölln graffiti. Rumors of the band’s demise were premature. On Halloween 2014, they appeared (“undead”) at Gorki Theater. Photo March 2014.

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malleable and provocatively expressive channel through which to speak the modern city, to probe its unresolved questions, and to interrogate its social processes. For the majority of klezmer and Yiddish musicians in Berlin, the city that frames day-​to-​day life figures only peripherally in their musical meanings. For the few who choose to scratch the surface, the multiple intersections exposed offer sites of musical emplacement that continue to open up creative, challenging, and ongoing ways to hear—​and so negotiate—​ the city in which they live and breathe.

5

“No. Something new. I don’t know what, but new. All of this gone.” He waved his arm, as if clearing the rubble outside. “You know what I saw today? They levelled the Chancellery. The whole building. And I asked one of the men, what happens to the stone? Marble some of it, nice. And he said the best goes to the Soviet memorial in Treptow and the rest to a U-​Bahn station. Like what happened in Rome—​you take the good stone and build something else, a new city right on top of the old one. It’s interesting to think about Berlin that way, no? One city on top of the other.” “And what happens to the people in the old one?” Irene said. Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

Introduction: The music of Jewish memory Klezmer is not always played by Jews, and it is not exclusively listened or danced to by Jews. As with Roma music, this has at times enabled a distancing of ethnic specificity, a loosening of Jewish ties in favor of a generic (and stereotyped) trope of rootless musicians wandering through more grounded musical cultures. The result has sometimes been that in the perceived absence of an explicit provenance, anyone can “claim” klezmer for themselves (Kaminsky 2014; Silverman 2015). A  separation from Eastern European Yiddish cultural roots has moreover been compounded by migration, destruction, and a resultant nostalgic shtetl discourse that has frequently located the music within romanticized fantasy rather than historical materiality; this is explored more fully in the next chapter. All of the artists covered in this book continue to work hard against this sort of cultural makeover. Their grounding of klezmer music within the spaces and discourses of the contemporary city speaks as a living embodiment of the ongoing revitalization of this music, and also the continued importance of Jewishness (historical and contemporary) within that revitalization. Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0005.

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Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  191

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The material of this chapter is slightly different. It comes from within the Berlin klezmer scene, but unlike what we have seen so far, it directly confronts the Nazi destruction of German Jewish life. Although not always referencing Jewish musical signifiers, or even always being what we could unequivocally call “Jewish music,” this material nevertheless sounds a clear sense of German Jewish history, while skillfully avoiding a default discourse of memorialization. This chapter thus augments a loose trajectory:  from early singers breaking through postwar silence, to pioneers and their sincere quest for knowledge, past the weird ambiguities of the German klezmer boom, through younger German musicians working hard to learn and disseminate a musical style, leading on to contemporary immigrant musicians using klezmer and Yiddish music to discuss and problematize ideas of Jewish cultural identity, and here, to music that derives its contemporary meanings from German Jewish history of the 1930s and 1940s. Much of this chapter traces out several shifting, and by now familiar, balances:  between rupture and continuity; between history and the present; between transnational intercultures and local networks; and between the Jewish musical archive and its contemporary reinterpretation. This is a story sliced apart by the Second World War that then picks up seventy-​five years later, largely thanks to a scene established in the 1990s. The music and texts at play are embedded within internationalized networks of Jewish cultural production and simultaneously rooted in the city of Berlin, drawing upon repertoire and performers that bridge local musical practice and the transnational Yiddish musical diaspora. In the same way that Berlin’s grand and only partially reconstructed Oranienburger Straße Synagogue creates its exhibition out of salvaged pieces of prewar Jewish life and the city’s Stasi museum turns interview chairs and peephole doors to new purposes as exhibition stands and information posts, this project self-​consciously mines a seam of Berlin musical history to forge a new-​old cultural artifact, and in the process forces the collision of then and now. This is an evocation of the past that allows for a particular perspective on the present, based in historical materials but framed through Berlin’s particular ability to exist across temporalities simultaneously—​aided in this case by its high proportion of world-​ class klezmer practitioners. The Semer Ensemble (formally Semer Label Reloaded) brings together some of Berlin’s most successful and adventurous Yiddish musicians to perform material that was recorded and released by Jewish record labels active in Germany in the years leading directly up to the Second World War. At

192  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

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Semer Ensemble’s helm is Alan Bern—​born in Bloomington, Indiana, but a Berlin resident since the late 1980s and one of the most influential voices in klezmer and Yiddish music today. Joining Bern are several of the most important younger singers and performers of new Jewish music, many of whom we have already met. Although it is intimately related to the klezmer and Yiddish musical scene in Berlin, this project exhibits an important singularity. Where much of Berlin’s revitalized scene represents a fruitful and creative adaptation of Eastern European Jewish tradition into the contemporary city, Semer Ensemble (SE) draws upon musical material that was mostly produced in Berlin itself. Rather than migrating from “elsewhere,” this chapter concerns musical texts whose physical location has, in a manner of speaking, remained unchanged, while history has moved decisively around them. SE is therefore a rare moment of genuine dialogue with Berlin’s own historical Jewish musical production. In this chapter I will discuss the background to the project and focus upon some of its musical material. I will examine what it can tell us about the relationship of archival materials to present-​day musical practice, in particular those separated from their original context by the Holocaust and historical migration. I will also question some of the ways in which SE and the “Reloaded” discourse rework certain historical narratives to better suit their own artistic purposes. Although it covers music that moves well beyond the klezmer revival, SE could not have happened without the German klezmer movement. From this stem the critical mass of high caliber musicians (many trained at Yiddish Summer Weimar), dynamic performance spaces, engaged audiences, and the desire to explore historical Jewish musical production in the city. SE performances overlap with klezmer’s contemporary performance spaces such as the KlezKanada festival and Berlin’s Gorki Theater Studio Я and Werkstatt der Kulturen. Its lesser-​known repertoire considerably enlarges the “revival” core, while performances in Berlin’s Jewish Museum and large European synagogues widen the new Jewish music audience demographic (and, perhaps, their musical reference-​points). At the same time, this is more than just another Berlin klezmer band or imaginative club night. It is a complex and provocative perspective upon Jewish history and memory as expressed through music—​an acknowledgment of the particular blend of loss and revival, nostalgia and modernity that has marked the revitalization of Jewish folk music in Germany since the 1980s. In its bridging of aspects of historical and contemporary Berlin Jewish musical culture, the Semer project is thus a direct comment on the multiple relationships between Jews and

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  193

The Semer (and Lukraphon) story, part 1 Vorbei, vorbei, vorbei Ein letztes Wort, ein letzter Gruß Vorbei Rolf Marbot and Bert Reisfeld, “Vorbei”

During the November 9, 1938, pogrom, later known as Reichskristallnacht, Hirsch Lewin’s business was destroyed. Located in Grenadierstraße (now Almstadtstraße), Lewin’s Hebrew Bookstore was part of the busy Jewish life of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district. Now a mass of boutiques, galleries, and 1 A heritage that, as Gantner (2014:38) notes, is often smoothed out in memorial architecture in the city, which instead “communicates a very homogeneous picture of the local Jewish culture, reflecting elements selected at the discretion of these actors, and not reflecting the possible diversity of self-​understandings that comprise the existing urban Jewish culture.”

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the city—​then and now—​an acknowledgment of the multidimensional cultural context of Jewish life: religious, secular, traditional, progressive, multilingual, distinct, and yet socially connected.1 The final part of this chapter then moves instead to listen in on a slice of Berlin Jewish memorial sound, a complex set of resoundings within the public city space. Like Semer Ensemble, it explores a way of hearing history through the sound of the present, in the process producing a particularly personal experience that is nevertheless fully grounded in the city of Berlin. This second musical address to German Jewish experience is seen in the honest and direct testimony of the singer Tania Alon. Tania is a Berlin Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust. For her, the singing and playing of Jewish music in Berlin has a directly personal meaning. Tania talks about the meanings of the Stolpersteine ceremonies at which she sings and the particular way that they situate the Jewish-​German discourse firmly within the physical and symbolic context of Berlin itself. Caught here within a web of history, memory, and cultural identity, Tania’s viewpoint is especially important as she is one of the few German-​born Jews on the Berlin klezmer scene, raised within a practicing Jewish environment. Tania’s sense that the particularities of her own German Jewish experience are sometimes missing from this scene provides an important counter-​narrative to the enthusiastic revitalization processes discussed throughout the book.

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2 The western center was Charlottenburg, nicknamed at that time “Charlottengrad.”

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funky emporia, this area to the northwest of Alexanderplatz was in the early twentieth century the eastern center of Berlin’s Eastern European Jewish cultural presence2—​the lively and crowded spot that newly arrived immigrants made for, often as a staging post toward Palestine, Paris, or the goldene medine of the United States. Lewin was one such immigrant himself. Born in Vilna in 1892, he was taken to Germany as a civilian prisoner in the First World War and remained there after his release, initially working in a bookstore and in 1930 opening one of his own. Lewin stocked religious and historical texts, children’s literature, candles, prayer shawls, and also a wide selection of phonograph records, which swiftly became his most popular item. In 1932 he took this one step further and inaugurated his own record label, naming it after the Hebrew word for song: “Semer.” Between 1932 and 1937, with tightening restrictions on Jewish cultural production in Berlin, Semer—​operating with the express permission of the Reich Chamber of Music and under Gestapo surveillance—​offered an increasingly rare recording platform for Jewish musicians and composers. Lewin’s label grew from re-​releases of existing recordings to new self-​produced material of artists based in Germany, including the young Galician cantor Israel Bakon, who cut Semer’s first original disc. The Semer catalog included cantorial music, popular Yiddish hits, cabaret, arias, and contemporary dance tunes from Palestine—​performed in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, and Italian. Recordings took place in various ad hoc locations around the city, and as the Nazi regime increased its persecution, Lewin had to scout for firms willing to make custom pressings for Jewish companies. From 1936 onward, with the imminent expulsion of all Jewish publishers and book handlers from the Reich Chamber of Literature, Semer Records supported the rest of Lewin’s bookshop business. Semer was the largest and longest-​running Jewish record label operating in Berlin in the 1930s, but it was not the only one. In the mid-​1920s, the Berlin-​born businessman Moritz Lewin (no relation) began to sell radios, gramophones, records, and musical instruments from his offices in Friedrichstraße. By 1930 he had opened branches in Gesundbrunnen to the north and Kreuzberg to the south and had become chairman of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce’s Radio Committee. With the Nazi takeover of power, Lewin was forced to move premises and saw his income drop. Despite

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  195

3 Information on Moritz Lewin and Lukraphon from Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz (2001:351–​55, 479). Unlike Semer, the etymology of Lukraphon is unclear, although the above writers offer possible options.

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this, by 1934 he was advertising sales of television sets in the Berlin Jewish Gemeindeblatt newspaper, and in early 1935 he began producing his own records under the brand name Lukraphon.3 Lukraphon recordings were all performed by members of the Berlin Jüdische Kulturbund or visiting artists working with the Bund—​smaller ensembles recorded in the basement of a synagogue, larger forces in the great hall of the Brüdervereinshaus in Kurfürstenstraße. Moritz Lewin’s label released new discs until the second half of 1936, of a variety and scope that arguably outdid Semer’s concentration on cantorial music and Yiddish songs. Between 1933 and 1936 the Palestine-​based labels Achva and subsequently Bema (both managed by Beer Maiblatt, a former employee of the Polish Syrena record company) also maintained an ongoing relationship with Berlin, taking advantage of international connections in order to use recording facilities unavailable to Yishuv-​based artists. While the against-​the-​odds persistence of Lukraphon and Semer undoubtedly represents an implicit resistance, their continued output needs also to be understood within the context of Nazi control of Jewish life—​in particular the presence of the Jüdische Kulturbund, which from 1933 had functioned as the hub of musical, theatrical, and literary activity for an increasingly restricted Jewish population. The outcome of a slightly bizarre, and by no means benign, cooperation between SS officer Hans Hinkel and Jewish theater manager Dr. Kurt Singer, the Kulturbund eventually became the only Berlin space within which Jewish cultural activities were officially allowed to take place. One of a number of propaganda tools promoting the fallacy of largely unabated Jewish cultural life under Nazism, the confinement of Jewish music to Semer, Lukraphon, and the Kulturbund also ensured that the corrupting influence of Jews was kept away from German music, at the same time providing a means with which to regulate and control the flow of Jewish cultural production (Hirsch 2010:33–​34). Restrictions stating that only Jews could take part in (or report on) Kulturbund activities—​or record and buy Semer and Lukraphon releases—​meant that not only was the taint of Jewish cosmopolitanism confined to Jewish artists, producers, and consumers, but also that Jews no longer had access to wider spheres of German musical culture.

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4 Michael Aylward, personal communication, September 20, 2019.

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Although they operated under uniquely restrictive and difficult conditions, the broad musical sweep of Semer and Lukraphon can also be contextualized within the wider frame of pre-​and interwar European, Russian, and Soviet Jewish music recordings. Michael Aylward (2003) notes the pre–​World War I presence of “a vigorous Jewish music recording industry” (2003:63), centered primarily in Warsaw and Lemberg, as well as Vienna, Budapest, Saint Petersburg, Czernowitz, and other cities. The primary output was Yiddish song (predominantly Yiddish theater songs), but cantorial music also featured strongly, particularly in recordings from Vilna, Warsaw, Budapest, London, and Vienna. At the same time, Tomasz Lerski’s 2004 history of the Warsaw label Syrena Records (1908–​39) shows a large market for Polish popular music, and particularly tango, a genre in which European Jews played a prominent role (see Czackis 2003, 2009). The interwar years saw a decline in recorded Jewish music, which Aylward (2003:69) attributes to the changing Russian market post-​revolution, the rise of nationalism (and hence lessened enthusiasm for ethnic minority culture) in Eastern European states, a growing taste for Anglo-​American music, and the aggressive marketing of American Jewish repertoire by the American labels Victor and Columbia. At the time of writing (September 2019), Aylward’s database of prewar Jewish commercially released discs numbers well over fifteen thousand.4 The variety of Semer and Lukraphon’s releases is testament to the diversity and complexity of Jewish cultural life in the Scheunenviertel, and indeed the wider city. It speaks to a Jewish experience that was able to operate simultaneously across different social and cultural continua, moving between insularity and acculturation, religiosity and secularity, the local and the international. The large number of cantorial recordings cut by Semer reflects the star status that certain prewar cantors achieved, as much as any particular gravitation toward the divine in German Jewish listening habits. And the steady stream of Lukraphon cabaret numbers by Jewish composers points to the centrality of prewar German Jews in this most Berlin of musical genres. Overall, the multilingual normativity of the recordings indexes a cosmopolitanism that is a striking pre-​echo of Berlin in the twenty-​first century. The pogrom perpetrators destroyed the bookstore premises and almost all of Semer’s record stock and metal master plates. Lewin was interned in Sachsenhausen but managed to reach Palestine before the end of the war, where he began producing records once more. Following his death in 1958,

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The Semer story, reloaded In 2012, Berlin singer and museologist Fabian Schnedler was involved in a Jewish Museum special exhibition:  Berlin Transit, focusing on Eastern European Jewish migrants to the city in the early twentieth century, in particular the districts of the Scheunenviertel in the East and Charlottenburg in the West. Fabian’s task was to design an audio exhibition room looking at the multilingual discourse of the city’s new arrivals—​represented through

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his son Zev took over the running of the company. The label that Semer became—​Hed Arzi—​is Israel’s oldest and the largest of its kind. Moritz Lewin and his wife, Martha, had managed to leave Germany for Italy at the end of 1937, and in March 1938 they sailed to New York. Immigrant life, however, was not kind to them. From 1938 to 1942 Moritz earned nothing at all, and although things began to improve slightly with the arrival of compensation payments from the Federal Republic of Germany from 1953 onward, he remained impoverished until his death in 1969. A set of familiar chronologies, up to this point, of destruction and its aftermath. But the story doesn’t stop there. After several decades reflecting a more fragile Jewish sound within Berlin, the Semer/​Lukraphon story in Germany begins again in the 1990s, achieving a brand new incarnation in the second decade of the twenty-​first century. In the meantime we need to take account of the move of Jewish folk music toward the German mainstream, the swelling post-​reunification klezmer scene, and its more recent distillation down to a multinational nucleus of world-​class singers, instrumentalists, and composers who make Berlin their home (or one of their homes) and form part of an internationalized network of Yiddish musical production. Without this core group of musicians and their receptive and culturally hip audience, the Semer Ensemble is unlikely to have happened. But perhaps more importantly, the turning of recorded historical sources into meaningful contemporary performance rests in this case on a collective ability on the part of these musicians not simply to move freely between different genres of Jewish music but to enjoy and exploit the multiple and conflicting relations and subjectivities that underpin such movement. The Semer project is therefore a fine example of the sort of chronological ambiguity that contemporary Berlin does so well, and to analyze it is to ask some important questions about the unavoidable filters through which we hear history.

198  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

The idea was to make it somehow contemporary, because the whole museum was afraid of too much shtetl kitsch. I thought of Socalled,7 to do some remixes of stuff, and also I asked the guys from Russendisko.8 They

5 Subtitled Jewish Musical Life in Nazi Berlin. The song “Vorbei” itself is a hauntingly beautiful slow  tango, sung on the Bear Family collection (BCD 16030) by Dora Gerson. 6 All of this information comes from personal communication with Rainer Lotz (February 7, 2018). 7 Aka Josh Dolgin: a Canadian-​born rapper, accordionist, and producer who specializes in mixing Yiddish material with DJ and hip-​hop techniques. 8 Wladimir Kaminer and Yuriy Gurzhy’s long-​running Kaffee Burger club night, beginning in 1999. Kaminer’s novel Russendisko was published in 2000, with a film adaptation appearing in 2012.

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books, newspapers, magazines, and recorded sources. Among the material was one Semer disc, and Fabian’s interest was further aroused upon discovering that much of the Semer catalogue had been rescued or rediscovered by the musicologist Rainer Lotz and released on a 2001 multi-​CD compilation from Bear Family Records in Lower Saxony, entitled Vorbei: Beyond Recall.5 The process had taken Lotz almost ten years, drawing on an international network of private collectors, public and national sound archives, and inquiries to Jewish communities around the world. In Germany, from 1934 onward, these records had only been available in Jewish shops, and only to Jews, on production of a pass. Most discs remaining in the country were destroyed or recycled by Aryan record businesses, and as a rule emigrés and refugees didn’t take heavy and bulky record collections with them. Consequently, by the late twentieth century, most Semer and Lukraphon discs were a rare thing, and almost all Lotz’s finds were single surviving copies—​spread across the United Kingdom, Germany, North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and Israel. Some discs were broken into several pieces, requiring expert restoration work, and Lotz also encountered some opposition from Jews—​one collector who resented Lotz’s non-​Jewish background, and one ultra-​Orthodox family who disagreed with the presentation of liturgical and non-​liturgical music in the same volume.6 Delving deeper into Lotz’s work led Fabian to think bigger than an exhibition soundtrack. Having made contact with Zev Lewin in Israel, he was concerned that any musical material should be given the space to develop its own artistic direction, including in particular giving these recordings a performative dimension that moved beyond simple re-​creation. At the same time, he was determined to avoid the clichés to which presentations of Yiddish music have often defaulted:

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  199 all had their ways, but they did not really fit the idea of the museum. So I said, OK, what about Alan Bern? . . . And then we kind of got the favorites together, the people.9

9 All Fabian Schnedler’s comments come from a personal interview at the Berlin Jewish Museum, August 27, 2014.

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This was the beginning of Semer Label Reloaded (now Semer Ensemble), a Berlin-​based ensemble that recreates the output of these prewar Berlin record labels for a modern concert audience. The choice of Bern for musical director was not a difficult one. Originally from Indiana but resident in Berlin since 1987, Bern is the director of Europe’s largest Yiddish arts festival, the long-​running Yiddish Summer Weimar. Through his work with the influential revival band Brave Old World, his own teaching, and subsequently that of his students, Bern is one of the musicians who has helped to disseminate a great deal of knowledge around historical—​and by extension contemporary—​ Yiddish musical performance practice. Bern’s centrality to Yiddish musical activity in Germany and internationally, and the respect that he commands from both insiders and outsiders, brings an authority, and authorial voice, to the project. And the “favorites” that Schnedler refers to are part of a strong network of exceptional, mostly Berlin-​based performers and composers, many closely tied to Yiddish Summer Weimar and other aspects of Bern’s musical life:  Michigan-​ born performer, songwriter and Yiddish musical agent provocateur Daniel Kahn; Yiddish singer and teacher Sasha Lurje (originally from Riga); Californian jazz trumpeter, composer, and Berlin immigré Paul Brody; Hamburg-​based Russian klezmer violinist Mark Kovnatsky; well-​ respected German jazz and world music bassist Martin Lillich; and occasionally Dutch violinist Vanessa Vromans, German clarinetist Christian Dawid, and Ukrainian-​Israeli singer Sveta Kundish (all also resident in Berlin). Outside of this immediate network, the ensemble features one of klezmer music’s international big hitters:  Klezmatics singer Lorin Sklamberg, whose distinctively plaintive high voice adds an unmistakable contemporary quality to the sound. Semer Label Reloaded’s first performance took place in the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2012, and since then the ensemble has played in Warsaw, Copenhagen, the United States, Finland, and Germany. Following a crowdfunding campaign, a live recording, “Rescued Treasure,” was released on Piranha Records in 2016.

200  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

For me, there’s no reason to set limits on something that thinks of itself as popular music. That would be, for me, a kind of a cop out. That would be playing it safe and hiding behind the historical moment, rather than saying hey, we’re doing this song now, and this song is an expression of something which is very very gut-​wrenching, and so we have to find contemporary artistic means for it to be as gut-​wrenching. We can’t sing a song that says close your eyes, your father’s never coming home again, put stones on your mother’s eyes and have it be a pleasant experience for the audience. It has 10 Unless otherwise stated, all of Alan Bern’s comments come from a personal interview over Skype (Edinburgh-​Berlin), September 13, 2019.

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Fabian Schnedler has been a part of Jewish music in Germany for several decades. Although not Jewish, he is a fluent Yiddish speaker and since the 1990s has regularly performed both historical Yiddish song and newly composed works. His work in the German Yiddish music scene and also Jewish Museum Berlin makes him a connecting node across several overlapping networks and is one of the things that makes the project possible. By his own admission, without his ties to the Jewish Museum and his work researching prewar Jewish life, it is unlikely that any of his musical collaborators (or indeed their audiences) would have found their way to the Semer/​Lukraphon material. Some way from core klezmer and Yiddish repertoire, it is music that was simply not, as he put it, on their “radar.” At the same time, performing the material in the Jewish Museum connects the project and its musicians to a different audience than Kaffee Burger or Oblomov regulars. To construct a concert set from the 256 pieces on the Bear Family collection, Bern, Sklamberg, and Schnedler each compiled their own shortlists, with a conscious emphasis on diversity. These shortlists were debated and a core of around eight pieces agreed upon, the remaining material selected with a view to creating what Bern describes as “an artistic, meaningful experience, not just a historical experience.”10 From the beginning, the re-​ presentation of historical sources brought about inevitable tensions between the roles of recreation versus reinterpretation. For a group of musicians who have spent many hours learning from old recordings, this was nothing new, although in this case there were—​unusually—​very specific urtexts to consult. And although SE’s renditions draw carefully on their original sources, they are also not afraid to push further than these originals were able to do, as Bern explains:

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  201 to be gut-​wrenching. And if the arrangement and the text from back then aren’t going to do it, then we have to find some contemporary means for doing that.11

Well, I think Lorin as an artist has such a certain way . . . that he’s very much himself right from the beginning. But I  was a bit shy, because actually I never sang cantorial music before that, and so I was a bit shy as a non-​Jew to sing a sacred Jewish text. You know you can sing Bach, you can sing sacred songs, that’s not the problem, but still you want to feel it, right? You want to be able to feel it and interpret it. And I think I can do it, but there was some uncertainty. It’s not something you do like, “Oof, sure.”12

While the concert performance of Jewish liturgical music in this project links to a prewar move of cantorial music from the synagogue to the stage and record label, it also directly addresses a discourse that has skulked around the edges of the klezmer revival worldwide, and particularly in Germany—​ namely, the large number of non-​Jews contributing to this vibrant retaking of Jewish folk music. While the scene, as well as most recent commentators, have by now moved fully on from these “Can white men sing the blues?” blind alleys, the debate up until this point has largely been conducted around secular klezmer and Yiddish music. The incorporation of cantorial repertoire—​ devotional music rooted in liturgical Hebrew texts—​arguably moves the goalposts slightly, or at least focuses back on the question, by presenting its audience with explicitly Jewish themes (the same is true of SE’s Zionist repertoire). Yet at the same time, Schnedler’s embrace of cantorial material and his performance’s seamless incorporation into the ensemble reframes this particular articulation of Jewish music as part of a larger constellation of ambiguous and fluid identities that the Semer project explicitly mines. Here is Alan Bern addressing this in his characteristically provocative way:

11 Alan Bern, personal interview.

12 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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The variety of SE’s selection also prompted questions about the relationship of performance competencies to these historical musical texts. For Fabian Schnedler in particular, the inclusion of cantorial music raised ambiguous issues around his own identity as a non-​Jew, as well as the specific technical demands of such music.

202  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

As a prominent and adventurous non-​Jewish performer in a Jewish musical world for several decades, Fabian has often approached his musical decisions with a good deal of thought. In considering the particular issues thrown up by SE, he drew inspiration from the overall heterogeneity and non-​purism of the project, while also placing considerable faith in the sophistication of his audience: It’s not too easy to stereotype it in the usual way, nostalgia, or Holocaust. . . . As easy as it is, if you go for cliché in Yiddish music, people have to be hip to it, that’s the problem. Otherwise they just read “other Jew” or something.14

A diversity of genre and an absence of easy stereotype is at the heart of SE’s repertoire: love songs, songs of loss and mourning, soldier’s songs, drinking songs, religious texts, and yearning Zionist anthems. Linguistically, the group covers English, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish with ease, once again foregrounding the particular brand of vernacular internationalism that Berlin does so well. Musically, the songs range from gentle parlor numbers to full-​blown comic cabaret pieces. And although many of the arrangements are faithful to the originals, there is no hint of parody or of cloying over-​fidelity. Instead, each number is treated on its own terms, free to explore its own musical and cultural world.

Semer as Jewish memory A fine example of the linguistic and cultural intertextuality underlying SE is the number shared between Sklamberg and Schnedler, “Kadish (Der

13 Personal interview.

14 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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Well, first of all I want to say that Semer Ensemble is not Jewish music. I’m very radical about that, and I put it that way purposefully provocatively. Semer Ensemble is the music of Jewish musicians of the ’30s, interpreted by us today. And “us today” are some of us Jewish and some of us not. So there is one perspective from which one can say this is Jewish music—​that’s the Nazis’ perspective. And that’s not the perspective that I want to adopt.13

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Mayn kind, zog kadish far dayn tatn. Bay di soldatn treft im di koyl. Mayn kind, mayn liber, Er kumt nisht mer vider, Dokh groys iz undzer adoynoy. [My child, say Kaddish for your father. The soldiers’ bullets shot him. My child, my love, He’s not coming back, But our Lord is great.]

The grim acceptance of fate (by both Yankl and his wife) runs through the song, a trope made both meaningful and sinister by our hindsighted viewpoint, incorporating as it does the knowledge of the fate of so many future 15 The two men worked together in Berlin in the 1920s in Robitschek and Paul Morgan’s Kabarett der Komiker (Jelavich 1993:198–​202).

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yidisher soldat).” This was originally a German song with words by Kurt Robitschek and music by Otto Stransky.15 A 1929 Yiddish version was recorded by the tenor Pinchus Lavenda for Vocalion records in New  York and later for Artiphon in Berlin (reissued by Semer). In 1930, the German tango singer Otto Fassel recorded the song for Odeon records under the title “Kaddisch: ein Ghetto-​Lied.” Already, then, within this song we can see some of the interweaving and overlapping strands of prewar Berlin musical production. These become richer and more complex when we consider the music and text themselves. The piece is a tango, composed in the slow, heavy style that characterized Eastern European tangos of the 1920s and 1930s. As with Berlin’s musical culture more generally, Jews were closely involved in the development of the European tango sound, and so it is no surprise to find a Jewish narrative here, in both languages. And as is common within European tango, the lush, densely romantic sound belies a deeper level—​in this case, darker themes of death and separation. The text tells the story of Yankl the blacksmith, who leaves his family to go to war, most likely pressed against his will and unable to pay his way out. Shortly after, his wife receives a visit from the rabbi, telling her that her husband has been killed. The mother takes the child to her breast and tells him:

204  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Especially now, in 2014. It’s a hundred years. It’s a 1914, First World War experience which talks about losing relatives, which doesn’t have to mean it’s an antiwar song. But kadish. Adoynoy iz groys. So I like this link between a World War I experience, then it’s a German Jewish experience. And then it’s Yiddish—​for other soldiers who spoke Yiddish it’s also an experience. So a lot of people had this experience, but then again it’s language and different perspectives. Even though it’s 99 percent the same lyrics.16

This ideological oscillation is reinforced by the song’s musical construction, powerfully conveying the contrast between external narrative and inner emotional world. The two verses, which describe the action, are set to a brooding march rhythm, the text declaimed in short, punchy syllables. The chorus, which narrates Yankl and his wife’s feelings, is set to a contrastingly lyrical and soaring melody, rising in the first two lines and falling back down for the second two. Longer suspensions mark out certain words: kadish, tatn, soldatn, liber, vider;17 and a rising minor sixth (a very Jewish interval) frames the tragically resigned cadence (figure 5.1). The past-​present dialogue that underpins SE operates on several levels. As Bern points out: It’s hard for us to hear these songs, or to find a way out from these songs, which doesn’t lead to the Holocaust, because the Holocaust stands between us. But in these songs you don’t yet hear the Holocaust. It’s perhaps the last flowering of this culture before our perceptions were so thoroughly imprinted by the Holocaust.18

The subsequent fate of this material and its makers means that we cannot avoid our own historical headphones, even though these are absent from 16 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview. 17 Kaddish, father, soldier, love, again (in this case part of nisht mer vider, meaning “no more”). 18 Alan Bern, speaking in a news report from Frankfurt am Main, June 2014. Video available on YouTube at https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=1Xky4Omql5g, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Yankls. But this, of course, is not all. The very idea of the Jewish soldier has, postwar, acquired new levels of meaning—​from Vilna partisans to the IDF. Absent from the song’s original cultural context, these resonances are inescapable to our contemporary ear. And as Schnedler points out, this historical translation has a linguistic parallel.

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the original sources. Hearing history in this way produces some unexpected resonances. It is because of traumatic history that this material has particular significance for modern audiences. And yet the specificity of its musical geography—​reaching back to prewar Berlin through an avowedly contemporary Berlin ensemble—​combined with the immediacy and affective power of its renewed rendition, militates strongly against conventional discourses of memorialization that have often dogged Jewish music in post-​reunification Germany.19 Commemoration, in fact, does not feature in SE performance or discourse. The project is never framed in terms of memorial, despite the fact that much of the material seems somehow to articulate a sense of disappearance, transformation, or awareness of future demise (“Die Welt ist klein geworden,” “Vorbei,” “Kadish”). To perform this music today, especially in Berlin, is therefore to fully acknowledge cultural destruction while at the same time offering a contemporary and proudly Jewish musical discourse that both incorporates and moves beyond memorial—​reveling instead in temporal overlap, in the play between past and present. It’s history, but also it’s a contemporary project; it’s not like one of these—​I always call them Betroffenheit [shock] projects, where you tend to have one reaction from the public. This is more open, I think, and it shows how much was there, and actually that’s also the emphasis of the museum.20

19 Klezmer clarinetist Giora Feidman, for example, has been a frequent performer at Holocaust memorial events. 20 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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Figure 5.1  “Kadish, der Yidisher Soldat” (Robitschek and Stransky), chorus. Harmony given to indicate suspensions.

