ALICIA SVIGALS ORAL HISTORY

NINA PICK: This is Nina Pick, and today's date is June 19, 2019. I am here in New York, New York with Alicia Svigals, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Alicia, do I have your permission to record this interview?

ALICIA SVIGALS: Yes, you do.

NP: Thank you. So to start off, could you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

AS: My mother's side immigrated from Minsk, around 1905, and in the same time period my father's side came from Odessa, though I have one great-grandmother from Romania, well, the border with Russia, now it's in Russia. I think Balta.

NP: And do you know what life was like for your ancestors?

AS: Not much. We have old photos. They look Orthodox. The men have long beards, and the women had shawls had -- although, let's see. That's on my mother's side. On my father's side they look more urban and dressed up, and yeah, they look very urban. I think they were quite a bit less religious on my father's side.

NP: And what were the professions in your family, historically?

AS: You know, I don't know about my great-grandparents, although one of them I think was a melamed, a teacher. My grandparents, my grandfather was a pianist. So, my grandparents were born in New York. Their parents came over when over 2:00they were twentyish. And my grandfather was a pianist who accompanied Judy Garland for some years. He played for Sid Caesar's "Show of Shows." He was in Astoria, and then in Hollywood. When he was fourteen, he went to the conservatory which later was renamed Julliard. I think maybe it was called Damrosch at the time. And my grandmother was a homemaker, although she worked as a bookkeeper before she got married. My grandfather on my mother's side was an accountant, and his wife was a homemaker. She had singing, dancing talent, but her father nixed that, and for a while she worked a milliner, well, in milliner's shop. And I was intrigued at some point to find out that -- first of 3:00all, when I first heard the story about how she would sing and dance in the street and in the city with a guy who had an organ, an organ grinder with a monkey on his shoulder, and somebody came by and said he was an agent and he wanted to make her a star. And I always thought growing up, Ugh, my awful great grandfather killed her dreams, but later I found out that that was often a lure into prostitution, and so maybe her father knew what he was doing. And similarly, millinery shops are sometimes fronts. So that's what I know about my grandparents. I think on my father's side, my great-grandparents had a dry goods store. Everybody was centered around this neighborhood, the upper west side, for a long time. There's Leo's Hardware, which is still on 93rd and Amsterdam was a cousin's, and they -- oh, actually everybody -- now that I'm remembering, on my 4:00father's side, they seemed to all be into laundry. They were launderers. And so, there was one great-uncle who would do Rachmaninoff's laundry, but he accidentally dropped a heavy laundry basket onto Rachmaninoff's dog one day, and Rachmaninoff sued him. (Laughs) So whenever I heard Rachmaninoff I feel guilty.

NP: And could you describe the atmosphere of the home you grew up in?

AS: Well, I grew up in the suburbs. We lived in the Bronx for two years and then moved to the suburbs. So, 1960s suburban house, but it happened that this suburb was a very artistic one, and my father is a visual artist, and my parents met at 5:00Music & Art. No, they didn't meet there. They both went there. And my mother's a musician, my father is an artist. And so, there was a lot of art and music in our house, and the town, Spring Valley, had this incredible community music school where a lot of people who are now, like, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and so forth. As young people they taught, and they continue to be involved with this music school. So, every weekend was filled with orchestra, chamber music. They were involved in the school in various ways, presenting concerts. So it was like a kind of bohemian, suburban atmosphere, and they sent 6:00me to the Workmen's Circle school, so my friends were all learning Hebrew, but I was at Hebrew school, but I was learning Yiddish. So we were sort of on offbeat family in the suburbs.

NP: And did your family observe Shabbos?

AS: No, what happened with my family was we started out really secular, and we had presents on Christmas, and we celebrated Hanukkah too. But then when my father's father died, he started becoming religious, and we joined a synagogue called Ramat Shalom in Rockland County where -- it was new. And there was a young rabbi who later became the president of Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, David Teutsch. And it was kind of an offbeat synagogue too, so it was in 1970s, and women were wearing talises. And so my brother ended up having a 7:00regular bar mitzvah there and studying Hebrew, but a few years earlier I had a Yiddish bas-mitsve [religious coming-of-age attained by girls at age twelve] in my backyard where I read my Torah portion and my haftorah portion in Yiddish with my Workmen's Circle school teacher. But by the time my brother was bar mitzvahed and I was sixteen, my father had become a bal-tshuve [non-practicing Jew who has become religiously observant], basically. And then we moved to the city when I was sixteen, and he got involved with Lincoln Square Synagogue, and then we observed Shabbos every week. But it was like a new thing. It was a bal-tshuve activity. (Laughs) It wasn't something that we had grown up doing at all.

