PETE RUSHEFSKY ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: So, this is Christa Whitney and today is April 10th, 2018. I am here in New York City with Pete Rushefsky. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History project. Do I have your permission to record?

PETE RUSHEFSKY: Absolutely.

CW: Great. So, I want to ask first, do you know where your name comes from?

PR: My name Pete Rushefsky? (laughs) Which part of my name? The first name or the last name?

CW: Well, both. I'm curious.

PR: Okay. Well, the Rushefsky family comes from a little shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community] named Kamenets-Litovsk, which is about thirty miles northwest of Brisk, which is Brest-Litovsk, which is a big city on 1:00the Bug River, which forms the border between White Russia and Poland. And it's sort of been an interesting border town for many years. So, my grandmother, who is a Rom, R-o-m, she came from Brisk. And my grandfather Sam Rushefsky came from this little shtetl, Kamenets-Litovsk, which is also this little -- I guess a tributary of the Bug, which is called the Lesna River. And he actually came from this little village -- it's sort of the suburb of Kamenets-Litovsk. We called it Zastavye. That's what he called it. So, sometimes I've seen it in yizkor books as Zamostavye and things like that. So, it was right across the Bug River -- I'm sorry, the Lesna River -- from Kamenets-Litovsk. And my grandparents actually met -- they met in New York. I mean, they were both refugees from World War I, 2:00basically. But they met at a landsman [fellow countryman] society meeting for -- it was the Kamenets society and the Kamenets landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally from the same region] would have parties and different things going on. So, that's actually where they met. They met at a dance, a Kamenets landsman's dance.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW: So, do you have a sense of what life was like for your grandparents when they were kids there?

PR: Well, it was -- tough lives. My grandfather was one of about eighteen children. Now, a few of them died very young and I actually visited the shtetl back, I guess, in the 1990s. So, actually, I mean, he gave me directions right to his house, so I actually found the old family homestead in the Old Country.

CW: And it was still there?

PR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CW: What did it look like?

PR: This beautiful sort of White Russian, Belarusian wooden architecture. In a 3:00way, sort of similar in style to some of the wooden synagogue-- that are sort of so famous from that region. And you could sort of see how that translated in sort of a scaled-down version to domestic architecture. Very beautiful. Now, I don't know exactly if that was the same house, but it was basically the plot. So, unfortunately, my grandfather, by the time I could bring back the pictures of the visit, he had really lost most of his sight. So, he could sort of make out the forest that he remembers cutting wood in in the back. He was the son of a blacksmith, a shmid. And he was put to work very young. I mean, probably ten, eleven, twelve, he started working, helping his father out in the blacksmith business. And later on, when he came to New York and settled in Brooklyn, that was his business -- was he was in -- blacksmithing carried on. Now, he wasn't 4:00making horseshoes or anything. But if you go around the city and you see a lot of the metal railings on various older buildings and things like that, that's what his business was. So, he actually had a company that would make those, fabricate those things, bend the iron. It was called Bedford Iron Works, and they've built some subway stations and things like that. So, that tradition carried on and my father growing up would spend time working in the shop in Brooklyn, growing up.

CW: Do you have any stories from your grandmother?

PR: Yeah. I mean, there's some wonderful stories from my grandma. And my grandmother's -- her mother was a baker and she was very close with some of her sisters. One of her sisters was a pretty well-known -- and this is in Brisk, the town of Menachem Begin, who was kind of the most famous Brisker, probably. Then 5:00there was also a very famous yeshiva there. And so, she would talk about how her mother would make challahs for Shabbos and distribute it to families who would be taking in yeshiva students. So, the yeshive-bokhers [yeshiva students] would be staying at private homes and they would bring challahs over for Shabbos so that everybody who was putting up a yeshive-bokher could have a challah for Shabbos and things like that. And I guess they had a bagel bakery, so they would make bagels. And her sister -- I'm sorry, my grandmother's sister was kind of prominent in the community. She was called a social worker. That's how my grandmother would describe her. I'm not exactly sure what a social worker meant, but what I took it to mean was she was very involved in sort of different community initiatives and things like that, making things better for people. But 6:00both my grandfather and my grandmother had really awful stories of the war, the destruction of the war. My grandfather recalled being in his -- I think looking out the window and having a younger -- I don't know if it was a younger sister or brother, an infant dying his arms as he watched bombers overhead, flying overhead. And my grandmother -- they sort of had to be pretty cagey, 'cause it seemed like every month or so, a new army would take control of Brisk with a different language and things like that and they'd have to sort of be able to negotiate a way to survive and continue to make a living as the new army came in. So, at some point, this just, on both sides, became untenable. And so, both my grandparents emigrated. And my grandmother has a great tale of -- she'd actually never met her father because he had come to America to make money to 7:00bring the family over. And there's a story, and I'll give you the link, it's on the internet. My sister and brother-in-law made a beautiful little documentary, interview of my grandmother telling stories like this. And she recalled coming in through Ellis Island. And then, I guess after being processed, her mother told her, "Oh, there's your father!" And she saw these two men: one was very well-dressed and the other not so well-dressed. And so, she kind of hoped it was the well-dressed man -- was her father. But actually, it was the other man. So, she started out a little bit -- I guess her first impression of New York was that little disappointment. But she was also very proud. She came to New York not knowing any English and was -- very rapidly learned the language and accelerated through school and things like that. Ended up working for, actually, 8:00a coffee company: the Turkish-American coffee company, which I'd love to find some information about. And I guess it was a Greek-run business. And she was well-liked. Originally, they thought she was -- her name was Rom and her first name was Bella. So, Bella Rom, I mean, it sounds like a great sort of stereotypical Italian name. Bella Rom, no? Beautiful Rome. But so, I think that sort of gave her a little bit more of an entrée into some of that world of New York than if she had a very Jewish-sounding name, I suppose. But she was well-liked in the company. She did a good job keeping the books and she was well-respected and they would invite her to family weddings and things like some Greek weddings. So, I have these great thoughts about my grandmother dancing Greek dances in New York in the 1920s and things like that and being a part of 9:00this interesting stew of culture in New York City.

CW: And so, where did you grow up?

PR: So, I grew up in Rochester, New York. My father grew up in Brooklyn and my mother grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. My mother's family was from, I guess, one more generation removed. My great-grandparents on my mother's side had all emigrated from Ukraine. And my mother grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, so they met -- my father was a patent attorney, is a patent attorney. So, he was working for the US Patent Department in Washington and they met in Silver Spring. And my father then got a job for Kodak, Eastman Kodak. Remember them? Used to be a very, very big company. And so, that's how I ended up being born in Rochester, New York, where my father worked for almost forty years. And I grew up there in a suburb, Brighton, which is probably about half Jewish and half 10:00Irish and half a smattering of other ethnic groups, things like that.

CW: And do you know much about your maternal side and life in Ukraine or stories?

PR: I don't, really. It was more -- like I said, it was one more generation removed. So, I mean, I knew both my great-grandmothers. But I really didn't get to talk too much with them about what the Old Country was like, whereas with my grandparents, that was a common -- so I'd be asking them all about the Old Country all the time. And I was one of those weird kids, like at the family simchas, the family celebrations, I preferred to sit with my grandparents and all their generation rather than my generation. My cousins were running all around at bar mitzvahs and things like that -- because I kept on wanting to hear all these old stories and things like that.

