SRULI DRESDNER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY: It's August 25th, 2011. I'm here at KlezKanada with Sruli Dresdner. This is Christa Whitney and we're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record the interview?

SRULI DRESDNER:You do.

CW:Thank you. Can you tell me about where your family comes from?

SD:Okay. My parents are more or less Holocaust survivors. I say more -- my father was a young child during the Holocaust. It started when he was four and he came here when he was eight. He actually was born in Charleroi, Belgium. His parents were very Hasidic. His father was mostly from Szatmár area of Romania. 1:00And his mother came from Galicia. But they moved to Charleroi, I guess, to try to make a living. And he had a kosher grocery store in Charleroi and was one of the only, maybe the only one Jew in Charleroi at the time, pre-war, who had a beard and hat and kind of dressed in a Hasidic way. My father was born in '36, so his family ran through France and Italy and eventually they were brought to the United States. And I don't know if you're familiar with the group that Eleanor Roosevelt brought to Oswego, eleven hundred families -- they were part of that, that group. My mother's family, both her parents were from Galicia. I know that her mother's family, they were first cousins, so my grandmother and grandfather's family all came from a town called Sanok, which we pronounce 2:00Sunik, in Galicia. And I believe it's east of Krakow. And they were living in Berlin since about 1920. And my mother was born -- they escaped after Kristallnacht in 1939. And they went to Cuba for two years before they were allowed to enter into the United States, and my mother was born in Cuba in 1940.

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CW:So, were there stories in your family? Do you have a sense of what your grandparents' life was like and your parents' life was like back -- or, I mean, your grandparents' life was like in the Old Country?

SD:Well, I know that they, my mother's family, was very poor. In Sanok -- they tried to make a living by baking fancy wedding cakes. And apparently, according to all those who have told me, there was not a great market for fancy wedding 3:00cakes from the other poor Jews that lived in Sanok. So, they kind of scraped a living. I think some of my grandmother's brothers were kind of snake oil salesmen. They had the gift of gab and they would go around and try to -- medicine shows and so on. That's my illustrious history. (laughs) My father's father actually, though, he grew up in the town of Szatmár. He didn't grow up to Hasidic parents, but he became very close to the rebbe of Szatmár and so that he even became a -- what's known in Yiddish as a "hoyz-bokher," or kind of like someone who lived in the rebbe's house and would help out. And he did that for a while and he was very learned. But he also was very gifted musically and 4:00he, interestingly enough, went to Vienna to study cantorial studies in Vienna. But he did not make a living as a cantor, ever.

CW:So, this was your grandfather?

SD:So, the cantorial student hoyz-bokher, that's my father's father. And my mother's family, they were the bakers.

CW:Did you ever know your father's father?

SD:Yes, I knew all of my grandparents. My mother's father, when they moved to Berlin -- I don't know if this is interesting to you, but made his living selling coats. But he very early on realized that you can't make any money selling to other Jews 'cause they bargain too much. So, he went out to the countryside and sold to non-Jews and made a very nice living and had enough money -- that's why they were able to escape. They had enough money that he could escape.

CW:So, did you learn songs from your grandfather or music from your grandfather?

SD:Yes, yes. Directly and indirectly. A lot, actually. A lot of the music that I 5:00know, the religious Jewish music that I know, comes through either of my grandparents.

CW:Like what?

SD:Like what? Well, on my father's side, the Sabbath table songs that my father would sing came from his father and what he knew from his father. But it's not only true, he also -- they all lived on the Lower East Side of New York when they emigrated to America. And so, my father spent a lot of time at my mother's father's house, also. My mother's father was, in my opinion, less gifted musically. Hope nobody's listening to this. But he loved music and he was a collector of nigunim [melodies], which are Hasidic melodies. And he really would collect them and he would go to different shtiblekh [small Hasidic houses of prayer] or small synagogue, Hasidic synagogues, and learn them. And if people came to the house, he would press them for nigunim. And my uncle told me that 6:00when they were in Berlin, he was extremely avid to get nigunim that were new nigunim from Poland. And anybody who came through Berlin, he would grab and say, "Teach me a new nigun from Poland." So, a lot of nigunim that my father knew came actually from his father and from his father-in-law. And of course, I learned those growing up, so --

CW:Can you tell me a little about the community that you grew up in?