NP: And what languages were spoken in your home?

AS: English. My great-grandparents spoke Yiddish, and when I would visit my 8:00great-grandmother with my family at the Workmen's Circle Home for the Aged in the Bronx on Gun Hill Road, they spoke Yiddish so we wouldn't understand. But once I started studying, as a child of the Workmen's Circle, I started to understand, but yeah, they spoke English. My parents were hoping that we could pick up where they didn't leave off, basically. Well, my father was. He was very interested in this.

NP: And were there aspects of Jewish culture that were particularly important to you as a child?

AS: Well, I loved -- what I learned in the Workmen's Circle school about the holidays and rituals -- I loved the idea, and so I was also encouraging my family to do more of that. And I developed a love of Yiddish culture through the Workmen's Circle. In addition to learning Yiddish, we learned Yiddish songs, and 9:00so when the early klezmer revival started, I was really primed for that, and it was very familiar. I'm a musician, so I was very taken with -- actually, my family used to listen to WEVD, right, "the station that speaks your language" -- where there was mostly Yiddish programming but other immigrant group language programs as well. I didn't know at the time that EVD stands for Eugene V. Debs. And so around the house, besides classical music and the classic music stations I would hear, in those days they played everything but klezmer -- Yiddish songs, the Barry Sisters, Jan Peerce, cantorial recordings -- but Yiddish music. And I loved that. So I was kind of an odd teenager in that I was very into Led 10:00Zeppelin, and I was buying heavy metal -- and we called that heavy metal back then -- LPs, but I was also buying the Barry Sisters when I found it in a used record store. So, I was very taken with that music.

NP: And did you also read Yiddish publications, books or newspapers?

AS: No, I mean, in the Workmen's Circle it was those Workmen's Circle primers. And we got to whatever intermediate point, but later when I graduated college and moved to the city and got a day job at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I also did the zumer-program [summer program] that they ran with Columbia University. And then I got to read Sholem Aleichem and to really start 11:00reading Yiddish literature.

NP: Did you have a particular favorite?

AS: "Motl peysi dem khazns [Motl, Peysi the cantor's son]," I loved that.

NP: And was there a particular political atmosphere in your home growing up?

AS: Well, (laughs) so I wouldn't say -- okay, when I was growing up we were Democrats, and strangely though, my grandmother on my mother's side was a Republican, and I remember her arguing with my parents over Watergate. And I later found out that my grandfather, her father, was very involved with Cahan of "The Forward" and the labor movement. Her sister, my aunt Jean who was closer to 12:00her father than my grandmother was, she was like, as a child, kind of a runner to deliver messages for clandestine labor activity. So my grandmother had grown up in this very left-wing household and then become a Republican. That's on my mother's side. My father, who -- he always, I think, and still does, tilt right, which put him at odds with everybody else in the family, and that's always been a source of difference in the family. So he got involved, when I was a kid, with -- the ADL? Not -- with Meir Kahane? And at some point when I was a kid he was arrested for breaking into the studios of WBAI and declaring it Radio Free 13:00Israel. They were protesting anti-Semitism on WBAI, and my mother saw him on the news. There was a fist fight. But when he was a kid, he would -- a teenager, he was standing on the street corners raising money for the Irgun, so he has always and still tilts right. And so it's been sort of a lifetime of political (laughs) arguments between everybody else and him. So, I would say it's a real mixed bag.

NP: And do you remember how you first learned about the Holocaust?

AS: Yes. I remember, it was traumatic. So, I was in third grade, and our librarian, it was like a unit that the librarian was teaching in our local public elementary school. And so, she took out "The Diary of Anne Frank," and 14:00you know, looking back I realize now that it was 1971. And I don't know what her history was, but it was very close to when it happened, although it didn't seem so to a third grader. But she explained the concentration camps and so forth, and I had nightmares for months after that. And I went home to my parents, and they said, Yeah, it's true.

NP: Were there people in your family, relatives who were affected?

AS: No, but my uncle, my great-uncle Pete, my mother's father's brother, was a photographer with the army. And he documented the liberation of concentration camps. I'm not sure which. I think Buchenwald, actually. And he was embedded with Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a commander, and he was embedded with his unit. 15:00And so, he would mail home things, and my mother -- this was, she was a child, would be there when they opened the packages. And one day, they opened the packages and there were these horrific photos. And she saw them, and her parents were like, Go into the bedroom. And I think that was traumatic for her. So that was our connection to that. But they all came over in 1905. And my father remembers -- no, I guess he doesn't remember. It must have been a story about how, so my great-grandmother [Olya?], my father's father, my father's mother's mother, was walking in the street, and she saw a headline in "The Forward" in 16:00Yiddish saying there were pogroms in Odessa, and she screamed because her family was still back there. So, they came over in time to miss that big pogrom, and -- so, we didn't lose people in the Holocaust.

