JEFF WARSCHAUER ORAL HISTORY

PAULINE KATZ: This is Pauline Katz and today is December 28th, 2010. I'm here at KlezKamp in the Catskills with Jeff Warschauer and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Jeff Warschauer, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JEFF WARSCHAUER: Yes.

PK:Thank you. To start with, I'd just like to ask you about your family as far back as you know.

JW:Okay. On my father's side, we come from Poland and Latvia. My grandmother, my father's mother, was a Yiddish speaker, a native Yiddish speaker. And that side 1:00had come from Latvia. Apparently, her father, who I never knew -- they were not wealthy but he was known for being learned. And I think his profession was a mirror maker, but he was respected in the community of Haverstraw, New York, which is Rockland County, not so far from here. Well, actually, they were from Spring Valley, also not far from here. My father grew up in Haverstraw and he remembers his grandfather singing nigunim [melodies] to him and he remembered -- my father passed away, but he remembered his grandfather singing nigunim to him and he remembered his mother speaking Yiddish with her sisters. My father who, as I mentioned, passed away -- I never spoke Yiddish with him. He would probably 2:00not have thought of himself as a Yiddish speaker, but I'm pretty sure he understood. Knowing him, he was a smart guy and if his mother was speaking Yiddish to keep secrets from him, then he would have learned it (laughs) to find out what those secrets were, so -- which is the other side of the classic story. So, that's, in brief, my father's side. My mother's side, I had a much closer relationship with my grandparents. My mother is a refugee from Germany and from a German-speaking, really very yekish [German Jewish] kind of family, although not a snotty yekish family. A family that respected Eastern European culture. At least she did, for sure. She and her sisters moved away from Orthodoxy but they 3:00were quite Orthodox in Germany and my great-grandfather, for whom I'm named, was -- continued to be Orthodox here in the United States. Not Orthodox in an Eastern European way, but rather Orthodox in a German Jewish kind of way. As I said, "Taure in derekh-erets," which means being fully observant and yet living in the ways of the world. This is a movement which started with Shimshon Refoyl Hirsch and continues now among the Breuer community in New York. I always think if my grandmother hadn't moved away from that Orthodoxy, I'd be living in Washington Heights, probably now and being a Breuer. But that's not how it 4:00happened. So, I grew up in the Boston area. And so, my family connection to Jewish culture and Yiddish culture was a little paradoxical. In some ways, it was quite removed, in other ways it was quite vibrant. We didn't have a lot of community involvement with the established Jewish community but what we had in the family was very intense and it was very Ashkenazic, mostly German Ashkenazic, so a whole different set of stories, not -- songs. And very personal connection to Europe. Actual connection to Europe, an emotional connection to Europe and to European life and -- although my oldest sister is a fluent German 5:00speaker and has worked as a translator, I only heard it. I didn't learn German as a kid. But I guess I could have.

PK:Did she?

JW:Yeah. I mean, I think she had more contact with my grandparents at -- for more years. And so, I think that helped. She just seemed to have, at a very early age, an unusual ability to learn German and she won prizes for it and she got sent to Germany for winning contests for her German. And so, she did. And she ended up living in Europe for -- oh, I don't know, twelve, fifteen years, mostly in Germany but some also in Ireland and some other places. And I always felt like my childhood, to some extent, happened -- even though I didn't actually go to Europe till I was a young adult, my childhood always felt like I was floating somewhere over the North Atlantic, (laughs) so -- and again, I 6:00didn't have a lot of community connection. My father was a physicist and, in that most Jewish way, he turned out to be an atheist. His Jewish response was to reject Judaism, so -- but he had a cultural connection, for sure, and my mother had deep cultural connections. And also, though we were extremely fortunate to get, on my mother's side, to get out of Europe right before the war, I always felt a palpable connection to the Holocaust and it was something -- which I think for a lot of kids of my generation, it was there. It was a story that we were trying to deal with. And as a child of a refugee, I don't feel as 7:00immediately affected by it probably as someone who's a child of a survivor. But I consider myself part of that story, also, and I think it's had a lot of effects on who I've become.

PK:Can you describe your Jewish community growing up?