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Semer as contemporary Berlin

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In its transition from prewar recordings to twenty-​first-​century performance, the Semer repertoire has moved from vernacular community life to a heterogeneous “world” musical landscape. At the same time, its contemporary framing offers both a synchronic and diachronic perspective upon historical German Jewish identities and dialogues. As a counterweight to the transnationalism of the contemporary Yiddish and klezmer music scene, we can therefore also consider the relationship of the SE project to the city of Berlin itself. As we have seen, klezmer and Yiddish music in today’s Berlin has rooted itself in the city through its performance spaces and performer networks, but its historical repertoire has often been drawn from music that was composed, performed, and recorded in places other than Germany—​ either further east or in the United States. This project, however, is the first to base itself on historical Berlin repertoire—​music written and recorded there, and speaking from that city’s particular prewar Jewish cosmopolitan narrative voice. Semer Ensemble brings Berlin into explicit focus—​both as a historical context for the original recordings and as a center of contemporary musical life uniquely capable of taking on this project. At the same time, positioning this relationship as city-​specific helps restructure the narrative of new Jewish music in Berlin toward a heterogeneous, culturally loose, urban flow. This connection to the city itself is also important in its address to some of the criticisms leveled at the German klezmer and Yiddish music movement—​ namely that the city’s embrace of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish music is geographically inaccurate and historically suspect. Critics have at times argued that the music’s discursive emphasis on Eastern European Ashkenazi culture—​some hundreds of miles to the south and east of Berlin—​both paints a false picture of acculturated prewar German Jewish life and simultaneously clouds the possibility of genuine contemporary German-​Jewish dialogue, perpetuating a comfortable and clichéd image of Eastern European Other over the complexities of actual German Jewish identities. Philip Bohlman (2008:172) rails at what he calls “the din of klezmer music” and its anachronistic evocation of a German Jewish past “that never was.” And historian Leslie Morris (2001:376) suggests that “it is the iconic function of Klezmer as sound, not the music per se, that triggers the metonymic link between Jewish ‘sound’ and Jewish ‘experience,’ however illusory, fictive, invented, or ‘hyper-​ real’ that may turn out to be.” Both Bern and Daniel Kahn are outspoken

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  207

It also opens for me, like, it’s kind of strange but I specialized as a Yiddish singer. I sang German songs, but not very often, so it happens that I sing German songs now, in a Jewish song project.22

Although today’s Semer Ensemble caters to a diverse audience, the original composers, performers, record producers, and consumers of their music were almost all Jewish. Nazi decrees made the cosmopolitanism that had characterized Germany’s musical life of the late Weimar era no longer possible. But where the original “Jewishness” of this music meant that it was subject to increasing confines and limits in Nazi Germany, the historical provenance of the contemporary Semer project instead, perhaps unexpectedly, liberates the material from the constraints of residual “Jewish” musical signifiers and closed categories of repertoire. This version of sounding Jewish in Berlin—​drawn from the most restrictive period of Jewish life in the city—​ nowadays reveals a more fluidly subjective space, for both performers and audience. This ambiguous subjectivity also has a reverse effect. One of the numbers is the comic “Im Gasthof zur goldenen Schnecke” (At the Golden Snail Tavern), recorded for Lukraphon by the German Jewish singer and composer 21 Kahn describes the assertion of Yiddish cultural absence in Germany as a “Yekke [German Jewish] myth” (personal interview), while Bern points to the rediscovery of Renaissance and Baroque Yiddish song in the work of scholar and singer Diana Matut. On Yiddish life in interwar Germany, including Berlin as first choice for YIVO, see Kuznitz (2014). 22 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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in their responses to these criticisms, pointing out that interwar Berlin was host to a thriving transnational Yiddish literary and musical culture, and also highlighting the deep-​rooted historical connections between the German and Yiddish languages.21 More specifically, Semer Ensemble emphatically counters this vagueness by locating that sound specifically, geographically, and temporally. This is, if nothing else, Berlin music past and present, performed by some of the city’s own most influential klezmer and Yiddish musicians and rooted in the materiality of prewar Berlin Jewish life. This grounding in the prewar city inevitably includes its celebrated cabaret of the 1920s and 1930s. This was a musical language born of its time that also stamped an indelible mark on the era. And for Fabian, a German singer who has spent his life singing Yiddish music, it is a dynamic that raises some thoroughly modern questions:

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We play this one Schlager which is a waltz, and you couldn’t—​some people don’t want to hear it, it’s so German. Some people feel like you can’t clap, and maybe they think of German soldiers in the Second World War. But this is also a Jewish context, yes? There were Jewish performers and Jewish composers involved. I like this, it’s somehow—​maybe I’m not sure if this goes too far—​but maybe it gives back an audience something that they can’t assess so easily. And it’s not Silbereisen and Musikantenstadl like the TV German folk music; it’s actually popular music from the 1920s and ’30s.24

Ironically, then, it is through this unlikely musical vehicle that Germans are given back the legitimacy to own and enjoy a part of their “own” historical popular music. Uneasy associations are mitigated by the performance’s Jewish context, leapfrogging the manufactured world of media-​based folk/​ pop culture and connecting directly with a contemporary German audience.25 For Alan Bern, there is yet another dimension to this cultural give and take: It struck me as paradoxical, and many of us, to realize that people were recording songs like “Golden Snail Tavern”—​songs that have zero political content—​right in the middle of Nazi-​run Berlin. And it’s not the case that they didn’t know that their lives were in danger. They were feeling it. . . . And I suddenly made the connection; I realized, wow, to be a Jewish 23 Despite this, after fleeing to Holland, Rosen was killed in Auschwitz in 1944:  see the Music and the Holocaust project website, http://​holocaustmusic.ort.org/​places/​camps/​western-​europe/​ westerbork/​rosenwilly/​, accessed September 30, 2019. 24 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview. Florian Silbereisen is the singing presenter of the German volkstümliche Musik program Feste der Volksmusik. Volkstümliche Musik, a broad, deliberately populist all-​singing, all-​dancing affair, should be distinguished from ethnic folk music. See, for example, this clip on YouTube: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=hqQtioKLQCU, accessed September 30, 2019. Musikantenstadl is a live German-​language TV program and touring show specializing in Schlager (light pop songs) and volkstümliche Musik. 25 Sveta Kundish made this same point in relation to the Yiddish Summer Weimar-​initiated project Voices of Ashkenaz, which explores the links between Yiddish and German folk song (personal interview, 2014).

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Willy Rosen, one of Weimar cabaret’s most successful all-​rounders. Rosen’s maxim was “above all—​no politics,”23 and this tune is no exception. It is a leery waltz describing a pub—​“nicht modern” and not even “sehr schön”—​ that nevertheless retains the dubious appeal of a coin-​operated player piano and dancing girls. Harmless and gently saucy, for Fabian the song has a deeper meaning:

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  209

As Bern readily admits, we cannot, of course, check this interpretation with the musicians on the recordings. It is a dimension of meaning that emerges through the juxtaposition of eras, contexts, and consciousnesses. Nevertheless, the performative aspect of music makes it a particularly powerful vehicle for such back-​and-​forth dialogues, “an ideal site for the deconstruction of the too easy opposition of past and present, old and new, traditional and modern” (Bithell 2006:9). Another number covered by the ensemble is the satirical song “Leybke fort keyn Amerike,” which tells the story of one man’s migration from old world to new.27 Leaving his pregnant wife, Reyzl, behind with promises of a ticket soon to come, Leybke becomes a successful tailor in New York. Forgetting his wife and child, he soon hooks up with the glamorous Tsipe. She reminds him of his family back home, and Leybke finally sets about writing Reyzl a letter. Sadly, this letter does not contain the happy tidings Reyzl had hoped for, but instead a divorce, allowing Leybke to wed his New World sweetheart, leaving his alte heym family bereft and penniless. Performed in multicharacter by Daniel Kahn either side of the interval (mirroring the original recording, which takes up both sides of the Semer disc), this is a story that would have resonated on both sides of the Atlantic, though perhaps for different reasons. In the context of Semer Label Reloaded, it acquires yet another level of historical meaning, performed as it is back in Europe by an American Jew—​the descendant perhaps of one such Leybke. As much of this book shows, this kind of historical cultural playfulness and fluidity resonates through much of Berlin’s contemporary Yiddish musical production. It is symptomatic of a sort of musical double-​consciousness, an ability to exist culturally in several places at once—​what painter R. B. Kitaj

26 Alan Bern, personal interview. 27 The original recording was made in Berlin in 1931 by Pinchus Lavenda and probably first issued on Artiphon.

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artist in 1935, persecuted by Nazis who claim that you don’t have a claim anymore on German culture, in the middle of that to make a recording about dancing girls in a nightclub is actually an act of resistance. It’s a way of saying, yes, I do have a claim on this culture. In fact, the act of resistance was to insist that it’s possible to be Jewish, to be a Jewish artist, and to have the same claim on any other culture that non-​Jews have. So for me it’s a kind of political statement in itself.26

210  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I’m a non-​Jew in a Jewish-​Yiddish scene, where I feel as an insider because I’m there for some years and I have friends. But also I’m an outsider, you know I have this mostly non-​Jewish audience where I’m kind of a translator. . . . It’s an in-​between space. Actually, this is not nice sometimes, but it’s also what I want, I think. And I had some time—​actually I decided not to talk about this any more, but I still can, it’s OK. Because I thought about this so much, like, I call it the goy issue. Goy is the Yiddish term, the insider term, telling that you’re an outsider, and that’s exactly what I am. . . . I’m just discovering in the last years that it is a good place.29

Questions and partialities Joyful, complex, and celebratory as it undoubtedly is, the SE project also raises some slightly thornier questions. In particular, the project’s title and surrounding promotional discourse offer a somewhat partial view. Of the ensemble’s twelve recorded tracks, only seven were in fact released on the Semer label:  “Ich Tanz,” “Scholem Baith,” “Kaddisch,” “Das Kind liegt in Wiegele,” “Achenu Kol Bet Jisroel,” “Jad Anuga,” and “Leybke fort keyn Amerike.” Of these seven recordings, only one (“Jad Anuga”) was definitely an original Semer recording. All the others were re-​releases of earlier recordings by the Artiphon or Kalliope labels. Four of the other pieces, “Simchu bi Jeruschalajm,” “Die Welt ist klein geworden,” “Im Gasthof zur Goldenen Schnecke,” and “Vorbei”—​in a standout performance by Sasha Lurje and one of the project’s linchpin songs—​were released on Moritz Lewin’s Lukraphon label. A further piece—​“E’ise pele,” included in a medley 28 Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto (1989:19). Cf. also Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic “double consciousness.” 29 Fabian Schnedler, personal interview.

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called Diasporism: “enacted under peculiar historical and personal freedoms, stresses, dislocation, rupture and momentum [living] in two or more societies at once.”28 SE explicitly mines this seam, exploiting the multilinguistic and overlapping cultural competence of both its performers and its audiences: in a multilingual city, no two audience members are guaranteed to “get” the same thing. Fittingly, however, such double-​consciousness is in this case not the exclusive preserve of diasporic Jews. For Fabian Schnedler, it is precisely this liminal contact zone that brings both problems and satisfaction:

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  211

In 1932, Lewin creates his own label, “Semer.” One year later, the Nazis come to power, forbidding Jewish musicians to perform in non-​Jewish settings. Semer becomes a Noah’s Ark for Jewish musicians who have nowhere else to go. For five years, Lewin makes recordings at a feverish pace, creating a precious time capsule of a world facing annihilation.31

Packaging this story to fit a heroic narrative of Jewish cultural resistance and even a form of survival is an understandably beguiling route. However, as both Lily Hirsch (2010) and the authors of the Vorbei collection’s accompanying book (2001) have shown, the claim that Semer was offering the only remaining outlet for Jewish musicians is not entirely true. Restrictions were of course tightening rapidly on Jewish cultural production from 1933 onward, but arguably the main resource for Jewish musicians in Berlin between 1933 and 1941 was not Semer but the Jüdische Kulturbund, which is mentioned only in passing in Semer Ensemble’s written materials. Likewise, several of the numbers that SE performs were in fact recorded before the Nazi takeover of power. There is a danger, of course, of turning these observations into mealy mouthed nitpicking. But one can be critical at the same time as celebratory, and for obvious reasons we need to probe narratives that are only partial, particularly where German Jewish history of the first half of the twentieth century is concerned. Given that the Semer Ensemble represents by far the most public link to this important historical piece of material culture and the networks that surrounded it, the opportunity to tell a slightly richer and more nuanced story than Hirsh Lewin’s alone not only represents a missed opportunity; it also diminishes the contribution of people other than Hirsch Lewin, despite the fact that SE draws equally on their work.

30 Catalog information from Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz (2001). 31 Liner notes, Semer Ensemble, Rescued Treasure (2016).

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with “Simchu bi Jeruschalajm”—​was recorded in Berlin for the Palestinian Achva label. Finally, Jenö Hubay’s “Czardas” comes from violinist Andreas Weißgerber’s private recording of a Lukraphon (not Semer) session.30 The Lukraphon label is mentioned just once in Lorin Sklamberg’s liner notes, but in the project’s overall promotional discourse the evocative narrative of one brave man representing the only outlet of cultural resistance for Jewish artists in Berlin proves too neat to resist:

212  Sounding Jewish in Berlin More interesting, perhaps, are the questions that arise around the very diversity that SE presents. This is highlighted by a comment made by Bern in an interview for London’s Jewish Music Institute, where he enthusiastically states:

As much of my book argues, this impressive claim is no exaggeration. The Semer Ensemble presents some of the finest musicians working in any genre today, not just Jewish music, and the performance as a whole is a dramatic and undeniably important contribution to Jewish music—​pace Bern—​past and present. But although all the performers are more than qualified to tackle this material—​and do so brilliantly—​this very fact raises a complementary question. Specifically, does the performance of such a diverse set of material by the same four singers and four-​piece ensemble homogenize what in its original form was far more various? To put it a little more bluntly: Does the performance of this massively varied historical repertoire, carrying a wealth of differing musical and cultural specificity, by the same eight people, risk undermining the very heterogeneity for which it emphatically advocates? There is, of course, no unambiguous answer here. It is clear that SE unites a potentially unwieldy and often unconnected mixture of music and style under one easily accessible banner, at the same time pointing to the existence of Jewish musical meanings beyond klezmer. If the price for this expansion is a heavier reliance upon “the favorites” (who, after all, make up much of this book), for Bern this is counteracted by the affective immediacy and embodied commitment of the performers (­figure 5.2): I’ll say that I think the Semer Ensemble has a kind of social historical importance, which is for people who, let’s say, aren’t so aware of this huge variety of musical genres that Jews were active in, a chance to experience that. And the second part of this is that we really play this music as our music. . . . We 32 Audio interview for a Jewish Music Institute podcast, June 29, 2016, https://​www.mixcloud. com/​jewishmusicinstitute/​semer-​ensemble%20/​.

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With these seven musicians, plus Lorin from New York, we’re able to cover the entire spectrum of music that was made by Jewish musicians in the 1920s and the ’30s. . . . And I’m very very proud about that. I like to say sometimes that Berlin is entering a kind of second golden age of Jewish music and musicians.32

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  213

are that music when we play it, you know. In “Goldene Schnecke” we’re bawdy, and when we do “Das Kind liegt in Wiegele,” we go to our most tragic place. And when we do “Ich tanz,” it’s a light-​hearted sophisticated salon. I mean, we embody that stuff. And, to the extent that we do that, that we succeed in doing that, we bring the audience through something that is also beyond words.33

“That’s not my problem!” Tania Alon and Berlin Jewish identity The tensions between a supposed homogenous people and the many ethnic, religious, and racial groups who are asserting their own identities make Germany a particularly interesting terrain to explore the ambiguities of multiple identities. . . . While Jews may well be German citizens and even (although today it is less likely) of German heritage, their stature, while secured politically and legally, remains uncertain, and they often still feel like strangers in their own country. Peck, Ash, and Lemke 1997:91

33 Alan Bern, personal interview.

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Figure 5.2  Paul Brody lets rip at a Semer Label Reloaded performance in the Gorki Theater. To the left is Alan Bern; behind Brody are Dan Kahn and Vanessa Vromans. June 2014.

214  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Wow. It was amazing because he composed so many songs I knew from the community, from my parents, and I didn’t know that he was the composer! And it was fun, to make music with him. So then it started for me to go on

34 The “four questions” of the Passover seder, traditionally asked by the youngest child present. 35 Carlebach (1925–​94) was an iconoclastic and hugely popular rabbi, composer, and singer. Born in Berlin, he lived in the United States, Israel, and Canada, traveling and performing widely. His particularly melodic brand of devotional song remains a staple of Jewish music today, although his personal conduct toward women has recently been seriously called into question.

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Tania Alon was born in Berlin. Her parents both survived the war—​her father in Berlin and her mother in Dortmund. They met at a postwar Jewish children’s festival in Schwarzwald and made the decision to remain in Germany, raising a family there. This is a choice that Tania also found herself making some years later, despite strong family and emotional links to Israel. I met Tania early on at the Klezmerstammtisch, where we quickly became friends, and our paths crossed frequently during my year in Berlin. I found it surprising that Tania was one of the very few German-​born and raised Jews that I  encountered on the klezmer/​Yiddish scene. I  wondered how much her own family history and sense of survival would fit with the more recent internationalization of Jewish music in the city, or whether she perhaps considered herself in some ways different from the majority of musicians and singers with whom she jammed and performed. Unlike many of the musicians in this book, Tania is an occasional performer, her participation centered on jam sessions and intimate concerts. But at the same time, as the following pages show, Tania’s slight separation from the scene is also a little of her own choosing, stemming from a different personal relationship with the music and her own German Jewish identity (her family has been in Germany for three generations). In what follows, I want to draw attention to the way in which Tania positions herself socially and culturally within and without the Berlin scene, rather than the detail of her music itself. Tania has been performing Jewish music in some form for most of her life—​beginning, as she puts it, with the ma nishtana34 when she was three years old. As a child she sang with her musician father for Jewish community events in Berlin, and as a young mother in Hanover she appeared onstage with popular rabbi and singer/​composer Shlomo Carlebach when he came to perform for the local Jewish community.35 For Tania, this was an event that brought together her own history with that of the wider Jewish world:

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  215 stage with my songs. A little later Giora Feidman came to Germany and told us that what we are doing is “klezmer” [laughs].36

PA: Were there times when you would have to explain? TA: When I was in the community, no. But in other places I always had to explain. The most Germans, if they hear that you not only do this music but that you are a Jew, that you are really Jewish, they are very shy and very touched. And they don’t have really the possibility to talk ehrlich, real, because they don’t want to hurt me and I don’t want to hurt them. And that’s a big problem. Till now.38

Ironically, then, Tania’s ethnic connection to the music she plays marked her as an outsider, implicitly unable to participate in a larger—​and meaningful—​ historical discussion. Tania noted the gap between her own life as a Jew and the symbolic boundary it erected between her and fellow non-​Jewish musicians, the inflection of her Jewishness as something rarefied and “special” becoming a barrier to more honest communication. For Tania, her Jewish identity, as expressed through music, was perceived more as a symbolic benefit to her non-​Jewish colleagues than any actual engagement with her own life—​part of what Michael Meng (2011:214) describes as “redemptive cosmopolitanism,” in which an ostensibly integrated and socially 36 All Tania’s comments come from a personal interview in Steglitz, Berlin, on June 16, 2014. 37 On Cooper, see Wood (2013). In Tania’s experiences, we can see a nice example of the way that many Berlin musicians who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s made less of a distinction between Feidman and American Yiddish musicians than is now sometimes the case with younger arrivals to the city. 38 Tania Alon, personal interview.

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Having met Feidman, Tania and the clarinetist Helmut Eisler invited him to Hanover to hold a workshop. Around the same time, she also began to meet American Jewish musicians in Germany, culminating in a trip to KlezKamp, where she encountered the influence of the Yiddish singer and cultural powerhouse Adrienne Cooper.37 For Tania, her German Jewish identity has always placed her in a particular position vis-​a-​vis klezmer and Yiddish music in Germany. Singing at events outside her own Jewish community and in the twenty-​five-​piece “klezmer orchestra”—​populated almost exclusively by non-​Jews—​that she helped assemble in Hanover, Tania frequently felt that her background made of her something between ambassador and museum-​piece  curio:

216  Sounding Jewish in Berlin meaningful Jewish presence acts as a kind of cultural Band-​Aid for all other immigrant problems. Tania, however, also sees opportunity in this position:

This responsibility is something she feels very strongly, connected as it is to her own family history: In the beginning sometimes my mother was listening to my concerts. And I know that it’s impossible for her to hear those songs [of the Holocaust]. And we are very close, because she’s the only survivor of the family who is still alive and I’m the only daughter, and we are very very close. But—​I’ll say this in German—​I believe that it is important to show that we are still here now. We are still alive. I am not religious, I am more secular, and in spite of that I feel very Jewish, you know? And I don’t need a synagogue in order to feel Jewish. I want to show what is alive, not just the past.40

The past in Tania’s music, then, is inescapable: on a personal level, in that certain repertoire causes too much distress to those close to her, but also on a wider cultural level, as a presence to be confronted and ultimately quieted by the sound of the lived present. One of the ways that Tania reinforces this connection is through her singing at Stolpersteine ceremonies. These small brass plaques, the size of a cobblestone, are dotted all over Berlin. Embedded in the pavement outside houses and apartments, they commemorate families or individuals taken by the Nazis from those homes.41 The inauguration of each new stone is frequently marked by some sort of ceremony, the nature of which is entirely dependent upon the participants, who normally comprise family members of those commemorated and current residents of the premises from which they were taken. Often the laying of the Stolpersteine will be 39 Ibid. 40 The second half of this quote was spoken in German. Tania noted that she always reverted to German or Yiddish when speaking emotionally. 41 See Hemmerling and Kavčič (2013). For its November 9, 2013, edition, the daily Berliner Zeitung carried the front page headline: “Seventy-​five Years Ago Jewish Synagogues and Houses Burned in Berlin. This Berliner Zeitung Is a Stolperstein.”

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It’s very different, because to feel free to be a Jew here is very different to the feelings my parents and my grandparents had. And I take it as a chance to heal the problems between Jews and Germans, Christians and Jewish people here. And I think it’s important for the whole world. It’s a little part of freedom.39

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  217 accompanied by a recitation or performance. When we spoke in 2014, Tania had recently taken part in a ceremony for a Chilean family. As the family had no connection to Yiddish, Tania sang the Hebrew song “Eli Eli.”42 She describes the connection to her own life powerfully:

The emotional punch is clear, sounding against the enforced silence of those who can no longer tell their own stories. The survivors also link Tania to her own murdered family, her own living sound in the city street addressing—​in memorial function and material form—​the absence and silence of her grandmother. But this is not just about the past, nor about the missing or dead. What is equally important for Tania is the way that these stones and their ceremonies resonate in the contemporary urban space. The aural presence, the inescapable nowness of sound, forces a connection between these personal histories (and the histories for whom they stand) and today’s city, the space within which their memories and legacies continue to be discussed, mourned, and argued over: Everybody can do it, but in this moment the Stolpersteine are lying on the floor, it is öffentlicher Raum [public space]. It no longer belongs to the house, nor to the person who initiated it; sondern es gehört Berlin. Ein teil Berlins [instead it belongs to Berlin. A part of Berlin].44

The personal story that each Stolperstein tells and the lived resonances of Tania’s singing overlap with the public, everyday space within which they physically exist. The stones and their songs become synecdoches, connecting to other victims, to their families and friends. And more than this, to the city of Berlin itself: the sounded urban space acts as a probe, drilling down to 42 “My God, My God,” words by Hannah Szenes, music by David Zahavi. Szenes was executed in 1944 in an attempt to rescue Hungarian Jews. 43 Tania Alon, personal interview. 44 Ibid.

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For me it’s a substitute to do it myself for my family. I can’t do it, because I have no people to ask. They are dead. And it’s very important for me to find people that have some memory of this time, you know? Their stories are sometimes so similar to my story. My grandmother also died on the transport to Riga. No one knows where she lies now. So for me it is very important.43

218  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

bring the historical city into the here and now. These humble little plaques, their surprising glints of gold punctuating the gray cobblestones, are both a part of the modern city and a quietly chilling reminder of what lies before/​beneath it (­figure 5.3). The reverberations that Tania sends into the city space, like all sound, will ultimately be absorbed by it. But not without leaving traces, sonic moments “that reveal rather than hide the discontinuous, often traumatic evolutions of the city’s past” (Ward 2011b:93). The juxtaposition of history and modernity is not an uncommon sight in Berlin. On the weekend of November 9 and 10, 2013, the anniversary of the pogrom that later became known as Reichskristallnacht, many shops around the city’s eastern hub of Alexanderplatz and western shopping street Kurfürstendamm affixed large semitransparent stickers to their main windows. These posters depicted a stylized image of broken glass, reinforcing the memory of smashed windows and destroyed lives seventy-​five years earlier. The embedding of an iconic and disturbing image in the midst of the sheen and smoothness of weekend consumer culture was a calculatedly powerful move: engaging the material fabric of the city itself in a jarring juxtaposition designed to “remember Berlin merchants and retailers in the pogroms

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Figure 5.3  Stolpersteine in Reichenberger Straße, Kreuzberg, marking the Itzig family’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1943. Photo May 2014.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  219

PA: Were they not interested in your feelings? TA: I think it’s not the problem of the interest; it’s the problem of the possibility of empathy. Nobody can imagine how you feel. And in workshops the Germans are not Jews, and the others haven’t lived in Germany, or they have just arrived. This meant that my feelings were not understood; they didn’t understand me, why it’s so hard to live here.47

45 From the official website of the city of Berlin, http://​www.berlin.de/​2013/​veranstaltungen/​9-​ 1011-​in-​berlin/​(no longer online). Fittingly, Berlin’s 2012–​13 commemorative series of the years 1933–​38 was entitled “Diversity Destroyed” (Zerstörte Vielfalt). See the Zerstörte Vielfalt page of the Deutsches historisches Museum website, https://​www.dhm.de/​archiv/​ausstellungen/​zerstoerte-​ vielfalt/​, accessed September 30, 2019. 46 Jalda Rebling raised the same issue more pointedly, suggesting that an emphasis on Eastern European Jewish culture maintains an idea of Jewishness as Other, preventing today’s German klezmer musicians—​some of them, at least—​from realizing that Jews may be their Berlin neighbors (interview, 2014). 47 Tania Alon, personal interview.

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seventy-​five years ago, and thus take a stand against intolerance, racism, and antisemitism.”45 The implication, sadly valid, is that things may have moved on, but not enough. Tania herself is open about the difficulties she feels that she faces as a Jew in Germany, seeing antisemitism and the internal squabbles of the Jewish communities as ongoing problems. Karen Weiss notes the dual role of warning and guardianship played by postwar West German Jews. Characterized by “both the highest of hopes and the deepest of fears” (2004:182), this community’s relationship to recent history was a clear, albeit fragile, one. While the small and reasonably coherent group managed to retain a strong sense of Jewishness—​both religious and cultural—​it did not much broadcast this identity. It is within this environment that Tania feels her Jewishness was nurtured and still lives. This stands in contrast to the large number of arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have since perestroika more than doubled Germany’s Jewish population (191–​92). For Tania, the changes of the last thirty years have been difficult and often marginalizing ones. Similarly, although her time spent at Yiddish music workshops in Germany was a full and satisfying musical experience, she could not help but feel in some way apart from her fellow workshop participants. Her background and its unusual relevance were, she felt, overlooked in the quest for a more general historical Yiddish experience.46

220  Sounding Jewish in Berlin The very specific German Jewish identity that Tania feels marks her out is, ironically, absent from this German Jewish musical context, a point made in a liturgical context by Lin Jaldati’s daughter, the cantor Jalda Rebling:

For Tania the particularities of her own German Jewish experience and the dialogue between history and her present-​day life lie consistently at the heart of what she does. And musically, her upbringing within the distinctive life of this community makes her hawkish at times about singers whose approach does not convince (unlike Jossif Gofenberg, her distinction does not necessarily divide along ethnic lines). For her, some performances stand out as affected, a day trip into the fantasy imaginary of “Yiddish-​land,” a Baudrillardian simulacra (Gruber 2009)  based on received ways of being rather than lived experience. In discussion, Tania revealed that she had enjoyed the very first Bar Oblomov jam session because of its acoustic intimacy, but she felt that once the sessions began to become very popular and busy, this intimacy had given way to a party-​driven “klezmer greatest hits”—​ a particular version of Yiddish music drowning out her own sensibilities and desire to lead a Yiddish song without microphone or large-​scale backing band.49 The explicit confrontation of responses like Tania Alon’s makes clear that although the last decade of Berlin’s klezmer musical culture has brought a renewed sense of purpose, transnational connection, and Jewishness, it has not carried everyone along equally. And yet the scene can doubtless hold these competing subjectivities—​symptomatic, perhaps, of the triumph of a belief in messy life over revivalist dogma. A useful reminder that we are dealing with parole over langue, with identities “constructed through, not outside, difference” (Hall 1996:4), and with a Jewishness that is “contingent 48 Ibid. 49 We should acknowledge, however, that this is also a somewhat partisan view. Singers such as Sasha Lurje and Sveta Kundish have very successfully led unaccompanied songs at sessions such as Oblomov. I would argue that Tania is making a more general critique here.

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And now I give you something on the top. American musicians till today, standing here telling Germans that they revived Jewish music in Germany. The entire cantors’ assembly came with a big something to Berlin, telling us that they came to revive Jewish liturgy in Germany. Can you imagine how embarrassed we all were? Who are taking care to hold a life and teaching like crazy?48

Sounding Jewish in Berlin  221 and contextual rather than definitive and presumptive” (Kirshenblatt-​ Gimblett and Karp 2008:3).

In their introduction to Jewish Topographies, Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke (2008:15) argue that as a result of the Holocaust, “the predominant focus . . . is on spaces of death and remembrance, memorials and museums, voids and relicts, rather than on living Jews and their spaces and spatial strategies, past and present.” Open to a plurality of readings (Alexander 2020), these “spaces of death and remembrance” nevertheless exist almost exclusively in relation to a bounded past, focused on displacement and disappearance. As zones of contemplation they enact a dialogue between past and present, but it is a dialogue outside of experiential time. Music, on the other hand, structures a real-​time space of shifting social relationships, enabling possibilities of community that are both temporary and longer-​lasting. The spaces produced by and through sound are contingent, performative, and felt: “The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies” (Small 1998:13). This actuality of music, its affective immediacy, sounds across real and perceived borders to confront the contradictions of history and culture. Like the artifacts and texts on display in Oranienburger Straße’s Neue Synagogue—​single pieces in a partial reconstruction—​the Semer Ensemble project uses individual recordings to build up a rich patchwork of the sound of Berlin Jewishness in the years immediately preceding its near destruction. In the process, it demonstrates not just how much was lost but also the narrowness of more recent musical Jewish musical iconography—​including the overuse of a wailing klezmer clarinet as shorthand for “Jewish” (Gilman 2006:3). These richly textured performances dramatically relocate an implicit discourse of display and memorialization within the modern city’s ongoing musical/​social processes—​tapping into the fluid multiculturalism that continues to be a celebrated part of post-​reunification Berlin identity, while standing simultaneously as historical record, social testament, contemporary performance resource, and site of cultural dialogue. Through the normalization of Jewish contributions to prewar German musical culture, the recognition that Jews don’t just make “Jewish music,”

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Conclusion

222  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

And then they gave me the question, but why are you living here still, when you don’t like it? But that’s not my problem! [Laughs] Life is not easy, and to work with your own story is not easy. But I like things that are not easy. I love it! It’s a part of my music.50

Berlin’s history of borders and transgressions is only partly counteracted by its more recent joyful international inclusivity, and absent presences persist in the urban hum. Tania Alon’s music and the Semer Ensemble are not simply contextualized by the city within which they operate. The specific meanings—​and problems—​that they frame could only have happened in Berlin. Their music speaks directly and with precision to the role of urban narratives in constructions of musical identity, confronting German/​ Jewish relations and connecting, sometimes surprisingly, across contradictory experiences. It prizes open layers of meaning and troubles attempts to “streamline collective memory” (Assmann 2015:328). At the same time, such affective, real-​time, embodied performativity reminds us that emotions and their fallout are not simply an annoying extra but are fundamental to musical life. The next chapter will move us for the first time outside of this lively and complex urbanity, into the processes, materials, and ideologies of contemporary klezmer “tradition.”