SD:I grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens. And this, I think, will be of interest to this project because Kew Gardens, Queens, in the time when -- I was born in 1961. So, in the '60s and early '70s, had only a small community of Hasidic-oriented and Jewish people. Now, there's many, many, many more. But the 7:00hotbeds of Hasidic New York were mostly in various neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The nice result for me was that we had a small Hasidic synagogue in the neighborhood. And anyone who was kind of Hasidic or even not Hasidic but wanted a stricter religious environment -- for example, not just a separation of men and women during prayer but a kind of a floor-to-ceiling thick curtain so that you wouldn't even know that the women were there. So, if that was your orientation, you would come to this small shtibl or small synagogue. And the nice thing for me was that, therefore, I really heard nigunim or songs and prayer kind of melodies from all over, as opposed to if had I grown up, say, in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn where maybe everybody would have come from more 8:00or less the same region. So, I got to hear music from all over, even Lithuanian music and non-Hasidic Lithuanian music and anything from the pan-Hasidic world.

CW:And what was your education?

SD:I was educated in Yiddish-speaking or at least primarily Yiddish-speaking, Hasidic-style religious schools. There are gradations of Hasidic religious schools. So, I was not part of a very insular Hasidic community, let's say like Satmar, Bobov. But in Queens, some of the differences, I wore -- I won't say normal clothes, but I could wear patterned shirts, for example, and we didn't only wear white shirts. And we all spoke English to each other but most of us, 9:00almost all of us, came from Yiddish-speaking parents. And there was definitely an attempt to teach our religious subjects in Yiddish. So, I heard a lot of Yiddish growing up. And in the synagogue that I grew up in, the rabbi's sermons were always in Yiddish.

CW:So, what was the content of the -- was it kheyder [traditional religious school] in the European style or --

SD:It was kind of a mixture. I actually think that the Hasidic yeshivas today, religious schools today, are much closer to what the kheyder was like in Europe than what I grew up with or even when anybody kind of my age grew up with, 'cause there was -- Hasidim was certainly Americanizing in some form. There was a sense at that time that a secular education was at least a little bit important. I mean, from the time I was in fifth grade, we had school six days a 10:00week and religious studies from nine to three. But then, we had secular studies from three to six. But at least they made an attempt to get real teachers and to try to teach us real subjects. I think that's not true anymore. So -- we weren't beaten too often. There was a little bit of hitting that went on, but it wasn't a daily occurrence.

CW:And are there any niguns that you remember from your childhood that were indicative of a specific person or a specific holiday that you really loved?

SD:Too many to really answer. I know many nigunim from my childhood that are indicative of a specific person and a specific holiday or a religious ritual.

CW:Okay. Unless you want to just throw one out there? No? (laughs)

SD:Okay, I'll sing. Is singing appropriate on this? All right. I associate every nice march from Galicia, Hasidic march from Galicia, with my mother's brother, Chaim, and it goes like this. (sings wordless melody, 00:11:33 - 00:12:33) And 12:00I've never heard that from anyone else. But we sang that a lot in my family.

CW:Just for various, for -- on Shabbos and --

SD:We would attach it to various prayers, but we very, very frequently attached it to the psalm that precedes the grace after meals or the Shir hamales before bentshing [saying the blessing after a meal].

CW:And so, we've been talking about your early time. I'd like to just talk for a 13:00second about how you got to where you are today. (laughs) But first, I'd like to just -- can you tell me quickly any projects that you're currently working on? Musical projects?

SD:Hm. Lisa, my partner, and I, we sing Hasidic nigunim in various contexts. And, well, I guess that's a project that we're working on. Well, other than our standard musical endeavors, that's about it.

CW:And at a certain point, you left that community that you grew up in?

SD:In the sense that I stopped being religiously observant, yeah.

CW:When did that happen?

SD:I had some issues in high school, which I foolishly resolved by immersing myself in what we tell the outside world is a rabbinical college but really is a kind of post-high school yeshiva where you spend your morning till night studying Talmud. I did that for a bunch of years. And as it was in that environment, I began to have a lot of questions and I met other people who had questions. And one question led to another and ultimately, by the time I was about twenty-three, twenty-four, I decided that I wanted to enter the real world and leave that life behind, at least as a personal practice. I still maintain ties to my family, though.

CW:And how have you been able to translate the music into new contexts?

SD:Well, actually, the first time I went to KlezKamp and then very quickly thereafter, I came to KlezKanada, which is about fifteen, sixteen years ago. It was a real eye-opener for me to see that there are -- firstly, I had no idea that there was such a rich repertoire of Yiddish music, generally. I knew, of course, the standard Yiddish songs that most American Jews knew. And I knew nigunim. And I knew the entire, frankly, kind of religious song repertoire. But I didn't know that there was this whole genre of klezmer music or instrumental or melodies and nigunim, even, that had been recorded by musicians. And so, that 16:00was a real eye-opener for me, in that there was a community of people who really cared about these melodies. Was also shocking to me. I had an experience when I was growing up, somebody handed me an Epstein Brothers recording. I think it was "The Epstein Brothers Play A Jewish Wedding" and I think I was about ten. And in addition to whatever else I was listening to, which was a lot of contemporary religious, Orthodox religious music and some, I guess, Beatles and whatever, I played this recording. And I fell in love with what that recording sounded like and the music that it sounded like. And at that time, there were people in the Orthodox Hasidic religious community who still played in that style and that kind of style. And I re-fell in love with the clarinet and I even was fortunate enough to study with Paul Pincus, I don't know if you've heard of him, when I was about eleven, twelve, and --

CW:How did that come about?