JW:Well, as I say, I'm in cantorial school now, so this is ironic. But I remember going to kindergarten -- I mean, just the whole connection to religious -- the idea of a religious community or religion in general, I think it was one of the -- maybe the first day of kindergarten, I remember going home and I was astonished. And I told my parents, "I met a kid today who believes in God!" And that was really -- I just couldn't believe it, that there's some kid who said they believed in God, I mean -- and so, that was really astonishing. And that 8:00could be the motto of most of my childhood, although my grandparents, again, from my mother's side, they kept kosher. We had Shabbos dinner. They went to shul. So, I experienced it there and there was something very heymish [familiar] and warm and comfortable about it that I think was really important. When my grandfather passed away -- he died too young, of cancer, and I had felt very close to him. And I guess I was nine years old. I'd just turned nine. And I remember, I don't even know where it came from, but I announced to my family, "I want to keep kosher." And my father said, "Well, that's nice, good luck," basically, like, "You're not really going to succeed in doing that in this 9:00house." But I really think it was a feeling of connection and wanting to preserve something of my grandfather that was speaking. I think that kids are -- I mean, I think that -- my opinion, is that kids are, most kids or many kids are extremely spiritual and no matter what happens, they remain spiritual and it affects them and it manifests in some way, whether it's in an organized religious way or not. So, when most kids around me were preparing for bar or bat mitzvah, I wasn't. But I started spontaneously reading and I started reading. I was a voracious reader as a kid, so -- and a lot of what I started reading at twelve, thirteen, beyond, was whatever -- books about Jewish subjects, which, again, seems kind of mysterious but I'm sure it's not uncommon, that people have 10:00unconscious ways of filling in gaps. And to me, that was a gap. I don't know what would have happened if I had been part of the mainstream. I might have rebelled against it. But I think that it's -- I felt a lack, either consciously or unconsciously and I tried to fill it. So, I remained a self-taught Jew for a long time. (laughs) Then, later, when I went to New England Conservatory and started playing Jewish music, I also wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Jewish religious life and I started going to shul and have continued doing that, obviously, and consider myself a liberal observant Jew. That's how I would put it.

PK:So, if they weren't religiously Jewish in the home, how were they culturally Jewish at home?

JW:Well, we did celebrate holidays very intensely but not a lot of them. We 11:00celebrated the home holidays. We celebrated Hanukkah candle lighting and we celebrated Pesach with a seder. But, for example, as a kid, I didn't go to shul on a regular basis, including the High Holidays, it just -- I didn't. So, I guess, for me, culturally, growing up, some of it was self-taught. Some of it were these holidays. Some of it were stories. A lot of pride about how my grandmother organized getting us out of Germany before the war. Stories about run-ins with stormtroopers that I grew up with. So, in its own way, kind of the 12:00cliché -- it's not really a cliché, but how the American Jewish religion, if you're -- can center on Israel and the Holocaust. And, in some ways, that's true in my case, too, because there was that, as I say, a feeling of some direct connection to the Holocaust. And also, my grandmother, once she left Orthodoxy, she became a Zionist. And so, there was a feeling of connection with Israel, not really acted upon. But we had books about Israel in the house and relatives coming and visiting from Israel. And so, there was that connection also, yeah.

PK:It's neat. Did you have Jewish friends?

JW:Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Newton. So, anyone from Boston knows Newton. And the center of Jewish life had been Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan. But then, most 13:00people moved out. That's a whole story in itself. And my parents weren't from Boston. We were transplants. But my parents were professionals and they moved to Newton because they wanted good education for their kids. And Newton and Brookline were heavily Jewish at that point. So, not everyone but a great number of kids were Jewish and most of my friends were Jewish. There was a strange thing that was going on -- very few black kids, of course. That might have changed a little bit, I don't really know. I haven't been to Newton too much, to my mother's regret, as of late. But there had been a history of animosity, to 14:00put it mildly, in Boston between Irish and Jews. And that was, on the surface, not really there growing up in Newton. But it was one generation removed. And so, things would happen where it kind of came out. And I would get in fights. There was a little bit of overt anti-Semitism, nothing too bad. Not like a generation before. But I noticed that when I would get in fights, it was almost invariably with an Irish kid. I mean, very, very interesting and sad but true. But, of course, I had Irish friends and Italian friends. And Newton was always a comfortable place to live for most families. But it was a little more economically diverse than it is now. So, yeah.

PK:How did you get into music?

JW:Well, music -- my parents, well, my grandmother, this is interesting. My grandmother was very musical, my grandmother on my mother's side. She played a kind of accordion, a German kind of accordion. She played guitar, a kind of a German Laute Gitarre, which is basically a guitar that looks like a lute, which I still have. And I have her accordion. And part of her moving away from Orthodoxy and probably her rebellion was she joined a Zionist German hiking group, which is called Blau-Weiss and is famous in German Jewish culture. And she would sing songs. I grew up hearing my grandmother and my mother sing German folk songs together, certain German folk songs that, I think, German Jews liked. 16:00And some of them have lyrics -- they're high culture folk songs. They have lyrics by Schiller and Goethe and those kinds of things, but also folk songs. And they had their kind of folk song revival back then, too. I mean, this is a wave that happens in various generations. But then, my uncle and my mother and my father actually all were lovers of the American folk song revival of the '60s. So, I grew up with that, too. I had an uncle who plays guitar. And there was a lot of that when I was growing up. So, I gravitated to -- well, first of all, my parents, they had basically read somewhere, I think, that it's good to teach your kids an orchestral instrument, so they --

PK:Can you pass me a tissue, please?