50 Tania Alon, personal interview.

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SE also points up how some parts of German culture can be re-​evaluated and made available once again, reminding us that German Jewish experience has sometimes been marginalized within klezmer music’s emphasis on Ashkenazi culture further east. For Tania Alon, the relationship between her Jewishness—​religiously informed but ultimately secular—​her German identity, and the music that she makes is paramount. These three fundaments underpin her maintenance of a historical sensibility, rooted in the city in which she grew up and still lives. At times, this pressure of memory leads to blind spots, aporia in representations of experience. But if these are unavoidable and beyond her control, they are also not to be ignored: they are part of her German, Jewish, and musical life in the city. Once again, the historical tension that stands in the background becomes the catalyst for meaningful cultural discussion, framed by the urban environment within which it is enacted:

6 Dissemination, Learning, and Responsibility

I happened to join a couple of groups at the Jewish community in Riga. I was part of youth Jewish theater, and a vocal ensemble. And I had just started doing a little vocal duet with another singer when a friend of mine, a violinist, who had gone to Petersburg Klezfest, approached us and said, “Would you like to do it with us, with live instruments?” And we were just like, sure, let’s try. And we just started figuring things out—​something just connected and I wanted to learn more and more. And we went to all these places in Russia and met  all these amazing musicians, and then came to Yiddish Summer Weimar—​which, you know, was a huge important turn, and still is. It’s one of the most important things that happened in my life, going there. Sasha Lurje, Yiddish singer

Introduction This book has discussed the people, places, and musical material that make up the various constructions of Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music. We have seen how patterned yet flexible networks of musicians, groupings, and repertoire create an ongoing narrative of developing musical meanings, and that the spaces within which these explorations happen in turn place different emphases on certain parts of the dialogue. The previous two chapters showed how the historical and frequently contradictory meanings of the city of Berlin itself are now beginning to insert themselves into this process. Underlying these discourses are the conflicting, creative, and occasionally frustrating dimensions of musical tradition: its meanings, relevance, and interpretations in the contemporary urban context.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0006.

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Curating the Tradition

224  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

The paradoxes of heritage are well understood: it recuperates a dead tradition of the lifeworld (or even kills off a living one) in order to bring it to a second life in print, in the museum, or onstage. There the tradition no longer serves ordinary social purposes but is an object of veneration in its own right, a monument of cultural identity; its form, “protected” from decay or corruption, becomes frozen in time. (Noyes 2009:246–​47)

In the North American klezmer revival, these “paradoxes of heritage” met with a context of post-​1960s identity politics and cultural rediscovery and 1 Here is Bruno Nettl (2005:4) memorably summarizing the problem: “It is difficult to find a single, simple definition, to which most people in this field would subscribe, and thus ethnomusicologists have been perhaps excessively concerned with defining themselves.”

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Much like the continued debate that dogs an acceptable definition for ethnomusicology,1 folklorists have filled pages in search of useable models of “tradition” and the “traditional.” Dorothy Noyes goes so far as to suggest “a tradition of talking about tradition: not so much a progression of ideas as a continual reworking of base meanings” (2009:234). Within klezmer, Barbara Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett (2002) and Mark Slobin (2000) highlight the historically problematic relationship between tradition and heritage, just as musicologist David McGuinness (2018) directly addresses “the problem with ‘traditional’ ” in Scottish music. Embracing traditions both clichéd and radical and fully aware of the pitfalls of definition, my scope here concerns processes of uncovering, revitalizing, curating, and living within “tradition.” In particular, I will look in detail at the hub of learning and dissemination that is Yiddish Summer Weimar. The influential contribution of this long-​running cultural forum and workshop series is the final element of our overall narrative. Analyzing the klezmer tradition as it applies to Berlin today offers a chance to look at how theories of musical revival stack up with the scene itself, but also an opportunity to unpack how an idea of “the tradition” has been re-​established (Hobsbawm 1983) in the first place, particularly through the ongoing work of Yiddish Summer Weimar and other workshops. This necessarily incorporates both product and process: “The telling is the tale; therefore the narrator, his story, and his audience are . . . components of a single continuum” (Ben-​Amos 1971:10). And it is through these processes of revival that particular questions of ownership, control, democracy, and power come to the fore:

Curating the Tradition  225

The younger generation, born roughly between 1960 and 1980, were looking for a musical identity in the context of folklore and world music. They stressed the cheerful aspect of Klezmer, most of them freeing themselves from a classical music training. . . . Their love of the sound of Yiddish music was their first motivation for their musical activity, but they nevertheless asked themselves about the unconscious function Jewish music had for them as young Germans. (Eckstaedt 2010:42)

That this particular piece of Jewish culture had been largely erased from much of Europe as a result of Germany’s own actions inevitably brought about its own supplementary knotty questions of motivation. At the same time, and as we saw in ­chapter 2, many younger German musicians were prompted by a desire to discover a cultural form that they felt had been represented principally by its absence. La’om was a German klezmer band who mostly met through workshops in the early 1990s and played regularly around the country until the early 2000s. Here is their clarinetist, Klezmerstammtisch and Saytham’s regular Stefan Litsche, discussing the band’s 1994 trip to New York State’s KlezKamp festival: It was for me a really amazing experience. Because it was not only about music, it was more about Jewish culture and all this different stuff. Literature, storytelling, cooking even. . . . Some were reticent to accept us, but I think finally we convinced them. Because as a band, we were quite serious to really understand the original style. We had a lot of discussions about this. For me it was interesting always to put klezmer music in relation to the other people who lived there, in Ukraine, or Azerbaijan, Romania, or wherever. And to learn this, how the music was exchanged between the people living there together. . . . The teachers at the workshops told us how they rediscovered the music, from recordings done in the US. But those musicians had also a history, which came from Eastern Europe, and how they traveled. And to understand all this, this was very interesting for us.

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activism, well covered by Netsky (2002b), Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett (2002), Sapoznik (1987), and others. In Germany, however, the klezmer “boom” offered a very different form of identification: this Jewish music was rarely being played, at first, by Jews. Non-​Jewish Germans were neither playing klezmer in order to reconnect with lost roots nor to re-​identify with their own submerged culture:

226  Sounding Jewish in Berlin And it was somehow a kind of being proud to make the historical sound, to reproduce this sound. We were proud of this.2

Tradition? And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word. Tradition! Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof

Tevye’s beguiling yet circular monologue is included here for more than kitsch value. Harnick’s 1964 lyrics are underpinned by a sophisticated Jewish American musical perspective that had been alive on Broadway for several decades, but they are also playfully reflective of a persistent hegemony of nostalgia: the security of assimilated Jewish American identity cushioning a distance from, and symbiotic affection for, the “old country.” Tradition through this appealing filter is neither fully anachronistic nor idealistically pastoral, although it enfolds both these elements. It is self-​referential and self-​mocking, complacent yet indulgent—​an occasionally incomprehensible series of rules of uncertain provenance that maintain “balance” even as the nature of and need for this balance continue to shift dramatically.3 For the put-​upon and beleaguered residents of Anatevka (Kasrilevke in Sholem 2 Stefan Litsche, personal interview, Nänikon-​Greifensee, Switzerland, June 3, 2019. 3 Ellen Koskoff (2001:74, 171–​72) notes how Fiddler is used in American Lubavitcher communities as a basis for group singing. Now there’s an irony.

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In addition to the discoveries of non-​Jewish Germans, within the last two decades more and more (often immigrant) Jewish musicians have entered the discussion, at times using music to explore their own Jewish cultural identity, or indeed the idea of Jewish cultural identity in the first place. We have seen throughout how this begins to break apart—​and rebuild—​notions of belonging, ownership, and heritage. This chapter looks at how the raw materials for this debate are informed to a greater or lesser extent by choices of repertoire, processes of transmission and dissemination, and frameworks of education. In other words, who is driving the “tradition,” and how?

Curating the Tradition  227

4 In Sholem Aleichem’s original stories, Tevye and his family do not actually live in Kasrilevke (their village is never named), but in Fiddler they have become Anatevka residents. On the “Americanization” of Tevye see Wolitz (1988). 5 See, for example, edited collections by Estraikh and Krutikov (2000) and Polonsky (2004). On different historical Eastern European Jewish “realities,” see Schlör (2007:5). 6 See ­chapter 5.

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Aleichem’s original tales),4 tradition is practice, a touchstone—​a rudder to steer through a changing world. For a knowing twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century audience, this kind of tradition is instead a nostalgic indulgence: a wistful, ironic (and imagined) memory of simpler times, and simultaneously a cultural straitjacket from which we collectively position ourselves as having moved on. The “traditional” life of Fiddler’s shtetl is largely poor, contentedly crazy, lovably flawed, yet irresistibly warm. It is iconic, and also of course heavily whitewashed—​a romanticized construction of small-​town Yiddish culture that conveniently ignores the heterogeneity and complexities of history and geography. Anatevka is not alone here, tapping into a postwar construction that had reached its zenith a decade earlier with Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s 1952 book Life Is with People—​a collection of “post-​Shoah legends, myths, and memories of the pre-​Shoah world of Eastern Jewry [presented] as fieldwork about the actual daily reality of the shtetl” (Gilman 1996:14). This romantically coherent picture of Eastern European Jewish life had in fact begun to appear decades before the Holocaust (Morawska 1993:309), driven by an immigrant need for a manageable sense of separation from “Old World reality” (Pinchuk 2001:172). More recent work on the historical shtetl has painted an increasingly nuanced and less pleasingly uncomplicated picture.5 Yet the vision of a “lost world of integrated, authentic Jewish experience located in the East” (Gilman 1996:14) remains hard to shake, even amid the transience of twenty-​first-​ century subjectivities—​or indeed the sophistication of Broadway lyricists, composers, and audiences. And as an easily accessed symbol of Eastern European Jewish culture, klezmer music over the past thirty years has frequently found itself strongly instrumentalized as part of this peculiarly “traditional” blend of irony and nostalgia, even while wider social consciousness may have advanced. Notwithstanding the radical and adventurous nature of much of the work that we have seen so far, the performance semiotics that German Yiddish singer Fabian Schnedler describes as “shtetl kitsch”6 continue to straight-​facedly inform a dominant, mainstreamed concept of Old World Jewish klezmer identity. Several decades after its revival, for example,

228  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

If tradition is a people’s creation out of their own past, its character is not stasis but continuity. . . . Oppressed people are made to do what others will them to do. They become slaves in the ceramic factories of their masters. Acting traditionally, by contrast, they use their own resources—​their own tradition, one might say—​to create their own future, to do what they will themselves to do. They make their own pots.

7 The perceived “unlearnability” of certain musical feelings is the basis for Lila Ellen Gray’s superb 2013 study of Lisbon’s amateur fado scene. 8 Available online at the Scottish Poetry Library website, http://​www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/​ poetry/​poets/​hamish-​henderson, accessed September 30, 2019.

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an internet search for “klezmer” pictures still reveals a preponderance of neckerchiefs (not really a traditional Jewish garment), waistcoats, and Russian-​style caps—​or what the British clarinetist Merlin Shepherd wryly dubs “the klezmer uniform.” Such homogenized Eastern European klezmer imagery both indexes and generates a default, against which must stand all other possible formulations of klezmer tradition through the work of musicians in America, Germany, and around the world. Beset by gaps in its own history and a vanished historical heartland, and driven externally by a continued exoticization of eastern Jewish Otherness (Waligórska 2010), klezmer cannot avoid a confrontation with this version of tradition. It must be navigated rather than disregarded, clichés owned rather than ignored. A deep commitment to Yiddish culture and a boldly provocative aesthetic sense are just some of the ways that contemporary Yiddish musical artists problematize the more conventional, residual klezmer “tradition.” And as we shall see when we discuss Yiddish Summer Weimar, unmasking the clouding effects of clichéd ethnic essentialism and “unlearnability”7 leads toward a more open and deliberately demystifying approach to collective learning. A comfortably mythical version of an imaginary past creates precisely the distance that ensures a loss of contemporary relevance; a more dynamic interpretation might include greater emphasis on both continuity and flexibility. The Scottish poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson wrote of a “carrying stream”:8 a flowing movement of human experience and cultural production in which we may choose to swim, but which nevertheless maintains a momentum of its own. Henry Glassie (1995:396) evokes a similarly appealing connectedness:

Curating the Tradition  229

The klezmer workshop in Germany—​whose tradition? Revivalist stylistic parameters and aesthetics are based on what is believed to be the stylistic common denominator of individual informants and/​or source recordings. . . . The balance between individual innovation and adherence to stylistic norms of the tradition [is] a basic point of tension within revivals. Tamara E. Livingston, “Music Revivals”

The shifting balance between innovation and fidelity to an assumed norm has been a central feature of klezmer music in Berlin, as discussed throughout. However, this “basic point of tension” has itself been subject to another dialectic, that of the ideological difference between two major influences on German klezmer in the 1990s: Argentinian-​Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman and the cohort of Brave Old World.9 We should reiterate here that postwar Germany was not without Yiddish music before the klezmer revival—​a common assumption often stemming from the reduced numbers and relative insularity of the country’s postwar Jewish population, boosted further by an occasional ahistoricism on the part of the 1990s and 2000s klezmer boomers. Yiddish singers Lin Jaldati and her daughter Jalda Rebling, Yiddishist and singer Karsten Troyke, folksingers Peter Rohland and Zupfgeigenhansel, and the bands Aufwind and Kasbek were all active well before Feidman or anyone else appeared on the scene. However, as discussed, these isolated “pioneers” largely lacked a coherent cultural narrative or useable network. Feidman and Brave Old World (and subsequently Yiddish Summer Weimar) would give it that narrative—​in two competing versions.

9 Pianist and accordionist Alan Bern, clarinetists Joel Rubin (until 1992) and subsequently Kurt Björling, singer and fiddle player Michael Alpert, and bassist and percussionist Stuart Brotman. Both Bern and Rubin settled in Germany (Rubin from 1989 to 2003, Bern from 1987 to the present day).

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Tradition as ownership offers meaningful and empowering cultural resistance. The ceramic factories of Central and Eastern Europe’s temporary masters, however, did more than force their slaves to make different pots. And in Germany, the process of rebuilding Yiddish musical tradition has become the locus of competing ideological perspectives, often through the strong influence of visiting musicians.

230  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Here first is an excerpt of a 2005 German interview with Giora Feidman.

And here is Alan Bern writing in 1998 about the musical background of Brave Old World: Many of us had gone deeply enough into Yiddish music and culture to recognize that the standard mish-​mash of repertoire and styles had sacrificed both cultural integrity and musical depth in favor of easy accessibility. . . . All of us were also performers and teachers of non-​Jewish traditional musics that had been co-​territorial with Yiddish music, such as Polish, Rumanian, Ukrainian and Russian musics, and as a result we perceived and were able to bring out the specifically European strata of the klezmer repertoire. Eventually, we articulated the goal of developing a new Yiddish music, whose language and forms would be consciously created for the concert stage and a listening audience, but still deeply rooted in Yiddish folk materials.11

The difference is hard to miss. Feidman’s is what we might term a universal humanist approach, supported by liberal doses of nonspecific, 10 Interview with Alexandra Janizewski for Salve TV, Weimar, September 29, 2005, available on YouTube at https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=fiGebpj2j8w, accessed September 30, 2019. 11 Alan Bern, “From Klezmer to New Jewish Music: The Musical Evolution of Brave Old World,” available on the Klezmer Shack website, http://​www.klezmershack.com/​articles/​bern.new.html, accessed September 30, 2019.

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AJ: I’ve read that your music has the ability to cross boundaries. What sort of boundaries? GF: It’s not “my music,” or “your music.” You said “your music”—​there’s no such thing, music is music. There’s no such thing as my air or your air. No, there is air, there is water, there is music. This body [indicating his body] is a pipe and through this pipe comes a language: music. People don’t play music, they speak it. And so first, it’s not my music, it’s music. That’s all. AJ: And so music is your language? GF: Not my language. It’s the language of people. To speak with the trees, with the animals, it’s a language. Music is dance, and dance is also a language. There is not only spoken language. All these are languages to communicate. Not between us, to communicate with the higher forces. What we call art is not from here, it comes from another dimension.10

Curating the Tradition  231

12 It is in fact largely based on Hindu philosophy with elements of Kabbalah mysticism (Rubin 2015a:211). 13 Michael Birnbaum’s (2009) rhetorical overuse of Feidman disciple Harry Timmerman as representative of the whole German klezmer movement is a revealing example: Timmerman is not one of German klezmer’s most important figures, nor does his clarinet playing warrant special notice (other than in its heavy reliance on Feidman’s own). 14 Here, for example, are two characteristic Feidman aphorisms: “The clarinet is the microphone of the soul,” and “I pick up the clarinet to share a message with mankind.” Both from his website, GioraFeidman-​Online.com, https://​www.giorafeidman-​online.com/​en-​gb, accessed September 30, 2019. 15 On the particular sociocultural guilt/​denial dialectic framing Feidman’s arrival in Germany, see Rubin (2015a:207–​8).

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nondenominational spirituality and a deliberately loose cosmic ordering.12 The trope of music as a universal language was of course not invented by Giora Feidman, and there is little wrong with it on its own terms. Where its romantic inclusivity falters, however, is through its conscious erasing of cultural difference—​a little close to the bone when framed within a culture that was itself the victim of a planned erasure. On the other side, we see an aesthetic and political commitment to “folk materials” and their rooting in “a specifically European strata.” The former looks toward a future that elides difference, tradition, and personal expression, the latter toward a pragmatic multiculturalism that admits artistic variation and individual voice and locates them within a social, historical, and traditional framework. Feidman’s social balm rhetoric has gone hand in hand with the development of his quasi-​guru status and rapid rise to popularity, especially in Germany. Perhaps as a result of this speedy public embrace, some critics have occasionally countered with unapologetically partisan appraisals.13 Nevertheless, it is not a massive intellectual stretch to read Feidman’s humility as something of a backhanded exercise in self-​promotion (Gruber 2002), the work of a self-​appointed musical Dalai Lama who claims to be nothing special while at the same time spending a suspicious amount of time at the secular pulpit.14 And yet, leaving aside the undeniable effects of individual musical personalities, perhaps these ideological positions should not surprise us too much. Born in Buenos Aires to Bessarabian parents, Giora Feidman emigrated to Israel in 1957 to play with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It was in the 1970s that he began his journey into klezmer music, and since this time Feidman’s brand of one-​world klezmer has toured all over the world, with particular success in Germany following his first appearance there in a 1984 production of Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto.15 His “one-​nation” speechifying fits well with the early State of Israel’s discourses of citizenship,

232  Sounding Jewish in Berlin notwithstanding that these have been severely compromised over the state’s short history:

An immigrant son of immigrant parents, Feidman’s language of pan-​ethnic humanity and musical brotherhood preaches new beginnings in a new land. On the other hand, American musicians coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s were faced with a very different local articulation of Jewish identity. Assimilated within the American aspirational mainstream,17 Yiddish musical culture was in this case often invoked to reflect a self-​consciously distanced nostalgia. Here is Yiddishist Michael Wex (2015:7–​8) situating things musically: The trauma of World War II and the fragile triumph of our assimilation meant that Yiddish, when allowed into public at all, was supposed to be a nod to where we had come from, rather than a picture of where we were. The standard non-​Yiddishist song repertoire thus leaned heavily on the late 19th-​century ambiance of such lullabies as “Afn Pripetshik” . . . and the occasional anti-​elegy like the ghetto fighters’ “Partisans’ Hymn.” It was no competition for “Hava Nagila.”

As we will discover, this historical contrast has its performative parallel. Where Feidman leans heavily on a soloistic, Western classical performance aesthetic, workshops at Yiddish Summer Weimar have been instrumental in promoting a more embodied musical relationship and rooted cultural sensibility. For Alan Bern, the journey to Jewish music was heavily influenced by his time spent in the late 1970s learning from Lester Bowie and the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Woodstock’s legendary Creative Music Studio. As 16 GioraFeidman-​Online.com, https://​www.giorafeidman-​online.com/​en-​gb/​biography, accessed September 30, 2019. 17 Alan Bern, for example, spoke (in a Yiddish Summer Weimar workshop) of a Bloomington childhood built more around baseball and small-​town Americana than anything “Jewish,” while Michael Alpert tells of a sense of “difference and marginality” that led him to late 1960s counterculture (Wood 2007b:376). See also Netsky (2015) and Sapoznik (1987) on 1970s American Jewish attitudes—​including those of older musicians—​to klezmer music.

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A cultural kaleidoscope of the most diversified colors, languages, traditions and sounds, which would now blend together in this young Israel. [Feidman] soaked up all of this with vigor—​and therein finds an image of himself.16

Curating the Tradition  233 Bern explains, this sparked a desire to get past the distancing effects of his classical training:

Notwithstanding the differences of approach outlined above, several of my older informants, along with a number of participants at Yiddish Summer Weimar, pointed to both Feidman and Brave Old World as early spurs in their enthusiasm for the music. At the same time, many admitted that the influences were discernibly different, such as the clarinetist Stefan Litsche: There was a quite busy folk dance scene [in the 1990s in Berlin]. And there I  met some guys and they proposed me to go to some Giora Feidman concerts. And a friend of mine took me to a concert of Aufwind, and there was a former friend of mine from music school—​the clarinetist Jan Hermerschmidt. We had played in the orchestra together. And then it began, yes. So, and then I was interested to learn more, and also friends said, “OK, we should play klezmer music.” And there have been arranged some workshops. I think the first workshop I did about klezmer music style

18 Alan Bern, personal interview. Bern is a classical musician by training. At the Creative Music Studio he studied with, among others, Frederic Rzewski and Anthony Braxton—​two musicians whose work has often explored the overlaps between composition and improvisation.

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But then, I  thought, well, the Art Ensemble of Chicago has spent time studying African rhythms and going into the traditional roots of the music that they’re playing now as avant-​garde experiments. And I thought, well, I  can play Stravinsky’s tango, but I  couldn’t play a tango for a dance to save my life. I can play Chopin mazurkas. What’s a mazurka? I play Bach allemandes and sarabandes—​what are those things? . . . And at one point I went to Hebrew Union College, and I went to the library and I found this stack of hundreds of old Yiddish and cantorial 78 rpm recordings. And when I tell this story I often also tell that I didn’t like that music when I first heard it. But I decided that I was going to learn it anyway. And then lo and behold about a year or two later the Klezmer Conservatory Band started up in Boston, and there was an opportunity to actually play that music. Which was really great, because I wanted to do everything I could do to get myself out of this mindset that music is a concert, with an elite performer onstage and everybody else down in the audience comparing that performance with the other ten performances of the same piece.18

234  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Giora Feidman achieved wide popularity throughout Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, and Stefan is far from alone in citing him as a first exposure to klezmer.20 However, as his comments also suggest, most of today’s Berlin klezmer musicians conclude that Brave Old World and Yiddish Summer Weimar’s renewal of tradition and traditional praxis was both more influential in the long term and more indicative of a felt musical and emotional connection. I decided to go to a workshop in Bad Pyrmont, from Brave Old World. I  think it was the first one in Germany;21 before there was only Giora Feidman. And there I met some musicians that I am playing together with still . . . from ’95 I am playing constantly klezmer music.22 All of Brave Old World, they are so generous with their knowledge. I think that’s amazing and so very very special. . . . They’re generous freaks, that’s what they are.23

Rubin (2014:42) suggests that Feidman’s musical aesthetic, with its emphasis on inclusivity and a distinct lack of sonic confrontation or ambiguity, is perhaps more appealing to Germans less interested in developing alternative listening habits, such as the unusual and “foreign” idiomatic details of klezmer. Feidman creates, in other words, a domesticated musical text: “easy to read, smoothed out and devoid of alien-​sounding idioms and 19 Stefan Litsche, personal interview. 20 Rubin argues that Feidman’s celebratory inclusivity means that to “the average German  .  .  . Feidman’s style is definitive of klezmer” (Rubin 2015:220). 21 In fact, Brave Old World’s workshops began in 1989–​90, taking place in cities such as Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg. Bad Pyrmont was perhaps the first intensive residential workshop in Germany. See “Klezmer Musicians, Aficionados Converge on Home of Pied Piper,” JTA, November 8, 1995, available online at https://​www.jta.org/​1995/​11/​08/​archive/​klezmer-​musicians-​aficionados-​ converge-​on-​home-​of-​pied-​piper, accessed September 30,  2019. 22 Carsten Wegener, personal interview. 23 Sanne Möricke, personal interview.

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was from Brave Old World, in Berlin, in WABE. . . . We had some sheet music; the most important was the Compleat Klezmer. It was a nice introduction. But to go into the style, it was more the workshops. Being taught by the teachers, Kurt Björling especially, and getting into the style. And then also learning by ear—​I wasn’t used to it! And at these workshops they also distributed a lot of recordings. Kurt manufactured tapes and distributed them.19

Curating the Tradition  235

24 Timmermann includes selections from Fiddler on the Roof in his concert program. 25 Interestingly, Jalda Rebling levelled a similar “guru” criticism at some American musicians, who she felt were claiming to bring “yidishkeyt back to Germany” (personal interview). 26 Within the context of Yiddish Summer Weimar, Feidman is something of a bête noire, occasionally invoked to reinforce one’s own musical authenticity.

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incomprehensible metaphors” (Waligórska and Wagenhofer 2010:6). If the idea of an Argentinian-​Israeli domesticating Eastern European Jewish folk music for a German audience is itself an intriguing one, Feidman’s explicit mediation of klezmer music—​his smoothing out of its sonic “difficulties”—​ can be more generally understood as a (very subjective) universalizing of knotty musical particularities. This stands in direct contrast to the bottom-​ up interactions between Berlin bar culture and Yiddish music at somewhere like Bar Oblomov, a scene based in the contemporary localizing process of a now transnational music and its global networks. Chapter  2 discussed Feidman and his followers Helmut Eisler, David Orlowsky, and Harry Timmermann. All four promote a sound that is soloistic, privileging individual instrumental voices and favoring accompaniment textures that contrast with but do not overshadow the clarinet sound—​such as guitar, organ, and percussion. Their music takes in popular, jazz, classical, and tango idioms, as well as an easy travel between Eastern European, Israeli, and Broadway repertoire.24 Feidman’s own playing is full of sobs, sighs, and glissandi—​the ornamental armory of the klezmer musician stretched to its full (possibly overfull) capacity. Rubin (2015a) also points to two Feidman “innovations,” both of which have been popularized by him to the extent that they are frequently (incorrectly) assumed to be based in traditional klezmer clarinet style. The first of these is a frequent pianissimo, a musical device that overtly plays up emotional content. Secondly, Feidman often incorporates a growling sound learnt from jazz clarinetists such as Benny Goodman (whom Feidman acknowledges as an influence and whose music he performs). Both of these strategies foreground the solo voice, marking an iconic individualism as opposed to the more heterophonic, collective sound of traditional klezmer kapelyes. This is a musical politics that reframes grounded tradition in favor of ahistorical “soul,” in the process promoting a paradoxically parallel egoism. In its universal humanism lies both its appeal and, through deconstruction of Feidman’s guru persona, its downfall.25 Feidman still performs regularly and successfully in Germany, but he has long since stopped organizing workshops or cross-​cultural projects in the country.26 Conversely, the “Yiddish folk

236  Sounding Jewish in Berlin materials” of Alan Bern et al., set within a heterogeneity that contrasts markedly with Feidman’s individualism, are still very much in evidence in the long-​running annual workshop and concert series in one of Germany’s historical heartlands, Yiddish Summer Weimar.

Upstairs is shpilndik, tantsndik, redndik, un shlofndik. Kum arayn, kinder, kum arayn. Alan Bern

In 2019, Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) celebrated its nineteenth year of existence.27 What began as a weekend music course is now a four-​week celebration of Yiddish song, traditional and newly composed instrumental music, and historical and contemporary Yiddish culture. Aside from the instrumental and vocal workshops that make up the backbone of the program, YSW offers courses in Yiddish language, dance, storytelling, and cookery, a series of children’s classes, and a “Festival Week” of concerts featuring international artists, many of whom also serve on the faculty as instructors. Unlike the hotel/​retreat atmosphere of KlezKamp and KlezKanada, YSW is well integrated into its surrounding civic and social environment: the festival began as a part of the Weimar Bauhaus University’s Summer Academy, and in 2009 the mayor of Weimar agreed to rent othermusic e.V. (YSW’s administrative body) a former school premises for the nominal fee of one Euro per year. This building now serves as cafe, informal venue, social hub, and occasional crash pad for YSW staff and participants. In 2014, I attended YSW’s Instrumental Music Workshop, and much of what follows is informed by a week spent surrounded by good music, supportive teachers, and wonderful company. To lift my discussion above happy reminiscing, I aim to situate YSW and its ideology within the wider context of musical tradition and transmission that is the focus of this chapter. I will argue that YSW largely reframes an often-​ invoked binary as something more akin to continuity through change.

27 “Upstairs is playing, dancing, talking, and sleeping. Come inside, children, come inside.” This memorable address came from Alan Bern in 2014, calling in smokers and fresh-​air seekers from the sun-​drenched steps outside Yiddish Summer Weimar’s home base, the Musikschule Ottmar Gerster at no. 1 Karl-​Liebknecht-​Straße.

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Yiddish Summer Weimar: Tradition in process

Curating the Tradition  237

People come [to Oblomov] without any knowledge or experience of klezmer music, get inspired in the sessions, play along, try things out. And then they come to Weimar to learn the style!28

Musicians’ weak ties to Oblomov engender a direct link to the more formalized network of the Weimar workshops: what begins on the ground in Berlin goes on to receive a more studied treatment at Weimar, which implicitly then reflects back upon the Berlin scene, as players who have attended YSW return to the city to fold their newfound knowledge into the city’s klezmer sessions and gigs. Fundamental to YSW’s aims and creative trajectory is the benignly powerful influence of Alan Bern. Bern has been a major force on the international klezmer and Yiddish music scene since the 1980s, through his work with the band Brave Old World, his musical directorship of projects such as the Other Europeans and the Semer Ensemble, his influential accordion playing (Alexander 2020), and his extensive ongoing involvement in international musical education networks such as London’s KlezFest. Bern is passionate in his commitment to an inclusive (at times challenging) pedagogy, which often

28 Sveta Kundish, personal interview. Sveta and her partner, accordionist Patrick Farrell, have been frequent participants at YSW, most recently in their duo project that sets Yiddish texts by women poets of the twentieth century to new compositions by Farrell.