SD:He was playing, I guess, Jewish weddings, and I asked people and they 17:00recommended him. So, I would go study with him. But I could not get any of my friends interested in this recording. So, I would have friends over and say, "You've got to listen to this. It's really amazing!" And nobody thought it was amazing. So, it was nice for me to find a community of people who really did think that this style of music was amazing. And there's a real connection between this, the emotion that's in klezmer music or the kind of music we play here and what goes on in a yeshiva or a Hasidic synagogue, especially on Shabbos, on the Sabbath, and just the style of singing, the emotion, its particular emotion are very similar. So, I found that it very easily matched. I always loved the music, even when I left the practice. And it was nice. And 18:00almost immediately, I began to realize that people wanted to hear what I had to sing and play and I was, of course, very, very eager to hear what other people were singing and playing. And I kind of merged it together and it really took hold of me and I stopped being the corporate lawyer that I was and devoted my life to playing this mostly Yiddish music.

CW:And some of the albums that you've done have been children's albums.

SD:Oh, yeah.

CW:How did those projects come about and -- yeah?

SD:When Lisa and I met each other and started to play music together, we both had young children at the time. So, we were kind of parents of young children and dealing with young children was something that we were doing every day. So, we thought that there was a need for this and that we might be able to do that. 19:00So, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best ways to communicate the music and the excitement of the music to young people of, really, all ages. And so, we made a couple of recordings which were kind of successful. And we do a lot of work in schools. And I mean, really, we've played in hundreds and hundreds of schools, and from Jewish schools to public schools and schools that have no Jewish kids. And it's been nice and rewarding. You want to know specifics of what we do, well, it was very important to us to bring real music. And so, we didn't rewrite anything. But what we tried to do is figure out an angle to bring kids into it and to make it interesting. So, we might do a 20:00clapping rhythm with them, but sophisticated not silly, and have them really clap and enjoy clapping, a clapping rhythm while we're playing a song. Or just we teach the song "Ot azoy [Just like that]" a lot, which allows them to yell out the words "Ot azoy." And we tell stories that incorporate Yiddish counting. We do a lot of dancing with them, sometimes dancing in place, and we've modified some of the traditional Yiddish dances so that they work in a school environment. And it kind of works. I mean, I don't know, this goes back about ten years ago. We played at a school in South Queens, completely, I think, Hispanic. And we finished the concert with a Hasidic nigun, Hasidic melody where we have the kids sing -- there's a recurring part that they sing along; it's 21:00pretty long. We use a system of having the boys and girls compete against each other as a way of motivating them to kind of be involved. Anyway, and some kid ran up to me as we were taking our equipment out of the school, I think about ten-year-old boy, and he goes, "That song that you sang," he sang a little bit of it, he goes, "That's the best song I ever heard." That was nice.

CW:What role does Yiddish language play in all this? I mean, is it important for you to transmit the language as well as the music in your work?

SD:Yes. Why? Well, I love Yiddish. I love Yiddish almost as much as I love 22:00klezmer music. And one of the nice things for me to be involved in this world is to be around so much Yiddish. And so, even though I grew up hearing a lot of Yiddish, for example, I never really read anything in Yiddish. But over the last ten years, I've started to read in Yiddish, which I love. And I guess it's just about having -- I'll call it making friends with the culture. So, I think if, when you hear the music, you make friends with the culture in one way and when you start to hear the language and speak the language and stop being afraid of the language, then you make friends with the culture in another way.

CW:Can you describe at all, for you, what the language and the music, how those 23:00are different parts? What do they sort of --SD:I mean, some people say, some musicians like to say that the music and the language have the same kinds of rhythms. I don't know that I so much feel that way. I just think that they're both beautiful in their own way. Yiddish is a beautiful language; it's juicy, interesting. It's a language that makes me feel warm when I hear it and speak it. And I feel the same way about the music. And I guess that's what I try to transmit to the kids when we are in that context, just the love for speaking the language, hearing the language. We try to connect the kids to the ways in which Yiddish has become part of English. And that, of course, varies. Jewish kids, and depending on where they are, some kids might have a lot of Yiddish. And of course, non-Jewish kids have some Yiddish also, because most everybody in New 24:00York at least knows the word chutzpah and they may have seen a gefilte fish jar or matzah.

CW:As parents, are you teaching your kids Yiddish?

