June 2023: Handpicked

Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a special 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.

Seth Rogovoy wears glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat, black and white illustration

Seth Rogovoy, the founding artistic director of the Yiddish Book Center’s annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music, is also the author of The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin, 2000), Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009), and Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He is a contributing editor at the English-language news magazine the Forward, where his writing has appeared since 1990. Seth’s writing has also appeared in dozens of other publications, including Haaretz (Israel), Jewish Quarterly (UK), Jewish Press (UK), Tablet, Moment, Berkshire Living, the Berkshire Eagle, and the Yiddish Book Center’s print magazine, Pakn Treger. Seth received a 2016 Simon Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for excellence in arts and criticism for his portrait of musician Leonard Cohen, published in Hadassah Magazine in its April/May 2015 issue. You can also read Seth’s work in his weekly Substack column, Everything Is Broken. Seth lives in Hudson, N.Y. 

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.” 

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: Lorin Sklamberg on The Klezmatics’ Repertoire 

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.  

40 Years in Yiddishland: The Yiddish Book Center Celebrates the Klezmer Conservatory Band: 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.  

But Is It Klezmer? Rock, Jazz, Punk, Hip-hop, and Techno Bring New Sounds to the Jewish Mix by Seth Rogovoy 

Not to be self-serving and plug my own work, but I selected this article I wrote for Pakn Treger back in summer 2011 because it deals with so many of the issues and concerns addressed by all the aforementioned interviews. My takeoff point is a discussion of an album called Tweet Tweet by the group Abraham Inc., a collaborative effort by clarinetist David Krakauer; keyboardist, vocalist, and beat maker Josh Dolgin aka Socalled; and Fred Wesley, the legendary African American jazz trombonist best known for his work with funk luminaries, including James Brown and George Clinton. Some may listen to Tweet Tweet and argue that it is not klezmer. I disagree. Not only is it klezmer; it is part and parcel of the klezmer tradition, because klezmer has always spoken in the idiom of its time and place. In a sense, the article serves as a manifesto for what Yidstock is all about. 

Q&A

Tell us about your selections and what they say about your relationship with Yiddish language and culture. 

I grew up with a strong awareness that I am descended from the same family as the great Yiddish author Y. L. Peretz—Peretz is my maternal grandfather’s name. The house in which I grew up and all my Peretz relatives’ houses contained voluminous collections of Peretz’s work, all of which I gobbled up insatiably (albeit in translation). My Peretz grandfather was also an Eastern European–bred khazn, or cantor, and he was always singing around the house, which I loved. (Family lore has it that before I could even speak, I sang along with him.) I also grew up with a great passion for the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In hindsight, it is no surprise therefore that the work of artists such as The Klezmatics, David Krakauer, Alicia Svigals, the KCB, and Socalled spoke so deeply to me and touched my soul, as the seeds were already planted in some obvious ways and in some less obvious, almost mystical ways. My participation in the annual Yidstock festival is a culmination of all this; it has been such a joy and privilege to be able to curate and share my enthusiasms by presenting so many of the greatest musicians from around the world working in Yiddish music, and especially in being able to support the most forward-thinking, creative artists in the field. 

What are you working on next? 

I stumbled upon the real-life story of Elyokum Zunser, a 19th-century badkhn (wedding poet) and Yiddish singer-songwriter from Lithuania, while researching my book The Essential Klezmer. Ever since then I have been fascinated by Zunser and his essential role in the development of Yiddish protest songs. I am also struck by the significant parallels between Zunser and some of the Jewish folk-protest singer-songwriters of the 1960s. I have long been working on a creative project based on Zunser’s life and work that explores those parallels and how they resonate until this day.