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The link between today’s Berlin klezmer scene and YSW is fundamental, and in discussion with Berlin klezmer musicians it rarely takes long for Weimar to crop up. Many of my informants (Sasha Lurje, Ilya Shneyveys, Christian Dawid, Dan Kahn, Franka Lampe, Paul Brody, Sanne Möricke, and others) have been both students and staff there, and many maintain an important musical and friendship connection with Alan Bern, readily acknowledging the influence of Bern and YSW on their careers and musical philosophy. Several in fact suggested that during the leaner, post-​“boom” years, it was YSW and its ongoing transnational connections that helped to keep the Berlin scene alive. Thus although YSW is not Berlin, it links directly with the city through the musicians who teach and study there (roles that substantially overlap). Here, for example, is singer and cantor Sveta Kundish making an explicit connection between Weimar and the Bar Oblomov sessions:

238  Sounding Jewish in Berlin focuses as much on the experiences that take place outside YSW’s more formalized workshop spaces:

Yiddish Summer Weimar is a deep learning environment, one that privileges community and connectedness as much as musical detail. Participants regularly talk about their time there as a turning point, a life-​changing experience.30 It promotes an integrated concept of musical transmission that takes learning by ear as its basis, and a musical approach that is context-​based and historically informed. For Bern and for the many musicians who have come under his influence, it is these two processes above all that help maintain a sense of living and developing, nondogmatic musical cultural tradition. The folklorist Dorothy Noyes (2009:248) offers a similar perspective: Let us agree that what is being transferred through the object is not in the first instance authority, which fetishizes the giver, nor property, which fetishizes the object while eventually debasing it into a commodity. Rather, the transfer is of responsibility.

Bern, in fact, refers regularly to an idea of “responsibility” when discussing the sharing and transfer of knowledge, and over the course of my week learning and playing I became aware of a number of key themes underpinning this—​informing an approach to Yiddish music that locates historical and cultural resources within a contemporary and malleable framework. It is a framework rooted in the heterophony of the music itself, a process that

29 Alan Bern, personal interview. 30 This was my own experience in 2014, also that of several fellow participants. More recently, Bern read me a moving and heartfelt letter from a participant in 2019’s Middle Eastern music workshop, who discussed the importance of making connections between Jews, Arabs, Germans, and other groups (in somewhere as historically symbolic as Weimar), but also the deep self-​reflection that her participation engendered. YSW receives many such deeply felt messages of thanks.

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I believe in general that what we consciously perceive and what we consciously understand is a fragment of what our actual experience is. And when we’re structuring things, we very often structure things in a way that is meant to accommodate our conscious experience. But that excludes the time and the space for all of the other experiencing, which we often don’t notice but which is absolutely essential to the kinds of experiences that I’m talking about.29

Curating the Tradition  239

Like Frigyesi, Dresdner explicitly links religious practices with musical points,31 implying that even if the goal of singing is not a religious one, understanding the religious context of this repertory will help musicians to make appropriate performance choices—​especially in a context like this workshop, where self-​consciousness and habit meant that students were reluctant to loosen up physically and move while singing. (Wood 2007a:227)

Heterophony as critical practice Each year, YSW is loosely built around a particular topic. In the past, these have included: the Bridges of Ashkenaz, exploring the links between German and Yiddish music; New Yiddish Music and Culture (for two years running); Yidishkayt!,32 and the Other Israel. These themes to some extent determine the choice of tutors and also give a framework for the Festival Week concerts. But while the presence of an agreed theme inevitably suggests a certain amount of forethought, at Yiddish Summer Weimar this mostly signifies the beginning of a discussion rather than a fully formed set of ideas. Deliberately eschewing any one singular perspective, the day-​to-​day Weimar methodology is characterized by a self-​consciously organic (and loose) sense of democracy and group decision-​making. In practice, this means that time is given each morning to general discussion about the day’s structure, with

31 Musicology professor Judit Frigyesi and klezmer and Hasidic music teacher Sruli Dresdner. 32 Yiddish: “Jewishness.” Although perhaps, given the diversity of Jewish life, better understood as “Yiddish-​ness.”

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incorporates multiple (often conflicting) voices into a creative dialogue, rather than a top-​down single artistic vision. I have divided the linchpins of the YSW pedagogical philosophy into four key points: looseness of structure and process, continuity between music and physical movement, organic connection between all stages of music making, and integration into the city and community. A longtime student of cognitive science, Bern is a keen advocate of integrated ways of knowing, and there is often an element of his teaching that self-​consciously forays into the spiritual. Importantly, however (and unlike Feidman), this is consistently brought back onto more solid, useable ground. The same is true for other YSW faculty, as described by Abigail Wood in a 2002 Hasidic nigun workshop:

240  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

It’s a very conscious choice. . . . Our brains have the amazing ability to create individual organization of the world based upon our fears and our dreams and our wishes and everything like that. We create order relevant to us out of a panoply of information that is so rich and so huge in its potential that we might as well call it chaos. And if you just throw somebody who’s used to having structured learning into the maximally unorganized chaotic framework, they’ll freak out. It’s just too much, too far outside their comfort zone. But I’ve understood that part of my mission since the beginning of YSW was to have some part of the experience that people who have this kind of Western pedagogical step-​by-​step methodical approach can hang on to, which gives them some security and some comfort, and then to push them towards the edges of different ways of learning.33

In general, this was felt by my co-​participants to offer a feeling of inclusivity and ownership—​a sense of dialogue perhaps absent from more conventional pedagogical environments: Maybe that we were working very freely, that there were actual creative processes going on, whose aims were quite undefined at the beginning, which is very different from the creative process for example happening in an orchestra project.34 There was no sense of hierarchical, teacher/​student dynamic, which also helped. It seemed that the tutors were also on a journey of learning and developing, just perhaps further on up the road than others.

However, for some workshop attendees this lack of overt structure hinted at a deeper lack of direction:

33 Alan Bern, personal interview. 34 These different responses came from different participants at 2014’s instrumental workshop, delivered to me via an email questionnaire. By general request, I have kept the comments anonymous.

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plans subject to change or modification depending on the group mood and individual agendas and preferences. Presentations and lectures are given panel-​style, with musicians freely interjecting viewpoints, clarifications, and differences of opinion. For Bern, this pleasantly easygoing methodology is in fact a deeply felt reflection of his ethos and approach:

Curating the Tradition  241 I was surprised at how unstructured the course was. . . . I was bored at times and thought the teachers were winging it. . . . Something I already knew is that great musicians are not necessarily good teachers.

How many times did I meet musicians from whom I wanted to learn, and who couldn’t teach me in a systematic way? So then I had the choice of saying “Ah, they’re not that interesting after all,” or I have to say “This is a challenge to my way of learning, to figure out. I want to learn from this guy, or this woman. What do I have to do, to learn to learn?” So I used the same in Yiddish Summer, that part of the challenge of the workshops is that we’re asking people to learn new ways of learning. Because a lot of times people would shut down, like “Oh well, this guy hasn’t even studied pedagogy, what’s he even doing here teaching?” Well, he happens to be the best trumpet player in the Balkans. Do you want to learn what he has to teach you, or do you want to complain about the fact that he didn’t study pedagogy?35

Within YSW’s rejection of a single “author” and embrace of a plurality of readers, we find a strong musical connection, namely that of heterophony—​ multiple voices speaking at once. To understand this better, we need to delve a little into the aesthetics of klezmer performance and the particular narratives surrounding it. In its definition of heterophony, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives the following: In modern times the term is frequently used, particularly in ethnomusicology, to describe simultaneous variation, accidental or deliberate, of what is identified as the same melody. (Sadie and Tyrrell 2001:465)

Among the “transnational klezmer revival” (Rubin 2014:34), a privileging of heterophonic playing is now a taken-​for-​granted performance practice, foregrounding the particular texture created when several instrumental voices all play the same melody, but rarely in exactly the same way (i.e., with

35 Alan Bern, personal interview.

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Bern is well aware of these conflicting responses, citing times in his own musical journey where he has been forced to confront his own learning prejudices and establish alternative ways of learning:

242  Sounding Jewish in Berlin differences of ornamentation, line, and cadence). Uncovered from detailed analysis of early recordings such as Belf ’s Romanian Orchestra,36 heterophony is also often felt to have a much deeper root in Jewish life,37 as exemplified here by the comments of two klezmer musicians and teachers:

When Jews pray they don’t do it in unison, but heterophonically. They tend to catch up and/​or wait at the end of certain key phrases. . . . I personally am a great, great fan of heterophony. It saddens me slightly that it’s gone so out of fashion. (Merlin Shepherd)38

This last sentence is revealing, hinting at a philosophical stance behind the aesthetic choice: togetherness in difference; individuality within a common idiom. It also foregrounds a self-​conscious opposition to—​and implicit subversion of—​normative classical performance that overtly values musical “tightness” and carefully matched unison playing, also reinforced in some modern folk and jazz music. Figure 6.1 shows a partial transcription from Michael Winograd’s new klezmer repertoire class at Weimar 2014. Although the class numbered ten students, for the purposes of illustration I have here only included four melody instruments: two clarinets, accordion, and violin. The excerpt shows the last four bars of the A part and the first four bars of the B part of a freylekhs by the young American composer Isaac Ohring. In particular, the transcription highlights the individual players’ differing rhythmic treatment of

36 See the Belfology website, http://​ www.belfology.com/​ notes/​ SirenaStory.html, accessed September 30, 2019. 37 While this book discusses heterophony in klezmer music, heterophony itself is by no means an exclusively klezmer (or Jewish) trait. Sadie and Tyrrell (2001:465) refer to heterophony in accompanied vocal music of the Middle East and Asia (between voice and instrument), gamelan music of Southeast Asia, and unaccompanied Hebridean psalms. Heterophony is also found within traditional musical cultures in parts of North Africa and Southeast Europe, some Middle Eastern instrumental music, and Shanghai’s Jiangnan Sizhu (Wong 2016:105), along with much early jazz and some contemporary classical works. 38 From the website Greek and Turkish Clarinet Music, http://​www.gtc-​music1.com/​forum/​index. php?topic=737.40 (no longer online).

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The same prayer was recited or sung to the same melody but with different tempi, vocal timbres, rhythms, and accents, which created this heterophonic sound. Subsequently, what the klezmer violinist heard and did in the confines of the synagogue, he repeated through his instrument. (Strom 2012:99)

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Figure 6.1  Heterophony as seen in a simplified transcription of Isaac Ohring’s freylekhs. Played by Michael Winograd’s new klezmer repertoire class, Yiddish Summer Weimar, August 2014.

244  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

Heterophonic ensemble playing requires a deep understanding of a melodic language. . . . Heterophony would later turn out to be the road to much

39 Nu Klezmer website, http://​www.nu-​klezmer.de/​klezmer_​en.html (no longer online).

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semiquaver patterns, syncopated melody notes, and end of phrase cadences and gaps (this excerpt is particularly rich in heterophonic ideas, as that is precisely what Winograd had just encouraged us to explore). The transcription is largely prescriptive and inevitably omits a great deal of information—​ a basic and abstracted visualization rather than a detailed analysis. The dynamic is a fairly even forte throughout. Alongside historical recordings and cultural basis in Jewish prayer, I noticed that Weimar advocates of heterophony also stylishly invoked more naturalistic and “human” similes. Alan Bern described the imagined weirdness of a large group of birds where every animal takes off and lands in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, in contrast to the collective yet differentiated flight of each individual bird that culturally signifies “flock.” Clarinetist Michael Winograd—​as we shall see—​draws abundantly and joyfully on foodie metaphors, and in a quasi-​parallel to Steven Feld’s (1988) discussion of dulugu ganalan, musician and researcher Josh Horowitz says, “Klezmer music is like a Jewish conversation—​everybody talks at the same time. The difference is that we listen to each other and are essentially saying the same thing. That is heterophony.”39 A commitment to heterophony therefore also underlines a certain way of thinking about music, one that privileges democracy of voices and the unpredictability of thicker melodic textures. This is in marked contrast to the idea of a dominant solo voice (à la Feidman), but also to classical music’s phrasing, mirrored articulation, rhythmic consonance, and precise tuning. This is not to say that heterophonic klezmer musicians do not take care to match what they are doing to each other, but that they often do it in conscious—​“traditional”—​opposition to a specifically Western classical-​trained school of thought. Caroline Bithell (2006:9) makes the point thus: “The continued currency of supposedly ‘old’ or ‘earlier’ styles . . . can represent an alternative world-​view to that predicated on a linear view of history driven by progress and betterment.” In other words, the uncovering of older, neglected performance practices in fact serves a dual function, offering a sophisticated dialogue with history while also opening up more innovative musical pathways. Alan Bern (1998):

Curating the Tradition  245 more extended improvisations in [Brave Old World], but at the time of [Klezmer Music] it represented an innovation simply by virtue of reviving a neglected traditional practice.40

Dance music—​Music for dancing Joel Rubin (2015:214) describes an arrangement technique popularized by Giora Feidman that evens out a bulgar’s inherent syncopated/​unsyncopated rhythmic tension into an ostinato 3–​3–​2 rhythm.41 When it is played as an ensemble tutti, Rubin argues that “the simplifying of the bulgar rhythm domesticates it for a predominantly classical, seated audience, foregrounding the vocal aspect of the melody played by the clarinet and downplaying the dance aspect.”42 Conversely, at Weimar the reinforcing of an embodied, dance aspect to the music is treated as fundamental. Even for musicians not directly involved with playing for dancing (through dance orchestra workshops), the connection between playing dance music and the physical act of dancing is underscored at every level. During my week there, each afternoon began with a half-​hour dance session—​including bulgars, freylekhsn, and horas—​during which time all players had the chance both to dance and, equally importantly, to play in the large ensemble accompanying these energetic and emotional moments. The relevance of locating dance music within actual dance practice was clear to all my interviewees, but this emphasis does 40 Klezmer Music, Brave Old World’s first album (1990, Flying Fish Records, FLY 560). 41 The figure looks like this: q eq eq. Listening to klezmer recordings of the early twentieth century, one hears this rhythm frequently, but it is usually played against a steady crotchet bass pattern—​creating a more complex rhythmic interplay—​and often less explicitly stated than in Feidman’s work. 42 Although I have no evidence for this, it is also possible that Feidman adapted this ensemble rhythmic statement from the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla and his quintet, in whose music it features prominently (Feidman was born in Buenos Aires and has recorded an album of Piazzolla’s music [2003, Warner]). Ironically, Piazzolla himself maintained that he took this rhythm from the Jewish Lower East Side of his youth (Azzi and Collier 2000:6).

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Invoked as metonymic of traditional practice, heterophony also comes to stand metaphorically for a looser, more modern way of musically being in the world, much as the “traditionalism” of ­chapter 2’s modernist musicians makes for a surprising freshness. In a similar way, the physical embodiment of musical space through the connection between music and dance is a central feature of the Weimar aesthetic, and the subject of the next section.

246  Sounding Jewish in Berlin something more, reinforcing a wider connection between the physicality of playing—​the embodiment of musical time and space—​and the music itself. Bern notes the importance of this relationship:

Given that many (though not all) klezmer musicians may rarely play for Jewish weddings nowadays, to root the music back into a social function becomes an ideological decision, a vote for Yiddish culture’s continued vibrancy and contemporary urban embodied relevance alongside its importance as concert music. It is also a musical choice, indicative of an approach that chooses to be informed by a “dance” sensibility as much as a performance one. This directly affects musical and structural factors: tempo, instrumentation, arrangements, and ornamentation. It means that the principal driving forces are frequently rhythmical, with decisions often based on whether the effect created is more or less likely to make you move. Examples from my interviewees included leaving out bass notes to lift the accompaniment and give the melodic line more movement (Alan Bern), placing accents before the beat to give greater rhythmic drive (Ilya Shneyveys), and layering cross-​ rhythmic patterns to build up tension (Sanne Möricke). The danceability of any given interpretation, therefore, is foregrounded as a conceptual choice, a statement of embodied musical intent that consciously leapfrogs any sense of separation between audience and performer. More than this, the relationship between dancer and musician is central to a holistic and satisfying understanding of the music, and to jeopardize that relationship is to risk falling into a sort of musical gray area, one implicitly over-​concerned with personal artistry at the expense of group communication. For Neukölln Klezmer Sessions accordionist Ilya Shneyveys, providing an accompaniment that adequately matches the changing emotional and structural parameters of both melody and interpretation is intimately linked to a danced response, whether the dancers are actually there or not: 43 Alan Bern, YSW accordion class, August 1, 2014, Weimar. In fact, Bern was expounding these views while dancing.

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You can follow the dancer, or the dancer will follow you if you’re giving this to him or her. If you don’t give this, or if it’s random, then they’re just going to start doing steps; they consciously or unconsciously disassociate from what the music is doing. And the thing is that the simplest dance tune, if you connect to these things, you’ll have so much more fun, because then what goes on between the musician and the dancer is a real communication. . . . Like you’re dancing together, but you’re doing it by playing the instrument.43

Curating the Tradition  247

In fact, for Shneyveys this relationship goes even further, translating directly into a very personal and particular version of instrumental embodiment: I kind of think of the accordion as a dancer. This [bass buttons] would be the feet and this [piano keys] would be the upper part of the body. And they might be independent in certain ways. It’s like he’s going somewhere (figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2  Ilya’s dancing accordion demonstration (feet). Yiddish Summer Weimar, August 2014.

And then he adds his hands (figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3  Now plus hands (dancer’s and accordionist’s right).



44 Ilya Shneyveys, YSW accordion class, July 28, 2014, Weimar.

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[There are] different emotional characters in different parts of a tune. One bit more danceable and rhythmic, and then it’s like a different topic, a different aspect. I see dancers often when I play; I see a dancer going from this into something else [plays and sings]. It’s changing all the time, and we have to be sensitive to what’s happening.44

248  Sounding Jewish in Berlin And then maybe he’s together (figure 6.4).45

Given that all the musicians interviewed in this book play for both dancing and concerts (often with considerable overlap during the course of a performance), I  was particularly interested in the relationship between the two—​in what could be transferred from one context to the other. For accordionist Patrick Farrell, one of the YSW 2014 instructors and since 2017 a Berlin resident, a clearly articulated link between dance and concert performances runs continuously through his work with the Yiddish Art Trio, a band that is in demand for both weddings and recitals:46 I think at least for the three of us, playing for the dancing, we’ve got a really clear concept of how we want to mix the push and pull, and exactly how to lay it down, and yeah, a certain amount of aggression, like get up there and get sweaty, just do it, you know? And that can transfer over as far as in a concert, like even if you’re not playing dance repertoire, you’re doing something with confidence. And we’re really not afraid to take things to whatever extremes they need to be, and I think that probably comes from playing a lot of dances.47

Through such playful but keenly felt connections, concert recital norms of distance between performer and audience are continually subverted and questioned. Moreover, these embodied processes of transmission further collapse static boundaries between stillness and movement: a conventionally

45 Ibid. 46 The other two-​thirds of the trio are clarinetist Michael Winograd (New York) and bassist Benjy Fox-​Rosen (Vienna). 47 Patrick Farrell, personal interview.

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Figure 6.4  Ilya’s dancing accordion, conclusion.

Curating the Tradition  249

still audience becomes a living, moving, dancing being, just as the bordered, seated performance space spills out onto the dance floor (­figure 6.5). Ultimately, too, klezmer music is rooted back into a functional role, as described later in this section. In a similar way, during my week at Weimar, nigun singing every morning was used not simply as a warm-​up, but as a way of negotiating musical community. As well as a more conventional circular seated arrangement, nigunim were sung in a massed huddle seated on the floor (what one participant memorably described as a “nigun bubble”) or standing up with elbows touching in a close-​packed and continually moving group. This also struck me as a beautifully simple illustration of music’s role in defining and creating space. To feel part of a fluid group, such foregrounded physical closeness was essential—​ we got close because we were singing. At times, the extra-​musical implications of this closeness were explicitly mentioned, but through praxis rather than theory:  the act of singing created the physical proximity, which in turn engendered a more “spiritual” connection. In a (very

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Figure 6.5  After-​lunch dance session at Yiddish Summer Weimar. The band includes Patrick Farrell (accordion), trumpeter Paul Brody, and fiddle player Eli Fabrikant (standing, foreground). August 2014.

250  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Jewish)48 emphasis on practice over dogma, it was the musical sound event that gave rise to everything that followed. Once again, here is Abigail Wood (2007a:222–​23) noticing a similar effect in her 2002 workshop sessions:

While a knowledge of dance steps and forms does not spring from nowhere, it is not yet fully embedded (through tradition or instruction) in either the musical or cultural networks under discussion—​unlike the well-​determined space of an Irish or Scottish ceilidh, for example. In the transmission of dances, the involvement of dance teachers and dance leaders is therefore fundamental. Philadelphia’s Steve Weintraub and London’s Guy Schalom both appear regularly at international workshops (YSW, KlezKanada, London’s KlezFest, Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival) to lead dancing and to teach dance steps. At Weimar, Walter Zev Feldman and Michael Alpert have both been strong and embodied advocates for dancing to klezmer music. More recently, Sayumi Yoshida has led dance workshops and afternoon dancing sessions there, often aided by Sasha Lurje (both of whom also lead dances at Shtetl Neukölln). The majority of dance dissemination in Germany, then, takes place within loosely formalized networks such as Weimar. With the exception of Tants in Gartn Eydn—​whose participants rarely overlap with other scenes—​none of the Berlin venues discussed here operate as formal dance environments, although more formalized dancing does sometimes occur. In Klezmer Bund concerts that I attended at Kaffee Burger and Gorki Studio Я, I spotted occasional dance-​floor choreography, sometimes taking in most of the audience, sometimes overshadowed by the looser individualistic movements of the majority.49 It is worth noting that most concert audiences are likely to have limited access to these established networks of knowledge, or to a culturally 48 On practice over dogma in Jewish religious thought, see Keller (2009:145). 49 We should separate the music discussed here—​and its associated dancing—​from more explicit “dance floor” music such as Yuriy Gurzhy’s Shtetl Superstars band, or the klezmer-​beats remixes of Amsterdam Klezmer Band. This connects to an international dance scene that uses Eastern European sonic markers as a semiotic reference point for excitement and difference, rather than as an

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The physical involvement of the participants in the performance of nigunim also changed over the course of the week, from initially sitting on chairs in a circle and concentrating on vocal performance, to the formation of a dense group around a table or onstage, within which all participants constantly moved, swaying, banging on the table or stamping on the stage to mark the pulse.

Curating the Tradition  251

I feel like the Tantshoys and the sessions are bringing klezmer closer to its original function, and this way of playing (improvised and connected to the moment, rather than performing set arrangements) only does the music justice. And I guess Berlin is a good place to do all that at the moment, with all the klezmer musicians living and visiting here and a very responsive audience used to attending such events.50

The importance of an explicit music/​dance connection at Weimar 2014 was brought to the fore in a masterclass session, in which a Leipzig-​based trio offered their arrangement of a Dave Tarras bulgar for constructive criticism. The playing was fast, fluid, and well-​executed, and the arrangement took in a slower, jazz-​influenced section before returning to the original up-​tempo feel. This fast tempo was the first point to be analyzed, by clarinetist Michael Winograd. Winograd suggested that the trio think about playing the piece at an appropriate speed for dancing a bulgar, enlisting several members of the workshop to dance while the band played again, this time at a slightly slower speed. The reasons given for this were to situate the music in a functional context (Winograd in fact referred to this new tempo as its “functional speed”): “Either being creative or working on presenting a traditional tune in concert, I like to be as comfortable with it as I can in its original context.” He also encouraged the trio to be looser with their carefully planned arrangement, to feel freer to interpret the melody and rhythm differently with each repeat, reacting to the relationship between players and dancers. The second point to be critiqued was the arrangement itself. Although never directly stated, the masterclass instructors read the group’s slower, articulation of a specific musical tradition (cf. Silverman 2015). See also DJ/​producer Armin Siebert’s comments in c­ hapter 2.

50 Personal communication, January 21, 2016.

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absorbed “tradition.” So while enthusiasm may be high, there is often less capacity for spontaneous engagement in structured group dancing, little collective sense of “what to do.” Consequently, such dancing outside of the formalized structures of workshops or festivals also relies heavily on the active involvement of one or two individuals to make it happen. The arrival of the Tantshoys nights and more recently Shtetl Neukölln may, of course, herald a change here, as indicated by Ilya Shneyveys:

252  Sounding Jewish in Berlin jazzier middle section as a clear reference to Giora Feidman’s musical lexicon (a sudden break in tempo followed by a slower, quasi-​“jazz” section is a characteristic Feidman device). This in turn prompted questions from Bern in relation to the music’s idiomatic roots:

In other words, to stretch this dance music so far from its functional underpinnings was to put the whole structure at risk, a show of genre juxtaposition that broke dangerously away from the purpose of the musical statement. Perhaps equally—​though only implicitly—​important in this case, was the erection of a subtle defense against the encroachment of Giora Feidman’s popular klezmer-​jazz style.

“First the territory, then the map” This quote, adapted from the work of semantics theorist Alfred Korzybski, comes from the “Philosophy” page of YSW’s website. It is used to underline an avowed commitment to learning by ear rather than from the printed page. This is not simple pragmatism, as in practice almost all workshop participants have high levels of musical literacy, and in fact many find playing by ear much harder than reading music. Rather, and as with much of YSW, it indicates a conscious and deliberate stance: The forester knows the territory. The mountaineer, they know the territory. They don’t have to consult the map to know where they are. The map is at most somebody else’s representation of where they are. So it’s been my goal, and I’ve said this countless times in YSW, I’ve said, “OK, you’re here for a week or two weeks; at the end of that time would you rather take away a map that you’ll try to remember what you experienced here, or would you rather take away a smaller version of the territory itself?”52

51 Alan Bern, YSW 2014 masterclass. 52 Alan Bern, personal interview.

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For me, as the listener, I’m tuning in to what matters in the language that you’re using. And then all of a sudden the scale changes and completely different things matter. . . . And if I’m constantly getting pushed out by different languages, it’s kind of a strange experience for me.51

Curating the Tradition  253 By his own admission, Bern rarely makes pedagogical decisions without first putting in a lot of thought and research. In this case, it was his own journey to becoming what he calls an “ear musician,” allied to his development as an accordion player, that inspired the YSW approach.

This commitment to a dialogic, naturalized way of learning and transmitting music goes further. It speaks to the integration of traditional material into a contemporary context, as well as an adaptability of contemporary context in relation to the needs of traditional material and transmission. Here again, tradition becomes a practical resource, combining process and content in a way that directly militates against a fetishizing of the musical text or separation from a living discourse: Within modernity, isolated traditions can be identified as relics or survivals signaling the distance of the present from a lost lifeworld. Neither traditions nor their bearers are admitted to coevalness with the modern subject. . . . Traditional process was not allowed visibly to disrupt access to traditional content. (Noyes 2009:240–​41)

It is, however, precisely such coevalness that is at the heart of the Weimar aesthetic. For Bern and others, traditional process and traditional content—​ at least as far as transmission within YSW is concerned—​are codependent. Of central importance, therefore, is an integrated cultural praxis of learning, participation, performance, and dancing. An accrual of cultural affect (of the sort discussed earlier in the chapter) matched by different levels of

53 Ibid.

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It was the beginning of me using the accordion as a passport into varying world musics and traditions. And I  spent some time wandering around with the mission of simply meeting people and learning from them. And it turned out that that started an absolute cognitive revolution in my brain. I had no idea that that was about to completely rewire my brain, but it did. I found myself being able to hear music with the same concreteness that I can see an object that’s sitting on my desk, rather than saying that I need to see the music in order to understand what I’m hearing, right? [Before] that point in my life, I had to play the note on the piano to know how it would sound.53

254  Sounding Jewish in Berlin historical knowledge makes this particular tradition meaningful and yet open to constant reinterpretation. Translated to international modern-​day praxis, yidishkeyt is both culturally specific and yet no longer “owned” by anyone: a range of questions rather than a set of instructions:

This lack of cultural hierarchy is also the basis behind the liberal doses of Hasidic wisdom, nuggets of philosophical and psychological insight, and anthropological anecdotes that pepper many of the instruction sessions at Weimar. At all levels, the pedagogical structure and process are largely determined by and through the particular attitudes and skill sets of the faculty instructors,55 be it Paul Brody’s freely improvised free association, Michael Winograd’s New York Jewish wit, or Sasha Lurje’s commitment to unity through song.56 Accepting that to explore Yiddish culture is necessarily in some senses to recreate it, YSW works hard to fight against the inevitable contradictions this process of reconstruction raises (Ray 2010:6). At the same time, Bern is not naïve about the special and specific context that surrounds an exploration of yidishkeyt in contemporary Germany: The reason why Yiddish culture maybe has a little bit more potential for that is because of the history of Jews in Germany. Jews in Germany, before the arrival of Syrian and Iraqi immigrants, were a special kind of other, and actually they still are. . . . So that means that somebody who has that in their background, and that’s there in German culture, when they come to YSW, that’s already a step into the confrontation of that whole history. Which is different than if I say it’s Jazz Summer Weimar. So it’s sort of like if we think of this whole thing as like a nice charcoal 54 Interview, Deutschland Radiokultur, July 20, 2015, available online at https://​ www. deutschlandfunkkultur.de/ ​ k omponist- ​ a lan- ​ b ern- ​ w ie- ​ v ielfaeltig- ​ i st- ​ j iddische- ​ musik.970. de.html?dram:article_​id=325433, accessed September 30, 2019. 55 Singer Sveta Kundish told me: “Alan takes a lot of care to bring people who do not necessarily attract a lot of students, but who are amazing teachers” (personal interview). 56 These are examples from my own week’s attendance, but the list of instructors over the years includes a very impressive range of expertise:  Zev Feldman, Joel Rubin, Petar Ralchev, Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer, Efim Chorny, Ethel Raim, Arkady Gendler, and many more.

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Teams work together. And at the middle of Yiddish Summer Weimar is a question. That question is: What is yidishkeyt? This is the question, the theme, and no one lecturer has the answer. And so it’s really a theme that is explored together, all throughout the day, among all participants.54

Curating the Tradition  255 fire, or something like that, the Yiddish part of it is like the starter fluid, that makes it explode right away [laughs].57

I think that understanding the cultural background and context of the music very much improves my playing; thus the background in general is important, although this presumably would also be the case if it was non-​ Jewish music.58 I think it extremely important to know what you’re dealing with when you take on anything with an “identity,” especially if it’s not your own. In my opinion, when handled thoughtlessly (hippies and didgeridoos, for example) cultural appropriation is almost a form of colonialism. In order to respect and nurture what is being “appropriated,” the cultural, emotional and historical baggage has to be understood. For me it’s not possible to play music from a certain culture without knowing about and being a little part of it.

However, while all agreed that history and background were interesting and important, opinions differed as to their musical value: Learning the ‘Klezmer language’, i.e., what ornaments etc. to use is really important. Interesting to have some background of Klezmer music, but going into lots of detail about the history doesn’t help me play any better, I think. For me it was very interesting, although I’m not immediately interested in the music as a cultural artefact. I’ve always played the music as a vehicle for personal expression, not as a source of group identity. Still, it’s good to know where the music came from when you study it I think. A lot of the workshops seem to be about talk. Get over it and play some music!

57 Alan Bern, personal interview.

58 Again, these are different responses to my email questionnaire.

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The importance of YSW’s multilevel connections elicited different opinions from my workshop colleagues. For some, an expressed link between music and cultural background was essential in order to play the music at all:

256  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

I want somebody who is in the AfD59 to be able to walk through the door and find themselves, after three or four days, in the middle of a life-​changing experience too. And if I put a banner over the door that says only people left of center are welcome here, then that’s not going to happen. So, you know, I am an extremely political person, but I’ve come to the conclusion, from many many years and lots and lots of experiences, that the best way to get to the political point of view that I believe in is simply to offer people a nonideological platform, where they get to experience each other. And they will get there on their own, because a politics which is based on fear of the other can’t survive deep encounters with others. At some point you have to say, what was that bullshit that I believed in, and why did I believe it?60

Weimar in action During my week at Weimar, I  attended two specialist classes:  Michael Winograd’s new klezmer repertoire and Paul Brody’s improvisation class. The two were a good counterpart to each other, one focusing in detail on four modern pieces of music, the other taking a much wider and looser philosophical approach to the process of improvisation, particularly in the context of Yiddish music. Both were geared toward a final concert performance at the end of the week, although where Winograd’s was planned and to some degree arranged, Brody’s was open-​ended and unpredictable, the only certain thing being one short riff that acted as a cue for the musicians to move from section to section.