NP: So you touched on this already a little bit earlier in relation to your father, but generally in your family, what was the perspective on Zionism and the state of Israel?

AS: Gung-ho. Also, at the Workmen's Circle that I attended, it was the 1960s, and the big poster on the wall was off greater (makes air quotes) Israel, right. And my friends, the town I grew up in, Spring Valley, was very heavily Jewish. And I went to a chamber music camp in the summer, but all my friends were 17:00involved in Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. And every summer they would go to that camp. And other kids were involved with other Zionist youth groups, and it was that era of unabashed, deeply-felt Zionism.

NP: And can you tell me briefly about your education. You mentioned attending the Workmen's Circle, so could -- yeah, tell me a little more about your education, both Jewish and general.

AS: So, I went to public schools in Spring Valley. I went to the Workmen's Circle and had a Yiddish bas-mitsve. And when I was sixteen we moved to the city 18:00before my senior year of high school, so I had to do something else for my senior year. So I just went ahead to college, and I spent a year at Hunter College, and then from there I transferred to Brown and graduated from Brown. What else can I tell you?

NP: What was your journey to becoming a musician?

AS: Ah, right. So, when I was five, my parents started me on violin lessons. And they told me that in Odessa, where we're from, all the kids took violin lessons. They also told me other things like, my great-grandmother was kidnapped by a gypsy caravan when she was five, and her father rode after her on horseback for a day and got her back. So, there were little stories about Odessa, (laughs) I don't know how true they were. So I went to this music school, which I already talked about, the wonderful music school. The directors were this couple, Ed and Janet Simons. He recently passed away at the age, I think, 101. And he looked 19:00like Tevye, this tremendous beard and these bushy eyebrows and this incredible smile and just beautiful person. And so I went through that program, which was very -- it was a different atmosphere than the competitive, you know, professionally-oriented music school model. It was about loving music, and they were very community oriented. And it was just a beautiful, warm place. And then he was involved with this music camp, The Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, where I ended up as a teenager going every summer. Also the same philosophy, like there are music camps that are very professional and intense like Interlochen. This was this little kind of hippie-ish camp in New Hampshire. It was all chamber music. And my closest friends, I met them there, and we've 20:00remained friends. And -- I was going to tell you something else. It'll come back to me. So then when I went to college, I started out majoring in neuroscience. I wanted to be a scientist, and I'm still very interested in science. And it's kind of the path not taken that I regret sometimes. And I dropped out of school for a year-and-a-half, and I went hitchhiking around Europe with my violin and played on the streets. I was nineteen, and I met musicians from all over the world, and I would learn their music. This was like at the very beginning of -- maybe it wasn't quite the beginning, sort of the middle of the worldwide folk music revival. And so, I played with Berber musicians and Catalan musicians, and 21:00it was amazing. So when I went back to college, I changed my major to ethnomusicology.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

NP: So if I were to have asked you when you were a child, say twelve years old, what you thought of Yiddish, what would you have said?

AS: When I was twelve? (Sighs) I would have said it's this beautiful language that we have to keep alive. And I was not that focused on it though, compared to other stuff. (Laughs) But yeah, I think I was inculcated with a concern for Yiddish, a love for Yiddish.

NP: Looking back on your childhood, what values do you think your parents were trying to pass on to you?

AS: The funny thing about my father is although he had this turn to the right, 22:00which was fueled a lot by his understanding of anti-Semitism and Israel and so forth. I remember as a kid him explaining racism to me and that being very upsetting, learning from him about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. And so, I actually learned from him to be concerned about social justice. And so, values other than that, kindness, charity -- we had a tsedakah box -- but mostly the love of art and music, stuff like that.

NP: So we've been talking about your background, and I'd like to turn now to discuss your later periods of your life. So let's start off with a couple questions about your history with Yiddish. So what was the general attitude towards Yiddish in your family and community?

AS: Well, I remember being surprised because I was attending a Workmen's Circle School learning Yiddish when my grandmother's sister, my aunt Charlotte, said, "Yiddish, it's a zhargon [often pejorative term for Yiddish, lit. "jargon"] -- that's not a language." So it was the first time I had heard Yiddish disparaged. Other than that, my friends and peers did not seem to be very aware of Yiddish. So only my family was really -- it was really only on our radar in my suburban world.