CW: And so, can you describe a little bit about your home in Rochester, where you grew up?

PR: Yeah, it was, I guess, a very typical suburban home at the end of a street, intersection with another street, and it was very close to our school. There was sort of a campus that had the elementary school, the middle school, and the high school and we could just walk there every day. And Rochester's a very -- it's a tight-knit Jewish community, a pretty good size, and with employers like Xerox, Kodak, University of Rochester and some of the medical centers there. It attracted a lot of Jews, particularly from the New York area. So, I think a lot of my parents' friends who were involved in the synagogues and they were social with -- at least from the Jewish community -- most of them, I think, had emigrated -- migrated from New York at some point. And I grew up in a 12:00Conservative synagogue, Temple Beth El, which is the largest synagogue, Conservative synagogue, certainly, and probably the largest synagogue in Rochester. And I would go to services with my father, basically on a weekly basis for Saturday morning service. And I loved hearing the music. And my father had, also, a fondness for cantorial music, too. We had a very good cantor, Sam Rosenbaum, who I didn't really appreciate at the time growing up. But Sam Rosenbaum, for years, he was the executive vice president of the Conservative Cantors Assembly. And a really important figure in the Cantors Assembly, a champion of khazones [Jewish liturgical music], the tradition. And sometimes, I think that created some tension with the congregation who maybe wanted him to be 13:00a little more progressive, either musically or the way he trained -- I mean, he was a tough trainer of bar mitzvah kids and bat mitzvah kids. I mean, if you didn't have your stuff together, you weren't going to get bar mitzvahed and there were cases where that didn't happen and that caused tension in the congregation. But it was just wonderful to hear this man daven every Shabbos. And yeah, so I really grew up with that sort of in the background at the same time I was by the -- I grew up playing Suzuki violin as a kid. And later in my teens -- actually, my mother had great foresight. For my bar mitzvah, we had a little party the night before the bar mitzvah, for the out of town guests. And she invited them over to the house and she hired this really great blues band, African American blues band from inner-city Rochester to play in the basement while the -- I think the thinking was the guests would come down and enjoy the 14:00band downstairs and then come up and have food upstairs. Well, my recollection of the evening is that only me and my uncle, who was a pretty good blues guitarist and folk musician in his own right, were down in the basement. I remember my uncle, Harry, sitting in with the band and playing guitar with them. And this was one of the first wow experiences I had with music, 'cause other than that, I really just knew -- growing up, I knew -- I had this sound of cantorial music in my ear. But in terms of my own music-making, that was sort of based on the Suzuki classical tradition. And I remember playing the "Brandenburg Concertos," part of the middle school orchestra and some hoedown number that was pretty cool and things like that. But this was sort of the first kind of wow experience that, Hey, wait a minute, I could be involved in making music that I think was a little more -- I guess closer to some of the internal -- that could 15:00really generate excitement for me, personally. So, you think about the -- remember the Blues Brothers movie where a beam of light goes over and hits Jake and Elwood. It was kind of that sort of moment in our basement. And so, after that, I sort of got obsessed. I tend to be an obsessive personality, so I got really obsessed, first with blues music. And so, I spent most of my teenage years locked in my room while my friends were out going to parties. I would rather spend Saturday night working on picking guitar like Mississippi John Hurt or Lightnin' Hopkins or something like that or figuring out licks that B.B. King or Albert King or Freddie King had played and things like that. But all through that time, I would love reading the liner notes. And remember those beautiful albums, the 33 1/2 -- playing albums and the wonderful liner notes? So, I always 16:00would really get just as excited about the stories behind the -- of the musicians and the communities they came from as I was about the music itself. And so, I spent many years playing as a blues guitarist. And then, in high school, I was part of a blues band that kind of went around and played different bars in the Rochester area. And then, I don't know if I'm getting too far ahead of myself, but --

CW: Well, let's pause the musical --

PR: Okay.

CW: -- track for a second, 'cause I want to ask a little bit about your growing up. I'm curious, did you hear any languages other than English when you were growing up?

PR: Oh, well, my grandparents, they were Yiddish speakers and, as typical, they used Yiddish so people, the younger generations, couldn't understand what they were saying. That was the use of it. Or they would tell these wonderful stories 17:00or jokes and the punchline would be in Yiddish and we'd all sort of scratch our heads. But after a while, we would get it, especially once you've heard the same jokes (laughs) or stories time after time. So, that was the main kind of Yiddish influence I had. And they would sit around the kitchen table and sing, too. So, sing songs from Yiddish theater. They would have certain kids' songs that -- some of them surely came from the shtetl, that I remember and things like that.

CW: Can you give an example?

PR: Yeah, sure. So, my grandfather, he would have this thing where he'd shake your hand and say, "Sholem-aleykhem [Hello, lit. "peace be with you"]." So, you'd shake his hand, (spoken in sing-song) "Sholem-aleykhem, bruder mushke. Gey in mark, un keyf a kushke. [Hello, brother Moishe. Go to the market, and buy a sausage.]" (imitates someone pinching someone else's cheek) And "kushke" would always follow with a pinch of the cheek. So, that was one thing. They would often sing to -- I think 'cause my sister's Hebrew name is Malkah, my sister 18:00Molly. So, they would sing from the -- what's the Yiddish song? Something Malkele. It's not coming to me. But (singing) "Oy, malekele, oy, malkele, ikh bin meshuge far dir [Oh, Molly, oh, Molly, I'm crazy for you], ya-na-na-na-na." So, they would make up songs based on Yiddish theater songs for the kids and things like that.

CW: When would you see them?

PR: We would usually see them once or twice a year. So, being the only ones in Rochester meant we were doing a lot of long travels as a family. So, we'd be driving down to Silver Spring, Maryland to see one set of grandparents, my mother's side, and driving to Brooklyn to see my father's parents. So, three, four times a year, we were taking these massive eight-hour drives through rural Pennsylvania and things like that.

CW: Did you have a favorite yontev [holiday] growing up?

PR: Did I have a favorite yontev? I don't know if there was one yontev, one holiday that particularly comes to mind as a favorite. I mean, I loved Pesach. My father would lead the service if we stayed in Rochester. Times we would come down to New York, my grandfather would lead it and my grandfather was kind of no nonsense. There wasn't much melody going on. But he was -- still, I think, maybe the fastest Hebrew reader I've ever met in my life. I mean, oh, he would really just plow through the service and we'd be eating dinner in no time at all. But my father kind of really took an interest in a lot of the melodies and things like that. And he still does. I mean, was just with him last week for Pesach and 20:00he led the seder. And so, I was sitting next to him and singing along. So, I guess that's a particularly special yontev melody memory. So, guess Pesach's a chag [Hebrew: holiday], maybe not a -- I don't know if it's a yontev. It's a chag. But, yeah.

CW: And when you were growing up, what was your relationship to your Jewishness? How did you feel about being Jewish when you were growing up?

