HANKUS NETSKY ORAL HISTORY

HANKUS NETSKY: I was born in Philadelphia in 1955, and I grew up in Philadelphia. And my father's family came from Kryve Ozero, which was in the Ukraine, Podolia -- also Tulchyn, was also in Podalia. And my mother's family came from Kishinev. And that's in Bessarabia, Moldova. Did I say that -- I said Podalia -- Podolia's southern Ukraine, as you know. Okay. And Kishinev is in Moldova. It's the capital of Moldova. And my other grandmother's family came 1:00from Bohuslav, Boguslav. And my father's family were in the fabric business, basically. My grandfather was in the rag business. My father took over the rag business from him when he died, which was in the -- around 1950. And my mother's family were musicians. And my great-grandfather was a batkhn [wedding entertainer]. And when he got to Philadelphia, there wasn't any use for that. So, he made sure his kids could play music. And they played Jewish music. And five of my uncles were musicians; my grandfather was a musician. So, I was born into that. That's what I was born into. The rag business and music, (laughs) basically. That's sort of the -- those were the two comfort zones for me, in a 2:00way. (laughs) 'Cause I could either go to work with my dad -- which meant sorting rags, literally. (laughs) I think probably if I -- at a very early age, I learned to blow into a baritone horn and a saxophone and things like that from one grandfather, and then on the other side I learned to tell the wool from the cotton. (laughs) So, that's kind of my early education. So, I grew up in Philadelphia in Mount Airy, which is a kind of middle-class neighborhood. And not a particularly Jewish neighborhood, really, where we lived. But we were very 3:00involved in the synagogue. There was a synagogue that was not that far away from our house where my family took me fairly early on and where I went to Hebrew school. And there was also a Hasidic shtibl [small Hasidic house of prayer], kind of a -- originally really in a house, really -- a Hasidic old-style European shul that was closer to our house, actually. So, when I was pretty young, my father became really good friends with this Hasidic rebbe. My father, who was -- didn't believe in anything, but he kind of liked this rebbe. And it's possible that his own grandfather -- I mean, his own grandfather was Hasidic. His own grandfather was killed in the pogrom, 1919, one of the Petliura pogroms. 4:00I don't know if you know about that in history, but it was a very -- they were basically the backlash from the revolution. It was like, okay, well, the White Russians were defeated, but now they're allowed to go down to Ukraine and kill as many Jews as they can. So, for whatever reason, anyhow, my father was attracted to that rabbi, who did not have a car and couldn't drive anywhere, so my father would drive him around. (laughter) So, that was sort of another part of my childhood Jewishly, the sort of normal Conservative synagogue; this Hasidic place, which was called Beth Solomon; Rabbi Isaacson -- so I became a little bit of a musician. I played and went to elementary school -- I didn't like school at all. I didn't like public school at all. I really wasn't 5:00comfortable there, and I didn't like the teachers, and I didn't feel close to kind of the people there. But I sort of liked Hebrew school; I liked the sort of comfort of the Jewish environment more. It was funny; the very first -- so because I came from a musical family, I started playing music, 'cause that's what you do. (laughs) So, my grandfather got us a piano -- terrible piano. Terrible piano. But there it was. So, (laughs) I played it. I figured it out, tried to figure it out as best I could. Took classical piano lessons. Couldn't figure out why I was playing classical music or what it was supposed to go like, but I knew -- I liked to figure out songs from the radio is what I really liked to do. And I played saxophone -- I started playing saxophone in third grade. And 6:00we played what I heard on the radio, what I liked on the radio. I had really kind of moldy fig kind of taste; I didn't like rock. (laughs) I listened to the stuff that the old people listened to. And I sort of put together a band of friends, and we would play, and we'd play at the synagogue when they'd have functions. And the very first paying job we had was when the Hasidic synagogue, somebody donated a Torah, and they thought they were still in Europe, so -- they're in Mount Airy in this middle-class neighborhood, virtually suburban, that was in Philadelphia but wasn't really -- it looked like a suburb. We had a Torah procession. I had to lead a Torah procession -- I was probably seven or eight years old -- from the house of the donor to the Hasidic shul. (laughs) And 7:00didn't know many Jewish songs, really, to play. I think we played stuff from "Fiddler on the Roof." It was probably just about when that came out, 1964, '65. So, that was kind of my early memories of Jewish things. I had a similar experience, I think, to Aaron Lansky, who writes about this in his book, actually what I'm about to talk about, which is that -- my grandfather died when I was four. And my other grandfather had died before I was born. And I had one grandmother who was very old, and she probably died when I was twelve or something like that. And she spoke this -- she didn't speak English very much. I assumed what she spoke was Russian, but eventually I sort of figured out it was probably Yiddish. And in Hebrew school, they started teaching us Hebrew. And my 8:00father had pronounced things a certain way, and I'd heard that. And then, one day the principal came in and just said, "We're changing the way we pronounce everything." And I have to say that for me, that was really a weird message. (laughs) I was probably in second grade, and I remember kind of listening to it, and, you know, "Oh, we're gonna say Shabbat, not Shabbos. Everybody repeat: Shabbat. And 'abo' is not 'abo'; it's gonna be 'abba.'" And I thought, Something is wrong here. What is this? And I was this little kid, but I was really turned off by it. It really bugged me. But I went along with it, somewhat. But it seemed to me like from that moment on, and very early on, that there was something weird (laughs) about the synagogue. Like, the cantor suddenly pronounced all the prayers differently -- and I'd started learning stuff, and I 9:00actually -- you know, if you're a kid and you learn "Sh'mo yisroel, adonoy," you learn it a certain way. Or "Yisgadal v'yiskedosh sh'mey robo." You know. I mean, I'd heard this already. I'd heard people say kaddish. I mean, my grandfather died when I was four. Whatever. There were people -- you'd say kaddish. And I heard that people would say -- and all of a sudden it was like, (spoken slowly in precisely accented Hebrew) "Yitgadal v'yitkadash" -- something was phony. It was really bothering me. So, I sort of -- I liked the Jewish