NP: And you speak many languages in addition to Yiddish, including Italian, Spanish, French, some German, and you're currently studying, I think you said Hebrew, Japanese, Russian.

AS: Yeah.

NP: So how would you say your relationship with Yiddish compares to, say, your relationship with other Jewish languages, such as Hebrew?

AS: Yiddish is mine, you know? Although it's been interesting finally studying Hebrew after all these years because it's like, Oh, I already kind of know it. I didn't realize how much Hebrew I have, not just via Yiddish but just pronouncing the words in shul all these years without knowing what they mean. But the grammatical structure, like the whole thing, it feels very natural. It's sort of like a few missing puzzle pieces, and it's coming together. And so Hebrew to me 25:00feels in a funny way like an offshoot of Yiddish. (Laughs) It's like Yiddish but with a lot of loshn-koydesh verter [Hebrew words]. (Laughs) Like religious Yiddish. Yeah, I think of Hebrew as sort of religious Yiddish.

NP: And so I'd like to turn now to a discussion of your work. And you're a violinist, composer, and a founding member of the Klezmatics.

AS: A founder of the Klezmatics. I'm no longer a member, a founder.

NP: Okay. And so you talked about your journeys around Europe and becoming interesting in ethnomusicology. What then drew you to klezmer music? Well, so I grew up listening to WEVD and all that vocal music. Klezmer is instrumental music. And there is a little klezmer inside those vocal recordings, like Dave 26:00Tarras, the great klezmer clarinetist played with the Barry Sisters, for example, and is on those recordings. So as it happened, my father, who in the 1970s ran -- he was the superintendent of arts in East Harlem in school district four. And he employed young artists, including Barbara Statman, the wife of Andy Statman, the great klezmer revival clarinetist who studied with Dave Tarras in the 1970s and was one of the people who got the revival off the ground. And so she's a visual artist. And they used to come visit us now and then socially in the suburbs where I was growing up, and they were right between my age and my parent's age, and I got to know Andy, and he was in -- before he got into 27:00klezmer, he was in bluegrass, played the mandolin, and he taught me the blues. He introduced me to playing non-classical music. Then, when he had this first legendary concert with cymbal player Zev Feldman at Townhall, I believe, which in 1977, I was there. And it was a lightning bolt of -- it was an epiphany, to use a not very Jewish term (laughs) because klezmer to me sounded like this fusion of the Yiddish music that I already loved and virtuosic instrumental music which was like Bach. (Laughs) And later I also, I got into bebop, and that 28:00sounded to me like Bach too in some ways, just this perpetual motion of sixteenth notes, and it was very exciting. So that was my introduction to klezmer music.

NP: And how would you describe klezmer to someone who was encountering it for the first time?

AS: Klezmer is the musical abstraction of the Yiddish language. It is overemotion-- not overemotional. It is overflowingly emotional. It's ecstatic and tragic simultaneously. It's an efflorescence of notes and acrobatics on the 29:00instrument. You can't explain music in words. You gotta hear it.

NP: And what would you say is the relationship between klezmer and Jewish culture more broadly?

AS: Well, when I started with the Klezmatics, when we first got together and we decided after a year or so that our direction would be not to just reproduce older Yiddish music in a kind of museum, audio-museum format but to try to move it forward, to claim it as our own and send it out into the future. One of my thoughts was that I wanted it to be the musical soundtrack for young Jewish culture. And I had a template for that at that time in the '80s because at the 30:00same time I had a job playing Greek music in a Greek nightclub in Astoria. And I was very obsessed with Greek music, and I was learning to play Greek music, and I was impressed and fell in love with how young Greeks who were all expats had a musical culture, which was Greek. And that music is a cousin of klezmer music too. The modes, the musical modes -- it's part of that continuum of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish, Arabic, et cetera mode scales, musical scales. So I wanted the same thing for Jews, that we could get this thing going again and have it really be ours for real. And so I think it happened. And in particular what was needed 31:00was secular Jewish music for secular Jews. And the klezmer revival started that that way. It was very easy for it to be that very secular Jews because technically it's instrumental music. It has no lyrics. Eventually it broadened, which is great, so to include Yiddish songs and to encompass the connections with very related music, like Hasidic music, Hasidic nigunim [wordless melodies], Yiddish religious songs, and to encompass all kinds of Jews and the whole spectrum of religious or not.

NP: And could you describe briefly how the Klezmatics was founded?