PR: (sighs) I don't know. I mean, I was just sort of a normal kid in so many ways. And because I lived in a very Jewish town, we weren't sort of parading around with Judaism on our chest or sleeves, but it was a very strong Jewish community. And I guess I didn't really appreciate -- it's funny, 'cause now I look back at our high school yearbook every once -- sometimes. I looked through 21:00the names and I realized, They were Jewish? Oh, my gosh, that's a Jewish name. He was Jewish, she was Jewish? And I didn't realize. All these people, I just thought of as Michael or Chris. Probably not Chris, but Michael or Steve or Julie. And then, I realized their last names -- well, it's a Jewish name. I didn't realize they were Jewish. So, it's interesting to look back in that way. But we were active in the synagogue and grew up going to Hebrew school in this Conservative synagogue, which later my mother became assistant principal of. So, it became more and more a part of her life. And eventually, my parents actually stopped going to the big Conservative synagogue and they went to a -- kind of the last old synagogue in the old Jewish quarter of downtown Rochester, along Joseph Avenue. And that was the Jewish area back in an earlier time. And so, 22:00there was a wonderful rabbi, Rabbi Hyman, who we really liked. So, we would go to Rabbi Hyman's old shul with its broken windows and things like that. Yeah, so they both got more involved in that. So, that was an Orthodox synagogue. But it was kind of a very relaxed -- I mean, they were just grateful for anybody to come downtown to help them make the minyan on Shabbos.

CW: So, then, I guess, how did you get from blues to Jewish music?

PR: Yeah. Well, there was a transitional phase through Irish music, which I really started getting into in college. College and then even graduate school. So, for a couple decades now, there's been sort of this revival of English, 23:00British Isles music. And specifically, there's been guitar techniques that have been created. And so, some of them are sort of based in what American blues pickers were doing. Some of it's based in -- blues and ragtime, I should say, plus with influences of classical guitar playing. And so, there's been this whole school of British Isles finger-style guitar with -- using alternate tunings and things like that. So, that was actually sort of a transition for me is using the skills I had picked up playing guitar. I was also playing banjo.

CW: So, how'd you get into the Irish stuff?

PR: Well, I think it was -- I was at Cornell for undergraduate and there was a very good British finger-style guitarist. In fact, he's one of the tops: Martin Simpson, who was actually living in Ithaca. He'd married an American woman and he was living in Ithaca during that period while I was there. So, he would do 24:00concerts every once in a while at Cornell and I would hear him and go, Wow, that's really, really beautiful. And also sort of connected sort of this technical -- some of the technical things I was doing with guitar with also sort of the -- maybe more than melodic inspirations I was getting. Not that he was playing Jewish music, but Jewish music's very much about melodic gestures and things like that. And also, the training I was getting in classical through Suzuki. So, I thought it sort of all -- it was put together in a really interesting way by these British finger-style guitarists who were picking at -- kind of conceptualizing their guitar as a harp and rendering melodies like that. Not just the melodies, but also having a bass line going with their thumb or some kind of alternating thumb going on. And so, I got really interested in that. And so, then I sort of really shifted over to that, learning that kind of 25:00music on guitar as well as banjo, playing banjos. Started going to Irish sessions. This is, I guess, after I graduated graduate school, I lit up in -- I was working in Buffalo, New York, which has a very strong Irish community. So, I was going to a lot of sessions. The Buffalo Irish Center's a great, great community resource there. And they had regular sessions and cèilidhs [traditional Irish or Scottish social gatherings] and things like that, so I was part of the -- and I got into the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, which is the international Irish music society, which is -- it's a wonderful example of cultural revitalization and keeping your culture strong -- is what the work of Comhaltas. So, Buffalo had a chapter and it was a very strong chapter and all 26:00sorts of activities that I would get involved with and things like that. So, at some point during that period -- it might have been in graduate school. Actually, no, I'll take it back a little bit: the year after I graduated from Cornell, I stayed in Cornell and I was dating a woman whose father was actually a klezmer clarinetist in Philadelphia named Marty [Millis?] and he had a band named Klezmore. So, my girlfriend was his daughter, Martha, and so Martha started feeding me some tapes of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Kapelye and I played a gig with her father. And so, I had to learn kind of how to get all this stuff together. There was also -- my mother was getting involved with a klezmer band in Rochester called the -- it was sort of the predecessor to a band that was around for a while called the 12 Corners Klezmer Band, which was -- the 12 Corners was led by a clarinetist, by Rob Mendel. And previous to that, it was 27:00sort of more of a community-based band. And so, my mother was getting involved with that. My mother grew up as a dancer. She was trained in modern dance and was very involved in community theater doing acting and then even choreographing and directing shows at our local JCC. I mean, these were nice, pretty good semi-professional productions and things like that. So, she got involved with this klezmer band, so that was happening at the same time. And then, in the mid-'90s, that's when Itzhak Perlman got involved with klezmer. So, I heard -- that's when "In the Fiddler's House" came out on PBS, I think it was 1995, and that was interesting because it was really putting the violin out as sort of the lead instrument rather than -- prior to that, all the music I was hearing from 28:00klezmer, especially like Klezmer Conservatory Band, it was really clarinet-driven music where it tended to take a lot of these more jazzy influences. And Klezmer Conservatory Band was doing a whole range of things, but that's sort of what I most remember, was more of their jazz-oriented stuff, which didn't really -- it sort of didn't fit with my string music aesthetic. But with Perlman, he was putting the violin out in the front, so that was something I could really relate to a lot more easily. I also, that time, started hearing Andy Statman's music, a wonderful clarinetist but also mandolin player. And so, the mandolin kind of resonated with a lot of the American music and Irish music that I was playing. So, there was a few different things that were coming together. And then, on Andy's first album, the famous Jewish klezmer music album of 1978, '79 on Shanachie where he's playing with Zev Feldman and Zev's playing 29:00tsimbl [hammered dulcimer]. And when I heard that, I was, like, Wow, there's something there. I knew about a tsimbl 'cause I had read a little bit in, like, Henry Sapoznik's writing and "The Compleat Klezmer," things like that, that there was this instrument, a hammered dulcimer. So, that was sort of a sound that was very interesting to me for these other musics, was the sound of a fiddle together with a dulcimer. Something about those timbres, the violin, the legato of a violin with the pluckiness of either a banjo or a hammered dulcimer. And so, I knew there was something out there in klezmer but I didn't really hear it until I heard that album with Zev and Andy. And also, Kurt Bjorling was playing with Itzhak Perlman. Kurt was a magnificent clarinetist, was playing tsimbl on those concerts and albums and things like that. So, I got really 30:00excited about this thing, that tsimbl, what's that, this hammered dulcimer? And what happened soon after was -- I'm trying to -- there was -- a few things that happened. I went to KlezKamp for the first time, I think, in 1995. And right at that time, Alicia Svigals from the Klezmatics was making a solo album called "Fidl" and on it, she featured Josh Horowitz, who was -- wonderful tsimbl player. And so, I remember at that KlezKamp, my first KlezKamp, they were playing together, kind of rehearsing for this album and I heard this stuff and I remember they were in a hallway or something, the two of them, and sort of a little crowd gathered round. And I just watched Josh play the tsimbl for just hours. I was just with my mouth sort of gaping wide open. It was just the most incredible thing I had ever heard. And it was one of those -- another one of 31:00those moments where just all these things sort of clicked and came together in a way that, Ooh, I didn't know all these disparate influences could come together like that. And so, I sort of caught the bug and it fed my obsessive personality. So, at that time, I was playing banjo. I came to KlezKamp playing five-string banjo. And what I would do is I would try and work out the tsimbl parts on the banjo. So, I actually wrote a book on this, which you can now -- I think you can download it for free on the KlezmerShack if you hunt around for "The Essentials of the Five-String Klezmer Banjo." But it was really when I saw Josh, and then I had other experiences: Kálmán Balogh, a wonderful, amazing virtuoso of cimbalom. Cimbalom's the concert -- tsimbl is usually used to describe more of a folk, the Yiddish folk version of an instrument which, in the late nineteenth 32:00century became a concert instrument, first in Hungary and then it spread around Eastern Europe. So, Kálmán Balogh's one of the great virtuosos of the cimbalom, the big concert version of this instrument in Budapest. And so, Kálmán came to Rochester for some concerts in the Hungarian community, which I came to and I took some lessons from him. And so, I was really getting obsessed and pretty soon I had acquired a cimbalom, a big concert Hungarian cimbalom. And that was great. If I'm getting too far ahead of --

CW: No, no, this is great!