education, I liked the Jewish atmosphere, but at the same time I didn't -- I felt like I couldn't trust the rabbi anymore. (laughs) That's kind of what it did to me. It was funny. And then, they were always trying to get the kids to go to Jewish summer camps, Camp Ramah. And kids would go to Camp Ramah, and they would give you full scholarships to go to Camp Ramah, and I got all As in Hebrew school, so it was like, You gotta go to Camp Ramah. And I'd go, "No way. I'm not going to this camp. This is, like -- so I can learn to speak Hebrew like some sort of robot or 10:00something?" I don't know. It seemed weird. It just seemed very strange. And I felt like I had plenty of Jewish identity. But I was confused about it. Because, as I say, I had it from my family. Jewish identity was you'd go to the rag place, and all the other people who worked, they all had numbers on their arms, 'cause they were survivors. And they spoke Yiddish. And they had opinions about everything that were really interesting. And they'd gone through all kinds of stuff, and they talked about it all the time. You're in a rag shop. It's like, you're sorting rags with some old survivor, you're not gonna just talk about rags. So, I kind of got an education from those guys in some way. We'd go out to the kosher dairy restaurant for dinner, for lunch, and then we'd go back. And 11:00I'm talking about when I'm six, seven years old. This is early on. If you're sorting rags, you can start pretty early. Same thing in my -- the other side. My grandmother, she liked the prayers. I had an uncle who was very religious, my father's brother. We'd go there for Shabbos dinner. So, there was plenty of that around. I just didn't really like the sort of establishment Jewish thing. As I said, there was some phoniness about it that was a little strange to me. But I kept going with it. By the time I got to Hebrew high school, it got much better. There were all kinds of diverse possibilities then, especially in Philadelphia. It was a good place for Jewish education 'cause there were choices. It was great, 'cause there were -- it wasn't one system. It's not a very religious city, so it's like, people could have their own version of things, and there was no sort of one way to do everything. I say that 'cause I live in Boston now, and 12:00I feel like there's no diversion from -- you have one way, more or less. And Philadelphia had some diversity. So, it was great, 'cause when I got to Hebrew school, to high school, I could learn Yiddish from a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was very powerful. I learned the Holocaust songs from a guy who was in the ca-- not in the camps, but who was a partisan. He had sung them as a partisan. We learned about Jewish meeting with philosophy. We learned -- interesting stuff. It was actually -- there was a lot of meat to it. And I was into it again. But when it came to things like summer camp, I was always gonna be at music camp. I was a musician. So, I did that. Meanwhile, as a musician, 13:00there wasn't much I could do with the Jewish thing. The cantor would invite me to do a duet every now and then. I could read Torah. But it just -- it wasn't much. There wasn't much there to do as a musician. It was kind of like the Jewish wedding scene. I had an uncle who was on that. But it was getting less and less Jewish in the '60s. And so, I would kinda ask about the music he did. It was funny; we would to Atlantic City, and he'd play at a kosher hotel. We'd go there on Saturday night. And I'd hear this -- people would get up and dance these old dances, and he'd play these old songs, and -- he didn't really want to teach me them, though, because he didn't think -- they were dying out. It wasn't really for my generation. It was sort of an assumption that when they were gone, this was gonna be gone. But I had in the back of my mind that this was something to learn at some point. And I think for me, the light bulb really went off when 14:00I was sixteen or seventeen. I was a pretty good jazz musician, and I played in All-City Jazz Band in Philadelphia in high school and -- starting in tenth grade. And it was very exciting, and I could play, and I could jam with all the kids, and I knew all the funk tunes at the time. Kool & the Gang was just coming around and all the -- it was good stuff. '60s, late '60s, stacks of old stuff. It was wonderful. And summer camp, I organized the jazz band. I led the marching band at my high school, actually, 'cause my music -- we had one music teacher. And he was really lazy, I think, but he was a great orchestral conductor. All he wanted to do was do the orchestra. And he had to do the chorus, which --- you know, 'cause there was -- he was the only teacher. And so, that meant, if there was gonna be a jazz band, marching band, a kid had to lead it. So, I did that. 15:00And it was fun! I would write arrangements for all kinds of things that shouldn't have been arranged for marching band. And we'd do them, we'd go play on the subway and do crazy formations that had absolutely no coherence at all and drive our football coach crazy. And organized a jazz band. I, again, learned to write arrangements for that, and I loved listening to big bands and things. But I did have in the back of my mind that there was something Jewish that was -- needed to express itself in music. And I'd go to this -- and in summer camp, same thing. I would lead all the jazz activities and organize things around that. And I taught improvisation. I would teach other kids to improvise. I'd teach 'em ear training; I'd get 'em singing. I'd get 'em to be able to play what they sang. And I got into that, kind of, as something. And I kind of knew I 16:00could always make a living at that. And I still do. (laughs) That's really how I make my living. But there was something in the Jewish side that was really kind of nagging at me. And I really think the moment for me that was kind of a cathartic moment -- I was at camp, and they did this play, called "Brecht on Brecht." And Bertolt Brecht was a heavy guy, you know? He wrote amazing stuff. Not only incredible political satire, but he took in the whole sort of tragedy of Europe, of -- he wrote -- "Mother Courage" was an unbelievable play about war. And there was a line in this play -- this play was actually about Brecht. It was different quotes from Brecht and different plays. And I remember the 17:00faculty did this play. And there was a -- at the end of the play, some -- it ended with this line which was, "I feel like a man who carries a brick around to show the world what his town was like -- what his house was like." That was it. Yeah. "To show the world what his house was like." And in that line, I just heard such incredible tragedy. And he was describing Europe after the war and being a European. And he was really -- I mean, he was talking -- speaking for himself. He was not Jewish. He was speaking for himself as an exiled