Yiddish Book Center
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פֿרישע נײַעס Now
Make the Universal Yiddish Library a Reality
Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music
Jewish Neighborhoods Series: Mexico City
UP NEXT | TALK | There and Back Again: Jacob Glatstein's Voyage Home | Thursday, June 1 @ 7 pm ET
The Shmooze | A Life in Yiddish Translation
Donor Profile: Joan A. Larsen
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Focus On Jacob Glatstein
In her 1969 story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick portrayed two Yiddish writers: Yankel Ostrover, whose short stories have become successful in English translation, and Hershl Edelshtein, an untranslated poet who stews with envy and resentment over Ostrover’s success. Rumor has it that the characters were based on the real-life Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jacob Glatstein, although Ozick has always denied this. What is true, though, is that Glatstein deserves a wider audience. Glatstein was primarily a poet, but if you’re looking for an introduction to his work you could pick up The Glatstein Chronicles, a pair of autobiographical novellas recently republished by the Center’s White Goat Press. (Our Great Jewish Books Club is currently reading it, and it’s not too late to join!) You can also sign up for a talk on June 1 about the book and Glatstein’s trajectory as a thinker and writer. If you’re looking for something right now, though, read on.
אויסגעקליבן Handpicked Seth Rogovoy
Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Seth Rogovoy, the founding artistic director of the Yiddish Book Center’s annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music.
Yidstock Musicians: Selected Oral Histories
I love this page of excerpts from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, as it serves as an anthology featuring some of the most popular performers of Yidstock, past and present. Included here are native-born Yiddish speaker Eleanor Reissa, talking about thinking and working in Yiddish and English; trumpeter and composer Frank London, a cofounder of The Klezmatics, speaking frankly about his early, unsatisfying experiences hearing Jewish music; Hankus Netsky reminiscing about listening to old Yiddish 78s in a Philadelphia attic with his Uncle Sam; Lorin Sklamberg about how he found his way from political folk music to Yiddish music and cofounding The Klezmatics; and clarinetist Michael Winograd, one of the leading Yiddish music innovators of “the younger generation.”
40 Years in Yiddishland: A Q&A with Hankus Netsky
The Klezmer Conservatory Band was one of the most important and influential groups in the first generation of the klezmer revival. Founded in Boston by Hankus Netsky the same year Aaron Lansky founded the Yiddish Book Center, the KCB brought klezmer and Yiddish theater and folk music to the airwaves and concert stages at a time when the music, like the Yiddish language itself, was thought to be a relic of the past. But through Hankus’s determined vision and relentless efforts, the genre quickly gained newfound respect as a music deserving not only of revival but of study and innovation. Over the decades, Hankus’s classes at the New England Conservatory and the ranks of the KCB produced several generations of musicians who went on to form their own groups exploring the rich tradition of Yiddish music and updating it to make it speak the language or accent of our time.
Teaching The Klezmatics with Adrienne Cooper
In this short excerpt from a larger interview, the late Adrienne Cooper—who was an essential part of the Yiddish and klezmer revival as a teacher, administrator, and performer—talks about cultural transmission. Specifically, she recounts teaching in YIVO’s summer program while simultaneously learning songs such as “Ale Brider” and “Shnirele Perele” and then teaching them to aspiring musicians, including Lorin Sklamberg and Alicia Svigals, two of the founding members of The Klezmatics. Both songs went on to become Klezmatics’ staples.
Why You Won’t Hear Me Singing about the Old Country
Speaking of The Klezmatics, in this wonderful interview, singer Lorin Sklamberg discusses how the group members decide on what to include in their repertoire. The word “authenticity” gets bandied about a lot in discussions of klezmer and Yiddish music, and Lorin explains how the most important aspect of authenticity for him and his bandmates is not about re-creating an old sound but rather choosing songs, whether old or new, that reflect the musicians’ concerns—songs that speak to the musicians’ themselves and, by extension, to contemporary audiences.
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