PR: Yeah. But there was -- also other things to connect with where I was. I was living in Buffalo and one day we saw in the newspaper this little ad: European dulcimers for sale, in "The Buffalo News." Now, not the kind of thing you usually see in the little classified section in "The Buffalo News." So, I called 33:00this fellow up and it turned out it was a Polish gentleman who had grown up actually in Belarus, in a town called Stolpce. And he was a maker and a player of the instrument. He had grown up actually playing on the radio, in Polish radio in that region, and kind of near the city of Baranovich, which is actually a big center for train transportation in Belarus. And so, for a number of years, I would just hang out with Jozef. I think he was in his eighties when I kind of met him. And eventually, Henry Sapoznik invited me to bring him to KlezKamp and I did a bunch of interviews with him at KlezKamp and that was really a thrill. And also, another important person was Sam Chianis, who was a beautiful cimbalom 34:00player. Back in the 1960s, he had been sort of the Hollywood cimbalom player. So, any movie in the '60s that featured the instrument, it was usually Sam who was playing. And he'd grown up in California and then became an ethnomusicology student at UCLA. And he was actually, I think, the first ethnomusicologist hired by the SUNY system and he ended up at SUNY Binghamton. So, as soon as I got interested in the instrument, Sam was a great resource 'cause I could just go down to Binghamton, get lessons, and he was just full of wonderful stories about growing up in the Greek community in California, playing in Hollywood, working with people like Pierre Boulez and Quincy Jones and things like that. And so, it was great to really spend a lot of time with Sam, who's still a dear friend and mentor to me in the field. And so, it also helped to be living in places like 35:00Buffalo and then, later, Syracuse, which are very cold during the winter and there's not a lot to do during the winter but stay inside. And that's what I would do: I would stay inside most of the winter and just played tsimbl, hours and hours a day, and be very happy doing basically that, so -- and getting more involved in bands. I got involved with the 12 Corners Klezmer Band, which was the main simcha band in Rochester. And played with them for a bunch of years. But as I started playing tsimbl more and more and realizing, Hey, I'm one of the only people doing this, I started getting calls from people. I mean, one day, out of the blue, I got an email from Alicia Svigals, "Hey, would you come down to New York and play a gig with me?" Well, I mean, that was -- Alicia Svigals calling me for a gig? I mean, it was sort of like, if I was back in my blues guitar days, Eric Clapton calling up and saying, "Hey, you want to play a gig 36:00with me at Giants Stadium?" or something like that. But that's the wonderful thing about our community is it's -- there are definitely people we consider sort of the stars and things like that, but you're not so far removed from them. They're your buddies, especially if you take an interest and are involved with the scene for a little while, these become your dear friends. So, I started getting more calls like that. Steven Greenman, wonderful klezmer violinist in Cleveland, he had a grant to do a project with the Cleveland Institute of Music and Carnegie Mellon University. Sorry, not Carnegie Mellon. Case Western. So, he did a string klezmer program there for chamber musicians and he invited me to come in as sort of the guest tsimbl player. And then, for many years, I played 37:00with both Steve, Alicia, then Joel Rubin was at that point up at Cornell. So, I started going weekly to visit Joel down in Ithaca. And we were going through the Beregovskii book and finding these amazing, wonderful melodies that nobody had really played since Beregovskii transcribed them back in the '30s, '40s, or -- some of these tunes were coming from the Ansky expedition in the teens. So, there were sort of resources, both there -- not too far away and New York was only a -- when I was living in Syracuse, a four hour, five hour drive away. And I started getting more and more calls for -- people who were looking for a tsimbl player, for what reason I'm not sure, but something about that they 38:00wanted to hear.

CW: I'm wondering if you can -- because people can't go anymore, if you can describe what KlezKamp is?

PR: Yeah, well, actually, KlezKamp is being revived now --

CW: It is?

PR: -- it seems like, yeah. They're gonna be doing a summer program at Jay Ungar's Ashokan camp, which is great. But KlezKamp, it was amazing. It was at a big hotel, so when I -- it was at a few different hotels. When I started, it was at the Paramount and others could tell the whole history of the Paramount much better than I can. But the Paramount, it was -- I mean, the history of these hotels, they often started as a few family members getting together and wanting to have a plot of land in the camp that they could all go to. And then, as more and more family members would come and started reaching out to more and more -- 39:00beyond families or networks of families. And they eventually ended up as commercial enterprises, so a lot of these old hotels kind of reflected that growth. And so, the Paramount, it might have -- there was all sorts of different -- all these windy hallways that were built in different eras, as you can see, the expansion of the place. And it had a lovely ballroom. Nothing so elegant, mind you, but it was a nice ballroom. And what did I know? I was in my mid-twenties at the time. But just to get the experience to come to the Catskills, was such a legendary place in Yiddish culture, and not far from where my father's family had gone. They would summer near -- not far from Monticello, actually right across the street from the Yasgur farm. Now the Yasgur farm was 40:00famous 'cause that was the site of the Woodstock festival. But the Yasgurs were dairy farmers and so they would go -- my father would always go to Miriam and Max Yasgur's dairy shop to get ice cream when he was a kid and things like that. So, I think my first -- when I was one or two, I would come with my parents. But after that, the family sort of stopped going to the mountains for the summer. So, for me, it was kind of like a chance to kind of experience Catskill culture in this pumped-up, revitalized way with all these young people coming to it and things like that. So, it was just incredibly exciting. You'd come to classes and I remember my first Ear Band I was in was led by Steve Greenman and Merlin Shepherd, and teaching these great melodies. And I remember attending lectures by Mark Slobin on Moisei Beregovskii's work, and that ended up being a 41:00continuing influence on what I've done decades later.

CW: Have you ever -- as part of this journey, did you ever study Yiddish?