German. But it really spoke to me about the destruction of Europe and the destruction of Jewish civilization, the destruction of Eastern European Jewish civilization. And I was sixteen or seventeen. I think I was seventeen. I'm not sure. Something 18:00like that, yeah. I was sixteen. I don't know. (laughs) Sixteen. Definitely sixteen. And I just remember -- I just broke into tears, and I just cried all night. And I didn't even go back to my cabin. And a friend stayed there with me, and she just held me, and she -- I could talk to her, and I could just tell her what I was feeling and sob and all this, and it was fine. I remember (laughs) my brothers were both at the camp, and they saw me with Harriet, and they're like, Oh, those damn actors. They did it again. (laughs) They shouldn't even allow theater. It was like, they were so angry that -- it looked like I was having a nervous breakdown because of this play. And it had a big effect on me. I was 19:00somebody -- I was emotional. I mean, duh. (laughs) I was very emotional anyway. But somehow, that night, that experience, really said to me, Okay. So, you're doing okay, and you have -- you've got a fine life, but you gotta do something about this. (laughs) You gotta do something about this. A man who carries a brick around to show the world what his house was like. Okay. So, you gotta build the house. You gotta rebuild this house. And I just really felt like that was gonna be what I was gonna do. So, I started asking more questions and asking my relatives, What is this music that you did and that my grandfather did, my great-grandfather did -- and as I said, my grandfather died when I was four. There were two people -- well, what am I saying? My uncle -- I had five 20:00relatives involved in music, very, very deeply involved. My mother's brother was a Broadway composer and a great pianist and a guy who just worked like mad, 'cause he also was a dentist. And he died when I was twelve or thirteen. So, he was out of the picture. But he was somebody who could've taught me this stuff. I had an uncle still alive, my mother's younger brother. But he wasn't playing anymore. He had gotten divorced, given up the trumpet because every time he went to a gig his wife would get together with the neighbor and eventually moved in with the neighbor, and so (laughs) second marriage, no trumpet. So, then there was another relative I called, an older guy. He was still playing. He was still playing Jewish jobs. But he was so down on it. He would say, "Ah, you don't 21:00wanna know about that. You'll starve. Forget about it. Just forget about it." And so, I called another uncle. And this uncle that I finally called, I wasn't supposed to call. (laughs) It was my grandfather's brother, who had at one point -- he was the guy -- he was the success. He was a dentist also. In my mother's family, it's all music and teeth. So, my uncle had a house. He was a dentist, so he was successful. So, in the Depression everybody lost their house. And the whole family, all the kids, everybody moved in with him. And he was trying to be a dentist, be an orthodontist. He was trying to make braces, and there were kids running around the -- (laughs) -- so, he didn't have a great relationship with my grandfather. But also, when my grandfather bought a house, he borrowed $10,000 from this uncle. And the uncle says he never paid him back. And my 22:00grandfather says he paid him back. Okay, so. For this reason, this uncle didn't give my parents a wedding present. For this reason, this uncle didn't come to my brother's bar mitzvah. (laughs) You know, it's like, the old sort of family thing. But, I had this photo on my wall. And there was a band. And my grandfather's playing drums. And one of my uncles is playing saxophone. And there in the corner there's this uncle, playing the trumpet. So, I'm thinking, He's in this band! He can tell me. So, I called him up. I was nineteen. And I -- it was like breaking with Moscow. It was like -- (laughs) I'd call him up, and I'd go over there. My grandmother's like, "Don't call uncle Sam. No. Don't talk to him. You're never allowed --" -- whatever. (laughs) I go over there. He's the nicest guy in the world. First, he tells me, I don't know, for an hour or so, we 23:00go -- "Let me tell you about your grandfather." (laughs) Okay. So. He gets that over with. It's everything. It's how -- whatever. He was interested in this girl, and my grandfather was married already, but my grandfather also thought the girl was hot, so he decided to go for her too, and whatever. All this stuff. Whatever. All this incredible gossip, which was pretty interesting, 'cause actually I met that woman later. (laughs) I knew who she was. My grandfather's mistress, whatever. Okay. But the point is, he then took me upstairs and started playing me records. And he said, "Okay, so here's the story." And it's funny; one of the first ones he played me, for example, was one that I played for the interns here, when I sort of want to show them really Jewish clarinet playing, like, what's the Jewish sound. (makes nasal instrument noise) You know, really 24:00so kvetchy. He said, "Oh, okay, so when I was a kid, I learned the trumpet. I learned it from an old klezmer -- here. I still have the music." And he takes out this folio, hand-written, pages and pages of these old freylekhs and bulgars. Says, "And then, soon as I could play, I played with Itzikl Kramtweiss." That was the clarinetist, actually, that we listened to in class, this Old World clarinet player. And he tells me all about him, and he tells me how he once tried to get him thrown out of the union 'cause he didn't pay the kids who played with him. But he got trained by klezmers. He was really trained by these Old World Jewish musicians. And then, he starts talking to me about playing in Atlantic City for the mafia and all this stuff, and just kind of what the world of a musician was like in the 1920s. He'd given up the trumpet in 1936 when he became a dentist and got married. But before 1936, he had a good twenty-year career where he played, a lot. And he really missed it. We're talking -- this is 1974, you know? (laughs) And he hadn't played for all those 25:00years. So, he loved to talk about it. He loved to talk about it. And he had my great-grandfather's record collection. So, he could just play me these Yiddish songs. And so, I brought over a tape recorder and I just recorded -- and the guy had infinite patience. I mean, he would sit with me for five, six hours. We would go through every record. He'd tell me about every record. He'd tell me, "I saw this guy at the Yiddish theater, I saw" -- this one's good; this one's bad. It was unbelievable. It was like, suddenly the -- I had this guy who was teaching me about the whole thing. So, I didn't know what to do. (laughs) I really didn't know what to do with it. Because I played the saxophone, and I played the oboe, and neither of them were