AS: Yeah. So I used to read "The Village Voice," the music -- there were music 32:00ads. Mostly it was like, "Seeking bass player." (Laughs) Everybody wanted a bass player. Nobody seemed to want a violinist, but one day this ad popped up. There was a clarinetist who was looking to form a klezmer band. And the thing is that when I was majoring in ethnomusicology in college, it was the beginning of the ethnomusicology department. I was the only undergraduate, and there was one graduate student named Lynn Dion who later became Shulamis Dion. I think she converted. And she was writing her master's thesis, or perhaps it was her dissertation, on Henry Sapoznik. And it was the early klezmer revival. So she brought all the stuff in for me, and I was like, Oh yeah, that's Andy. I've heard this stuff. I never heard it again after that. Wow, you're into it too. And so I was already curious about it, and remember, this is before the 33:00internet. Everything was harder to find, and everything you found was a jewel and a gem and a find. You couldn't just Google it. Sometimes my parents and I would go on trips to the Lower East Side, and I'd find a cassette. "Ah! A cassette!" you know, everything was so monumental. So what happened? I read this ad, and I was like, yeah. And I answered the ad. It was this guy Rob Chavez, a clarinetist who had come from California where he had a group called [Khatse-plats?]. Now, the funny thing is, we found out later that there was another Khatse-plats that was suing his Khatse-plats for whatever. (Laughs) He wanted to call -- no, no, that's what it was. He wanted us to call ourselves Khatse-plats, and then we found out that he had belonged to a band called Ellis Island that another band called Ellis Island was suing. And we were like, Well, 34:00that's funny. He wants to wade out into those waters again? Let's not do that. And since the Plasmatics were very big at the time, we decided to call ourselves the Klezmatics. And so the band accrued and formed slowly on the Lower East Side. And local gigs and then our career exploded when we got involved with a new world music label in Germany. It turned out Germany was a place where young people were -- there was a subculture of people desperately trying to learn about Jewish culture. And so that was a strange, interesting, ambivalent experience to tour. We toured Europe four or five months out of the year, like two weeks here, three weeks there, five weeks once -- for these wildly 35:00enthusiastic young audiences. We could practically have done a mosh pit with them. And so then Itzhak Perlman got involved, and that raised consciousness of klezmer here in the United States. And then that lasted -- I was one of the leaders of the group. There were three of us who really -- me and Lauren and Frank ran the group, although it was a collective. That lasted seventeen years. Then I had a baby. They said, We're kicking you out of the band. We can't have any mothers of babies in the band. And I sued them because that's illegal in New York state, for pregnancy and sex discrimination. And I won a large settlement, stayed home with the baby for a couple of years. Hadn't been my plan, but it was 36:00wonderful. And that's the story. I left the band. I was the only woman in the band, which was -- being a woman in music, especially at that time and especially in that band, was really a study in itself of something.

NP: Would you want to say more about that?

AS: Sure. Like what?

NP: Yeah, like what were you finding as a woman, both in the band but also in the wider music performance world?

AS: One of the really fun things about the Klezmatics was how we collaborated with other artists a lot, partly thanks to Frank's -- Frank is very outgoing, 37:00active musician, and he had many connections, and he would bring in people. All of us did, but him in particular. And I was really hit over the head early, after having been brought up and told you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. I grew up during the woman's movement, the second wave of the women's movement, and then the reality of the work world and music in particular, nonclassical music. Because in classical music, at some point they instituted the blind auditions behind a curtain, and boom, orchestra membership went from like one percent woman to fifty percent as soon as they couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, which is like, can you get a clearer scientific experiment than that? But in the rest of the music world where there's no blind auditions, it was really shocking the sexism, like the way the men would talk to 38:00each other and ignore more. And I would bring up -- the same thing women complain about everywhere, in boardrooms you mostly hear about it. A woman comes up with an idea. Everybody ignores her. And then the guy next to her says, "I have an idea." Repeats the same idea, and everybody goes, Ah, brilliant. (Laughs) And that's what it was like, both within the band and outside the band. And it was hard. I had to really develop a thick skin. I had to learn to fend for myself. And so, it's interesting. The world has really changed, but I'm still learning from this because this summer, this past summer, I taught at Ashkenaz, the Ashkenaz festival in Canada for the first time, and the theme that year was women in music. And there was a panel for the first time about women in 39:00the klezmer scene, and so even after decades of struggling with this, for the first time I heard the stories of my colleagues who I've known for decades, and none of us had ever heard our stories. I mean, they knew about the lawsuit and so forth, but I hadn't -- they hadn't heard details, and I hadn't heard their stories. But what I learned the most was that younger women were looking for mentorship, and I realized that we weren't -- not just younger women. My colleague Marilyn Lerner, who is a wonderful pianist who I work with, talked about how one thing that happens is in the jazz world, there's a lot of mentorship between older and younger men, and she felt like women, being so beleaguered, didn't know or realize that we should be mentoring younger women, especially since no one else was going to do it. So, I really resolved to mentor 40:00young women at that point. I realized I hadn't been doing that. I felt remiss. So, it's really been a journey, which is continuing. And I was also hardened that the young men who attended this panel, they sounded really galvanized to do something about it also and to be what young people today call allies, which was lovely.