PR: I self-studied. So, I went through Weinreich's "College Yiddish." I had learned German in high school, so I had a German background. So, in some ways that's good; in some ways, it hinders you, 'cause you have to unlearn a lot of things when you're trying to learn Yiddish. But growing up with my grandparents and I had that in my ear -- and when I finally moved to New York, I actually spent six months living with my grandmother. And I would help -- practice Yiddish on her. But the problem is, my Yiddish, it was very -- I can read the 42:00"Forverts," especially if it's an article on something where I'm fluent in. If it's an article on klezmer or anything Itzik Gottesman -- or a lot of the stuff Jordan Kutzik writes, I can read what they're -- 'cause I tend to know the subject, so I can read and really enjoy those. But I sort of lack the conversational Yiddish, 'cause I didn't take it in a class. So, that's an experience I hope to have sometime in the future -- really actually taking a Yiddish class or working with someone on conversational Yiddish. My wife's now taking classes through the Arbeter Ring with Perl Teitelbaum and she loves it. They're online, so people all around the world are participating on these online Yiddish classes. So, it's great, 'cause she's doing that, now we can -- it's inspiring me to maybe go back and do some of that.

CW: Have you ever had to use Yiddish in your research or stuff?

PR: Well, I did, yeah. Well, first of all, in terms of archival research, certainly, whether -- just going through song titles or you get a 78 that's with a Yiddish label and being able to translate that and understand that. But also, for trips -- in the '90s, I traveled twice through Eastern Europe. And so, there were times in Ukraine where I was forced to -- Yiddish was the lingua franca and I had to get by in Yiddish 'cause we didn't share any other languages with people I would meet and things like that.

CW: So, what were those trips?

PR: So, I'm trying to think. I traveled through Ukraine and went to places like L'viv and Czernowitz, Kiev, but also towns like Berdychiv, which was a very 44:00famous Yiddish center and the center of klezmer music in the nineteenth century. It was sort of like ground zero for klezmer music in the nineteenth century -- and also traveling to Belarus.

CW: And were you going on your own or --

PR: Yeah.

CW: Okay.

PR: Just going on my -- I would do a lot of research on what I would -- the things I wanted to see. But I wanted to really get a sense of this world that I was reading so much about and talking so much about with people at places like KlezKamp and KlezKanada and things like that. So, it was really great and magical in many ways to be able to put those live experiences of going back to these places and meeting people in these Jewish -- there's a lot of continuity in these Jewish communities. And really inspiring to be able to experience that.

CW: Yeah, I guess can you say more about that? What did you -- find any standout stories from those trips?

PR: Oh, gosh. Well, I think one problem with it -- these were -- I was working full-time. I was a healthcare administrator. So, I couldn't spend weeks and weeks doing field research in a particular locale. So, it was really traveling where you had two days in this town, three days in this town. But spending time in Brisk, I stayed with a gentleman -- see if I can remember his name. I can't remember his name right now, but I could get it for you. So, he was basically the last person from the Jewish community of Brisk who had survived the Holocaust and come back to the city, who had been there, part of the community, 46:00before that. And spending time with -- I was -- communicating him in broken Yiddish, basically, which -- he was very nice and sort of tolerating. And I had a tape recorder, so I taped him so I can play -- I asked him to record messages for my grandmother, and I brought them back and, "Greetings, Bella, from Brest-Litovsk." And so, "It's nice to connect with a Brisker in America," and this and that. And that was a really special moment. And other places, not so related to Yiddish music, but traveling through places like Transylvania, which is in western Romania, and meeting musicians, traditional music musicians, and these little villages. And Transylvania's interesting because it's been 47:00basically scoured by ethnomusicologists, particularly from Budapest, for decades as part of that cultural revitalization. So, I remember I would have books on the traditional musicians of Transylvania. So, I kind of would remember these guys and then I'd find myself in a village meeting one of them and then, after a while, remembering, as he's playing flute for me for hours and hours of just -- wonderful flute player -- kind of a wooden flute, saying, "Hey, I think I remember you from this book I have at home." And then, he pulls it out himself. "Yes, here it is!" So, it's been sort of a cottage industry of researchers who have gone through in some of these areas and researched and recorded a lot of the musicians. But Belarus is very different, 'cause there's a lot less -- it's been more impenetrable politically, socially, culturally in many ways, although 48:00there's been some important collecting, especially by -- well, Zisl Slepovitch and his teacher, Nina Stepanskaya -- did some very important research. And in an earlier era, Sofia Magid. But there's a lot of places that are still -- Jews living, folk traditions to be documented, Yiddish songs that we really don't know about otherwise. And who knows? So, that's part of the exciting part, is kind of being on this -- I don't really like to use sort of the treasure hunt kind of model, 'cause it sort of carries with it some sense of appropriation of culture, but of being able to share worlds with people and things like that -- 49:00is so exciting. And it's exciting when you get -- is because I've sort of grown up within this revival, some would call it a revitalization of culture. So, it's really interesting when we meet people from outside who have kind of learned these musics in a more traditional way where we've come at it through learning these melodies in KlezKamp and KlezKanada and now Yiddish New York and all these klezmer festivals around the world. So, it's a real fun thing when we find musicians who have really come up as part of the oral tradition and they're playing the same tunes or -- we learn things and it's an interesting way to sort of check the revitalization and, I guess, how organic it is versus musicians and other people who have really grown up in it.

CW: I'm curious how your work in Jewish music traditions connects, if at all, to 50:00your own Jewish sense of identity or your own Jewish -- yeah, identity?

PR: I think it's sort of the center of it in many ways. I guess for many reasons, sort of mainstream Judaism, it just didn't really sort of relate to me for whatever reason. I think one thing that's sort of not talked about enough is the aesthetics of Judaism. We talk about Judaism as a religious system, we talk about it as -- I guess, in terms of the culture, as an ethical code, peoplehood -- but I think what's gone missing a little too much is a discussion of Judaism as an aesthetic system. And so, that's why sort of a lot of the changes in, for 51:00instance, synagogue music over the last thirty years have gone a way that I just feel -- it's sort of left too much of the aesthetic sensibility that I grew up with behind. And so, I think in many ways -- also, klezmer is a way, sort of -- it provides an alternative to a lot of -- sort of the mainstream Jewish politics, I think, on everything from Israel to issues of the American society. And it gives you a way to sort of create a world that's much more customized to you and your sensibilities. It's another portal you have to a meaningful Jewish life. And so, yeah, so getting to know not only the music itself but this whole 52:00community that's now international. It's just been a wonderful way to really connect with people and be part of a social movement that goes beyond us. And it's a very diverse social movement, but there's also sort of core tendencies towards maybe, for instance, progressive politics or what have you that a lot of us find comfort in, find sort of our own place in the universe through.

CW: From your perspective in part of this community that you're describing, where do you think -- sort of what is the status of Jewish music right now?