really instruments that you could play much of this music on. But I just kind of kept it in the back of my mind, and I kept listening to these records. What I would do is when I would drive around, I'd just listen to these tapes all the time. I'd take it in. It was nice. I had 26:00five or six years just to listen. And I guess around 1978 or so, I started playing Jewish music because it just -- I just felt like I could. And funny; I was in Boston, and I was teaching at New England Conservatory, and as soon as I started teaching -- I got my master's when I was twenty-three, in music composition. But I was doing more improvisation things, and I was teaching improvisation as a TA, and I got a job as a full-time teacher at age twenty-three at the conservatory teaching improvisation. And it was a department where every-- it was completely open stylistically. It was not jazz. It was not classical. It was not any particular ethnic music or American -- it was anything we wanted. It was called Third Stream at the time, although now it's called Contemporary Improvisation. Completely no genre boundaries, just basically music. So, I said, Oh, okay, I'll teach my students. So, I would bring these 27:00records in and play them. And it took a few years for me really to get a band together. Meanwhile, there was a little -- this was going on in other places, too. There were people -- if I would play, I'd just play my oboe with a piano player who also was from a musical family, and we'd play for Hadassah luncheons or something. But there was a revival starting. Other people in other parts of the country were having the same experiences, seemingly: finding stashes of old records and listening to them and learning Yiddish and all that. And I'd already learned some Yiddish. And I learned Yiddish as a freshman when I was in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, I took Yiddish also. Then, I learned Yiddish at Harvard Hillel. And so, I was into it. So, I started a band with students, basically. You know what it was, I didn't just start a band, I -- there were these jam sessions that I started. What it was was -- I didn't know what to do 28:00with this music, really. I had all these recordings. I had no idea what to do about it. And one Christmas vacation, some old friends of mine from camp, basically, invited me to come to an Irish cèilidh [Irish Gaelic: traditional Irish or Scottish social gathering]. And I went to a cèilidh at Mick Maloney's house in Philadelphia. And I was completely blown away. There was a room with just the fiddlers, and there was a room with the singers, and there was a room with the pipers, and there was a room with whiskey, and there was -- (laughs) it was great. And it was just going all night. And in each room, everybody was like -- one tune would just lead into another. Okay. That's what you do. You just have a party, and everybody learns music. So, I knew the songs, you know? I actually had learned them. And I just -- I was saying, Okay. So, I just kind of put an ad in the paper. I said, We're gonna have parties, and we're gonna learn 29:00Jewish music and Yiddish music, klezmer music. And I didn't have any idea what would happen. And it turned out that a lot of people were interested. They were actually interested in learning this old Jewish wedding music, and they'd show up. People from all walks -- I mean, it wasn't just students. It was strange. This old Yiddish singer from the Ukraine showed up at the first session. (laughs) I didn't know what to do with her. I mean, she was amazing. And actually, we did a discovery page on her father-in-law recently. But incredible. Who wrote her own songs in Yiddish -- shows up. But also all these young kids. People from other schools, people who weren't students. First session probably had thirty people at it. And I'm playing tapes and recordings because I don't have a band, and it's not like the Irish cèilidh because I can't -- there's no reference point. (laughs) But within a few minutes, we're playing. And we start 30:00sounding -- Oh no, what should the trombone do? Ah, it sounds like they'd do this. Oh, okay, let's -- well, how 'bout the drums? Oh, I guess you do this. We figured it out. We started playing. We started playing. So, this is probably 1978, 1979. And then, one of these students just said, "Hey, I'm gonna get us a concert." So, that's what happened. And we did a concert at New England Conservatory in February of 1980 -- sorry. February 1980 -- and people really liked it. It was crazy, actually. It was like -- I didn't know what to expect at all. 'Cause it was organized by Hillel, and Hillel events in a lot of -- mostly people stay away from them in droves, you know, (laughs) in a lot of cases. It's like, the sort of square side of the Jewish thing in college in some ways. But that wasn't true in Boston so much at that time. There were actually really some 31:00hip Hillel rabbis, and the particular guy who was assigned to my school was an actor, and he was a dramatic director, and he said, "This is gonna be the biggest thing ever." (laughs) He loved this. Because he wasn't religious. He wasn't a rabbi. He was actually just a guy who loved Jewish activity. He was from Eastern Europe. So, he just got really into it. And I couldn't believe it. The people were hanging from the rafters. It was so jammed. We didn't have enough seats. It was standing room only and five hundred people or something in this hall. We didn't have a big enough hall. And there was all kinds of Jewish music. We listened -- I just found people who wrote original music and people did a little bit of classical Israeli stuff and all kinds of anything -- and at the end, this band played. And we'd called it Klezmer Conservatory when we were doing the cèilidhs, the Jewish cèilidhs. So, we called it Klezmer Conservatory Band. And it just happened that the people who were at the school at that time 32:00were good. It was an interesting place to be. The conservatory, New England Conser-- it still is. It's still sort of where it's at. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I've been teaching there now for thirty-three years. It's a great school. It's an amazing school. It's different than any other music school 'cause it has this side to it of, like, Forget about boundaries; we're just trying new stuff. But not in a pretentious way, just like, in a really -- it's like, We've got background, we've got -- we're gonna see what we can do. If we really know a lot of music, where could we go with it? (laughs) In a very grounded way, in a sense. So, this was one of the areas. And it was really cool because the group was maybe half Jewish. But it was just -- the clarinetist was a guy named Don Byron. And he shows up because -- he's from New York, he's from 33:00the Bronx. On Sunday mornings, he listened to "The Jewish Hour." He's African-American, but his father was from Jamaica. He'd listen to "The Jewish Hour" on Sunday morning 'cause -- why? 