NP: And then have you since become involved in mentorship?

AS: Well, it's changed how I interact with -- like I'm paying more attention to younger women musicians as our work intersects, and yeah, I feel like there's a real change. It's time to do that.

NP: So you mentioned when you first started performing, you were performing to 41:00these very eager audiences in Germany. What's your explanation for that enthusiasm that you received?

AS: They were working through the history, their history and the Holocaust, and I think for the people who were involved, my feeling was that it was a genuine attempt to grapple with history. And there was a longing to connect with Jews and Jewish culture. Sometimes it felt weird and fetishistic and a little -- an artist friend of mine introduced this word to me this week -- instrumentalizing other people. We felt a little objectified, like they were seeing right through 42:00us as people, ignoring us as people, and we became like symbols. And there was something yucky about that. But for the most part, it was like we could feel their wanting to do something about their history.

NP: And could you describe how your relationship to Jewish music has evolved over your lifetime? What are you currently drawn to in your work?

AS: Ah, okay. So, in terms of my interests, my current interests in Jewish music -- well first of all, I should say I've always been interested in all kinds of music. So, I grew up trained classically. Ten years ago or so I returned to that, and so I started studying classical violin playing again, and I've been 43:00working very hard on that. I had that other career in Greek music. I've become very interested in jazz over the years and working on playing jazz violin. I've gotten very interested recently in Afro-Cuban music, and I've been taking African drum lessons. And I'm just, I think of music as a whole, and I'm interested in all of it. A few years ago, I took a five-day intensive course in Turkish makams, modes, musical scales, which interests me very much both because of my experience with Greek music and because they're related to Jewish music. So, my interests in Jewish music partly are learning about the music that Jewish music is related to. From the Jewish music point of view, recently I've become much more involved in trying to work out in my mind and also along with a 44:00musicologist at University Colorado Bolder named Yonatan Malin, theory, Jewish music theory because it hasn't been theorized the way, say, Indian classical music or Arabic or Turkish music has. There isn't an indigenous, an internal music theory like those music traditions have. So I've been trying to theorize it. It's something I'm working on, interests me a lot, and I'm excited about. There have been a few attempts. There have been people who have also been working on it, my colleagues like Walter Zev Feldman, Joel Rubin, Joshua Horowitz, and so I've read all their stuff, and we're all kind of in dialogue. 45:00And so as part of that I've gotten interested in cantorial music because I feel that's where you hear some musical characteristics like the neutral thirds of the Middle Eastern scales. They're in cantorial music, but there's so little you can read about that. Mostly you read people saying, "Well, they're singing a little out of tune. It's expressive." It's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's really deliberate, and it's related to these other kinds of music. So that's, on the one hand, that's where I've been going with Jewish music, kind of looking backwards but looking forwards. What I've been doing is write -- for years now I've been writing new Jewish music, klezmer music and also composed -- yeah, through composed music. So I've been writing a film score. I have two projects 46:00which are original music for silent film. The first one "The Yellow Ticket," I wrote, and I play it with pianist Marilyn Lerner. The second one, "The Ancient Law," is a collaboration with a silent film pianist named Donald Sosin. We wrote it together, and we've been touring it. And I've also been writing songs, setting Yiddish music to poetry. And I sing them because I've also been studying voice and singing my own songs.

NP: Could you describe what drew you to work with the genre of silent film?

AS: It was a commission. I had never thought of it before. So one of the fun things about music is that things just happen serendipitously, sometimes. So Joshua Ford, who was curating the Washington, DC Jewish Film and Music Festival 47:00at the time, called me, or somebody from there. It was his idea anyway. He wanted to get somebody to write a new score for "The Yellow Ticket," which is a Pola Negri film. She was a star of the silver screen. And a film about a Jewish young woman in a shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] who, in order to study medicine in St. Petersburg has to lead a double life in a brothel. It's made in 1918, so incredible, you know. So they sent me the film. And I was like, "Okay, I'll take a look at it." And it was like, Whoa, I didn't know this existed. Just those images, film footage of the world in 1918. They were depicting, in some parts of the world in the 1880s, you know. The 48:00interiors, the people, and that film contains some of the only film footage of Nalewki, of the Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw which became the Warsaw ghetto and then was gone. And the new Jewish museum there sits on that site now. So then in the course of writing the music for that film, I learned, talking to my family, that my grandfather played for silent films at symphony space, a block from where I live now, when it was a movie theater. And he played with an orchestra. And that's how he met my grandmother. So my very existence (laughs) is due to silent film music.