PR: Well, Jewish music's a very diverse thing. And I guess it has a lot of statuses or stati (laughs) depending on where you are, the type of music you're talking about. So, we could take that piece by piece. In terms of klezmer, I think there's been a wonderful revitalization, but it hasn't really penetrated the wider Jewish community that much. Although I can say now that, twenty years later, that I've been -- and a lot more people in the US from Jewish communities and outside the Jewish community know the word klezmer, okay? First of all, the word klezmer -- I mean, the music really wasn't called klezmer before -- really, Zev Feldman was -- in many ways gets a lot of credit, that original project, which was actually based here at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, 54:00which is -- this is a whole 'nother story, but the place of the Center in this revitalization. The Center was then called the Balkan Arts Center and so they were doing -- Andy and Zev. Andy Statman, Zev Feldman were doing a project and they were being helped by Ethel Raim from the Balkan Arts Center, wonderful Yiddish singer Martin Koenig, and they needed a name for the music. So, they were applying for an NEA grant. So, Zev said, "Well, if you ask the musicians what kind of music they play: We play wedding music or we play the bulgars or we play the freylekhs," names of particular dances. And there wasn't really a name for the genre. And so, Zev said, "Well, there's" -- and putting in this application to the NEA -- "well, there's this kind of obscure word called klezmer that's really used for the musicians, but it's been used by a couple resear-- I think Moisei Beregovskii used it as a term for the genre in his writings in Russian on Yiddish. Why don't we call the project a klezmer music 55:00project?" And that was really the first time it was really coined as the name of a genre. Now, there were bands before that. The Klezmorim were kind of the first revival band, so that was going on maybe a year earlier, and Giora Feidman who himself came -- a very famous clarinetist who came from a klezmer family in Buenos Aires. His father was a klezmer clarinetist, too. He was putting out albums in the mid-'70s like "The Magic of the Klezmer." But it wasn't until, I think, that NEA application that in English the term klezmer music was sort of coined as a genre name. And so, that's very new. And I'm sure many others have talked about the difference in how communities relate to klezmer music here in the US, where it's seen as -- in many places, having a very functional role as 56:00wedding music or wedding -- for a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, not necessarily an art form that you would sort of appreciate and put onstage, but as a very functional -- important but functional music. Whereas if you go to Germany or places like Poland or other parts of Europe, there's less connection to it as the function of klezmer. So, they're kind of approaching it, I think, with -- more eyes open as, Oh, this is a -- concert music that we'll see. We'll see Bach tonight and we'll see (laughs) klezmer tomorrow and something else the next night. So, that's really interesting. And these two things feed into each other. So, a lot of the part of the revival of the music -- non-Jewish audiences in Europe have been a very important part of supporting a lot of the ensembles here and allowing the music to continue to grow back in America. And what America 57:00provides is sort of the music, the musicians, and having a grounding in the tradition and a grounding in the functionality of the music. And it's wonderful because now we have some of the world's best musicians -- are Germans who grew up or are operating in Berlin, people like Christian Dawid and things like that who are coming from a different world in their personal lives but have become accepted as masters of this music and really important parts of this wider movement. So, that's history about klezmer -- and the other musics have different -- you could give a sort of a state of the affairs on each different music. I mean, there's the Yiddish song tradition, which has really lagged, I guess, in the revival -- the revitalization of Yiddish culture -- because you 58:00have to know Yiddish and you have to have a mastery of Yiddish language to really practice the tradition. So, that's sort of a barrier of entry, so we've been doing a lot of work with Ethel Raim, who's the co-founder of CTMD, Itzik Gottesman and Josh Waletzky through projects like the Yiddish Song of the Week website, which we're trying to get out as many of -- which Itzik edits. We put it up for him and things like -- and it's a blog and the idea is to disseminate as many Yiddish songs -- and not just Yiddish song. It's sort of Yiddish songs outside of the typical five or six that you would always hear. Not that we don't love those five or six, but there's a whole rich (laughs) multi-variant tradition. But also providing translations, the transliterations, the commentary, and most importantly, field recordings because that's what's been 59:00hugely missing in Yiddish song -- has been access to field recordings of traditional Yiddish singers. So, what you would get on the albums that were available were sort of people who had come to Yiddish later in life because they came from operatic backgrounds or they were jazz singers or maybe from show -- maybe from a sort of a Broadway sensibility and things like that. And that's great, too, but what was missing was sort of people who sang like my grandparents. That wasn't available. So, we've been really trying to make that available through the Yiddish Song of the Week. And so, we're quite proud of that. We've been involved with -- we're so excited because the Ruth Rubin collection has just gone online on the YIVO Institute website. We were really involved in doing a lot of the digitization work. This is through Center for Traditional Music and Dance -- and assisting YIVO in getting that getting up. We've been working with Miriam Isaacs, wonderful Yiddish scholar down in Washington, DC, on digiti-- not digitizing but disseminating the collection of 60:00Ben Stonehill. So, Stonehill was a guy who -- not that he had any background in this, but 1948, just decided to encamp himself at the Hotel Marseilles on the Upper West Side for a few weeks where there were hundreds of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors who were being temporarily housed. And he came with this big recording device and recorded thousands of hours of Yiddish songs. So, we now have a Stonehill Jewish Music Archive website through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. And so, through projects like this, we're hoping to kind of develop, I guess, the fluency in this rich, rich material. But it's definitely -- certainly lagging behind klezmer music. And then, there's other genres. There's traditional khazones, which is -- I think in the Hasidic community, 61:00there's still very, very -- a lot of interest in preserving the way Yossele Rosenblatt sang and things like that. And it's interesting because now there's more and more connections between some of the Hasidic cantors and the folks like us in the Yiddish music revitalization. And, you know, Hasidic nigunim [melodies] is another area. So, there's so many different areas to really talk about with that. But in general, what I'm really most interested in is -- (coughs) excuse me, preserving not only the repertoire but the whole aesthetic sensibility. So, when you want to sing Yiddish song, you should hear how a traditional Yiddish song or Yiddish singer like Lifshe Schaechter-Widman or Harry Ary or -- these are sort of some of the pantheon of great Yiddish singers who we have on the Yiddish Song of the Week, how they actually sang it, the dialect they used, the inflections they used. How, when you listen to Lifshe -- 62:00and Lifshe was Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman's mother and Itzik Gottesman's grandmother. I mean, wow, she sings -- Itzik calls it the high lonesome sound, which is a Bill Monroe reference, but it is kind of like that. It's a whole aesthetic world right there in her delivery and the way she sings. It is so kind of foreign to everything we think about in -- with our contemporary aesthetics but so great in that it opens up -- and not just to copy that and revive something that's no longer, but use that as a starting point to develop all sorts of possibilities of what you could do in a very contemporary yet very rooted way. And I love that about klezmer, too, is going back to the oldest recordings of klezmer music before it came to the US, of violin and tsimbl. And 63:00you realize, Wow, these guys, it's a totally different violin technique. There's no vibrato or a very different kind of vibrato but there's a whole ornamentation system. There's a whole series of kind of -- system of putting together repertoire, choose -- selecting repertoire, putting repertoire together to create these essentially kind of concert suites. And how can we take that and use it to create new music with that also has a very deep reference to this older aesthetic? But not just because it's an older aesthetic but because it has value for our contemporary world. Ethel Raim always says we have a choice of how to live. We can either live forgetting the past or we can actually remember the past and use it to enrich the future. And so, I kind of vote for the latter. I think it's a really wonderful way that she puts it.