'Cause there was great clarinet music. And he was a clarinetist. And he was interested in that. And so, he became the clarinetist, and Frank London was the trumpet player, and these guys -- and the women. It was almost half women, actually, in this band. Three fiddlers. And we played. And immediately, we got gigs. And that's really what happened. It's like, I wasn't even trying to start a band; I was just trying to jam. But people came up. And it's funny. I think that that very first thing -- (laughs) somebody came up right after that gig and said, "We want you to play in our synagogue. Once a year, we have a big concert on Friday nights, and we have a budget for 34:00it." I'm like, "You haven't booked this yet? What --" He said, "Nah, I'm gonna scrap that. I'm gonna do this -- we're gonna have you. Everyone has to hear this." It was crazy. Because Boston was -- it's funny, 'cause it was a very formal Jewish place. It wasn't like Philadelphia. Philadelphia was a heymish [familiar] Jewish place. It was a place where -- there was still Yiddish, and there was still -- you could go to South Street and it's still really dirty and disgusting, and you could still buy a suit where you bought your bar mitzvah suit, and it was like -- it had real sort of soul. Like Brooklyn, you know. Like Brooklyn. It was just kind of -- Old World Jewish was still around. Not so much in Boston. Boston had had this cataclysmic event, which was basically the complete destruction of the Jewish community, through redlining, through 35:00bulldozing, through God knows what. It was just like -- you know. And people were dispersed to the winds. So, the Jewish community was coming out of the woodwork. They're coming from the places where they -- the old Dorchester/Roxbury Jews, the real Boston Jews, coming to this concert and going, "I haven't heard anything like this for fifty years." And I'm like, Huh? Harry Ellis Dickson, the concertmaster of the Boston Pops, comes up to me and goes, "You don't know what you're doing. This is, like, huge." I mean, he tells me this. These people who are just -- it was kind of an amazing thing. 'Cause I wasn't from there, and I didn't know that -- this woman who had been booking Jewish entertainment for years in Boston calls me up and says, "What are you doing? You're not allowed to do this. I'm in charge." I'm like, Really, what are you talking about? But we were getting gigs like crazy. Everybody wanted us to play at their synagogue. Everybody wanted us to play a concert. So, it really kind of mushroomed, and it became a big thing, and it became something that I knew was gonna be part of my life from then on. But I didn't know how to 36:00translate it into teaching or translate it into anything educational. Except for one thing: I was already teaching. So, I could bring it into the classroom. So, there I was at this totally goyish music school teaching Jewish music. (laughs) 'Cause why not? And I started doing that in, I guess, 1980. It was funny; I mean, 1970 -- 1980, actually -- I said to the president of the school, I said, "Okay, we've got this band. The Jewish community's going wild about it. And you could really do something for this school if you make this part of the curriculum." And he said, "No way. (laughs) We don't want that. No, we'd have to have a band of every possible ethnic group if we -- we can't just favor Jewish music. No." So, it was great 'cause that made the band professional. That meant we had -- we could get gigs. We weren't students anymore. I mean, even though they all were, like, nineteen years old. I was twenty-five. So, we had to become 37:00a professional band. And within a year, we made our first record. We were on "Prairie Home Companion." We were playing Philly Folk Festival. (laughs) It was crazy. It just kind of became this very -- I think because it was students and it was -- for $500, you could book the whole band. It was funny. It was like, we kind of blew all the other bands out of the water because we were a fifteen-piece band -- we became a thirteen-piece band, which was a little more manageable, (laughs) but it was crazy. It sounded like a whole theater orchestra. They could really make some noise. So, we kind of caught everybody by surprise, and we made records, and we -- so it was good. So, that career really blossomed and made it possible for me to kind of rethink my whole musical style, my whole musical journey, and how to go back now and really get an education -- the education I missed. And that really made me think about Jewish education and 38:00really made me think about what it is I needed to learn. And the question was, How could I learn it? And the only Jewish education I had in music was from my relatives, and then from my cantor. And the cantors were great. They were always very generous with me. Joseph Levine was an incredible cantor. He's written books, and he taught at JTS, and he's taught many generations of cantors already. And he was my teacher. He was one of my congregat-- I was very lucky. My congregation would go through cantors like -- about every year, they'd get a new cantor. And they were all amazing. So, (laughs) it was a lot of fun. But the point is, I started teaching it at school. The school within about a year realized they'd made a big mistake, and they did make it part of the curriculum, and they let me teach it as a course. And so, when the whole sort of KlezKamp movement started, which is 1985, I'd already been teaching for five years. And so, I became part of that and taught at festivals. My band went on to record 39:00with Theo Bikel and Robin Williams and Itzhak Perlman and Joel Grey and a lot of people who taught us very well, who also were wonderful -- collaborate with over the years. That's been really great. So, it's really been this -- trying to realize -- and I feel like I'm doing it every day, just trying to make up that lost time in the education. 