59 The right-​wing German nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party.

60 Alan Bern, personal interview.

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These oppositional responses from my fellow musicians reflect an interesting dichotomy. On the one side, there is a feeling that to play without a clear knowledge of tradition is to miss the musical and interpretative point, but on the other an underlying concern that too much emphasis on history and tradition (“cultural artifacts”) can in fact get in the way of the personal expression of lived music. For Bern, the fact that YSW is able to hold these contradictory views within a functional group context, are unsurprisingly at the heart of his philosophy of responsibility.

Curating the Tradition  257

61 All the following quotes come from the weeklong new repertoire class that Winograd ran at YSW, August 2014. 62 See Appendix 1.

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Winograd’s teaching technique is deceptively simple: he plays, we repeat, he talks, and then we all play together. But he doesn’t talk about the music, at least not directly. He talks about Italian food (“What about a pasta restaurant up top, with a klezmer nightclub on the bottom? It would close in three days”61), or Irving Fields, the (then) ninety-​eight-​year-​old composer of “Miami Beach Rhumba” who at that time was still playing in a downtown New York bar five nights a week. Or he suggests an arrangement idea as a joke, a dream that will never happen: “Wouldn’t it be great if there was an accordion hit on that beat? Ah, if only that could be . . .” Musical points are couched within the familiar, the self-​mocking: “You need to fall up. I know that’s not really possible to fall up, in most situations. But in klezmer it is! Remember when you used to fall up the stairs as a kid?” As we learn the tunes, arrangement points suggest themselves but are never imposed. Musical structures and processes arise out of the act of playing, and the sound and physical feeling of group communication are always more important than specific detail—​it is through bringing together our multiple voices that we learn to manage the closeness. The classes have the feel of a jam session, albeit one with a clear leader. Michael’s instant familiarity, his trousers with holes in the knees, and his apparent lack of seriousness and avowed iconoclasm (“I am overturning tradition and radicalizing Jewish culture by removing two notes and the bom biddy bom”) contrast powerfully with his total commitment to the music. It draws us in, and as we learn the tunes, we also learn to be with each other. Although geared to a final performance, this version of klezmer transmission is fully participative (Turino 2008b) in both form and function. The four pieces that Winograd brings all explore a different side of klezmer repertoire and performance. Merlin Shepherd’s “The Tongue” is a driving, honga-​like melody built around the transition between the misheberakh and ahava raba62 modes. It is a straight-​ahead groover of a tune, and we treat it as such, digging into the repeated phrases and stretching the quavers into more idiomatic jagged rhythms. The (then) eighteen-​year-​old Isaac Ohring’s freylekhs is a joyful dance piece. Parts 1 and 3 are marked by percussive stops and hits in the melody; part 2—​repeated as part 4—​is a more fluid major-​ key excursion, large melodic leaps giving way to catchy descending phrase patterns. This is the first tune that we learn and the least “arranged” of the

258  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

We should do it again, and this time really concentrate on making one voice, you know? I don’t really have any tips on how to do that. Just listen, listen carefully. And if you’re not together with the person next to you, get together with the person next to you! We could all sit on the floor like we did this morning; I don’t know if that’s going to help [laughs]. Gonna make it a little tough for the cello. And everyone, for that matter—​yeah, it’s a bad idea.

Cultural tropes are freely invoked and then cheerfully subverted: I think what makes this music great is when everyone is doing different stuff but it all sort of comes together, like spaghetti. Right? [pause] Spaghetti? [long pause] It’s a ridiculous analogy to use, spaghetti, no one’s telling me that’s a ridiculous analogy? OK, let’s try it [counts in tune], like pe-​nne [clicks fingers], gno-​cchi [hums first part of tune], ma-​ca-​ro-​ni [all play].

63 See Appendix 1.

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four. Michael encourages us to fill holes at the ends of phrases and sections with material that bridges the gaps and maintains the energy:  “You don’t want those parts to stand on their own without feeling connected. Take some risks, take some chances, try to fill up the spaces.” By contrast, violinist Mark Kovnatsky’s “Tsesheydung [parting] nigun” is a plaintive minor-​key piece, a wordless song that recalls Mendelssohn as much as klezmer. We play this piece without chords, bass, or rhythm accompaniment, trying to breathe with each other. The pulse itself becomes mobile—​stretched in places, contracted in others as each phrase recalls and comments upon its predecessor. The fourth piece we learn is a terkishe,63 one of Winograd’s own. This is the most overtly sophisticated, skipping ambiguously between E minor and E major, with a nod to classical choral harmony in its third part. This is also the only piece to generate any extended discussion about arrangement, precipitating an interesting and eventually creative friction between different musicians’ expectations of the needs and requirements of musical preplanning. Winograd (­figure  6.6) is respectful and subversive in equal measure. Unlike Bern, he makes no claims to Hasidic knowledge (although he has played plenty of Hasidic weddings), and in fact any sense of “the spiritual” is swiftly undermined:

Curating the Tradition  259

Nor is family, that other Jewish staple, safe: I feel like, along with feeling the tempo of the tune, feeling where the downbeat is, also sort of feel the sway of it. You know, it’s like a very—​it falls into it. It falls down the stairs. But, like, gently and lovingly. It’s like if your brother pushed you down the stairs, but from a place of love. That’s what he always told me, at least [laughter, pause]. Jerk.

And not only is family gleefully undermined, but along with it the oftentimes sacred revivalist dogma of the wisdom of elders: Yeah, get that eeurgh. It’s more ay-​ay-​ay-​ay-​yaa. Think of that sound. Aaah! Everyone sing that [all sing]. Not so clean, everyone! AAAAH! This is the

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Figure 6.6  Clarinetist Michael Winograd in good company. Yiddish Summer Weimar, 2014.

260  Sounding Jewish in Berlin sound that my grandfather used to make. This is how my grandfather used to sing, just like this [pause]. He was not a good singer.

Whatever the group before us does, we will steal that material, and that will be the basis for our improvisation. It tells something to the audience, and it bashes boundaries about how we make music. And I think stealing ideas is very important in improvisation. Shamelessly taking and using for yourself.

We practice this covertly, creeping into the neighboring classroom on a flimsy pretext in order to hear what another group is playing, then returning to our room to use this stolen material, picking up phrases and motifs but separating them from their original musical context. Small groups of notes become found objects, to be explored, traded, or discarded at will. This is the first half of the piece. The end of this section is signaled by a classic klezmer cadence (figure 6.7).

64 All of Brody’s quotes come from his weeklong improvising class at YSW, August 2014.

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In contrast to Winograd’s repertoire class, Paul Brody’s improvisation sessions have no set repertoire and no overt schema, but the result is equally musical and delves just as deeply. We begin by playing just one note, trading the sound from person to person. Brody encourages us to strip our thoughts down to the barest minimum: “Find the amazing expression within not even a half step, really get into your sound.”64 The next step is to add a semitone, variety achieved through tone, volume, attack, and decay. We move around the space, playing with different formations, close together and further apart, facing each other or playing into the corners of the room. For Brody, to improvise with other musicians (or alone) is to enter a deep space of listening and communication. This space can take time to reach, so Paul’s suggestion is that we each give ourselves a word—​a synecdoche for this feeling of concentration to enable us to reach our deeper musical state rapidly. The combination of looseness and focus is important for Brody: “We’ll practice being loose, but playing tight.” He works hard to convey a sense of improvisation as an extension of the ease of conversation, making us bounce our instruments up and down in the air until they no longer feel like something extra but instead part of our physical presence. Before we begin each performance, Brody tells us, gently, that “our instruments are light in our hands.” Gradually, an idea—​or perhaps a philosophy—​for a piece takes shape:

Curating the Tradition  261

There is a musicians’ joke about this cadence: to the tune itself, one sings the words “Now you know this is a Jewish song.” For Brody’s group, this cadence moves from the edges of klezmer cliché to become the basic raw material for the second half of our improvisation—​built around a texture that gains speed, energy, and complexity in each of its three repetitions. Each time, the cadence acts as a call-​and-​response marker for section change, although the last iteration—​the end of the piece—​leaves the final resolving notes ambiguously absent (figure 6.8).

Figure 6.8  The same cadence as played by the whole group.

It is a simple yet radical idea to take the least interesting part of the klezmer repertoire (a stock cadence) and make this the focal point. The conventionally phatic, the expected, the heard-​before, is turned into the only stable element in the whole piece. This is how Paul describes his thinking to the class: One of the main cornerstones—​a Jewish cadence. So we are saying, forget the melody, we’ll play the cadence and let’s get on with the improvisation.

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Figure 6.7  One of several traditional klezmer cadences, part of Paul Brody’s workshop piece.

262  Sounding Jewish in Berlin Which is very cool. It’s playful, it’s a statement, and it gives us a little brick to hold on to.

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It also, ironically, marks the boundaries of what we play as idiomatic. Whatever goes on between these cadential signifiers, however atonal and arrhythmic it gets, is framed by self-​consciously “Jewish” brackets. Writing of folkloric forms and structures, Dan Ben-​Amos (1971:10) makes the point thus:  “The opening and closing formulas designate the events enclosed between them as a distinct category of narration, not to be confused with reality.” Brody’s ethos is to pare things down to their smallest constituent parts, to chip away at an idea until its kernel of creative possibility is uncovered. In the case of klezmer music this becomes a gesture, a short phrase, an ornamental “noise”: the whole revealed through the amalgamation of small detail. And like the cadence, these details provide a tangible element to hold on to: the music remains rooted, albeit tenuously, in specific material and is thus marked as distinct from (“not to be confused with”) the pure abstraction of free improvisation. Once again, we are playing heterophonically, our sound the result of all voices in conversation. In fact, Brody repeatedly uses the analogy of conversation when describing his musical practice, encouraging us to move—​physically as well as musically—​in and out of the conversational space between instruments and players. He also includes the audience in this dialogue: “If we go quiet for long enough, the audience will completely start being noisy.” Michael Winograd and Paul Brody are both secure in their knowledge of, and facility with, the resources of tradition as a musical language. Winograd earned his stripes as a teenager at KlezKamp; Brody—​finding himself in Berlin teaching klezmer music—​worked hard on his own to immerse himself in both the musical idiom and also Jewish religious learning. But neither musician is fenced in by their traditional allegiances. Both are free, within the context of YSW and also in their daily musical lives, to disrupt and question this tradition, to pull at its seams and expose its workings. They subvert as much as they reinforce, and in doing so in fact sustain a vision of Yiddish music and culture as robust, malleable, and creatively multidimensional—​a knowing and sophisticated interpretation of transmission and discovery. In its challenge to stasis and distance, and its insistence on mutual trust, their work embodies the Weimar ethos more generally:

Curating the Tradition  263

The transformative potential of YSW’s shared experiences, mutual support, heterophonic voices, and unpredictable outcomes—​for both teachers and students—​frames tradition as an ongoing, transnational, and intercultural dialogue. Writing of African diasporic cultural communication, Paul Gilroy (1993:199) makes a similar point with characteristic eloquence:  “It may make sense to try and reserve the idea of tradition for the nameless, evasive, minimal qualities that make these diaspora conversations possible.” As a way of rounding things up, I want to look at how YSW situates itself and its “traditional” discourse in relation to its surrounding urban context.

Weimar and tradition The adopted home of Goethe and Schiller, center of post–​World War 1 German politics, original location of the Bauhaus school, and also early adopter of Nazism, the city of Weimar is well aware of its place in German cultural and historical tradition. And as previously mentioned, YSW works hard to locate itself as part of its host city, rather than a separate, retreat-​style learning environment (such as KlezKanada or the Catskills’ KlezKamp). Every evening sees large public jam sessions at different locations throughout the town center, and in 2013 dance workshop participants staged a series of flash-​mob performances in the central square (overlooked by the large

65 Alan Bern, personal interview.

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Prejudices cannot be overcome by arguments. They have to be overcome by experiences that are deep enough in someone’s existence. And so I thought, well, that means that we should spend less time in YSW talking about clichés and prejudices and antisemitism and so forth, more time putting people in situations which have enough insecurity that they have to kind of find their way through it. They’re going to feel that they trusted someone they shouldn’t have trusted, or that someone they didn’t trust was actually trustworthy. Or someone that they thought they had nothing in common with, five days later they feel like they’ve got shared experiences. And when there’s people from twenty-​five different countries there, and they’re having those experiences and realize, actually it doesn’t matter where they come from, or their skin color or religion. What matters is their character as human beings. And that has transformative potential.65

264  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

We are not a religious organization, but the spirit of that, of having a day where people just connect to themselves, we invite people from the outside to come, there’s wine on the tables and songbooks. We sing songs together, for us it’s OK to play instruments. . . . It’s not a performance; you can stand up or sit down, tell a joke, sing a song, tell a story, tell something true about your life, play a piece, whatever it is that you like to share. I think of it as an event like if you had your own home and you were inviting friends and maybe you found out, oh, there’s some interesting people in the city and I haven’t met them but they’re supposed to be cool, so let’s invite them over.67

YSW also connects regularly to wider education and social networks within Germany and abroad, as the following examples show. The Caravan Orchestra, a joint project between Weimar and the University of Haifa, brings together German music students with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim musicians based in or around Haifa. Now in its third year, the project—​under the artistic direction of Ilya Shneyveys at Weimar and Jiryis Murkus Ballan in Israel—​was awarded the 2018 German-​Israeli Shimon Peres Prize.68 YSW’s 2019 theme, “The Weimar Republic of Yiddishland,” explored the encounter between the Weimar Republic and the “politically virtual but culturally very real Republic of Yiddishland”69 (of which Berlin had been the unofficial interwar capital). As part of Festival Week, the Triangle Orchestra—​a joint project between YSW, Medem Bibliothèque Paris, and Łódź’s Marek Edelman Dialogue Center and featuring young musicians from those three cities—​ performed Henech Kon’s interwar Yiddish opera Bas-​Sheve. Othermusic and YSW have received significant support from the German Federal Cultural

66 Yiddish: “a voice from the heart.” 67 Alan Bern, YSW, August 2014. 68

See the Caravan Orchestra website, http://​caravanorchestra.eu/​shimon-​peres-​prize-​2018/​.

69 From the Yiddish Summer Weimar website, https://​yiddishsummer.eu.

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statue of Schiller and Goethe themselves). Festival week concert audiences are largely made up of the general public, and the final workshop concert is also a public one and always sold out. Friday night of YSW’s workshop week sees an event known as a shtim fun harts.66 This is also a public event, but one designed around the familiar intimacy of a Friday night Sabbath table. Here is Alan Bern outlining the thinking behind the event and its links to the wider city:

Curating the Tradition  265

Conclusion The post-​Holocaust absence of a Yiddish core constituency in Europe has made a revival of klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin subject to inescapable

70 Jewish composers, of course, but also American jazz, atonal music, and national music of countries considered enemies of the Third Reich. See Haas (2013). 71 Weimar klingt! website, http://​www.weimarklingt.de/​e_​wk.html, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Foundation, and the organization regularly promotes concerts as part of national and international events such as Anti-​Racism Day. Recent years have seen the summer workshops supplemented by a number of groups and events for young students and children, along with an ongoing program of collaborations with local schools and cultural organizations. In 2017 Bern received the Order of Merit of the Free State of Thuringia. The name itself—​Yiddish Summer Weimar—​articulates a deliberate connection to its external environment. The setting of these three words together connotes more than language, time, and place. By piling these three powerful signifiers on top of each other (without the help of a conjunction or preposition), their meanings are free to overlap and also become interdependent. Yiddishness and Weimar become intertwined, historically emplaced, and sensorially rooted in seasonal rhythms. This is in marked contrast to the musical specificity and geographic generality of many other similar klezmer/​ Yiddish workshops: KlezKamp, KlezKanada, KlezFest. This expressed link between city and culture is also not afraid to confront history. The year 2013 saw the seventy-​fifth anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, commemorated by large-​ scale events in Berlin and around Germany. Bern was commissioned by the city of Weimar to create Weimar klingt! (Weimar resounds!), an evening-​long sound installation, culminating in a concert of Nazi-​banned composers. Beginning with handbell ringing at Stolpersteine locations, Weimar residents were then invited to throw open their windows, “flooding the streets with sounds of music forbidden in the Nazi era.”70 Churches and the city hall added their larger bells to “the joyful cloud of sound. . . . All of Weimar joins together in a simultaneous sound celebration.”71 In one of the crucibles of early National Socialism, the integration of sound, remembrance, and mobile togetherness addresses itself directly—​sonically and in real time—​to German Jewish history.

266  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

72 The international klezmer scene meets Anderson’s (2006:6–​7) definition, albeit loosely:  imagined because all members will never meet, a community through a (vague) sense of comradeship, and limited in the sense of having borders, however elastic. At the same time, it is very different from the imagined communities of nationality discussed by Anderson.

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ideological tussling: without a clearly accessible history, the multiple communities have been inevitably, to some degree, imagined. But imagined communities can also interact with a real and tangible scene.72 This chapter has outlined some of the networks of dissemination and education that inform this interaction, both conceptually and materially. While these processes often take place within well-​defined workshop spaces such as Yiddish Summer Weimar, their effects are directly discernible in the ongoing operations of the Berlin klezmer scene. What is learned and discussed at Weimar feeds into the on-​the-​ground musical life of the city, taking its place within a “theory of everyday practices, of lived space” (Certeau 1984:96), whose heterophony of praxis refuses overregulation (96). Linking YSW and Berlin is the crucial element of lived musical experience that connects the bounded klezmer community and the unpredictable city (Amin and Thrift 2002:78). In this way, elastic but useable borders are drawn: a loosely felt transnational connection assumes a tangible presence in terms of repertoire, performance practice, theoretical approach, and instrumental embodiment. The contested meanings of Berlin klezmer tradition have been led in different philosophical, aesthetic, and musical directions by two major influences. Where one consciously sidesteps notions of cultural difference, the other looks deeply into a nearly obliterated history. As a result, YSW presents a particularly resonant version of tradition, based as it is in rooted performance and historical specificity rather than vague impression: something that can be taken hold of and taught, rather than mysteriously “felt.” At the same time, YSW director Alan Bern’s commitment to a fully connected (and creatively unpredictable) learning environment means that these graspable traditional materials take their place within a keenly felt emotional and social connection—​as, surely, all traditional materials should. At YSW, confronting assumptions and challenging received ways of learning are more important than established doctrine or imposed consensus (­figures 6.9–​10). And if the fallout is occasional disagreement or conflict, this is precisely the challenge that ensures that Yiddish musical culture remains fully engaged with its modern urban environment. We now return to Berlin, but to a much quieter Berlin than seen and heard so far. As a counterpart to the sense of complex, rooted, and joyful noise

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Figures 6.9–​10  Yiddish Summer Weimar fluidity in action. Top: Alan Bern, Chitoshi Hinoue, Kim Kamilla, Anna Lowenstein, and others playing and dancing at a jam session at othermusic e.V.’s OMA Café. Bottom: participants find alternative ways of absorbing the afternoon lecture. Both August 2014.

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that has dominated this book, I want to move outside klezmer and Yiddish music, into the silent and sounded memorial spaces of the city. Not quite a postscript, but not quite part of the main discussion either, this final chapter offers some thoughts on the dialogue—​between history, memory, and the present—​that continues to pervade the urban soundscape.

7 The Silence of the City (Postlude)

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Elie Wiesel, Night Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. John Cage, Silence

Sounding the city Away from the stag weekends, all-​night clubs, and arm, aber sexy media cool, Berlin is often a surprisingly quiet city, compared at least to other internationalized hubs such as Barcelona, New  York, Dakar, or Mumbai.1 Traffic—​vehicle and pedestrian—​is for the most part orderly; kindergarten children walk in well-​behaved lines to the playgrounds that spring up on so many street corners, heavily pierced and well-​tattooed anarchists still wait patiently for the red Ampelmann to turn green even when the road is clear, and cyclists ride smoothly and politely (unlike Amsterdam’s bell-​happy brigade). The sound of a raised voice on the U-​Bahn is unusual—​more often than not belonging to a tourist—​and blotchy-​faced street drinkers mostly keep their own unintrusive company. It is easy to hear church bells on a Sunday.2 Such relative quiet in a capital city sets into relief the transformative power of its noise.3 Echoed throughout its transient and internationalized public 1 A longer version of this chapter appears in Alexander (2018) 2 In these ways, Berlin resembles other German cities as much as other internationalized capital cities. At the same time, Berlin is often considered by residents of other German cities to be excessively noisy. 3 Noise being more sociocultural index than acoustic fact: “an issue less of tone or decibel than of social temperament, class background, and cultural desire” (Schwartz 2004:52).

Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0007.

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Performing Berlin

270  Sounding Jewish in Berlin

4 See Einstürzende Neubauten’s website, https://​neubauten.org/​en/​biography, accessed September 30, 2019. See also Moran on East German “convenient silence” (2004:217).

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spaces, contemporary Berlin’s daily street performance—​fleeting, mobile, and diachronic—​is an implicit response to the relentless surveillance and competing proprietorship that divided and monitored the postwar city. And indeed, in a city that has hosted so many competing ideologies over the last hundred years, auditory life has frequently doubled as a means of control and a way of speaking against it. Weimar-​era cabarets offered a gaudy, sexualized, and loudly guttural underground excess while the repressive noise of National Socialism grew above. During the latter part of the city’s partition, bands like Einstürzende Neubauten created worlds of industrial sound that both sprang from and subverted the noiseless ennui of everyday late Cold War life.4 And until recently, as we have seen, the excited buzz of klezmer music has come under fire for too easily (over)filling a sense of Jewish absence. In between, defying both the city’s local calm and its joyful international noise, lie Berlin’s silent memorial spaces. Part of the built environment but sonically separated, these spaces frame a silence that inscribes the city’s traumatic history onto its physical structure. It is endlessly tempting to read these spaces, and their silences, as legible simulacra of the historical ruptures that they commemorate. But in fact conventional figurations of silence as lack of agency, proxy for death, or symbolic precursor to the divine have less to offer when applied to the spatialized quiet of memorial sites in the city of Berlin. As a postscript to the lively sound of Berlin klezmer that has so far filled these pages, I want therefore to step away from the music and into the silence of the city’s Holocaust memorial spaces. In a loose complement to the effervescent Singing Balconies of c­ hapter 1, this final piece instead explores ways in which silent memorialization coexists with the everyday sonic life of the city. Looking beyond an easy elision of memorial silence with reflection, respect, or meaningful absence, this entails a consideration of the unpredictability and liveness of memorial spaces, their capacity to open up a parallel space of subjectivity (and history) by clouding the normative sense of silent past /​sounded present. When conventions are reversed—​when the present is silent—​the past can resound in surprising ways. Abigail Wood writes that “nobody’s sound space—​not even that of the state—​is immune from involuntary juxtaposition with the sound of Others” (Wood 2015:71). In a city where hotly contested memorial is often structured into the daily ever-​present (Ladd 1997:234), collision and ambiguity

Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City  271

Phenomenologies of silence 1: Schweigeweg (silent path) Just as shocking as the outrages of the cynical so-​ called “Reichskristallnacht” was the wide sphere of the population who blithely took part, with such efficiency that no one raised their voice against it. Gedenkweg 2013 website

Aural networks fix a community of listeners—​albeit temporarily—​in space and time. Noise, or its absence, marks “the limits of a territory” (Attali 2009:6). And yet silence is not a natural accompaniment to sorrow or loss. Initial responses to death and tragedy are usually far from silent, and many formal commemorative processes are neither noiseless nor solemn.6 A performative ritual, collective silence is one of the things that turns grief into commemoration, demarcating memorial time and space and simultaneously releasing everyday life from the burden of continual mourning. This silence is the public presentation of personal sorrow, a paternalistic subduing 5 Think, for example, of the open adjectives that attach so readily to silence: pregnant, uncertain, eerie . . . 6 An Irish wake, for example. Also see Tolbert (1990) on Karelian lament and Feld on Bosavi “expressive weeping” (1990).

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are never far away. Sound here is multiple, richly textured, and heavily contingent: the spaces of memorialization continually inflected by the city that surrounds them. Listening here “implies a preparedness to meet the unpredictable and unplanned, to welcome the unwelcome” (Westerkamp 2015:n.p.). An increased focus on what Attali (2009:7) terms “subversive noise” reveals the fragments and traces hidden within these memorial geographies, their metaphorical dimensions. This is a silence that in its liminality becomes a force for the transgression and subversion of borders both temporal and spatial, producing an imaginative space that is ambiguous, affective, and deeply meaningful.5 Through its disregard for physical boundaries, silence as remembrance becomes a zone that the past and the present can inhabit simultaneously—​highly appropriate in a city whose very fabric enacts daily the play of multiple temporalities. Running through this discussion, therefore, is a perpetual seam of where and how past and present Berlins clash noisily—​or silently—​into each other (Till 2005:196).

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A performative paradox: present but silent. 75 years ago, noise defined the night. Broken glass, stones through windows, shouts and threats. Today we mark our memory by refusing to shout back. We simply offer our slow careful footsteps along the same roads, the noise now that of buses and Saturday shoppers, the only broken glass from the odd bottle left on the street. Silence turns thoughts inwards, bearing witness to the violence of historical noise by neither adjudicating nor complying. It is the silence of those rendered voiceless (for whom we cannot speak), but also of those who would

7 Of mourning rituals in Australia’s Northern Territory, Magowan appositely notes: “The indeterminacy of [women’s] crying sounds, as opposed to the sense of crying-​songs, renders the act of crying potentially powerful and dangerous and in need of regulation by men” (2007:85).

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of the bereaved mother’s wail or the abandoned infant’s scream.7 Memorial silence, we might say, interpellates its participants as controlled, responsible, and reflective: a sonic border that indexes an observable “respect” for history. But in Berlin, history itself is slippery; it is raw and partisan. Silence here unsettles and ripples the narrative surface. The transition from sounded to silent acts like a wiggly line in an old television program, heading back into the past while still viewing from the present. In what follows, deliberate (and provocative) silence in the city marks out a space of memorial. But the ambiguity of such heavily urbanized silence also suggests a freedom to move through multiple territories and subjectivities, to slip back and forth across historical lines. On November 9, 2013, I took part in a silent walk through Berlin marking the seventy-​fifth anniversary of the November pogrom, a night that came to be known as Kristallnacht. More than simply signifying memorial (and defining memorial space), here silence itself becomes memorialized—​invoking both the enforced silence of the slaughtered and also the fearful silence of those who did not speak against it. Silence, in other words, transforms from a tool of remembrance to become both its process and its object. What follows are my highly subjective responses, written the next day. These deliberately reflexive reactions are applied here to interrogate the ways in which this performative silence might open up the past, but also the limits of such nonverbal embodiment.

Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City  273 not speak up. Here we identify in reverse:  personal silence, multiplied, becomes a collective.

The route is from Marienkirche to Oranienburger Straße synagogue. After speeches from civic and religious leaders, there is a sudden hush as the walk sets off. It is immediately odd, as if an actor has stayed on stage too long: something not quite usual. We shuffle out slowly, a bit of murmured chat or kids whispering questions. About 1000 people, most over fifty, moving calmly and deliberately—​not gloomily—​in the afternoon sun. No chants, slogans, or uniforms; only one banner at the front. All we are offering is the open signifier of our gathered silent presence. Mysterious (but not playful) in the center of the city. First stop is outside the Berliner Dom. About ten young people stand on the steps holding placards with names and dates. Dressed in their everyday clothes, they are relaxed but attentive. In the middle of the steps is a microphone, and the teenagers walk to it one by one to read out lists of deportees. It is powerful at first, obviously, but after fifteen or so names, dates, ages and fates, the overwhelming emotion is in fact boredom. I think how even my father8 would have started to look at his watch and make winding-​up motions. But perhaps the ennui and dissatisfaction are important. After

8 Himself a Liverpudlian Jewish teenager at the time these deportations and murders were taking place.

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The event has two parts: Schweige (silent) and Weg (path). It is fluid, moving, furred around the edges as people come and go, overtake and lag behind. To stand still and “observe a silence” has boundaries, frames, clarity. To walk and be silent in a large yet loosely defined group is to muddy those boundaries, to move in the margins either side of static observance. Who is a participant, who is simply a passer-​by? What noise is allowed (footsteps, coughs) and what do we forego (speech)? And there are children, who will never be silent for very long. There are elderly people who must at times articulate a need. This is human silence, communal and contractual. A disorderly silence (choice), not an imposed one (coercion). Just as our walking has a loose coalition—​we are not marching in step—​so our silence is real yet flexible.

274  Sounding Jewish in Berlin about twenty minutes an organizer quietly suggests that the leaders move on. The kids continue to recite names and tragic fates as we file slowly by.

The next stop is the Altes Palais on Bebelplatz. I realize that we are standing next to the underground library, another sealed and silenced space of historical absence. A choir of young people, supported by a small brass ensemble, sings “Shalom Aleichem” as we arrive—​we listen in respectful quiet. Next is a Bach cantata, and then “Dona Nobis Pacem.” Some of the crowd join in (few were able to do so with “Shalom Aleichem”). The singing is pretty and gentle, and yet this is a Schweigeweg—​silence is the whole point. I wonder what exactly we are listening to, and what for. Is this entertainment along the way? Are we praying? Voicing hope for the next generation​? Or because music marks events (even silent ones). Although the performance is good, we don’t applaud—​it seems wrong. There is a short silence and the choir picks up “Shalom Aleichem” again to send us on our way. Now in the thick of Unter den Linden, we collide more and more with Saturday afternoon noise. The contrast seems to give purpose to our steps (and our silence). As I veer off at Friedrichstraße, I become aware of my tread and gait becoming suddenly faster and lighter, independent again. I feel like Verbal Kint as he leaves the police station.9

Mary Fulbrook (2009:127) writes that “no physical site of memory has significance without participating witnesses.” But the nature of participation is as significant as the testimony it enacts, and signifying power is realized here through the subtle subversion of expectations: a conventionally noisy thing (a moving crowd) becomes a silent mass. Its aural presence removed, the physical fact of the crowd is oddly foregrounded.10 In the city space it is usual 9 The iconic final scene of 1995’s thriller The Usual Suspects, where arch-​criminal Roger “Verbal” Kint, who has been pretending to be disabled for the whole film, calmly escapes capture and gradually “sheds” his disability in the process. 10 The same weekend saw the Night of the Singing Balconies, as described in ­chapter  1. The organizers, when denied permission to repeat their wonderful night a year later, responded with Die

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We walk around the back of the museums and reappear on Unter den Linden, now on the turf of tourists, hawkers, bystanders. But we are loosely bordered-​ off, even if the barrier is highly porous. People come up to ask what we’re doing—​the short responses are hushed, almost severe.

Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City  275

Nacht der Schweigenden Balkone (The night of the silent balconies)—​a neighborhood walk interspersed with stops under balconies where this time the performers stood silent. 11 In fact, one need not work too hard to find something comical in the idea of trying to persuade a group of one thousand modern-​day Jews to remain quiet. Just think what Woody Allen or Jackie Mason might have done with it.

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to find many people not talking to each other, but far rarer to see them all—​ without words—​moving and acting deliberately as one. Here, however, both togetherness and silence take center stage. And yet this silence, precisely because no one is “talking” about it, remains ambiguous and open. Cultural associations and signifying strategies are implicit rather than stated: Quaker witnessing or Thoreau’s nonviolent resistance. And interestingly, the idea of silent commemoration strikes me as not a particularly Jewish one, or at least not an Ashkenazi Jewish one.11 Jewish prayer tends to be heterophonic—​the varying tempi and volumes of concurrent recitation often lending an appealingly ragged, anarchic quality. Where the accidental aural and physical juxtapositions within the stone slabs of Peter Eisenmann’s infamous Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Holocaust Memorial) index an individualized sense of dislocation and rupture, the loose unity of the Schweigeweg relies upon what Iris Marion Young (1990:238) memorably calls a “side-​by-​side particularity”—​a specifically city-​based set of spatial practices that enable the collective movements of multiple beings across common territories. But beyond individuals occupying shared space, togetherness here takes on a moral consensus that is absent from the daily urban “politics of tolerance” (Tonkiss 2005:23). It is a consensus achieved specifically through a collective (and unspoken) absence within the urban space. Along the Schweigeweg, memorial silence—​placing itself at the heart of the city—​ inflects urban noise. Performative quiet bleeds into everyday sound, and it is the city that cannot avoid the involuntary juxtapositions of the silent crowd. By self-​consciously removing/​opposing daily noise while simultaneously locating itself in the middle of normative urban chance encounter, the silent walk thus “commandeers” (Moore 1994:83) the city for new uses, implicitly endowing its contingent urban togetherness with a loose yet unavoidable moral/​ideological credo for this short period of time. To adapt Georg Simmel (1997:184), our silent agreement, framed within the anonymity of the city, makes us—​for now—​“audible” to ourselves and to each other.