CW: I'm curious, 'cause we're working on this project about Beyle 64:00Schaechter-Gottesman. If you can try to describe to me, a non-musician, sort of about Lifshe, her mother, what tradition did she come from and why is she kind of held up as one of these, as you were saying, in the pantheon of that tradition? (laughter)

PR: Well, it's funny, the people we think of as in the pantheon, it just happened that she happened to be Beyle's and Itzik's forebear. So, not that there weren't thousands of people like Lifshe, but she was a good representative of the tradition. But it just so happened, by pure luck, that, because of family connections, a lot of her stuff was recorded from the '40s through, I think, the '70s. So, we have that. You have to hear the stuff. Go to the Yiddish Song of 65:00the Week and listen to "A naye geshikhte [A modern history]," her song, "A naye geshikhte." Or there's one she sings, which -- I can't remember what it's called, but about a cemetery and walking along the cemetery grounds. Haunting, haunting presentation. And you really get a sense, wow, there's a real art to this and this is an absolute master of that art form. And it's great because the aesthetic reference points, they can't be found any other place other than what it is. This is sort of -- our ears have been so tuned to recorded music, commercially recorded music, music that's perfectly in pitch, music that -- especially with popular music that integrates a lot of rhythms, originally probably coming from African musics and things like that and African American musics. And so, we're very much tuned into that, whether we sort of know it or 66:00not, and rock and electric guitars and synthesizers and things like that. And this is just coming from a completely -- this is a cappella singing and there's just such a richness in that single voice and what that single voice does, not being hemmed in by any harmonic accompaniment or rhythmic accompaniment. It's all about the line the voice is creating and it's just -- and when rendered by a master, you hear it and you know it. And also, one of the things that Beyle was so good about is just her delivery, the way she communicate-- even if you didn't understand what she was singing, well, that -- the way she would communicate. And to be with her at a zingeray [singing party], the zingeray are these -- would happen at the Gottesmans. They're still happening at the Gottesmans' house, which is on Bainbridge Avenue, which is now the house for Yiddish 67:00scholars and cultural activists. But to hear Beyle at a zingeray and watch her eyes light up as she would kind of tell a story through these songs, you could just look at her face and understand the story. And that was part of the -- that's part of the art form. It's sort of the communicative nature of the art form, 'cause it's not an art form that was created to be put onstage. It was an art form that was really created to be sung in small -- in a home or in a small community setting where you're really kind of interacting with community members and things like that. And to be able to watch Beyle and -- there are others like Ethel and Josh Waletzky, Perl Teitelbaum also, it's great. And we have so few people who grew up with this left that it's really important to work with those 68:00people -- Ethel. I'm talking to you, Ethel, Perl, and Josh (laughs) more than anybody, really, on assisting them to pass on this tradition and to find a new way. It's never gonna be the same. It's never gonna be the same tradition. But we can take things and that whole aesthetic experience and, perhaps through some careful recontextualization create a new life for it that has a lot of meaning and enriches our wider world.

CW: If you don't mind, I'm gonna ask a little bit more about Beyle --

PR: Okay.

CW: -- if that's okay. Did you --

PR: I'll tell you what I know, but I --

CW: Yeah, I mean, (laughter) did you get -- how well did you know her and how did you meet her and stuff?

PR: Oh, how well did I know Beyle? I don't know. I would spend time with Itzik and Emily and Esther and Beyle at their house. I can't say I spent a lot of 69:00time, but I went to a few zingerays. I would see them -- once we went camping in their back yard in Monticello, which was full of mosquitoes, but we had a great time anyways. And we'd see Beyle at all sorts of community events. Even when she was -- late in life, she was still -- she still found the koyekh, the energy, to go out and go to concerts and -- yeah, that was one -- some of my most daunting experiences were performing Yiddish concerts and who's in the front row? Beyle. And she was always really warm and, I think, accepting of people and just so enthusiastic. Also, Beyle insisted on speaking Yiddish to you. If she knew you knew one word of Yiddish, she would not speak in English almost at all. Only out of complete resignation, she would throw up her eyes. "Okay, I'll speak in English." But that was great, too, to experience the -- be sort of forced to 70:00communicate with Beyle in Yiddish. And her nephew, Binyumen Schaechter's very much the same way and I think that's great, is these are people who (claps) -- they want you to speak Yiddish and it's great to have people like that who are pushing you in a very positive way to deepen your linguistic experience and things like that.

CW: And I guess from your position here at the Center and just in the field, what was her role and sort of importance in the Yiddish music scene?

PR: Well, Beyle was really -- I'd say Beyle and Josh Waletzky, to my mind, were really the leading contemporary Yiddish songwriters of the last thirty, forty 71:00years probably. Maybe I'm missing someone else who I'm going to (laughs) feel bad about after the interview's over -- and have them in New York and part of our community, just in -- it's been just wonderful. So, Beyle is also great because she would write children's songs and we have these wonderful children's albums that she did of her -- and she was a poet. We were very honored, we helped her win an NEA National Heritage Fellowship Award, which is our nation's highest honor in folk and traditional arts. And so, to be part of that -- and that's the great thing about this work is you're really part of a family. You become part of these families for generations. Ethel and I talk all the time: there's certain musicians we're working with now who -- we worked with their 72:00grandparents. Ethel and Marty Koenig, worked with their grandparents back in the '70s and things like that and now we're working with grandchildren who have become master musicians. And so, anything we can do to sort of help facilitate those family and community traditions is just -- it's super rewarding. It's really rewarding. So, yeah, so Beyle was a really -- having Beyle either in the audience or going to an event where Beyle was participating as a songwriter -- it was also sort of like a good seal of approval. You were sort of being blessed, but blessed on from above, that whatever you were doing, it was important in some way.

CW: Blessed by some sense of authenticity or what did that --

PR: Yeah, some authenticity, someone who was really a master of these worlds. 73:00And so, that was always our -- and Beyle just spent so much time helping the revitalization of the culture through being a teacher at the Sholem Aleichem shul eyn un tsvantsik [School #21], what you -- the zingerays she would host with Itzik in her backyard. And, I mean, just in so many ways was -- she was just always there. I mean, it was amazing, a woman who was in her eighties would still be trudging out to Manhattan from the Bronx to hear a couple kids in their twenties playing Yiddish music and being really warm about that and sort of inviting them to come back, spend time with her. And it was just such an amazing experience to have that.

CW: I guess I'd like to ask -- you have been on a lot of different projects as a performer. Is there any project in Yiddish-Jewish music that has been particularly important or that you're particularly proud of?