'Cause as I said, I felt like Jewish education was very limited. And that the Jews -- the mainstream Jewish education system had basically taken culture and just kind of written it out of the picture and substituted Israel, whatever it is about Israel, to make that our cultural 40:00identity. And in order to make that the young people's cultural identity, they really had to get rid of the other one. It's like, We don't want to confuse them. They have one identity, and it's Israeli. Huh? (laughs) Now I'm confused. I mean, I joined Hashomer Hatzair, by the way, as a kid. I was in the Zionist youth movement because, I mean, you have to meet girls somewhere. But it's like, (laughs) I knew it wasn't gonna be about identity. It was fun, though. But it really was confusing from that point of view. And I really felt like I had this mission to reconstruct -- and I was so lucky every damn step in the way. Nineteen eighty-seven, I think -- 1985 I met -- no, that's right. Nineteen eighty-- yeah. Nineteen eighty-four, 1984. There was one Yiddish actor in Boston, this great Yiddish actor. He had come up there in 1932. He had already 41:00been in the radio for ten years in New York, and he'd been -- Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish theater, and he'd toured all over the country, and he'd played every major role in the Yiddish theater, and he knew everybody. He'd been onstage with Molly Picon and all the big stars. And Paul Muni was a good friend. It was crazy. And this guy was still around. He was still doing a radio show in Boston every week. He'd been doing it since 1930 when -- he was the glue of the Old World Jewish community in Boston. And I met him basically when I -- I think I played his sixtieth wedding anniversary party. They needed a band, so. And I met this guy and, like, the next day, of course, he calls me, "I need an accompanist." (laughs) So, I started working with him. I started interviewing him. And I realized, Wait a minute. There's people around here who know this stuff, and they could teach me. And I worked with him for fifteen years. Again, he's eighty-five years old when I met him! He lived to be a hundred. (laughs) And he was on the radio till the day he died. So, it was unbelievable. Through 42:00the whole KlezKamp world, there were all these amazing people, again, who were around, who you'd meet. Ruth Rubin, who I mentioned in class, the great scholar of Yiddish folksong, I met here at the Book Center, actually. Aaron Lansky called me up, said, "Hey, you know what? You ever hear of Ruth Rubin?" I said, "Yeah, I've read all her books. I have all her books." "She's coming to the Book Center." And I got in my car; I drove right out here. And we were washing dishes together the whole afternoon, me and Ruth, and singing songs, and we became great friends. And for years, I would bring her to the conservatory to teach. So, it was possible to get this Jewish cultural education. But it wasn't there in a library. It wasn't in a book. It wasn't in the mainstream Jewish community. If you went into a Jewish archive, there was nothing to look at of any value if you wanted to try to learn this. You had to actually literally go to someone's 43:00house and go into their basement and dig through a box, (laughs) you know, and -- Oh, yeah, there's your 78s. Thank you. Yes, you won't be needing these, will you? Okay, great. And you had to just do it. It was like guerrilla warfare, you know? It was insane. And there were no camps. So, 1985 we started KlezKamp; that sort of starts a whole sort of chain reaction of these kinds of workshops and things. But it was a fun time. And a community really grew together at that point, of younger people who were interested in this. And we got to know each other, and we'd sub for each other's bands and go on tour with each other and it was a lot of fun. So, for me it was really an interesting education, but I kinda had to get it myself. And then, I would say -- and then the next -- and I'll just mention one other thing, and then you could ask me a question, (laughter) if you want. I decided I really needed to be more grounded, though, and 44:00understand the history and the culture and how to talk about it. 'Cause, really, seriously, I'd never gone to college, I'd only gone to music school. I had a bachelor's and master's degree. So, I went back for a PhD and went to Wesleyan University and studied with Mark Slobin. And Mark Slobin was the great scholar of the klezmer revival. And it was hilarious because he had been studying me since 1980. (laughs) It was so absurd. It was like, he'd written all these articles -- I was in them, but he was the scholar. And so, it was very funny, 'cause he became my teacher in 1996, and -- yeah, I was there till 2004. I earned my PhD in 2004. And then, started working here maybe two years later as their education director. And that's pretty much it. I mean, I went to the Weinreich program, learned Yiddish. In 1983, I went to Harvard and took another 45:00year of Yiddish 'cause a friend of mine taught there and would let me sit in. And from then on, I just spoke Yiddish with all the old people I always saw all the time, so it just became a conversational language for me. I was never the stickler for grammar or the -- it didn't make any sense to me because it didn't seem like the old people that I hung around with were -- I wasn't interested in scholars; (laughs) I was interested in musicians. So, I knew enough Yiddish to speak with them. And I still do. But it really -- this place gave me a home that has really been valuable in that it gave me kind of an institutional home that is different than the conservatory. The conservatory's a music home, and it's a great outlet, but this place is a place that start-- they really were making a 46:00switch to education at that time and to outreach and to redefining their mission. We've saved Yiddish literature, okay, now what do we do with it? How do we tell this story? And I was kind of brought in to help tell them how to tell the story and help kind of conceptualize what that should look like. And I've been very glad to see that this sort of guerrilla warfare I describe, this idea of saying, You are a valuable resource; teach us what you have to teach us -- I mean, I do this all the time. I told you this guy lived to be a hundred, but I -- so after he died, okay, so there was the bal-tfile [leader of prayers] at my shul. He's fantastic. And I can study with him for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of his life. He's got a lot to teach. You find these people. You find these people. Our tradition is oral tradition. It's oral tradition. It's 47:00transmitted from generation to generation. As soon as we stopped doing that, we had nothing. It's not a school thing, really. (laughs) It's done this way. It's done like these -- one-on-one interviews, that's great. Oral history's great. Oral history project's a great thing, because oral history project means, I'm talkin' to you! I love that. That's really great. 'Cause really, when it comes down to it, that's what's goin' on. That's the real way, actually. And then, they also have empowered me with this Discovery Project, which I just love. Again, you find somebody, and they have music, or they have recipes, or they -- and you put 'em on the web, and they can get out to everybody, instantly. That's what's so nice about this education mission being defined at this time because now it's possible to just instantly get this stuff out. So, I really am, I don't know, very happy with what is now available in my life. In my life, it's the 48:00teaching, still at the conservatory; I'm department chair. It's teaching here. It's Discovery Project. And it's my own improvisational groups and creative music work, and I don't have time for anything else, so I don't know what I would do if I wanted to. (laughs) But I don't want to do anything else anyway.