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Phenomenologies of silence 2: Gleis 17

With his concept of heterotopia, Michel Foucault theorizes a space of alterity, a space that confines (or liberates) difference by structuring a chronology and geography related to, yet separated from, the everyday world: a “counter-​site” within which other “real sites . . . are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986:24). Gleis 17 is a well-​preserved platform and section of railway track bordering the large and pretty woods of Grunewald to the southwest of the city. Places, dates, and numbers cast in large webbed iron sheets along the platform’s edge commemorate victims of the many trains that left this spot, ferrying people to their deaths in camps further east. Bordered by trees and patches of rough grass, this is a place of silence and reflection. Birches—​some taken from Auschwitz—​grow up among the track’s far end, and weeds sprout between the railroad ties next to a disused brick hut, indicating a railway that has long ceased to know the sound of trains or passengers. Unlike the Holocaust Memorial, Gleis 17 is already set apart from the noise of the city by its location in a quiet suburban area. Visitors are already interpellated: attuned to a sense of silence before reaching the platform. Where large memorial spaces encourage multiple and lengthy routes and retracings, Gleis 17’s hidden pathways are more subtle. Here, one lingers, stops, bends down, crouches, turns, and turns again. Although the platform is linear, its silence invites repeated interruptions and breaks in motion, an increased focus on small movements and small sounds, or their absence. And sonic traces and echoes exist here too. As one walks slowly along the silent platform, the clearest sound is of your own footsteps, overlapping freely with associations of solitude, lonely railway stations, fear, and even romance. Also, of course, the beguiling yet disturbing idea of walking in someone else’s tread. Gleis 17 is also multiply heterotopic, a counter-​site that juxtaposes and challenges space, form, and time. The platform and tracks are “real” yet lead nowhere, at least in the conventional sense; the silenced steel rails point to unseen geographies both extant (on maps) and imaginary (these tracks themselves will never again take us to them). Thus the platform and its apparatus—​fully formed and in situ—​are rendered paradoxically

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The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Foucault 1986:25

Performing Berlin: The Silence of the City  277

12 Wiesel’s Night, for example, frames the sonic vocabulary of departing cattle trucks in explicitly physical, aggressive terms: “A prolonged whistle pierced the air. The wheels began to grind” (Wiesel 2006:22). 13 The memorial was in fact erected by the German railway company Deutsche Bahn. On the German rail network and deportations, see Hilberg (1998). 14 Aural “bleed” across open spaces is of course not an unusual feature. What is especially dramatic about this example is the particular quality of the juxtaposition: modern railway noise encroaching upon tracks that have been purposely silenced.

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functionless. This is not the emptiness of an endless Midwest line before the freight train comes thundering through. It is not an artifact relocated to a museum, nor is it a working reconstruction. City train stations are places of human and mechanical mobility; platforms are full of noise, but a noise that in its ubiquity says very little. A silenced platform, on the other hand, resonates loudly—​the mute tracks, dramatically stilled, stand in material and aesthetic opposition to the sounds of terror that they represent, and of which they were a part.12 The spaces and temporalities that Gleis 17 encloses are thus both incompatible and yet fully connected. The unremarkableness of the track itself jars bitingly with the places of death wrought in iron along its side, and yet both are linked through the instrumentality of the rail network in the implementation of the Final Solution.13 The contradiction, aptly, is perverse: that Gleis 17 “does” nothing is precisely what makes it mean much. It has been stripped of its function because its function was unspeakable atrocity. And yet its materiality signifies; its silence speaks. But once more, the silence is “everywhere punched and torn open” (Certeau 1984:107), sounding a parallel rupture in spatial and temporal narrative. To spend some time here with open ears is to yet again experience an immediate and felt aural clash between competing subjectivities, and between “slices in time” (Foucault 1986:26). Although a self-​contained memorial site when approached from the nearby road, Gleis 17 is also adjacent to the complex of platforms forming the working Grunewald S-​Bahn station, carrying passengers in and out of the city and reachable directly from Grunewald station itself. Ascending the steps from the S-​Bahn underpass, one carries these everyday sounds of railway life into the silent memorial space. The quiet of this furthest platform is therefore distantly inflected by the unremarkable, quotidian noise of daily commuter public transport life.14 These are not sound effects, yet the aural connection back in time to when similar sounds marked the singular yet everyday terror of these particular railway tracks is inescapable. Gleis 17’s silence is what opens it up to the materiality of lived sound—​jumping across the physical space of the

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contemporary S-​Bahn platforms to complete a perceptual loop that cuts through the reflective memorial quiet into the disturbing resonances of the past. In a small part of our listening selves, the silence of these tracks enables them, through imported local sound, to come sinisterly alive again. Yet at the same time, the distinctive mundanity of suburban railway noise, curiously, pushes home nothing so much as the normativity necessary for effective genocide. As competent urbanists, we skillfully internalize the differing rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 1996), learning to live by them but not “hear” them. A train platform is normalized through its noise and movement, rhythms of mobility that in their predictability signify the very everydayness of the city. Stillness and silence at the platform’s edge arrest these rhythms, isolating them and making their difference audible. Simultaneously as silence offers a space apart from the ongoing rhythms of the urban, therefore, it forces us to hear these rhythms anew. The proximity of silent memory to the daily sounds of train life exposes perceptual borders as similarly permeable, revealing what Jay Winter (2010:3) describes as “hidden deposits” that are “dynamic, unstable, and at times, intrusive.” Through these conflicting geographies and temporalities, in the quietness of the railway tracks, silence (or perhaps the space between silence and sound) becomes a way of hearing the past.

8

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-​selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Maybe an excess amount of consciousness can be very counterproductive when you’re thinking about yourself. The way you kind of painted the picture of me, being an Israeli, from Jewish heritage, living in Germany, in Berlin, and trying to make music. That would be probably way too much consciousness to carry around. And I think the approach that I use of being able to just absorb and put out, without thinking too hard about where I come from and what I do, is what makes it possible for me to actually make art, or to actually produce, express, all of those things. Because otherwise, if I had been too conscious about it, I would be too preoccupied with needing and wanting to express anything. Tom Dayan, personal interview

Throughout this book, we have seen the many ways in which Berlin klezmer interacts with the material and symbolic spaces of the city: creating communities both temporary and longer-​lasting, expressing and challenging identities, and ruffling (occasionally reinforcing) ideological assumptions about Jews, Germans, and German-​Jewish history. We have seen how dynamic and overlapping networks of musicians, organizations, and audiences offer continually renewing perspectives on tradition, on practice, and on what it means to be making Jewish music in the city of Berlin. We have seen how music formalizes or informalizes space, and in turn how spatial practice liberates or constrains musical meanings. We have seen how real and imaginary renditions of the city itself can insert themselves into textual and Sounding Jewish in Berlin. Phil Alexander, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190064433.003.0008.

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Conclusion

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musical processes—​in ways fantastical or confrontational. And we have seen how a commitment to education, research, and dissemination can inspire and give form to a new, at times radical, musical scene. In Berlin, the ideological terrain into which this music has rooted itself is neither freshly ploughed nor gently pastoral; it is complex, unpredictable, and full of mines. This is compounded by the fact that, notwithstanding Berlin’s long and close relationship with Yiddish culture, the music that we nowadays acknowledge as “klezmer” did not come from the city. This has at times led to an ambivalent circularity that, at its essence, reduces klezmer music to a vehicle for German reparation, an (over)accessible signifier of Jewishness that offers a simultaneous sense of nostalgia, and an escape route from history. As this book has shown, however, these arguments and correctives have been unable to impede the development of klezmer music in the city. Moreover, the lively embrace of klezmer and Yiddish music by German musicians and audiences has created a living and contingent space that international, Jewish and non-​Jewish, musicians have entered and energized with impressive vibrancy. Traditional musical forms, if they are to survive beyond heritage, must resonate with and find relevances within their contemporary environments. The work of these musicians and the participation of enthusiastic audiences show that Yiddish musical culture can not only revitalize but develop in provocative directions. It shows that in order to remain meaningful, traditional culture must be in dialogue with the city itself: its musical networks, its urban ethos, and the surface and hidden meanings sedimented in its changing spaces, histories, and interactions. This is music that structures identifications and promotes allegiances that cut across and problematize historical borderlines. Klezmer and Yiddish music in Berlin draws on a sense of history more nuanced than the Holocaust, speaking to identities more subtle than those of guilt/​appropriation. By locating its practice within the spaces and meanings of the city, klezmer makes itself emphatically of that city. Writing in 1937, the Jewish Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski argued for a need to continue what he had begun—​the detailed study of klezmer music as it existed at the time (Beregovski 2000:538). In 2020, klezmer musician and scholar Joel Rubin reiterated the recommendation that had concluded his 2001 PhD thesis—​that contemporary ethnomusicology should study the music of the klezmer revival and postrevival “in all of its various forms, phases, and geographies” (Rubin 2020:281). At the

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end of his comprehensive 2016 study of klezmer history, Walter Zev Feldman (2016:272) suggests that “perhaps this music of the diasporic Jews is somehow more relevant in our contemporary world, where the distinction between the local and the global is more porous than ever.” Standing on the shoulders of these and other giants, I have brought these appeals and questions to bear on a city that has for some time been host to Europe’s most dynamic and inventive klezmer and Yiddish music scene, a place that showcases a seemingly inexhaustible ability to continually reinvent itself. This synthesis has informed both my methodological structure and my theoretical orientation, providing geographical and temporal boundaries and also explicitly scaffolding my analytical perspective. I have avoided drawing lines between “object of study” (music) and “context” (the urban), instead grounding my work in the inextricability of the two. This is music of a city, and of the city. My first question concerned who:  the multiple networks and evolving combinations of musicians and audiences, strong and weak ties that create and sustain these Berlin musical dialogues. While musicians migrate freely between spaces, ensembles, and perspectives (and inevitably work frequently outside the city), we have nevertheless seen several different enunciatory positions from which klezmer and Yiddish music is addressed. The German pioneers worked with commitment and limited resources, forging a distinct—​and nowadays less heard—​soundworld. Following in the wake of the 1990s “klezmer boom,” the modernists brought an artistic single-​ mindedness and an adventurously expanding repertoire. More recently, fantasists choose to take kitsch-​inflected Yiddishland historiographies to their visual and musical extreme, while transformers explicitly mine a frequently political seam of contemporary Jewish cultural identity, through a radically mobile musical aesthetic. My second question was where. The spaces of the city root this music in different ways—​from the carnivalesque to the self-​questioning. My introductory case study, the Night of the Singing Balconies, suggested a certain set of characteristic spatial practices:  the self-​conscious overlap between official and unofficial space, high cultural capital placed on the art of bricolage (making do with the materials to hand), and a delight in the possibilities of instant community. Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish music spaces all adapt, reject, or negotiate these ways of thinking. Several of the city’s bar/​ club venues use klezmer as one among a number of musics that fulfill a gently subversive mix-​ and-​ match party/​ dance aesthetic. Complementing these more carnivalesque zones of encounter, as we also saw, are musical spaces

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that set out explicitly to question and problematize notions of Jewish identity as expressed through klezmer and Yiddish music, pushing at wider cultural questions, assumptions, and oppositions. Still others ally themselves with a more conventional image of Jewish space, while some dispense with ethnic allegiance entirely in favor of formalized participative musical practice. We also found that the particular combination of street-​level discourse and erasure of performative boundaries mark out Neukölln’s Bar Oblomov (and its offspring Shtetl Neukölln) as a potentially radical Jewish space. In all these cases, the relationship is dialectic:  the music produces the space as much as the space frames the music. All offer a shifting sense of community—​a set of sub-​scenes within the wider city scene—​and in different ways all tap directly into Berlin’s historical processes of border marking and its ongoing quest for their transgression. If different spaces and repertoires foreground to different extents the Jewishness of the musical meanings at play, very few spaces are fixed in these meanings. They depend upon an ever-​ renewing—​and ambiguous—​sense of development. In this way, they connect strongly with their shifting urban environment. I also discovered that klezmer and Yiddish music offers Berlin a chance to view itself: the city is textually and musically emplaced as a fundamental and distinct part of the narrative. I uncovered sites of imaginative and fantastical escape, loci of dark history (where German and Jewish identities are inextricably linked), and manifestations of contemporary linguistic and cultural fluidity. This again is indicative of the ways in which the music directly sounds the city, a dynamic relationship that marks the urban as an active piece of the story. Through an engagement with both history and the present, klezmer music offers alternative—​occasionally contradictory—​reflections of the city of which it is a part. This includes particular and various experiences of contemporary Berlin Jewishness, enacted through a lively and polysemous dialogue that takes in personal history, material culture, and German Jewish identities (as seen by both Jews and non-​Jews). Bedecked with memorial and yet living gleefully in the moment, Berlin is a city that exists simultaneously across past, present, and future. Historical, current, and potential Berlins confront each other across the city’s topography and its material and imaginative culture. Ghosts, memories, reminders, and hopes are inscribed into the urban landscape and its social life. Rich in their exploitation of contemporary mobility, elements of the city’s klezmer music also resonate at different levels of this temporal dialogue, intertwining within the urban soundscape and opening up gaps in time and space. A project such

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as Semer Ensemble or the work of Daniel Kahn addresses directly the city’s particular ability to live in different moments simultaneously. The work of these artists is grounded in a provocatively intersubjective sense of history and memory. Straddling multiple chronologies, it confronts powerfully the ambiguous and complex relationship between Berlin’s troubled past and its noisily effervescent present. We also discovered that while parts of this musical scene enjoy a playfully sophisticated multiplicity, there remain some actors who do not see their own experience so clearly represented. Berlin klezmer and Yiddish music is also not afraid to grapple with slippery, and frequently conflicting, ideas of tradition. In particular, we delved deeply into one of the most prominent and influential contemporary manifestations of Yiddish musical tradition: Yiddish Summer Weimar. This revealed a richly contextual approach to the music, grounded—​philosophically and actually—​ in the multilayered concept of heterophony and in embodied practice. It is an approach that encourages learning at the margins and through difference, taking care to locate the music within historical and contemporary contexts, rather than a more preachy universalism. Separation from historical function does not make klezmer functionless, and one of its contemporary roles is based in a conscious reframing of klezmer as social dance music. This has been achieved by the creation of specifically dance-​based environments, but at Weimar it also often informs a performance approach that takes its aesthetic, rhythmic, and structural cues from the “danceability” of any given interpretation. Through the ongoing network connections of participants in both places, the separate, delineated, yet inclusive educative space of Weimar links directly back to the city of Berlin. This book helps us to hear Berlin in the 2010s—​an important moment that saw the arrival of challenging new musical voices and the development of transformative musical spaces. If I have argued throughout for the importance of mobility and versatility in maintaining klezmer and Yiddish music’s urban relevance, the corollary is that things trapped within these pages in fact refuse to be pinned down. An embrace of fluidity also means an acceptance of change and loss. My book is therefore also a small elegy, a snapshot of a particular slice of time that is already beginning to look different. Berlin’s ongoing struggle between the city’s grassroots communities and the moneyed advance of corporate and commercial forces continues to alter its social and cultural life, and many would argue, with justification, that the countercultural Berlin (whose legacy this book occasionally hints at) in fact disappeared for good some time ago. Several of the spaces discussed

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here—​Maison Courage, Oberwasser, Kaffee Burger, Fuchs & Elster—​have now shut their doors permanently. Their closure marks a shift in the musical landscape, though in what direction is yet unclear. No musical world, of course, sits still. One or two bands represented here no longer exist, and doubtless new ones are being formed as I write. Some musicians have moved elsewhere; new ones have arrived. And some have sadly left this world altogether. On January 6th, 2016, ten days before her forty-​seventh birthday, accordionist and educator Franka Lampe lost her battle against cancer. A bridge between older, established, and more recent klezmer/​Yiddish musical practice in the city, Franka as both musician and friend was recognized by all in a specially dedicated Saytham’s Lounge event four days later, a concert by her band Ljuti Hora on January 21, and a dedicated Klezmerstammtisch session on February 15. Participants spanned all categories, from pioneers to transformers, illustrating once again the generous overlap and creative fluidity of this vibrant scene and its self-​ identification as a heterogeneous yet deeply connected urban community. Traditional music of many kinds is alive in the modern city, but it must negotiate that city. It must navigate a tricky path between legacy and innovation, between “here” and “elsewhere.” The proliferation of sound (the different sounds of Jewish folk music, clapping, lively chatter) in Oblomov, Oberwasser, and the other spaces discussed here force a living link that cuts across lines of “then” and “now.” This link can be controlled and careful, perhaps delicately respectful at the expense of being overly emotional, or it can be messy, unpredictable, and heterogeneous. It can reinforce taken-​for-​ granted ways of being, or it can question them in irreverent or unsettling ways. The imaginations of the musicians that inhabit these urban spaces sound an affective immediacy of musical moment while simultaneously allowing us to feel the past. And in the process, the city and its characteristic creative aesthetic continue to enact an ongoing relationship with the music played, heard, and danced to.

APPENDIX 1

A Brief Overview of Klezmer Music

Klezmorim and their music Perhaps the first problem confronting us is that of definition itself. Formed of the Hebrew words kley (vessel) and zemer (song), the term “klezmer” initially referred to musical instruments in Hebrew, subsequently a musician (pl. klezmorim) in Yiddish, and now widely encompasses a range of musical forms and styles that are to a greater or lesser extent recognizable as stemming from Ashkenazi Jewish culture.1 Although arguably it is as a musical genre that the majority of people would nowadays define klezmer, this use is largely only from the 1970s klezmer “revival” onward. Moshe Beregovski (2000, 2001) seems to be the only scholarly prewar source to refer consistently to klezmer as music.2 This etymological ambiguity raises parallel paradigmatic questions for a definition of klezmer—​whether by reference to musicians, repertoire, or musical form and performance practice. Moreover, prewar definitions according to function, social environment, and musical material are nowadays problematized by contemporary klezmer’s transnational reach, the dissipation of a “klezmer caste” in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, changes in ritual function, variation in repertoire, and stylistic developments.3 1 In parallel, we might say that these musical forms and styles, linked as they are through history and contemporary practice, are nowadays indexical of a certain type (or sometimes memory) of Ashkenazi Jewishness. 2 Although a mid-​1920s American Yiddish press article about Joseph Cherniavsky and his Hasidic Jazz Band also refers to “di alte yidishe klezmer muzik” (old Jewish klezmer music). See Rubin (2020, introduction). 3 This sort of debate also, of course, accompanies Jewish music more generally. Where Curt Sachs, in 1957, famously posited Jewish music as “by Jews, for Jews, as Jews” (in Werner 1976) and Idelsohn

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Although this is a book about contemporary practice, some basic background information will be useful for many readers. This section therefore gives a (necessarily brief) introduction to klezmer music, synthesized largely from the excellent work of klezmer scholars as detailed below. It is intended as a quick reference guide, and for far greater depth and detail I would encourage readers to go directly to the sources cited. I am also sincerely grateful to Joel Rubin for his comments on and corrections to what follows. The most comprehensive history of Ashkenazi klezmer music is Walter Zev Feldman’s Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (2016). The most significant prewar source is the work of Moshe Beregovski, whom Feldman acknowledges as his clearest forebear. Joel Rubin (2020, 2007) has explored in detail the clarinet style, social environment, and modern influence of Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein, and Hankus Netsky gives a lively account of klezmer in twentieth-​century Philadelphia. For an accessible introduction to the klezmer world, see the work of Yale Strom (2002, 2012), Mark Slobin (2000), and Sapoznik and Sokolow (1987). On the klezmer revival in America and Europe, see Slobin (2002), Waligórska (2013), and Rubin (2014, 2015a).

286  Appendix 1 We should also note the suggestion of several leading musicians (Brave Old World’s Alan Bern and Michael Alpert among them) that rather than “klezmer,” we should be speaking of “Yiddish music” or “new Yiddish music” (Bern 1998; Alpert 2015), in specific reference to a culturally rooted historicism. Alternatively, here is trumpeter Frank London with a more functional perspective:

Klezmer music is a ritual instrumental music of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Weinreich (1977) gives the word Ashkenaz as Yiddish for “Medieval Germany,” but as an ethnic descriptor Ashkenazi refers broadly to Jews who trace their roots to Central and Eastern Europe. Although there is evidence of klezmer musicians dating back to the sixteenth century (Feldman 2016; Rubin 2020)—​the point at which ritual musicians known as leytsim5 began to form themselves into more professional guilds—​reliable musical detail begins to take shape in the nineteenth century. Klezmorim in Europe reached their apogee within the Pale of Settlement, the bounded territory of approximately one million square kilometers within which the vast majority of Russia’s Jews were restricted from 1791 until its formal abolition with the overthrow of the tsar in 1917. Between 1820 and 1910, the Jewish population within the Pale quadrupled to over five million, eventually making up more than half of the world’s Jews and frequently forming a majority in some cities and many small towns (Klier 2010). Here and in neighboring territories such as Galicia, klezmer musicians formed hereditary castes—​musical lineage often passed down from father to son,6 each kapelye (small orchestra) usually possessing a certain repertoire—​although there was extensive overlap. By the mid-​nineteenth century, small groups of fiddles and cimbalom had frequently given way to larger ensembles—​ especially in the city—​that included transverse flute, brass, cello, and poyk7 (Rubin 2015b:121). Feldman (2002) identifies four categories of klezmer repertoire: core, transitional, co-​territorial, and cosmopolitan,8 arguing that whereas non-​dance forms probably

as “the tonal expression of Jewish life and development over a period of more than two thousand years” (1944:24), Mark Slobin is a little more phlegmatic: “The mirage of Jewish music evaporates as you gaze at it, replaced by the vision of a group of Jews singing whatever they like, from any local source” (Slobin 1995:222). 4 These examples of tying ideology to naming are strongly reminiscent of the terminology debates that accompanied 1960s free jazz and its exposition of a renewed African American consciousness: “Whatever jazz is, I call it mine, baby” (tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, quoted in the footnotes to Larkin (2004:121). See also Kofsky (1970). 5 Yiddish: “buffoons.” 6 An excellent illustration is Leopold Koslowski (1918–​2019), made famous as “the Last Klezmer” of Yale Strom’s 1994 documentary of that name. Koslowski’s grandfather Pesach Brandwein was the leader of one of Galicia’s best-​known kapelyes, in which his ten sons played. Most of Pesach’s family was murdered in the war, but six of his sons (including the clarinetist Naftule Brandwein) emigrated to the United States. Koslowski himself, having survived a Nazi camp, finally settled in Krakow, where he became a touchstone for the city’s klezmer and Yiddish musical revival (Waligórska 2013:102–​3). 7 The klezmer drum setup, usually consisting of marching drum with cymbal attached on top. 8 See Rubin (2020:107–​8) for a critique of the limits of this taxonomy.

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Musician’s warning:  inclusion of an augmented second interval may lead to your music being labelled klezmer. Music that functions as klezmer is klezmer. If an eastern European Jewish community needs the lambada at a wedding, then it’s klezmer. (London 2002:209, italics in original)4

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9 The notable exception, forming the bulk of Feldman’s 2002 study, is the Bessarabian bulgarish. 10 Taking place in the Hebrew month of Adar, Purim is a Jewish festival celebrating the Jews of Persia’s deliverance. It incorporates a large amount of performance, drinking (unlike other Jewish festivals), and topsy-​turvy. 11 Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu, based loosely on the eponymous Berdichev violinist—​real name Yosele Drucker—​required footnotes translating the musician’s lingo into Yiddish (Rothstein 2002:24–​26). 12 Although in contrast to “wandering Jew” stereotypes and Fiddler-​esque mythology, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the majority of klezmer musicians were more likely to be urban and settled than rural and nomadic (Rubin and Ottens 2004:296). 13 This, however, does not apply to many of the main areas where klezmorim were active, and indeed the actual amount of dialogue between both musical groups is still a source of debate. See, for example, Silverman (2015:163). Feldman (2010c) suggests: “Combined Jewish and Gypsy ensembles became the rule in Ottoman Moldavia and Russian Bessarabia. In Moldavia, however—​unlike the situation in Hungary and Bohemia—​the Jewish musical element remained strong, often attracting non-​Jewish musicians who performed and composed in a ‘Jewish’ style.” 14 Some klezmer musicians achieved widescale renown, such as Pedotser (Ukraine, 1828–​1902) and Stempenyu (Ukraine, 1822–​79).There were also several popular concert performers of klezmer music, such as Guzikov (Belarus, 1806–​37), the Wolfsthal brothers (Galicia, late nineteenth century), and Yontl Shpilman in Poland. 15 Eastern European Yiddish culture nevertheless continued to thrive in the first three decades of the twentieth century: “Perhaps the shock of the Holocaust has blurred our vision so that we see an Old World destroyed before its time. . . . These men and women carried songs back and forth,

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saw considerable regional variation, the core dance repertoire was surprisingly consistent across many areas of Jewish settlement within Eastern Europe.9 The mainstay of the klezmer musician, often working closely with a badkhn (emcee/​wedding jester), was the wedding—​a celebration that could last up to several days and was structured according to ritual practices and events, many of which required music (Beregovski 2001:11–​13; Feldman 2016, c­ hapter 5). But weddings alone were unlikely to provide adequate income. Klezmorim performed their wide repertoire in taverns, at balls, and in private homes, for Jews and non-​Jews, in towns and cities. They were also called upon to play for Jewish community events such as Purimshpiln.10 Often, like many musicians, they were somewhat at the edges of everyday society; klezmer musicians had their own professional klezmer-​loshn argot (Rothstein 2002),11 and many traveled more and came into contact with a wider range of non-​Jews.12 In particular, dialogue between Jewish and profession Roma lautari musicians fomented an ongoing exchange of styles and forms (Feldman 2002:86), with both groups sometimes dividing up a wide wedding circuit between them.13 As Mark Slobin (2000:68) puts it, klezmorim were “city-​minded musical ambassadors,” transporting tunes back and forth across a large geographical and cultural network, creatively combining “the cozy, gossipy communality of traditional small-​town and emerging big-​city Jewish life.”14 But cozy though things may have been, conditions within the Pale were for the most part characterized by a harsh economic reality and institutional antisemitism. Under Nicholas I (1825–​55), Jews were severely restricted in work, movement, and property. The more liberal stance of Alexander II (1855–​81) encouraged education for younger Jews, but any emancipating effects were cut short after Alexander’s death, with two waves of violent pogroms in 1881–​84 and again in 1903–​6. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus witnessed mass East-​West Jewish migration: to Western Europe, to Australia, to Palestine, and to South America, but overwhelmingly to the goldene medine (golden land) of the United States. From 1881 until the end of open-​door immigration policy in 1924, approximately two and a half million Jews arrived from Eastern Europe.15 A large number settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, although Chicago and Philadelphia also absorbed

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enriching the musical environments of two continents, through the peak decades of immigration” (Slobin 1982:12). 16 Rubin (2001:61–​63) notes that these instruments, in particular clarinet, were already beginning to achieve prominence in nineteenth-​century European kapelyes. 17 Such as the bigger band recordings of Abe Schwartz, while in Philadelphia Harry Kandel’s brassy sound reflected his time spent with John Philip Sousa (Netsky 2015). 18 This was also true of interwar Poland. See Rubin (2019).

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large numbers, becoming the third and fourth largest Jewish communities in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Uprooted from both shtetl and city, forced into cramped slums and sweatshop labor, the new arrivals set about creating communities as best they could. Weddings moved to the catering hall, and where fidl and tsimbl had once dominated the music of the old country, the music’s new metropolitan home and burgeoning jazz age surroundings were reflected by the rise of clarinet and trumpet as principle melodic (and virtuosic) vehicles,16 allied to the “Westernizing” encroachment of the jazz rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums. The greater volume and stronger “presence” of winds and brass also fitted a modern, noisier, decidedly urban soundscape,17 reflecting also the increasing influence of the phonograph (Netsky 2002a:15–​16) and subsequently radio (Kelman 2008). Immigrants banded together to create landsmanshaftn, membership societies based on their town of origin, and Jewish trade unions flourished in an ongoing battle for workers’ rights and acceptable working conditions. Where landsmanshaftn largely promoted a continuation of the European repertoire of their origins (Rubin 2020:52–​54), musicians’ involvement in trade unions (Loeffler 2002) gave rise to accompanying musical changes: an increased politicization of klezmer musicians, new sources of work playing for marches and workers’ parades, and a widening of the repertoire to include Yiddish workers’ songs and Internationalist anthems.18 Some of these changes are still in evidence today with contemporary klezmer musicians’ self-​conscious adoption of partisan or political songs and the creation of a new Yiddishist musicians’ manifesto (Svigals 2002). Although weddings continued to be an important source of income, their shortening from a full day (or even several) to just a few hours, along with the dispensing of many of the accompanying ritual practices, marks a parallel change in the needs and functions of klezmer repertoire. Within an increasingly assimilated environment, the continued penetration of American popular music into klezmer foregrounds a separation between “old” and “new” ways of musicking, specifically the emergence of a younger adaptable, literate musician, able to play in a variety of styles and contexts. Netsky (2002b:57) suggests a changing semantics, between the klezmer (musician) as a “vestige of the Old World” and the newly versatile muziker, who “carried on the klezmer music tradition while distancing himself from klezmorim.” The appearance of printed sheet music such as Nat Kostakowsky’s International Hebrew Wedding Music (1916) and Jack and Joseph Kammen’s dance and concert folios (beginning in 1924) also point to a transformation of processes of transmission from aural to written. Although dynastic kapelye musicians had no need of these books (Rubin 2020:25), they indicate an increased inclusion of non-​klezmer (also non-​Jewish) musicians on the bandstand (Netsky 2015). The ease of moving between musical genres and styles that widespread written music offered marks a change in the klezmer tradition of patrilineal handing down, just as it points to the new Americanized klezmer’s more mobile location

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19 On Yiddish theater, see Heskes (1984). On Yiddish popular music in America, see Slobin (1982). 20 Brandwein was from Przemyslany in Galicia, Tarras from Ternovka (both in present-​day Ukraine). 21 Originally released in 1956 on Epic LN 3219, now available on Sony EK 86320. 22 On music in the pre-​state New Yishuv see Hirshberg (1995). On its role post-​1948, see Regev and Seroussi (2004). 23 See Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett (2002). In fact the decline had begun in the 1930s, paralleling the gradual decline of the landsmanshaftn. 24 This process of incorporation had in fact begun much earlier: by the late 1930s the majority of music played by American klezmorim consisted of American and international repertoire. 25 Klezmer still performs a functional role in some Orthodox communities in America, the United Kingdom, and particularly Israel, where it has developed a small but significant “preservationist” (Rubin 1998b:18) tradition among Orthodox (haredi) Jews. See also Mazor (2000). 26 Notwithstanding the handful of dedicated musicians and singers that had been keeping the Yiddish music flame alive long before the klezmer revival in Germany (see c­ hapter 2).