NP: And can you describe a particularly meaningful experience from your career as a performer?

AS: Oh, gosh, there are so many. I mean, it's been my life. So a particular one. 49:00This is a crazy one. After a Klezmatics concert, a woman came to the edge of the stage to talk to us. And she said to me, "I just want you to know that your album 'Rhythm and Jews,' I have a cassette of it. And my mother was in a coma for months, and I would play music by her bedside, and recently I put on the cassette. And she opened her eyes and said, 'What is that beautiful music?' And that's how she came out of her coma." I was like, Okay. Retire now. I didn't become a doctor, but I did this.

NP: And you've also been a teacher for many years, and could you describe the challenges and/or delights of teaching klezmer?

AS: Well, one thing that's been interesting is -- okay, so the idea behind teaching klezmer fiddle started out that the fiddler is the quintessential Jewish instrument, right, "Fiddler on the Roof." It was considered, in the Old Country, the avatar of Jewishness, the fiddle, "Stempenyu," the Jewish violin. But the revival started out as a clarinet phenomenon for various reasons, including that jazz clarinet was popular at the time, that recorded technology wasn't kind to the violin. So to me the violin felt still neglected when I started in the 1980s, and I wanted to bring it back. And I wanted -- the violin 51:00was like the Yiddish language of instruments for Jews, (laughs) in my mind. So I wanted to bring that back, and what was interesting, what's been interesting is to see how when I started, it was so hard to get people to play those ornaments. Should I show you? Okay. (Picks up the violin sitting behind her) So, one of the things that characterizes klezmer fiddle playing and all klezmer instrumental play are what we call ornaments, a vocabulary of sounds which are not notatable in Western notation. And every musical culture has them, including Western music. Western music's ornamentation are trills, vibrato. In klezmer -- (tunes violin) it'll do. (Plays violin) You hear those sobbing sounds? (Plays violin) 52:00It mimics the singing of a Yiddish folk singing or cantorial singing. (Sings wordlessly) And I figured out listening to old recordings and slowing them down to half speed what was going on, and also with the help of Michael Alpert, who was one of the people who figured this out early on, and Leon Schwartz, who was an elderly klezmer fiddler who I got to take a couple of lessons with when he 53:00was in his late eighties. So teaching, I had to explain to people how to do this in the 1980s and '90s. That was very hard, to get people to hear this naturally. By now a generation has passed, and the music has spread all over the world. And when people come to me, they have no idea how to do it, but once I show them, (snaps her fingers) they get it right away because it's in their ears. So this has been very gratifying because I feel like, I did that. (Laughs) So --

NP: And do you consider yourself an activist?

AS: Politically?

NP: Culturally, politically, any way.

AS: Absolutely. I mean, I'm a lesbian. I'm a lesbian mom. I've delighted in being active always. And I've always believed an individual could make a big 54:00impact by sort of the ripple effect. You're just a little pebble, but, ah, look at that. In history, I think history works that way. And so, I was in college in the 1980s and gave visibility. I thought that was a great idea. So, I mean, when you're a kid, so this is a little bit kid-like, but my friends and I thought a good idea on parents' weekend would be to grab our girlfriends and boyfriends and kiss in public. Let people see, and visibility would change everything. And I think it's true. It has. So same thing with being a parent. My wife and I are a part of kind of the second -- just in the same way that I'm a second-wave klezmer revivalist, we are kind of second-wave lesbian moms. We're not the very first generation to openly conceive and bring up children. We're the second. So 55:00there were still not that many people doing it when we did it, and I felt like my activism was a sort of personal activism where out in public my wife, these are my children. These are our children. And I think it's worked, you know? And I'm not an activist in the sense that I spend as much time directly on political activism as I wish I could. I know, it's priorities. So okay, I feel a little guilty about that. But I do what I can. And I mostly try to do what I can by having the courage to just speak and just by example and be honest about what I 56:00think and not avoid that confrontation and change people's minds.

NP: And what of your sense of Jewish identity has been most important to transmit to your children?