NORA FEINSTEIN: Great. Well, thank you so much.

HN: Sure.

NF: Clearly it sounds like Jewish cultural education is very much important to you. And given that we are past the time where there are as many people who grew up in this culture that you're speaking about -- there are still some -- and given that it is an oral tradition -- but on the flip side, movements like KlezKamp and like klezmer music are so youth-driven, it seems, how do you think we are going about bridging that gap, and how should we be going about that in 49:00the future?

HN: Well, it's a really interesting question. When KlezKamp started, Dave Tarras, the great, great, great American klezmer -- maybe the greatest klezmer in history -- was still alive and was able to -- was still teaching. He was in his eighties, but I mean, I saw him play live in 1978. And that world is fading. And at the same time, what I see that I find difficult is that the music is a commercial opportunity for people at this point. When I first started doing it, it was really a way to starve. (laughs) It didn't look like any kind of commercial opportunity. But I have to say, I was very lucky -- soon as I started a band, people were hiring us. Well, that was very interesting, 'cause it was like, that could subsidize the learning. In other words, I'd go out and play a 50:00concert. And I'd be playing for these people who knew a thousand times more Yiddish music than I will ever know in my life. They were the audience. And they were kvelling because we were young, and we were playing Yiddish music. But I was not playing it because I thought I was teaching them anything. They were enjoying it; as I said, they were, (spoken in thick Yiddish accent) Ah, the young people, it's so wonderful to hear them play the Yiddish music. Great. That's very nice. I was playing it to meet them. You know, it's like, you join a Zionist youth group to meet girls, but you join a -- you go play a concert to meet old people. (laughs) I was married by then, so. (laughs) So, it really was true that basically -- for me, it was this insidious thing. Yeah, of course I'm gonna play a concert, because it gives me a chance -- I literally -- literally, literally, literally -- in every single con-- I've probably done, I don't know, 51:00two thousand concerts. Every single concert -- I don't care if I'm playing at the Hollywood Bowl. I've played at the Hollywood Bowl, and I played at Radio City Music Hall and Tanglewood and got -- I get up there onstage, and I say, "And, if there's anyone in the audience who knows this music, we want to meet you, and we want to learn it from you." And they take me seriously. And they come back, or they write to me. And they find me. And I learn the music from them. And that's what I want to see more of in the younger generation. I don't know what the population is of people who can still teach this music. But it's pretty large. It gets smaller every year. But they're out there. They're out there. We find them all the time. A lot of the folks who really grew up with this and really know it, they don't think anybody wants to learn it, even now. They have no idea that there's this huge revival. But they're out there. I know 52:00they're out there. And I just would encourage the younger people not to start thinking that they're it. (laughs) But yes, absolutely. They're good. They should be performing. That's wonderful. And their parents love them, and it's so cool. It's like, music that parents like -- wow. That's kind of wild, for young people to be attracting their parents to a concert. And they're also -- and it's very youth-driven, as you say, and there's a whole youth culture around it. But I see these guys, like the guys in Sway Machinery, for example -- like, the most radical guys, like Josh Dolgin or Sway Machinery -- they are students. I can't remember his name now, the guy in Sway Machinery, but he's a khazn [synagogue cantor]. He studies with khazonim. He goes to the Hasidic shtibls. He picks up 53:00stuff there. And then, he brings it and takes it and samples it and makes it into what he does, puts it with a beat, makes it into metal. (laughs) Dolgin, man, Dolgin leads a synagogue choir in Montreal, and then he goes out and he's a DJ. I was in San Francisco playing with Theo Bikel, and Dolgin shows up, and he's like, "Theo, Theo, Theo, come into this recording studio." (laughs) And he says, "Okay, okay. I want you to sing 'Belz.'" (laughs) "What do you mean you want me to sing 'Belz'? There's no accompaniment." "No, no, sing 'Belz.' And then, I'll put the accompaniment on later." (laughs) You know? It's like, whoa. No, man, no. The intergenerational aspect of this music is the only interesting thing about it. I'm sorry. Jewish culture is intergenerational. It has to be intergenerational. It can't be some young person thinking they know everything. (laughs) So, I just want to see the people who do it continuing to really do 54:00their homework. Not do their homework, but just get the joy of having a mentor. And realizing how -- some old lady in a nursing home who can sing one Yiddish song, like, and just sings that Yiddish song all the time 'cause she's got Alzheimer's, and the social worker goes, "Yeah, it's really sad, all she does is sing this one Yiddish song." But she sings it better than anybody in the world. And you gotta find that person and sit with her. And the cool thing is, she will sing it over and over for you. (laughs) And you can study that. Whatever, you know? Music is social. You have to actually -- it's not like just a way to feed your ego. (laughs) So, I would just hope that in the younger generation that 55:00that curiosity continues. But I'm not worried about it at all, really. I'm really not. I don't see much that implies that -- I mean, I was just -- just yesterday, I'm up in the thing -- what do they call it? The bookshop. And I come in, and I hear this fiddler, and I'm like, Who is this? This is amazing. I'm listening to it, and I'm saying, Oh, it doesn't sound like Deborah Strauss, who played in my band for years; it doesn't sound like Steve Greenman. These are the guys who were sort of like the people who everyone looks at as the great klezmer fiddles of the younger generation. Nah, it's somebody better. And I'm looking at it, and it's Jake Shulman-Ment. I knew the kid since he was, like, eleven, you know? Now he's what, like, twenty-six or something. He's better than any of 'em. He's fantastic. I just was so impressed. Okay. Deborah was his teacher, okay. I'll give Deborah some credit. (laughs) But it -- amazing. No, there's a real 56:00blossoming going on. The key is that it's not about any person; it's about whole culture. And you learn a culture, it takes a while, and you have to really engage with it. And there's a lot of aspects to it. I also don't think musicians should cut themselves off from the religious aspect, because everything they do is feeding off that. So, they better know what it is. They don't have to believe anything. I mean, nobody -- like, if people say -- I say, like, "Go to shul," and they're like, I don't believe in God. I'm like, What's God have to do with it? Are you kidding? This is about music. You think that, you know, if Jay-Z wants to go to a gospel church that he's not gonna be welcome? They're not gonna come say, You bastard, look what you do. It has nothing to do with our world. Are you kidding? He's gonna walk right into church, and he's gonna steal everything from that church. (laughs) That's not even a question. But Jews have 57:00this thing. It's like, the religious folks, that's like a separate world or something. It's crazy. If somebody tells you you have to do something, just basically smile and go like, No, I don't. (laughs) But you mind if I record you? (laughs) Yeah.