PR: Well, I think in general, my work as a performer has been focused around -- we talked about these older aesthetic sensibilities and how can you sort of use them and understand them and then use them as a basis for creating new music or recontextualizing in contemporary ways and enriching the culture? So, for me, my love is these Eastern European klezmer, which was very different than what developed in New York City through the work of people like Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras and at the Epstein Brothers, which was clarinet-driven music, very horn-based. And also, it's talked about a lot how a Jewish wedding in New York, 75:00you took something that happened over a week's time with different parts of a wedding celebration in the Old Country, was now being smushed together into a two-hour, three-hour event at a catering hall. And there was, in Eastern Europe, all the different towns, they would have -- there were different music traditions that went with different parts of a traditional wedding. And so, a lot of those -- not only did a lot of the repertoire not translate over to New York and America and other places but entire genres of klezmer music got dropped, okay? So, things called "dobry dens," which are these tunes of -- "dobry den" means "good day" in Slavic languages. But these dobry dens were tunes that were basically developed to welcome guests to weddings, and they were beautiful melodies. And so, Moisei Beregovskii and the Ansky expedition 76:00collected a number of these, and we know some from other collections. That whole genre didn't exist in America. It was Old World stuff. American Jews didn't relate to that anymore. These were sort of slow, beautiful melodies. There was a form called "skoczne [Polish: lively]." So, "skoczne," I guess, really means "jump" and, again, has some sort of Slavic connection. But the skoczne melodies that Beregovskii collected -- well, they had a lot to do with baroque music. They were sort of this hybrid of klezmer melodies and baroque melodies and things like that. And they were also very often used not as functional dance music, but it was very typical for the best klezmer musicians to play tsum tish, which meant "at the table," "at the wedding banquet table." And they would get a 77:00chance to play little concerts and compose these melodies. That was a sort of a differentiator between klezmer bands and if you were competing, was who could compose the best melodies and sort of -- or whose family lineage had the best melodies. And so, klezmer musicians, they tend to be a little protective of some of these really nice melodies. Some of them spread a lot and some of them were only known -- a particular town. And so, there's just such beauty in these melodies and they're actually very well adapted for concert presentations rather than all this dance music which you typically hear at klezmer concerts these days but you're not seeing the dances performed along with them. So, they tend to be sped up and they're not real-- they're playing them too fast for dancers and things like that. But a lot of these older sort of melodies are very well suited for concert presentations. So, a lot of my stuff that I do is sort of 78:00related to that, is sort of bringing back these European klezmer traditions and creating aesthetics and creating new music with it. So, I do a lot of composing, I do a lot of work with -- Steven Greenman in Cleveland's a wonderful composer whose work is really based in these older klezmer genres. But to me, this my -- it's not like we're revisiting something in the past. Because we've been doing it for so long, it's kind of our musical identity is this stuff. So, I've done a lot of work to try and further that in creating concert suites where you could sort of even go farther but create a thirty to forty-minute performance piece based on these genres and integrating different -- in kind of consistent ways that gives a real sort of flow for an audience and the performers themselves. 79:00So, this is something I called concert-form klezmer. So, it's my sort of creative outlet in developing these longer suites and also borrowing form-- using some ideas that I've gotten, in many ways inspired by the work of Zev Feldman who's, in addition to being one of our leading klezmer scholars, is also a leading scholar of Ottoman music. And so, through Zev's writings, I've gotten interested -- and through the Center's work with communities such as the Bukharan Jewish community, which is mainly based in Queens. We have about fifty thousand Bukharan Jews here and some of the world's greatest masters of the Shashmaqam, which is the classical music form of Central Asia, which integrates poetry, classical Persian poetry with beautiful composed melodies. So, taking ideas from that is how can we have something that's still very much related to klezmer but expanded outward into allowing musicians for longer pieces of 80:00self-expression and -- can tell stories, tell different stories and new stories in a way that's very related to the tradition but can be very contemporary about what they're looking to express. So, a lot of my work is based around that. After being so influenced by Itzhak Perlman and Hankus Netsky and Klezmer Conservatory Band, the original "In the Fiddler's House." I've had the honor of -- last seven, eight years of working with Hankus and Jim Guttmann and the ensemble in performing with Itzhak and recording albums. And we did a PBS "Great Performances" piece a few years ago with this cantor, Helfgot, Yitzchak Meir Helfgot who's an amazing, amazing cantor for the Park East Synagogue here in New York. So, it's been a real thrill to that and sort of go back to these programs 81:00that really had such an influence on me twenty years ago. Now I'm part of it, so that's been a real thrill.

CW: Yeah. I'm curious if you have advice for someone sort of interested in getting into the scene. What would you want them to know or what would you advise them to do?

PR: Well, I think there's certainly resource-- there's a lot, there's so many more resources available now. I mean, you could just go on YouTube and just hear so much great klezmer and really important archival recordings. That just didn't exist when I was starting out. We had to buy records, or Kurt Bjorling from Brave Old World has been an important resource and he would have these Klezmer 82:00Resource Tapes. He issued maybe a dozen of these, which -- very well cleaned up recordings of kind of the best of the best. And so, they were great things. So, I always encourage folks, if you want to learn traditional klezmer, start with these recordings. Start with these pre-World War II recordings, and the earlier the better, and learn the heck out -- and this is what you do in any music that you're trying to learn is you learn the heck out of what recordings are available from the masters. Now, today, we have a cadre of teachers who have now -- are great, so you can seek them out. I mean, what's great about klezmer is, as I said, it's not like rock-and-roll where there's so many levels of separation between the greats and people getting in. You're not so far removed. So, these people are available. They're by and large very willing to help and 83:00very friendly because many of them started out as novices and had worked their way through the system. So, it's -- find teachers. Go to the camps. The camps are a great experience. So, we have a camp here, Yiddish New York, which is over December, the holiday week in December. There's KlezKanada, which is great, in August. There's camps all over Europe now that you can go to. South America has the Kleztival in São Paulo. And these camps, they're just a great way to experience not only the music but how it fits into the wider culture. And I think the most important thing I tell people is don't just spend all your time playing music at these camps and don't worry about going to all the classes, either, 'cause some of the best times I've had at all these camps are just getting to schmooze with one person or two people and that's how you create 84:00meaningful and wonderful lifelong relationships with them, people who are -- that you might find you share a whole lot with but also can learn a lot from.

CW: Great. Well, is there anything, any stories that you wanted to be sure to get in this interview that (laughter) we didn't talk about?

PR: I'm trying to think. No, I mean, we're at an important point in time right now where sort of the last generation of folks who grew up, outside of the Hasidic community, in the Yiddish-speaking world, particularly from Europe, are kind of passing on. And so, we have only a few more years left to document -- that's why I think the Yiddish Book Center's -- these videos are just such an incredible resource, a lot of the people you've documented. But it's a really 85:00critical time to document as many of them as we can while they're still with us. And also, it's a point in time where the people who are sort of the first generation of revitalizing the tradition from the 1970s are also becoming the elders and the seniors. And it's time to really spend a lot of time with them because they were such important transitional figures in linking people like me with the folks who grew up in these traditions. And so, a lot of them came from traditional homes or backgrounds themselves but were -- grew up in America or other places now. And also, because they sort of had this outsider-insider relationship to the culture, that meant they sort of had become, even if they 86:00weren't formally trained as ethnomusicologists or folklorists -- they were sort of doing that kind of -- learning about the traditions using similar toolsets, which is really valuable because it makes it easier for them to sort of pass on in some ways. So, you're not getting as much of sort of firsthand primary source, I guess, primary source exposure to the culture, the tradition, but you're getting it from these folks who came from this very interesting generation of insider-outsiders who had to really explore the tradi-- who had a huge background in the tradition but also had to kind of put their folklorist hats on and say, Okay, grandma, now how did you sing that song, when did you sing that song? And sort of try and create documentation around that. So, a lot 87:00of that documentation is in their heads and not really -- hasn't been put on paper or even videoed or things like that. So, I think that's an important thing. That's part of what the Yiddish Song of the Week, we're trying to do with that, is having someone like Itzik, who's a perfect model for that, be able to sort of translate and contextualize traditions in a way that's very easy for someone now who grew up in Berlin or grew up in Buenos Aires or wherever around the world without -- not growing up in a Yiddish-speaking home, they can sort of get a much deeper understanding of the tradition. So, every period is an interesting time, and this is a particularly interesting time given that dynamic.

CW: Yeah. Well, thank you so much!

PR: Thank you! Been a pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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