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on the changing map of popular music, now taking in Yiddish theater,19 dance halls, Broadway, and classical music. This integration can be contextualized with reference to the twin American clarinet colossi of Dave Tarras (1897–​1989) and Naftule Brandwein (1884–​1963), two of the most important figures of twentieth-​century klezmer. Both men were from established klezmer families,20 and both arrived in America as fully formed musicians. However, where Brandwein’s fiery style—​heavily influenced by Galician klezmer violinists—​remained relatively unchanged throughout his career, Tarras (who, unlike Brandwein, could read music) went on to incorporate newly composed and compiled Greco-​Romanian-​influenced dance tunes into his repertoire. And where Brandwein made his last recording in the early 1940s, Tarras recorded the late-​1950s series Freilach in Hi-​Fi and perhaps the most significant pre-​revival jazz/​klezmer recording: Tanz!,21 with his son-​in-​law Sammy Muziker. Assimilation into the American middle classes, a decline in the Yiddish language (Katz 2004), an increased postwar desire to move away from alte heym (“old country”) associations, and a new Jewish focal point of the young state of Israel—​with its attendant new folk music22—​combined from the 1950s onward to push klezmer music largely beneath the level of everyday Jewish consciousness.23 Musicians continued to play, but did so increasingly within the confines of the “Borsht Belt” Catskill vacation retreats, their music incorporating more and more Israeli pop, American rock, or Latin lounge in the process (Sapoznik 1987:14).24 In the 1970s, however, second-​generation American Jewish musicians, contextualized by a post-​1960s identity politics and an increased interest in European folk and dance music (Jacobson 2002), would rediscover and re-​energize klezmer music. Key prewar players were sought out and became mentors to younger musicians (London 2002:209), in line with the growth of a forceful educative network that was to spread the music further and also begin to formalize a range of artistic approaches. Less and less part of Jewish ritual life,25 klezmer music—​now frequently allied with Yiddish song (Wood 2013)—​began to take its place on the world stage, at the same time becoming central to a renewed secular Yiddish awareness. As American artists like the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and Brave Old World—​and also Argentinian-​Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman—​began to tour Europe, local musical interest was swiftly ignited in the United Kingdom, France, and especially Germany (Waligórska 2013; Rubin 2014, 2015a; Eckstaedt 2003).26 At the same time, increased openness to external cultural influences allied with a loosening of anti-​Jewish policy in the former Soviet Union began to create a parallel klezmer constituency much closer to

290  Appendix 1

Klezmer is a typical hybrid system combining the diasporic with a number of sources from the dominant culture in a unique way that resonates for both “ethnic” insiders and larger audiences that pick up on its energy and distinctive sound.

Form, structure, sound A syncretic genre with a wide aesthetic reach, klezmer is difficult to define musically. Melodically, it overlaps with elements of cantorial music, Hasidic nigunim, and Romanian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Near Eastern folk musics (Feldman 2016), often combining several modes within a single tune. Western Ionian (major) and Aeolian (minor) appear regularly (Beregovski 2000:294), along with three modes that are nowadays seen as characteristic of klezmer music: ahava raba (also known among klezmer musicians as freygish),28 misheberakh,29 and adonoi molokh.30 The first two contain an augmented second interval; the third corresponds to the Western mixolydian (figure A1.1).

Figure A1.1  Three common klezmer modes. As with much traditional music, these modes are a resource, not a prescription, and their use is flexible. Each section of a tune may slip between different modes and each treatment of the mode is variable in and of itself, subject to occasional bending and

27 On Yiddish music in the Soviet Union, see Rubin and Ottens (2005) and Wollock (2000). 28 Beregovski (2001:15) calls this scale “altered Phrygian,” in reference to the Western Phrygian flattened supertonic—​though not the characteristic augmented second interval created by the freygish major mediant. 29 Beregovski (2000:549–​67) calls this the “altered Dorian.” 30 These modes (known in Yiddish as shteyger), along with two others, were named by Idelsohn (1944:72–​91) according to the synagogue prayers in which they appear. The names, however, do not reflect actual usage by klezmorim, and indeed the precise link between prayer modes and klezmer melodies remains ambiguous.

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the music’s original homelands.27 The klezmer “revival” has seen a once functional music reimagined across a range of social and cultural contexts, transformed into a music for concerts, festivals, street bands, clubs, bars, and jam sessions. It has also been integrated in varying degrees with a distinctly New York downtown sensibility, through its contribution to the city’s Radical Jewish Culture movement (Barzel 2015). Nevertheless, we might still apply Slobin’s (2000:8) definition:

Appendix 1  291

31 Two examples from Sapoznik and Sokolow (1987): “Ot Azoi” (composer Shloimke Beckerman; Abe Schwartz Orchestra, 1923) and “Baym Rebn’s Sude” (Abe Schwartz Orchestra, 1917). 32 On klezmer and dance steps, see Helen Winkler (2003). On Jewish Eastern European dance, see Feldman (2010a,b, 2016). 33 Also known in some areas as pamelekher (slow) freylekhs, it seems that as a dance, khosidl can refer to improvised solo dancing and also a slower version of the basic freylekhs. On the genre, see Feldman (2016). 34 No traditional dance exists for the terkishe. It is, however, frequently played for modern-​day dancing. Helen Winkler (2003:21) suggests (following dance leader Steve Weintraub) using the steps to a modern Orthodox men’s dance that she calls Yerushalimer Hora. 35 It could also be argued that the hora or zhok is not in 3 at all, but rather consists of a basic two pulse “long-​short” meter. This is reflected in the dance steps, and also in the tendency of some performers to subdivide the hora bar into something closer to five ( ). 36 On the particularities of the Philadelphia sher, see Netsky (2015).

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transgression (helped by the fact that klezmer is almost always played on chromatic instruments). For example, the ahava raba mode alters the sixth degree to a major (rather than flattened) tone when dropping below the octave.31 These melodic materials form the bases for several distinct dance and listening forms (for a full and detailed discussion and analysis see Feldman 2016). Most common is the freylekhs, a lively mid-​to uptempo duple-​meter line or circle dance.32 Also in duple meter, the bulgar has developed certain distinctive melodic characteristics (Feldman 2002), along with a set of dance steps shared with several Balkan forms and the Israeli hora. Although both bulgar and freylekhs are in  or  meter, the freylekhs as it appears in contemporary repertoire is often characterized by a more regular melodic and rhythmical line, often containing smaller repetitive stepwise fragments, whereas bulgars are likely to be made up of larger intervallic leaps and more syncopated phrases, with a greater prominence of triplets and contrasting note durations. In rhythmic accompaniment, bulgars are notable for their underlying 3–​3–​2 quaver pulse ( ), often set against an unsyncopated four-​beat bass pattern to create what Rubin (2015a:214) describes as “interlocking rhythms.” Two slower duple-​meter dances are also common. The khosidl is a slowed-​down freylekhs,33 whereas a terkishe frequently possesses a more sophisticated and complex melodic line, underscored by a choppier version of the “Habanera” rhythm ( ).34 The slow dance known as zhok or hora is klezmer music’s most enduring triple-​meter form (usually written in ). Melodically, it can encompass small repetitive motivic development and also more rhapsodic, romantic lines, and its accompaniment is almost always a pronounced emphasis on beats 1 and 3 ( ).35 The doina is klezmer’s free-​meter fantasy, a structured, semi-​improvised showcase for melody instruments. With its roots in the older form of taksim (Feldman 2002:94), a doina is conventionally structured by repeated melodic motifs and subtly developing patterns, often employing a wide range of ornamentation techniques and decoration. It is accompanied by sustained chords that move within a limited harmonic framework according to melodic cues from the soloist (Beregovski 2001:19). Several forms found frequently in klezmer repertoire are defined more by function than musical structure. The sher is a square dance: its many associated tunes fit the formal group/​couple structures of the dance itself, although several pieces exist that have now come to be associated with the dance and have hence adopted the name “sher” somewhere in their title.36 A skotshne is a mid-​tempo instrumental display piece, often characterized by complex semiquaver passages and fast runs. We might also note the triplet-​heavy sirba,

292  Appendix 1

37 This relationship does not necessarily parallel Western classical music’s progression to or from relative major: a movement from the “major” tonality of ahava raba to the (similarly) major key a minor third above, for example. 38 Beregovski (2001:19) describes klezmer modulation as “uncomplicated but consistent,” with modulations (led by the melody) “always heard very distinctly.” 39 Plural of the Yiddish word dreydl, a four-​sided spinning top played with during Hanukkah (dreyen means “to turn” in Yiddish). 40 Rubin (2020:177) also notes a perceptual distinction, in that almost all terms associated with klezmer ornamentation are “of a sad or lamenting quality.” Thus while many ornaments “may not necessarily be technically different from those present in other cultures, the way they are perceived from within Yiddish culture appears to be different” (my emphasis). 41 Slobin (2000:105) also refers to a parallel term kneytsh (“wrinkle” or “crease” in Weinreich 1977).

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the fast Ukrainian kolomeyke dance, and the various lilting dobry’dens and dobranotchs that traditionally opened and closed celebrations. Notwithstanding all of the above, it is usually worth urging caution when referring to tune names and musical forms. As with many types of traditional music, identical material will often develop different names in different places, be named differently in different printed collections, or be renamed (and therefore symbolically copyrighted) by recording artists. For example, a tune which appears in Kostakowsky as “Freilachs” (2001:93) has been recorded as: “Amerikanskaya” (Belf ’s Rumanian Orchestra, 1912), “Der Galitsyaner Chosid” (Max Leibowitz, 1920) and “Schweir und Schwiger Tanz” (Abe Schwartz, 1920). In Beregovski’s collection, however, it is labelled “Skotshne” (2001:156). Harmonically, klezmer music often uses chord progressions that ground the melody without overshadowing it, or—​in the case of instrumental showpieces—​do not obscure the soloist. Chords often change only at cadence points or are used in passing to reinforce certain melodic lines. More recently (in revival times) the use of harmony as tonal color rather than structural device shows the wider influence of jazz and classical harmonic palettes, although this has also produced something of a “traditionalist” backlash in the form of a return to more static harmony, frequently resulting in interesting melodic/​harmonic clashes. Klezmer tunes tend to be divided into at least two and frequently three or more sections, and it is not uncommon for each of these sections to signal a corresponding harmonic and/​or modal change (Beregovski 2001:19). Movements up or down a minor third,37 up or down a major second, to the subdominant (minor or major), and between minor and major in the same key are all common.38 Klezmer performance practice is also rich in melodic ornamentation (Rubin 1998a:13), known as dreydlekh.39 More than mere decoration, these ornaments are one of the things that gives the music its distinctive voice.40 Here again we encounter discrepancies in terminology. The Yiddish word krekhts (pl. krekhtsn) translates as “moan” or “groan” (Weinreich 1977). In klezmer music, this word is used by some musicians to refer to a general collection of ornaments that imitate a sob or catch in the voice, borrowed from cantorial tradition. Other musicians, however, use the term to indicate a specific and characteristically “klezmer” technique: an échappé grace note of indeterminate higher pitch, which differs from the classical appoggiatura in that it is attached to the preceding note, frequently marking a short gap between this note and the next (hence the “catch” or “sob” effect).41 A similarly idiomatic sound is that of the tshok, a “ ‘bent’ note . . . with a laughlike sound that is more cackle than giggle” (Strom 2012:100). Short slides are common (longer glissandi exist but are rarer), either between pitches or leading up to the opening note of a phrase; longer notes are regularly bent downward (or “squashed” on trumpets) and snapped smartly back up to pitch. Ornamentation techniques are also shared with baroque music, such as rapid trills (between melody note and the scale note above) and mordents.

Appendix 1  293

42 Also, several klezmer “stars”—​most notably Giora Feidman—​have popularized a “solo-​backing” texture that tends to cushion an individual solo melodic instrumental voice within sympathetic but non-​intrusive harmony (see Rubin 2015a:213).

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Today’s ensembles (with a few notable exceptions) mostly feature some combination of the following instruments, though rarely all of them: fiddle, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, accordion, piano, guitar/​banjo/​mandolin, cimbalom, bass/​tuba, and percussion. Some exceptions to this soundworld (such as electric guitar, electronics, or toy piano) are discussed throughout the book. Almost all instruments will perform multiple functions, migrating between melody, high or low counterlines, and accompaniment, although inevitably certain instruments will conventionally gravitate more in one direction than another. Bass parts tend to stay close to root-​fifth patterns, allowing drummers to explore a more syncopated rhythmic palette. Traditional klezmer playing is also notable for what has come to be known as heterophony—​the texture of several related musical voices sounding simultaneously, a group of melodic instruments all playing the same tune but not in exactly the same way (see ­chapter 6). Several scholars cited here note (and some also regret) that the assimilation of klezmer music into the American Jewish mainstream was paralleled by a diminishing in the practice of playing heterophonically.42 One final point needs to be made. Historically, klezmer music and Yiddish song have not always been natural bedfellows—​instrumental klezmer music often functioning in ritual domains such as all-​male wedding kapelyes, and Yiddish song (frequently unaccompanied, often sung by women) rooted in the family, politics, social and working life, or the theater (Beregovski 2000; R. Rubin 2000). However, with klezmer’s arrival in the New World and onto American recordings, and with the increased connections between Yiddish theater and working klezmer musicians, these two musical worlds began increasingly to blur. From the 1970s onward, often driven by the important efforts of singer/​ musicians like Michael Alpert (b. 1954), Lorin Sklamberg (b. 1956), and Adrienne Cooper (1946–​2011), klezmer and Yiddish song have met more and more, largely through the concertizing effect of modern-​day performance. At the same time, the use of the Yiddish language helped frame a more distinct cultural agenda and allowed performers to “engage directly with extramusical issues” (Wood 2007b:374). With both genres somewhat divorced from their functional roots, the social distinctions between these two worlds are now harder to draw—​musical and musicianly connections across both are commonplace. I therefore treat klezmer and Yiddish song in Berlin as one cultural “unit”: the contemporary sociocultural arguments made are frequently relevant to both. However, I make no attempt to link klezmer and Yiddish song through specific formal or musical examples.

APPENDIX 2

Interview Information

Tania Alon (b. 1965) Tania is a Berlin-​born Jew—​one of very few that I encountered as a regular part of the klezmer scene in the city. She is a singer and guitarist, possessed of a gently lyrical style and a quiet self-​confidence. Tania was disarmingly honest about her particular inside-​ outside relationship to Yiddish music in Berlin. We talked at length in the sunshine in a pretty park near Tania’s Steglitz neighborhood on June 16, 2014.

Alan Bern (b. 1955) A relentless dynamo of the German and international klezmer movement for over thirty years, Bloomington-​born Bern remains a hugely influential figure—​through his innovative musical projects (Semer Label Reloaded, the Other Europeans), the legendary Brave Old World quartet, and his cheerful stewardship of Yiddish Summer Weimar. Although I had the opportunity to chat with Alan on many occasions, we only got round to scheduling an official interview—​via Skype—​on the thirteenth of September, 2019. As on previous occasions, I found him a generous and inspirational interlocutor (in this I am very much not alone), whose musical and teaching philosophy continues to influence my own.

Marina Bondas (b. 1979) Marina is a Ukrainian-​born violinist who has been living in Germany since she was a teenager. Alongside her regular orchestra job, she leads the klezmer band Di Meschugeles. In possession of a rigorous classical technique, Marina’s description of the difficulties encountered in adapting this learned musical behavior to the ambiguities of playing klezmer was honest and enlightening. We met at Berlin’s Russian Café Volands on August 18, 2014, where we talked for several hours over beer and prosecco, accompanied by the gently romantic strains of Soviet film music piped through the restaurant’s music system.

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Below is a list of the interviewees represented in this book, as well as the dates and locations of interviews. I have included brief and informal biographical material. Almost all interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Berlin between September 2013 and September 2014, with a couple done more recently while on tour or over Skype. In the body of the text, I  have given the location and date of each interview the first time it appears, thereafter simply listed as “Interview” plus the year. Unless otherwise stated, all material for each informant comes from this same meeting.

296  Appendix 2

Paul Brody (b. 1961)

Tom Dayan (b. 1984) Tom is not a klezmer musician but a composer and a jazz drummer. He is an Israeli musician who has made Berlin his home since 2009. Although he only features tangentially in my study, his opinions on personal authenticity and non-​German Jewish identity were instructive and thought-​provoking. I met him through his partner, accordionist Paula Sell, and we talked for an hour and a half at his home in Pankow on August 12, 2014.

Eli Fabrikant (b. 1982) Eli was born in Riga but moved with his family to Jerusalem when he was four years old. He has been in Berlin for over a decade, building up his group Knoblauch Klezmer Band—​now sadly defunct—​and regularly attending jam sessions and gigs in the city. Avowedly non-​Zionist (unlike his family), Eli retains his left-​wing political convictions and is deeply honest about the ambiguity he feels in his own Jewish identity. He is similarly frank about his personal connection to klezmer and Yiddish music, increasingly immersed in a traditional vocabulary, and at the same time fully connected to the appealingly anarchic performativity of his current home. We met and talked in the sunshine on the edge of the canal in Kreuzberg on June 9, 2014.

Patrick Farrell (b. 1978) Patrick is a Michigan-​born accordion player who has lived and worked in New Orleans, Brooklyn, and now Berlin. He is a sought-​after teacher at American and European klezmer workshops, works regularly with many Berlin-​based singers and instrumentalists, and is widely acknowledged as one of the leading klezmer accordionists on the international stage today. Our interview was conducted over bottomless coffees in a cozy Neukölln cafe bar on March 22, 2014. I also benefitted from Patrick’s generous tuition and general musical insight for a week at 2014’s Yiddish Summer Weimar.

Jossif Gofenberg (b. 1949) Jossif was born in Czernowitz but has lived in Berlin for the past forty years. He is warm, friendly and a passionate advocate for his music. We met early in the morning of August 27, 2014, at the Jewish Gemeindehaus in Charlottenburg and talked for an hour, during which time it became apparent that Jossif knew every single person who went in and out.

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Born in California, Paul has made Berlin his home for nearly thirty years. He is an inventive, eclectic, and deceptively thoughtful musician, honest and funny about his ongoing development (musical and Jewish) and continually on the lookout for interesting things in which to get involved, including regular theatre composition and radio production. Paul’s enthusiasm for his adopted home is infectious, paradoxically matched by his avowedly American West Coast German accent. We talked for a couple of hours while we did a slow bar crawl in his Schöneberg neighborhood on September 2, 2014.

Appendix 2  297

Emil Goldschmidt (b. 1983)

Jan Hermerschmidt (b. 1966) Born and raised in East Germany, Jan is a longtime member of the klezmer band Aufwind. He is also a frequent collaborator with singer Karsten Troyke. Over coffee opposite his studio in Prenzlauer Berg on May 19, 2014, Jan talked with conviction and honesty about his early travels within klezmer music, and also about his band’s curious insider-​outside status today.

Daniel Kahn (b. 1978) Born and raised in the Detroit area and with a background in theater, Dan is one of the driving forces of the Berlin—​and international—​Yiddish music scene. His politics are as sharp as his wit, his capacity for onstage anarchy as compelling as his deep commitment to Yiddish culture. During my time in Berlin (where he moved in 2005 at the suggestion of Alan Bern), it seemed that Dan was somehow involved in everything I looked at. We had in fact met several years before I arrived in Berlin, on a festival stage in the Czech Republic. In Dan’s room in Neukölln on December 6, 2013, amid a jumble of instruments, sheet music, and old gig paraphernalia, he paced rapidly and talked passionately. We finished off the interview with a four-​handed rendition of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low.”

Sveta Kundish (b. 1982) Sveta was born in Ukraine but moved with her family to Israel in 1995. Raised in a secular family, she went on to train as a cantor, leading services in Germany, while at the same time appearing with klezmer and Yiddish musicians across the world. A seeker of new musical pathways, Sveta also puts her classical training to good use in her performance of Yiddish art music with accordionist Patrick Farrell. We met at a bar in Neukölln and talked for a couple of hours on September 5, 2014.

Franka Lampe (1969–​2016) I first met East German accordionist Franka in London in 2006 when we were sharing a bill at the Spitz in Whitechapel. Since then, she redoubled her efforts as one of the busiest klezmer and Balkan musicians in Berlin. A friendly and generous musician, Franka put me forward for several gigs and jobs during my fieldwork year. Like all the musicians here, she was forthright in her opinions and held to her own musical tone of voice with strength

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Emil spent his early years in Germany and then moved with his family to Denmark, where he now lives—​and where he fronts the excellent klezmer band Mames Babegenush. Emil has been closely connected with the Berlin scene for many years and was one of the original members of the Bar Oblomov sessions house trio. He is a superb clarinetist and an all-​ round lovely guy. We became friends at Yiddish Summer Weimar 2014 and then shared a stage several years later at the Copenhagen central synagogue. The material in this book comes from a Skype interview conducted on the sixteenth of September, 2019.

298  Appendix 2 and conviction. We met and talked on what felt like the first spring afternoon of the year, March 4, 2014, in the pretty cafe next to the fountain in Friedrichshain’s Volkspark. Franka’s early death after a long battle with cancer on January 6, 2016, robbed Berlin’s klezmer and Yiddish musicians of a wonderful musician and a good friend to many.

Heiko grew up in Saxony. A  former member of the band Aufwind, he is a veteran of the German Yiddish and klezmer music world. He was also the first German to attend KlezKamp and maintains a friendship with many American musicians. Highly intelligent, Heiko is great company and never short of an opinion. We met for the first time at a bar near Bornholmer Straße, where we drank late into the night, and a few weeks later (on November 26, 2013) for a slightly more formal interview at his ex-​wife’s Weißensee restaurant.

Stefan Litsche (b. 1967) Stefan grew up in East Berlin, where he played clarinet in the same youth orchestra as Aufwind’s Jan Hermerschmidt. We met first at the Klezmerstammtisch and jammed and performed together regularly during my time in Berlin, continuing our musical partnership once I  had returned to the United Kingdom. Stefan is an accomplished software engineer, a charming and gracious human being, and an enlightening conversation partner: rehearsals and post-​gig chats with him frequently embrace political philosophy, fast and slow thinking, biological-​social interfaces, and much more. He is a creative, supportive, a generous musical collaborator, and a very dear friend. Although we talked about klezmer many times during my fieldwork year, we did not schedule a formal interview until several years later, on the third of June, 2019, enjoying the Swiss hospitality of our mutual friend Lenz Hüber.

Sasha Lurje (b. 1985) Riga-​born Sasha is a wonderful singer, a committed researcher, and a warmly inclusive person. Always ready to sing (or dance), she is one of the Berlin klezmer and Yiddish community’s most vibrant forces. I also benefitted from her knowledge and enthusiasm at 2014’s Yiddish Summer Weimar, where Sasha manages to be involved and endlessly charming on all levels simultaneously. We met on a snowy afternoon in a Kreuzberg cafe on the twenty-​first of January, 2014.

Hampus Melin (b. 1979) Raised in Malmö, Sweden, but a Berliner for over a decade, Hampus is one of the coolest musicians I  have ever met. With a straw hat perched permanently on his head and a hand-​rolled cigarette lodged almost permanently in the corner of his mouth, he is funny, polemic, charming, bombastic, and friendly, usually all at the same time. An extremely

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Heiko Lehmann (b. 1963)

Appendix 2  299 groovy drummer (originally jazz, now mostly klezmer), Hampus is also a very political individual—​always interested to listen to someone else’s views, and equally keen to let rip with his own. We talked for several hours over curry, beer, and coffee in Kreuzberg on July 21, 2014.

Sanne is Dutch and settled in Berlin in her early twenties. She is a great musician and a wonderful host, always apparently happy to share her considerable knowledge and experience with good humor and honesty. She is probably the funkiest klezmer accordion player in the world (perhaps the only funky klezmer accordion player in the world?) and is both funny and revealing about the development of her very personal and instantly recognizable groove and style. We met and played music several times throughout 2013 and 2014 at her apartment just off Greifswalder Straße, where a cup of cinnamon coffee seems to be permanently on offer.

Jalda Rebling (b. 1951) Jalda is a singer, cantor, cultural activist, and scholar. She is the daughter of Yiddish singer Lin Jaldati and pianist and musicologist Eberhard Rebling. Jalda has been involved in Jewish music in Germany for much of her life and was one of the early organizers of Berlin’s ongoing Days of Jewish Culture festival. She is highly critical of many recent developments in klezmer and Yiddish music in the city, feeling that they promote an American bias in their historiography and sideline pre-​1980s activity. A charming, generous, and loquacious interviewee, she talked with me for an hour and a half at her Prenzlauer Berg apartment on June 26, 2014.

Fabian Schnedler (b. 1973) Born in Berlin, Fabian studied Jewish and German literature and also trained as an actor. I met him briefly at the same time that I first met Franka Lampe and was immediately impressed by his linguistic dexterity, charm, and obvious intelligence. Since then, he has combined a career in museology at the Jewish Museum with ongoing musical work in some of Berlin’s most interesting Yiddish music groups (Schikker wi Lot, Semer Label Reloaded, Fayvish). He snuck me into the Jewish Museum staff café, where we talked over lunch on August 27, 2014.

Till Schumann (b. 1949) Till was Born in Detmold, West Germany. He cofounded Oriente Musik in 1994, specializing in what the company’s website calls “world chamber music.”1 In that time, he 1 Oriente Musik website, http://​www.oriente.de/​en/​about-​us, accessed September 30, 2019.

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Sanne Möricke (b. 1971)

300  Appendix 2

Paula Sell (b. 1985) Paula was born and raised in Berlin, a young girl when the Wall fell. Well-​traveled and in possession of an adventurous spirit, she hides her considerable talent behind a modesty and continual self-​questioning. Paula retains a very appealing romanticism about her burgeoning musical career (including an all-​female pirate trio), which she admits insulates her from some of her more hard-​bitten older musical colleagues. We spoke for a couple of hours over bottles of beer on the corner of Friedrichshain’s much-​loved Boxhagener Platz on June 24, 2014.

Ilya Shneyveys (b. 1983) Ilya comes from Riga but called Berlin home—​in a manner of speaking—​from 2013 until 2016, when he married cantor Sarah Myerson (KlezKanada built an extended teaching program around their wedding ceremony) and relocated to the United States. An energetic and inventive multi-​instrumentalist, Ilya was the initial leader of the hugely popular and noisily sociable Neukölln Klezmer Sessions (his place has now been taken by the equally adept Patrick Farrell). He is co-​founder, along with Sasha Lurje, of the Yiddish rock band Forshpil, and more recently is central to a number of New York-​based projects. Ilya is also one of the driving forces in the groundbreaking Caravan Orchestra (Weimar/​ Haifa). We met at his temporary flat in Neukölln on December 17, 2013, where he kept me amused, entertained, and stuffed with persimmon from the nearby Turkish market.

Armin Siebert (b. 1973) Armin grew up in East Germany. He initially made contact with me a few years before this project to request a CD of my band, after which we stayed very loosely in touch. Armin is a record producer, band manager, journalist, and DJ, with a keen ear for the developing world music tastes of Europe’s dance floors. We met at his office in Mitte, where I got to gape at his record collection, on June 24, 2014.

Karsten Troyke (b. 1960) Born in East Berlin, Karsten has been a mainstay of European Yiddish music for decades. He is friendly, funny, and modest in equal measure. He also possesses a voice and a talent for languages like few others. We spoke at length in his kitchen on July 20, 2014, while he made omelets for his band and coffee for me and smoked endless cigarettes.

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has put out records by Kroke, Daniel Kahn, Sandra Weigl, Geoff Berner, Karsten Troyke, and many more. He is a regular and passionate supporter of the city’s live klezmer music events (he was at Oblomov from the start) and more recently has been an active contributor to the organization of Shtetl Neukölln. Now officially retired, he is enjoying the company of his grandchildren while in fact working just as hard as ever. We talked over tea and orange juice in Oriente’s office in Steglitz on July 22, 2014.

Appendix 2  301

Carsten Wegener (b. 1967)

Michael Winograd (b. 1982) Born on Long Island, clarinetist and composer Michael Winograd currently lives in Brooklyn. Although we never had an official interview, his musicianship and humor were an integral part of my time at Yiddish Summer Weimar. Much in demand for gigs and weddings with many of America’s finest klezmer musicians, Michael also crops up in Berlin on a regular basis, always seemingly eager to play (and talk). In addition to those listed above, I also carried out lengthy personal interviews with the following people. Although material from these interviews is not reproduced here, I am very grateful for the contribution made to my research. Frank Klaffs (Piranha Music) Wolfgang König (music journalist) Jascha Nemtsov (pianist and academic) Sybille Plappert (amateur Yiddish singer) Uwe Sauerwein (singer and guitarist, Kasbek Ensemble) Daniel Weltlinger (violinist) Jenny Wieneke (accordionist) I am also grateful for more informal conversations with (among many others):  singer Eléonore Biezunski, clarinetist Martin Borbonus, clarinetist Christian Dawid, accordionist Szylvia Czaranko, percussionist Olli Goers, violinist Matthias Groh, bassist Lenz Hüber, pianist Götz Lindenberg, guitarist Neil MacDonald, singer Andrea Pancur, regular audience member Georg Potzies, bar owner Ursula Weigert, and percussionist Attila Wiegand.

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Carsten was born and raised in West Berlin. He is an extremely self-​possessed musician, perhaps helped by the fact that he is also a professional tennis coach. An avid instrument collector and instrument adapter, he has been playing bass in Berlin klezmer bands for nearly thirty years, as well as being a part of iconic Berlin freewheelers 17 Hippies and more recently ?Shmaltz!. We met at his Friedrichshain flat (his own and purely for music—​he also has another flat with his family two floors below) on May 2, 2014.

Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City Phil Alexander https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190064433.001.0001 Published: 2021

Online ISBN: 9780190064464

Print ISBN: 9780190064433

END MATTER

Published: March 2021

Subject: Ethnomusicology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City Phil Alexander https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190064433.001.0001 Published: 2021

Online ISBN: 9780190064464

Print ISBN: 9780190064433

END MATTER

Published: March 2021

Subject: Ethnomusicology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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Index 

Index For the bene t of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number. 17 Hippies 164–65301 a shtim fun harts 263–64 accordion 66115–16122253296297–98299301 as dancer 247–48 in ensemble 5054–55657478128165–66175–76177–78179257–58 jam sessions and 142147–48300 in klezmer 17n.2663–6486156237–38242–44293 Achva record label 194–95210–11 Ackroyd, Peter 67–68 ahava raba mode 257–58290–91 Aizikovitch, Mark 52 Alexanderplatz 13193–94218–19 Alon, Tania 20193222295 Jewish identity of 214215–16219–20 musical background of 214–15 singing at Stolpersteine ceremonies 216–17 views on klezmer 220 Alpen Klezmer 86143–44 Alpert, Michael 3–418nn.28–323365111286293 in Berlin 7–851–52108152 Bronya Sakina and 71 upbringing of 232n.17 at Weimar 250 Altes Palais 274 Anatevka 226–27 antisemitism 1137–39106–7218–19263287–88 Art Ensemble of Chicago 232–33 Ashkenaz 3n.23–4286–87 Ashkenazi Jews 310–1194n.1206–7274–75285286–87 Auschwitz 4–538–39172208n.23218f276 Ausländer, Rosa 82119 Aylward, Michael 196 “Azoy Lang,” 122 Bad Pyrmont 234 badkhn 287 Bakon, Israel 193–94 bal-folk 42101–3103n.15 “Balkan party” scene 42 Bambaataa, Afrika 158–59 bandoneon 50 banjo 507071–72167n.17293 Bar Oblomov  See Neukölln Klezmer Sessions description of 141–42

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in Klezmer Bund logo 111–13

Bear Family Records 197–98200 Becker, Howard 1632–33 Belf’s Romanian Orchestra 62–63241–42291–92 Beregovski, Moshe 62–63111–13280–81285 Berlin “arm, aber sexy,” 188n.43269 borders and 2099147162–63164187222270–71278 bricolage 719–2024–263095–9699103–5150–51154–55181281–82 cabaret 4668–6992–93100n.13113–14165–66166n.15167175–76179196202207–8269–70 changing face of

12–1399n.12103–5145163–64280

courtyards 21–23 gentri cation of 103–5114n.37137144–45 history and 78–91324–2527–2839–4041–42536682–8395–9697101107–8113–14156–57161– 62164170172175183191204–5211216–17218–19222254–55265270271–72280282 memorial in 20–2124106172190193n.1193204–5217221270–72276277–78282–83 multilingualism of 4647101163–65170176–77192–93196209–10 performativity and 2–3624–2592–93179272275296 quiet in 20–21128140–41216–18266–68269–70275277–78 reuni cation and post-reuni cation 5–6295068–6999106144145n.88156–57164175–76204–5221 street music and culture in 5–61321–2324–25519699105–6130144–45175–76265269–70274– 75n.10281–82 Wall 100124–25175300 West Berlin, history of 4–53843–445188–8995–9696n.397n.5124–25128164197–98218–19 Berlin Transit 96n.4197–98 Berlinerisch 165–66167 Berliner Dom 273–74 Berliner Philharmonie 36–3750118–19 Bern, Alan 295 in Berlin 51–5253n.48108229n.9 on dancing 245–46 heterophony and 238–39244–45 musical development of 232–33253 as musical hub 3386199 pedagogy of 58237–40241251–52 Semer Ensemble and 191–92198–99200202204208–9212 Weimar Klingt! 265 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 236–37253–55256263–65266 Yiddish music and 18n.29122230286 on yidishkeyt 254 Bialas-Tenenberg, Sara 3846 Biermann, Wolf 38–39 Bikel, Theodore 85186n.40 Björling, Kurt 58n.57229n.9233–34 Bleibergs 129139n.79 Jewish space and 130–31132 location of 128 music at 128129–30 Bohlman, Philip 6n.6206–7 Bondas, Marina 74184295

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p. 320

Borbonus, Martin 124–25301 Brandwein, Naftule 59n.6162–6390178n.30285286n.6288–89 Brave Old World 3251–52237–38295 “Daybreak,” 71 in uence of 5–657–58176–77229233234289–90 members 229 musical philosophy of 230–31244–45286 workshops of 233–34 Brecht, Bertolt 165170 Bressler, Judy 107–8 bricolage de nition 99n.1199–100 fantasist klezmer and 181182 Neukölln Klezmer Sessions and 150–51154–55 See also Berlin bricolage Brinner, Benjamin 31 British cultural studies 2–31617 Broadway 111226–28235288–89 Brody, Paul 160–61175–76199296 Berlin and 2882 Jewishness and 77–78 klezmer and 76–77 musical development of 76 teaching at Yiddish Summer Weimar 237254256260–62 Bucharest Yiddish Theater 49 “Bulbes” (Karsten Troyke) 46–47 bulgar 77–7896–97 p. 321

characteristics of

291

dancing to 115–16245–46251 rhythm of 245–46 bulgarish 58287n.9 Bundism 111n.30 cabaret (musical style) 38–3945–46165–66175–76196202207 Café Einstein 108 Café Oberwasser 52140283–84 description of 134–35 See also Klezmerstammtisch cantorial music 109–10233 klezmer and 290292 Semer and 194–95196201 Caravan Orchestra 264–65300 Carlebach, Shlomo 214 “carrying stream,” 228 Certeau, Michel de 1624–25146265–66277–78 Charlottenburg 128194n.2197–98296 Cohen, Leonard 46 Cold War 78–997164171173–74187–89269–70 Cooper, Adrienne 18n.283249n.4085111215293 Creative Music Studio 232–33233n.18 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

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Breitkreutz, Frieder 5153–54

ow, concept of 126129–30 Czernowitz 128156n.1196296 dance folk dance 4271n.90101–3150233–34 klezmer and 50536097115–16125–26143248250–51 music (klezmer) 71n.9078n.100180286–87288–90291–92 nights 5–614124–25151–52 in venues 14259–6068–6994114–15127129–30142146 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 236245–48251263–64283 “Das Modell” (Knoblauch Klezmer Band) 179–80 Dawid, Christian 144n.86301 on Berlin klezmer 27–28 musical networks of 3258n.5986–87199237 Shtetl Neukölln and 151–53 Dayan, Tom 89n.127279296 Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Holocaust Memorial) 275276 Di Meschugeles 74184295 diaspora 29191263280–81290 diasporism 209–10 doina 2680–81291 Doors, the 79 dulugu ganalan 244 Duvoux, Arnaud 179 East Berlin 297298300 history of 88–8995–96113–14164193–94269–70 reaction to klezmer 40 theater in 118 Yiddish music in 4–534–3537–3943–4448 Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude 9–10 Eisel, Helmut 91 “Eli, Eli,” 216–17 Epstein Brothers Orchestra 5–6 Epstein, Max 57n.55 “Es iz shoyn shpet” (?Shmaltz!) 98 ethnomusicology de nition of 224n.1 development of 98157–58241280–81 relation to my study 2–316280–81 urban ethnomusicology 6158 Fabrikant, Eli 55–56296 Jewish identity and 183 klezmer and 74180 on Klezmerstammtisch 145–46 Knoblauch Klezmer Band and 69–7075177–79183 Oblomov sessions and 148 Far from Moldova (Paul Brody) 81–82 Farrell, Patrick 55–56143n.84237n.28296 klezmer style of 57

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“Dance Me to the End of Love,” 46

on playing for dancing 248 p. 322

Fassel, Otto

202–3

Feidman, Giora background of 231–32 in Germany 5–639–40205n.19214–15233–34235–36289–90 in uence of 89–9192176–77229235 interview with 230233–34 on klezmer 14–15130 musical philosophy of 230–32 playing style and repertoire of 232–33234–35244245–46251–52293n.43 problems with 136230–32235–36 Feldman, Walter Zev 5n.53348n.3589n.126160–61250254n.56280–81285 Fete de la Musique 2468–69 Fiddler on the Roof 67129–30160n.8226–27235n.24287n.12 eldnotes 2159121135142 my study and 16–17 Fields, Irving 257 “Firn di Mekhutonim Aheym,” 59n.61178n.30 folk dance 71n.90150233–34See also bal-folk folk music American 37169–71 German 13739–4141n.2469–70208 Israeli 289–90 Russian 51148 Folkwiese 101–3125 Forshpil 143–44300 musical style of 79 relation to Yiddish tradition 71n.8878–8182–83 review of album in Forverts 81n.110 See also “Fraytik;” See also “Volekhl” Foster, Stephen 111n.31 Foucault, Michel heterotopia, concept of 276 Frankl, Hai 39n.19 “Fraytik” (Forshpil) 80–81 Freylekhs 2696–97147–48156242–44245–46257–58 form 291 Friedman, Perry 38 Friedrichshain 1321–2223101103–5 Fuchs & Elster 36–37123n.56283–84 Ganovim lider 58–59 Gebirtig, Mordechai 38n.16110n.28 Gershwin, George 158–59 Ghetto (Joshua Sobol) 39–4050231–32 Gleis 17 description of 276 heterotopia and 276–77 silence at 277–78 Glik, Hirsh 38n.1639n.18

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perception of at Yiddish Summer Weimar 89–90235n.26

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 186–87263–64 Gofenberg, Jossif 296 Jewish identity and 129131–32 on klezmer 12n.19130220 musical life 34n.9128–30 Goldschmidt, Emil 55–56117n.41140–41297 Oblomov sessions and 143–44150 on Shtetl Neukölln 151–52154 Goodman, Benny 235 Gorki Studio Я 36–37 description of 119 Klezmer Bund and 119–20121250–51 Gorki Theater 50124–25143163n.12184–85192–93 Berlin and 118–47 Görlitzer Park 168–71175 “Görlitzer Park” (Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird) 171–75 Gottesman, Itzik 81 goy 49210 “Gran Bufet” (?Shmaltz!) 165–67 Granovetter, Mark 1635–36 Gray, Lila Ellen 228n.7 Grinsteins Mischpoche 54–5561n.7162–63 Groh, Matthias 163n.12301 Saytham’s sessions and 35–37134137139–40 p. 323

Grunewald station

171172276277–78

Günther, Anja 59n.63113–14 Gurzhy, Yuriy 113–14116198n.8250–51n.49 Hackesches Hoftheater 5–633–3445505292 Hanukkah 131n.70153292n.39 “Harbstlid” (Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman) 121–22 Harnick, Sheldon 226–27 Hartman, Glenn 115–16 Hasidic 60n.6468n.7978n.10496n.4180254258 Hebdige, Dick 1699–100 Hebrew Union College 233 Hed Arzi 196–97 “Heidenröslein,” 186–87 Henderson, Hamish 228 Hermerschmidt, Jan 144n.86176n.26233–34297298 on Aufwind 48–51 on klezmer boom 52–53 heterophony around the world 242n.37 de nitions of 241244 in klezmer 241–42244–45293 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 238–39241242–44283 Hildebrandt, Bert 54–55 Hinkel, Hans 195

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“Good Old Bad Old Days” (Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird) 175–76

Holocaust 38–40106162n.10193227 commemoration 5–6106n.19221275 e ect of 8–9159–60216287–88n.15 relationship to klezmer 1040–41n.21265–66280 Semer Ensemble and 191–92202204 silence 4–538270276 hora 62–6371–7296–97147–48182 dancing to 116245–46 rhythm of 71n.90173–74291 Hynes, Nina 22 “Ikh vel aykh gebn tsu derklern,” 143 “Im Gasthof zur goldenen Schnecke” (Semer Ensemble) 207–8210–11212–13 imagined community 68265–66266n.72 immigration to United States 3–435193–94286n.6287–88 interculture 191 Berlin klezmer and 2953 Israel, State of 507477–7889111–13136148–50183196–98214264–65289–90 Giora Feidman and 231–32 It’s Klezmer! (You Shouldn’t Know From It) 61–62 Jaldati, Lin 4–538–39229299 jam sessions in Berlin 15–6133087214 in Krakow 60–61 liminality of 133–34 musical identity and 87–88289–90 networks and 2932–3335–3762–63 Shtetl Neukölln and 152 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 257263–64 See also Klezmerstammtisch; See also Neukölln Klezmer Sessions; See also Saytham’s Lounge Jewish community of Berlin 40–41n.21 concerts organised by 88–89 postwar community 219 relation to klezmer in Berlin 88–89109128–29153154 prewar community 106 Jewish Culture Festival (Krakow) 326077–7886n.12186–87 Jewish Museum Berlin 81–8288n.12596n.4299 Semer Ensemble and 192–93197–98199–200 Shtetl Neukölln and 153 Jewish soldiers 203–4208 Jewish space Bar Oblomov and 145150–51154–55 Berlin klezmer and 40–4197105107–8109128130–31281–82 in Europe 106107 Jewish topographies and 107 Klezmer Bund and 116119122–23 virtual Jewish space 40–41106–7182 p. 324

Jewish wedding atmosphere of 59–60128

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Hubay, Jenö 210–11

in Eastern Europe 3287 in immigrant America 3–4288 “Klezmer Bund” and 111 klezmer’s move from 28n.2 music of 125n.61142180 playing for 8891246248 Jews in East Germany 4–534–3537–3988–89 in Eastern Europe 3–437225–26286–88287–88n.15 image of 3940–416786n.120160–61206–7228 New York and 3–588 as Other 10106–7109162n.10190206–7215–16219n.46221228254–55 in West Germany 40–4188–89219 See also Ashkenazi; See also klezmer; See also Semer Records; See also Tania Alon; See also Yiddish; See also Yiddish song; See also Zentralrat Jiddische Lieder (Zupfgeigenhansel) 39 Jidische Vergessene Lieder (Karsten Troyke) 46 Judelman, Craig 55–56 Jüdische Kulturbund 194–95211 Jüdische Kulturtage (Days of Jewish Culture) 40–4184 Jüdisches Gemeindehaus 128–29296 “Kadish (Der yidisher soldat)” (Semer Ensemble) 202–4 Ka ee Burger description of 113–15 history of 113–14283–84 klezmer at 365968–69115–16117–18200250–51 in relation to other venues 36–37119122–23126–27133 Kahn, Daniel Klezmer Bund and 36–37110–13119 music and performance of 47119–20121–22156169–76282–83299–300 musical background of 169297 musical networks of 32333685117–18144 relationship to Berlin 53n.4882–83172175181 Sasha Lurje and 84–85184–87 Semer Ensemble and 199209 on Yiddish music and culture 97109n.24116–17120–21206–7 See also “Görlitzer Park;” See also Klezmer Bund Kaminer, Wladimir 113–14198n.8 Kammen folios 288–89 Kapitel 21 52 Karneval der Kulturen 2468–69 Karpen, Andreas 51–5253–54 Kasbek 137n.78162 background of 4–551–52229 musical style of 53–54 Kasrilevke 226–27 Kettmann, Steve 40–41n.21 khosidl 291 kiez 145n.88152

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in Germany 4–510–1127–2840–414888–89106128–29153213–14219225254–55279–80286–87

Kirstein, Petra 134 Kitaj, R. B. 209–10 Klein, Björn Carel 66–67 KlezKamp 57–5862–6386n.121215225236262263–64298 Germans at 49 name 265 KlezKanada 53n.4857–587886n.121160192–93236250263–64 name 265 wedding at 300 klezmer album covers 160–61 in America 1–23–47–8374877–78224–25228232285n.2288–90293 band names 58–5961–6268n.80162162n.11 boom 5–67–85052–5355–56191224–25229237281 cadence 241–44260–62292 p. 325

cliché in

67–68757689–90160–61179198202206–7228261

de nition and its problems 1887–8891159–60285289–90 East/West reactions to 40 in East Berlin 4–534–3537–394043–5157–59107–8144–45 fantasists 68–7074–75167–68181–82184281 and folk music 2n.114–152440–414250617684–8587–88116–17125130136139148152–53159n.5170– 71187197234–35242284 geographies 3–481–8296–97144152160162–63206–7265280–81287 in Germany 1–24–67–827–283739–424877–7881–828688107–8156176–77215224–26234–35254– 55 history of 3–652–5696–97159–61285–90 instrumentation 3–442–435063–6468–69707481111–13184235241–42246286–87288293 jam sessions  See jam sessions; See Klezmerstammtisch; See Neukölln Klezmer Sessions; See Saytham’s Lounge) kapelyes 396160–61235286–87288–89293 memorial and 2497–98191204–5217221282–83 modernists 57–6692–93281 modes 177–78180257–58290–91 in New York 3–488287–90 non-Jews playing 1–210–1134–35495588–89107–8109131–32201210215224–25280288–89 ornamentation (dreydlekh) 41–42241–42246291292 picnic 5–6150–51 pioneers 43–5292–93191229281284 police 57 revival/revitalization/resurgence 3–45n.57–810–1112n.1818n.2837444858–5987–89156159n.5176– 77190192–93201220–21224–25229265–66280–81285289–90 street music and 96289–90 transformers 75–8192–93281284 transnational community of 14–1534–3553578588150160191206220–21234–35237241–42265–66285 tune names and problems of 53n.49291–92 “uniform,” 227–28 venues  See Bar Oblomov; See Bleibergs; See Café Oberwasser; See Ka ee Burger; See Gorki Studio Я; See Saytham’s Lounge; See Tants in Gartn Eydn)

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Klezmatics, the 5–63257–5871n.88160–61199289–90

versus muziker 288 in West Berlin 4–54051–5288–89107–8128 workshops in Germany 5–639–405357–588690–91176–77219225–26233–34 and Yiddish song 1818n.2837293 See also Yiddish song) Klezmer Bund concerts 33115–16119250–51 logo 111–13 as network 110117–18 venues 113–14118123 See also Gorki Studio Я; See also Ka ee Burger; See also Tsulib Beylen Klezmer Chidesch 34n.9128–29131n.70 Klezmer Conservatory Band 5–651–52107–8233289–90 Klezmer-Gesellschaft e.V. 90–91 Klezmer Schwof 124125129–30 Klezmerstammtisch description of 135–36 history of 134–35 reactions to 136–37145–46 Knoblauch Klezmer Band as fantasists 68181 musical style of 50177–78183 performance style of 69–7075147–48178–79 relationship to Berlin 179 See also “Das Modell” p. 326

Koch, Claudia

50

Korolenko, Psoy 338594110119 Korzybski, Alfred 252 Kostakowsky, Nat 62–64288–89291–92 Kovnatsky, Mark 199 Krause, Stu 54–55 krekhts 63–6474292 Kreuzberg 1399n.12100n.13101103–5144–45170–71194–95 Krims, Adam 1620163–64 Kundish, Sveta 40–4155–56199220n.49297 cantorial career of 41n.23 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 208n.25237254n.55 Labsaal dance hall 124–25 Lampe, Franka 297–98 Bulgarian music and 58 celebration of 284 on klezmer 59 Klezmer Bund and 110117–18 musical background of 4957–59176n.26237 musical networks of 3236–37113–14134–35 See also Klezmerstammtisch landsmanshaftn 288289n.23 Langer, Hans 48–49 La’om 4958–59107–8134n.73141225 lautari 3287 Lavenda, Pinchus 202–3209n.27 Lehmann, Heiko 34–354049176n.26298

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“Klezmer Bund” (Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird) 110–13

“Levunesca” (?Shmaltz!) 70–72 Lewin, Hirsch in Berlin 193–94211 in Palestine 196–97 Lewin, Moritz in America 196–97 in Berlin 194–95 Lewin, Zev 196–97198 Lewinsky, Charles 9–10 Lichtenbaum, Avrom 120–21 Life is with People 227 Lindenberg, Götz 46301 Litsche, Stefan 298 on jam sessions 134n.73137 on KlezKamp 225–26 on klezmer in Berlin 137141 on workshops 233–34 Livingston, Tamara 44229 Ljuti Hora 284 Lotz, Rainer 197–98 Lower Saxony 41n.23197–98 Lübars 124–25129–30 Lubavitcher 226n.3 Lukraphon 94n.1194–96197–98207–8210–11 Lurje, Sasha 298 on Berlin 177 Daniel Kahn and 84–85119184–86 Forshpil and 7881 on identity 84145 musical background and performance 115–16122220n.49223 musical networks of 60n.6686 Semer Ensemble and 199210–11 Shtetl Neukölln and 151–52153 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 237250254 Lyons, Chris 70n.83177–78179 Maiblatt, Beer 194–95 Maison Courage.  See Saytham’s Lounge Malwonia 167 and Berlin 168169 language of 167n.17 relationship to klezmer 167–68181 Mames Babegenush 143–44162n.11297 Mandelson, Ben 36 Maquin, Samuel 60n.6663–64 Marek, Pan 128–29 “Margaritkelekh,” Daniel Kahn and Sasha Lurje 184–87 Karsten Troyke 45–46

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“Leybke fort keyn Amerike” (Semer Ensemble) 209210–11

Marx, Karl 156279 Mauerpark bricolage and 101 description of 100 music in 5–624101–3125 Sunday afternoon in 100–1 Melin, Hampus 298–99 on Berlin 30144 p. 327

klezmer and

12n.1955–5661173–74

musical networks of 36143–44151–52 on Oblomov sessions 146–47 See also Neukölln Klezmer Sessions; See also You Shouldn’t Know from It Mende, Claudia 71–72 Merriam tripartite model 157–58 Meyering, Wolfgang 41n.24 micromusics (Mark Slobin) 19–2029 Miller, Eugen 128–29 misheberakh (mode) 180257–58290 Mittelhochdeutsch 4–5 Modern Klezmer Quartet 58–59 Möricke, Sanne 299 accordion playing of 63–6465 klezmer and 57234246 musical networks of 3258n.5960n.6686–87 Morton, Frances 133 Müller, Christian 51 musical networks description 19–2031–3385–86133281 gatekeepers 36–37 hubs 33–35 See also weak ties Music of Yiddish Blessings and Curses, the (Paul Brody) 81–82 music revivals 4448229 See also klezmer revival Musikantenstadl 208 “My Yiddishe Mama,” 131–32 National Socialism 265269–70 Netsky, Hankus 3–4285 Neue Synagogue, Oranienburger Straße 191221273 Neukölln 114103–5114n.37142–45152 Neukölln Klezmer Sessions description of 1141–43150 development of 134146–47 Jewish space and 145–46150–51281–82 klezmer music and 147–48 participant responses to 145–46148–50 personnel 143–44300 relationship to Berlin 94141144–45 “New Old Europe Sound,” 117181 Berlin klezmer and 182–84 New York

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musical background 60–61

contemporary klezmer scene 289–90 di erences to Berlin klezmer 4–588 Jewish migration to 3–4287–88 klezmer history of 3–489n.126287–90 Night of the Singing Balconies, the description 21–22 urban space and 23–24 Nigun(im) 78109–10150180290 at Yiddish Summer Weimar 239249–50 “Odessa Bulgarish” (Grinsteins Mischpoche) 54–55 Ohring, Isaac 242–44257–58 Orientalism 106–7 Oriente Musik 3645299–300 Orlowsky, David 90235 ostPost 22 Other Europeans 81–82237–38295 othermusic e.V. 236264–65 Oy Division 3385 Pale of Settlement 396–9796n.2286–87 Pancur, Andrea 86121–22301 participatory music 125–26127 Pegelow, Detlef 54–55164–65 ?Shmaltz! and 71182 philosemitism 37–3867–68106–7 Piaf, Edith 159 Piazzolla, Astor 245n.42 Pinto, Diana 106–7 Plato Papers, The 67–68 pogroms 3–4128–29218–19287–88 Polyakovska, Mila 34–35 postmodern 76167 Potzies, Georg 139n.79301 Prenzlauer Berg 49 gentri cation of 144n.87 and klezmer music 134137 radicalism 100n.13113–14 relation to current scene 132144–45 prewar Jewish recordings 196 Pukwana, Dudu 158–59 p. 328

Räfven

117

Rebling, Eberhard 4–538–39299 Rebling, Jalda 229299 on American musicians in Germany 220235n.25 on German klezmer musicians 12n.1934–35109 on Jews in Germany 10219n.46 Tage der jiddischen Kultur and 34–35 reggae 100142161–62 Reich Chamber of Literature 194

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“Odessa Bulgar” (Kasbek) 53–54

Reich Chamber of Music 194 Reich, Hardy 50 Reichskristallnacht pogrom 193–94218–19265271272 Rescued Treasure (Semer Ensemble) 36199211 Robitschek, Kurt 202–3 Rohde, Andreas 50 Rohland, Peter 4–539229 Roma music 81–82116n.39176n.24 Jewish music and 161–62182190287 Rosen, Willy 207–8 Rotfront 116–17 Rovatkay, Adrian 71–72 Rubin, Joel 86 Brave Old World and 58n.57 in Germany 51–52108229n.9254n.56 klezmer and 3–49–1033245–46280–81285 “Volekhl,” 79 “Rumanian Hora” (You Shouldn’t Know From It) 62–64 Russendisko 113–14198–99 Sakina, Bronya 71 Sapoznik, Henry 3–449n.40 Sauerwein, Uwe 5153–54109n.24301 Saytham’s Lounge description of 137–39 locations of 137n.78 as network 35–37139–40284 Schaechter-Gottesman, Beyle 65119121–22 Schalom, Guy 86250 Schechter, Gregori 16n.24160n.9 Sche

er, Karl 7n.9154

Scheunenviertel district 33–3496–97128–29193–94196197–98 Schikker wi Lot 58n.5965299 Schlager 168169208 Schnedler, Fabian 32109n.24299 Jewish Museum Berlin and 197–98200 musical background of 65200 relationship to Yiddish culture 14n.22201202209–10227–28 Semer Ensemble and 198–99202–4205207 Yiddish song and 4758–5965–66 Schudack, Thomas 54–55 Schumann, Till 36151–52299–300 on Berlin klezmer 94144148–50 Schweigeweg 274–75 description of 272–74 Seidemann, Burkhart 34n.945 Selhorn, Josh 43–44 Sell, Paula 59n.63165–66296300 Semer Ensemble (formerly Semer Label Reloaded)

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Römer, Thomas 124–25

background to 191–93197–99 Holocaust and 204–5 Jewish music and 201–2 personnel 199212–13 promotional discourse 210–11 relationship to Berlin 206–7209–10 repertoire of 200–1202210–11 See also Alan Bern; See also Fabian Schnedler; See also “Im Gasthof zur goldenen Schnecke;” See also “Kadish (Der yidisher soldat);” See also “Leybke fort keyn Amerike;” See also Rescued Treasure history and development of 193–95196–97 prewar Berlin and 196 repertoire of 94n.1194–95196 “Shalom Aleichem,” 274 Shantel 42116–17 Shepherd, Merlin 227–28242257–58 sher 291–92 Sher on a Shier 58n.59 performance 59–60115–16 personnel 59n.6386n.122 ?Shmaltz! Malwonia and 167–68181 p. 329

musical style of

69–70

name 164n.13 “New Old Europe Sound” and 182 personnel 68137n.78164–65301 See also “Gran Bufet;” See also “Levunesca;” See also “Viva la Malwonia!” Shneyveys, Ilya 2755–56121–22300 Alpen Klezmer and 86 on Berlin klezmer 87132250–51 on dancing and accordions 246–48 Forshpil and 7879 on Jewish identity and music 109–10 musical networks of 35143–44237264–65 as session leader 147–48 Shnirele Perele 60 Sholem Aleichem 67160n.8226–27287n.11 Shostakovich, Dmitri 58–59 shtetl 3 image of 68152160–61181190198–99 immigrant Jews’ relationship to 227–28 Shtetl Neukölln 5–614250–51281–82 development of 151–52153–54299–300 name 152 philosophy of 151152–53 relationship to Jewish community 153 venue 152 Shulman-Ment, Jake 85173–74 Siebert, Armin 42–43156300

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Semer Records

signifying practice (music) 916 Silbereisen, Florian 208 Simmel, Georg 275 Singer, Kurt 195 Sklamberg, Lorin 86111 Semer Ensemble and 199201202–3211 Yiddish song and 18n.28293 skotshne 291–92 Sobol, Joshua 39–4050231–32 “Sog nischt kejnmol” (Zog nit keynmol) 39 Soko, Robert 42116n.39 Sokolow, Pete 111 Sousa, John Philip 111n.31288n.17 Stolpersteine 172193216–18265 Stone Roses, the 159 Strangelovesongs (Daniel Kahn and Sasha Lurje) 184–85 Stransky, Otto 202–3 subculture Berlin klezmer as 29424457–5893 bricolage and 99–100 superculture 2940–41448493 Suzanna 46 Sverdlov, Igor 128–29 Syrena Records 194–95196 Szenes, Hannah 217n.42 Tage der jiddischen Kultur (Yiddish Culture Days) 34–3541n.224548n.365052 tango 74158–59198n.5233235245n.42 Yiddish tango 46n.30196202–3 Tants in Gartn Eydn description of 124–25126133 perceptions of 126–27 philosophy of 124250–51 relationship to wider Jewish culture 125–26 Tantshoys 151–52250–51 Tarras, Dave versus Brandwein 288–89 bulgar and 78n.100251 in uence of 62–6390285 Zev Feldman and 48n.3589n.126 Tempelhof 150–51 terkishe 148291 Tevye 226–27 “The Tongue” (Merlin Shepherd) 257–58 Timmermann, Harry 92235 toy piano 7071–72166172293 Toyt fun a seylsman (Death of a Salesman) 85 Treptower Park 24171172190 Trio Scho 46

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Socalled 198–99

Troyke, Karsten 4–5300 linguistic versatility of 46–47 musical background of 38–3943–44 musical networks of 364586152297299–300 performance style of 45–46 repertoire of 46156 on Yiddish music in Berlin 34–3544–4555 p. 330

“Tsesheydung nigun” (Mark Kovnatsky)

257–58

tshok 292 Tsulib Beylen description of 121–22 and Jewish identity 122–23 Tuttle, Michael 60n.66173–74 Un as der Rebbe singt: Jiddische Lieder (Peter Rohland) 39 uno

cial space de nition of 105–6 jam sessions and 147 klezmer and 118–19133 o

cial and 96281–82

urban ethos de nition of 20163280 of Berlin 82163–64175178187–89 Valentine, Ginny 105n.18 Verfremdungsklezmer 170 virtual Judaism 11n.1740–41106–7 “Viva la Malwonia!” (?Shmaltz!) 168–69 Voices of Ashkenaz 40–41208n.25 “Volekhl” (Forshpil) 79 “Volekhl” (Joel Rubin) 79 “Vorbei” (Semer Ensemble) 193198n.5204–5210–11 Vorbei: Beyond Recall 197–98 WABE 4549233–34 Waletzky, Josh 121 Wandering Jew 160–61n.9287n.12 Wang, Sara 54–55 Warsaw Yiddish Theater 49 Warschauerstraße 1321–22 Watts, Elaine Ho man 60 weak ties de nition of 35–36 jam sessions and 133139–40237 Klezmer Bund and 117–18 Wegener, Carsten 301 on Malwonia 167–68 on music 18n.2741n.24165182 musical background of 164–65234 on ?Shmaltz! 70 Tants in Gartn Eydn and 124126

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tsimbl 65288

Weigert, Ursula 36–37134–35301 Weimann, Robert 105–6 Weimar klingt! 265 Weimar, city of 236263–64265 Weimar Republic and Yiddish culture 4–511n.16264–65 Weintraub, Steve 250291n.34 Weißgerber, Andreas 210–11 Weltlinger, Daniel 86301 Werkstatt der Kulturen 152 Wieneke, Jenny 134301 Wings of Desire 164 Winograd, Michael 301 musical networks of 85152248n.46 teaching at Yiddish Summer Weimar 242–44251256–60 tradition and 160–61262 “Yesli U Vas,” 143 Yiddish Art Trio 248 Yiddish culture in Germany 4–54894n.196–97152196206–7227254–55280 See also Tage der jiddischen Kultur; See also Yiddish Summer Weimar “Yiddish-land,” 67–68161–62220281 Yiddish language Aufwind and 48–49 Daniel Kahn and 84–85169 decline of 232289–90 with other languages 4794184–85202–3204 in Paul Brody’s work 81–82 “postvernacular,” 160 shared roots of 4–541–42206–7 ?Shmaltz! and 167–68 Yiddish Summer Weimar and 236 Yiddish song Berlin klezmer and 1819151–52170–71220 cliché and 67–6876 in East Germany 4–537–384043–44 German pronunciation and 39 Germany and 33–343741–424594n.1187 history of 18n.28207n.21293 instrumental accompaniment 4678 marches and hymns in 111–13 p. 331

modern link with klezmer

4n.418n.28289–90293

prewar recordings of 196 See also Semer Records) in West Germany 4–53951 See also Aufwind; See also Daniel Kahn; See also Lin Jaldati; See also Sasha Lurje; See also Fabian Schnedler; See also Semer Ensemble; See also ?Shmaltz!; See also Karsten Troyke; See also “Yiddish-land” Yiddish Summer Weimar 20–21 Berlin and 32237 dancing at 245–46251–52 history of 51–52236

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Wiegand, Attila 54–55301

name 265 network connections of 333571199 nigunim at 249–50 organisation of 239–41 philosophy of 238–39252–53 relationship to the wider world 263–65 responses to 223238n.30254–56 teaching at 228256–62296298 tradition and 160224253–54262–63283 See also accordion: as dancer; See also Alan Bern; See also Paul

yidishkeyt 160235n.25253–54 YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) 4888–8994n.1207n.21 Yoshida, Sayumi 250 You Shouldn’t Know from It approach to klezmer 60–61115–16 “It’s Klezmer!” album cover 61–62 musical style of 5062–64 Yusipey, Roman 66n.77 Zeller, Vivien 41n.24 Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) 88–89153 Zhuk, Vanya 85110 Zionism 89183201202296 Zupfgeigenhansel 4–550229 Jiddische Lieder 39 Zwischen Welten duo project 66–6768n.79

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Brody; See also heterophony; See also Michael Winograd Yiddpop (Fayvish) 65