SD:Ha. Lisa did not grow up in a -- well, her father speaks Yiddish but she did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking environment. But she's been trying very hard to learn it and speak it and we've gotten to the point where we can now really tell pretty extensive secrets to each other in front of the kids. So, we are guilty of the same things that we are angry that our parents did for us, yeah.

CW:And have you studied Yiddish?

SD:Unfortunately, I really haven't had a chance to study it formally, but --

CW:But you can read. What do you like to read?

SD:I'm a big Peretz fan, so -- a lot of Peretz and some Sholem Aleichem. I try 25:00to read things that have also been translated into English so that I can go back and forth when I need to.

CW:Do you ever see a time when there's gonna be more dialogue between the klezmer world or this world and the religious community?

SD:I don't really know how to respond to that. I think there is some interface now. There are always religious people that attend these events.

CW:I guess I'm specifically talking about music.

SD:I don't think that contemporary religious Jews are so interested in this music anymore, generally. And that's not wholly true, but I think they've created a kind of a distinction in that world where, on Shabbos, when it's up to 26:00your singing, then there is still a very strong connection to what I would say is Old World music, which is kind of, at some level, synonymous with klezmer music. But outside of that context, they are absolutely not interested in klezmer-sounding music. Or, if they hear it, it's kitsch to them. I will say, however, that when I do go into those worlds and I play the older style of Jewish music, I do get a lot of good response.

CW:So, do you collect niguns?

SD:I guess I do, but I'm very discriminating. So, I really only like the really great ones and I think there are a lot of bad ones. And that's part of the problem of disseminating nigunim is that there are so many bad ones. So, one of the things I like to tell people that I share nigunim with is, "Only sing the 27:00good ones." But the good ones are really, really good.

CW:Are there characteristics that make a good nigun?

SD:Yes. Firstly, they're not trite. So, they're not cliché. But there are other things. The good nigunim will kind of hammer a particular note, almost. They almost always contain sections where the same note is repeated for a very long time, maybe even across a few bars. So that, I think, that creates that kind of really great meditative quality. I taught my class this year a nigun that I 28:00don't know if anybody knows, that I know from a Holocaust survivor who I grew up -- he was an adult and I was a child and he sang this in the synagogue I grew up in. And it has sections like, (sings wordless melody, 00:28:19 - 00:28:24), you know, so -- and it carries over in other parts of the song. (Sings wordless melody, 00:28:29 - 00:28:34) So, I think a really good nigun -- I mean, I shouldn't say this. One kind of really good nigun has that kind of repeated note that you just linger over and just soak in. And so, that's, I think, one way to have a good nigun. And many of them do, or they'll have things that are deceptively simple. The one I sang from my uncle before has that in a second 29:00section. (Sings wordless melody, 00:29:06 - 00:29:12) So, things like that that really, I think, grab you.

CW:Great. What is your take on this term of the klezmer music revival, cultural revival?

SD:The term?

CW:Yeah.

SD:I think it's accurate, for one. I think there was a revival. I think it's small, unfortunately, although, I mean, it had a good fifteen or so year run. I mean, for us who are trying to make some sort of a living doing this, the word klezmer has become a little toxic. There's a lot of people in the Jewish world 30:00who say, Okay, I've been there, done that. I don't want to hear that anymore. So, we don't use it. We tend to just say Jewish music. I don't know what else to say. It obviously attracts musicians and there's a whole lot of young people here.

CW:What do you see as sort of the role that you, especially considering your work, that you are really reaching a lot of people, kids, through your work? What is the role that a performing artist can play in cultural, linguistic, musical transmission?

SD:Oh, I think we can play a very important role. I mean, when we're in the 31:00context of, say, we go into a school, we're only there -- let's say we have the kids in front of us for forty-five minutes, an hour. But I still think that we leave them with a good lingering, positive association with the music that it's interesting and lively and cool, even, which is important to us. I mean, obviously, in a place like KlezKanada, you have more of an opportunity to share with people who really care about the music. And then, you can reach them at a deeper level. I'm not sure I answered your question.

CW:Yeah. I just wanted to give you a minute if there's anything that you want to say in this interview, 'cause we have to go in a minute. But is there anything that you wanted to share?

SD:It's great that the National Yiddish Book Center exists. It's great that 32:00people like you work for it and that you're really preserving a culture for people who are interested in it, that there's now really -- and it's a great place to go and you can find almost any material that you need to find. And it's a nice home for people who love Yiddish and Yiddish music to come together.

CW:Cool. And last question, do you have advice or a message for future generations?

SD:How wonderful. Yes, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. So, however you feel about your background or your culture or maybe the religious context, the parts of it that work for you and that mean something to you -- which in my case, was music and language -- hold onto, because they'll enrich your life.

CW:Great. Thank you.

SD:Yeah.

[END OF INTERVIEW]