AS: The culture. I really believe in what I learned at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Okay, it was a day job, but it was a transformational day job. It was a golden era for some of us. Young, klezmer, and Yiddish culture revivalists, we all had day jobs there, me, Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics, Jenny Romaine, the theater artist, Michael Alpert, Henry Sapoznik of Kapelye and later Brave Old World and then Henry's projects, Henry who stared KlezKamp, and more people. That was like -- Adrienne Cooper was my boss, the great Yiddish 57:00singer. And then later we had an all-woman band together called Mikveh. It was this time of incredible excitement and creativity and collaboration, the 1980s at YIVO, people who were doing clerical jobs, some of us. And I worked for my wonderful boss Sam Norich. And so the YIVO philosophy, which I drank in, was, We are not about how Jews died. We are about how Jews lived. There's more to Jews and Jewish culture than the Holocaust. The Holocaust was death. Let's talk about life and keep it going. So, I did grow up in this kind of standard, American Jewish, Holocaust-centric, and also Israel-centric culture, and that was a 58:00revelation. Let's find out deeply what our culture is, not just a smattering of Yiddish words and gefilte fish, but there is this deep, old, complex, rich culture that is so much more than that. And it's very scholarly place, it was a very idealistic place, but -- scientific place. I mean, visenshaftlekhe institut, knowledge, and so that is how I think about Jewish culture and how I've wanted to convey it to my children.

NP: And what do your children -- what is their relationship with Yiddish?

AS: I think it is in their ears and their souls even though they are young, and what your parents are into is not so much (laughs) what you're into. They're kids of their generation. They're very into hip hop and rap, and that's their 59:00music in a lot of ways in the same way that Led Zeppelin was also my music. And I got to play with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page at a certain point. But they grew up with it in their ears, and I think it is theirs.

NP: And what would you say currently is the place of Yiddish within Jewish culture?

AS: It has a foothold now. It's been amazing to see how Yiddish studies programs have spread, how there's a place called Yiddish Farm. There's Yiddish-Vokh, where I'm going to go do "The Ancient Law," this film this summer. There's a National Yiddish Book Center, the Yiddish Book Center. So there's been an 60:00exponential liveliness to the life of Yiddish culture. But it's still a kind of a tenuous toehold. It would be so great, my fantasy is to see some connection happen, some gap bridge between the ever-growing population of Hasidim here, people whose children, their first language is Yiddish -- Yiddish speakers, native Yiddish speakers -- and our world of secular Yiddishists. That is a huge gap, but wouldn't that be amazing, to bridge it? Because I am sure there are plenty of people who would like to live along that continuum, and it's such a fissure. And it would be great for Yiddish.

NP: And what do you see as the future of klezmer?

AS: Klezmer feels healthier than Yiddish. A language is really hard to learn, but music is something, it's much more accessible to people, much more easily accessible to people than language. And I feel like it's really solidly back. People are taking it in all kinds of directions. There are amazing musicians working with it. So I think it's there now in the way that other musical cultures are -- like Irish music and so forth are doing their thing.

NP: So we're nearing the end of our time here, and I'd like to ask, what advice would you want to share with a young musician?

AS: Listen. Young musicians should listen to the old stuff. Go back, back, back to the beginning. Listen to the older stuff and reconnect with it because music should and does evolve, and it changes, and that's great, and it's how it should be, and at the same time, it's really imperative to go back to the source and hear where things were. There's a flavor we can never recapture. I spent years figuring out how to do it, but your generation always has its own flavor, and that's great. But it's so great to at least try that futile project of seeing if you can try to sound like those people. See if you can understand what it was like, and at the very least hearing it and love it. So that's my advice. Listen 63:00to their earliest recordings.

NP: And more generally, do you have some wisdom or life experience that you would like to share with future generations?

AS: Life experience? Yeah. First of all, women, don't put up with any crap. Keep at it. This is a long, long struggle, and you got to keep at it. And young people generally, the world has become so noisy. What a noisy world, the internet. Everybody's got a platform now. There's thousands of voices talking in your ear. There used to be only a few curated voices. Okay, democracy, wonderful 64:00on the one hand, and ugh on the other hand, just over abundance and a lot of hype and a lot of insincerity and a lot of commercialism. So, my advice is, try to block it all out. Don't get sucked up in hype. Don't get sucked up in trying to sell yourself. Try to hang on to your childlike wonder. Try to remember what you really love, what you loved when you were daydreaming in the backyard staring up at the sky.

NP: Well, thank you so much. I'd like to thank you both personally and on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center.

AS: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

[END OF INTERVIEW]