NF: Great. Just one last thing.

HN: Sure. I don't know; I probably filled in a lot of your questions already.

NF: No, you really did. You spoke about this sort of a-ha moment of seeing the performance at your camp and hearing about the brick.

HN: And by the way, I don't think that ever would have happened at Camp Ramah. In a million years. (laughter)

NF: Okay. So, your mission has sort of been, with the Klezmer Conservatory Band and also with teaching and education and getting these stories, to begin 58:00rebuilding the house.

HN: Yeah.

NF: How do you think we're doing?

HN: Great.

NF: Great?

HN: Yeah.

NF: Okay. Excellent.

HN: This is the most impressive rebuilding, in my opinion. This is really quite -- this place is great. This place is that -- it is, in a way, that kind of house. You know? I think it's great. But obviously YIVO and the Ansky -- the new Ansky foundation in New York that they just started, that Pete Rushefsky just started with Zev Feldman, and the project that Indiana University is doing in Eastern Europe, going over there, and the new Ansky expedition, it's like, they're going over and saying, Okay. Well, what is still here? There's incredible stuff going on right now. And there's energy. There's real energy. And there's youthful energy. And there's some financial support. That's big. 59:00Colleges are still way, way, way behind. And Judaic studies programs? Forget it, in most cases. They are just so into their little academic worlds, mostly. It's very much like, Oh, it's all written down; everything is already collected; every-- in culture? No way. Almost nothing. We just have a tiny little sliver. 'Cause academics didn't care about it. So, it's crazy. It's like, we have to do a lot of work. But, starting to change, right? 'Cause Indiana University, that's a Judaic studies program doing that. University of Virginia has a music scholar. Indiana actually has a music scholar as part of their Judaic studies program. So, this is starting to change. People are starting to see that culture is part of the picture. You know what's -- it didn't change -- the main thing is this 60:00culture did not come back because of the mainstream Jewish world at all. That's kind of the lesson. They're still kinda looking to say, Oh, well, you know, if we do that, that program -- if it was a Jewish program, that's too Jewish. No. We're still gonna have -- single dance is still gonna be a DJ. Whatever. The culture is still seen as something very foreign in the general mainstream Jewish community. But there's plenty of movement. And it's been a countercultural movement. Don't get me wrong. I feel like it has been a real grassroots Jewish movement to rebuild, to rebuild this culture from the ground up. And that the mainstream Jewish community is starting to look and starting to say, Huh. Maybe we need to invest in that too. And that, I think, has been one of the successes 61:00of the Book Center, is they're starting to kind of reach out in that way and say, Look what we have! And people come here, and they just don't believe it. They see this place, and they see the intern program, and they hear about this oral history project. That's real. That really says to them, Oh my God, this is permanent. This is actually something that's important. We don't have much time with the older generation, so I think we really need to get on that. But we're on it. (laughs)

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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