JW:Yes, sure.

PK:Thank you.

JW:So that your kids can experience playing music with other people. I don't know if this was something -- my parents both loved classical music and folk 17:00music, both. And so, I took recorder lessons. My sisters played recorder. I used to play with them. I learned harmonica. I had a little folk duo and we went on TV and all of this kind of stuff. But on my own, I learned ukulele and guitar. And I learned trumpet. I played trumpet for many years. So, that was a kind of combination of formal and informal musical training. The instruments that I really stuck with were the ones dearest to my heart and those were guitar and, later on, mandolin and singing. And at first, I didn't get formal training in that stuff -- until I turned about eighteen.

PK:Why did you go to the New England Conservatory?

JW:Well, I had been a professional musician since I was seventeen. And so, I was 18:00giving lessons --

PK:Doing what, or how -- what kind of --

JW:Oh, okay: folk, country, bluegrass. I grew up, I spent a lot of time with people who lived in Newton who had come from all over the US. Kind of an extended family group house that I spent a lot of time at and they were folk music people and bluegrass and country people, from Kentucky and Ohio. And so, I pretty much lived over there for a lot of my teenage years. And so, I became -- what did we say -- a Jewbilly, basically. I was a Jewbilly for a long time. And so, I learned to play bluegrass guitar and country music and had bands that played at seventeen, sixteen, seventeen. I was making my living, such that it was, giving guitar lessons and playing in bars and clubs and stuff like that. 19:00And so, that's how I became a professional musician. And then, I really needed to make a living and I started playing commercial country-western and rockabilly and kind of rose in that scene within the confines of the Boston area. I was a side man for a pretty -- at the time, anyway -- pretty well-known rockabilly guy named Sleepy LaBeef, who -- I think if you're into that music, you would know who he was. But I was his front man and -- which means I would play lead guitar for him. But before each set, I would sing five songs. And it was a little ridiculous 'cause I'm five-four and he's six-six and he's built like a tank. So, it just looked a little silly and I was this little Jewish kid in my cowboy 20:00boots and Western shirt and little black pants and -- but it was a way to make a living and it was fun and grueling all at the same time.

PK:What did your parents think of it?

JW:My parents, they were very open-minded about -- it was basically, You should do what you love. And I guess they figured it would all work out somehow, as it has. So, I think that was good on their part. So, yeah, that's -- I don't know, it just was. I don't know. Things back then -- I'm really a child of the counterculture, I think. I look at my friends who are in their twenties or students and friends and I think, Oh my gosh, there's so much pressure on people now. But back then, there was kind of like, Oh, it's groovy, it'll work out, 21:00blah-blah-blah-blah. And in fact, the way I grew up, it was almost I rebelled against the high pressure and I thought that -- I took some time off after high school and I just thought, Oh, search around, and that seems rarer now. It's not unknown but it's rarer. I think the economics of being youthful these days is much tougher than it used to be. So, it's a different time. I really topped out on the kind of music I was playing. Not stylistically. There was a lot further to go. But I just felt like I needed some serious training, serious professional training that I hadn't had. And I remember, I was talking to this rockabilly, Sleepy LaBeef, and he wanted me to stay in the band. I was quitting to go to school. And he said, "Well, why do you want to go to school? Why do you want to 22:00go to school, Jeff?" And I said, "Well, I really want to go. I want to learn to read music better and really be --" And he said, "Read music? You don't need to read music. The cats in Nashville don't read music." And I was like, "Yeah, I know, Sleep, but I really want to do this." So, I left, and I had obviously applied and gotten into the New England Conservatory. When I found out I got in, I was actually playing in Greenland with the USO of all places, north of the Arctic Circle. And I called my mom and she said, "Well, I have good news for you. You got the letter." And so, from Greenland, I went the next fall to New England Conservatory. The reason New England Conservatory -- was it was the only place I wanted to go. I don't know, that's been a kind of a pattern for me. The only place I wanted to go to college was New England Conservatory. The only place I wanted to go to grad school, where I am now, is Jewish Theological 23:00Seminary. I think it's -- for certain people, there's only one place you want to go. Now, I don't know if that's 'cause that's the one place I want to go or the one place that would have me, (laughs) you know, I'm not sure. But it's very specific. New England Conservatory has a wonderful program called Contemporary Improvisation. At that time, it was called the Third Stream program and it was very -- what's wonderful about it is it's an opportunity for people who don't quite fit into the mold of classical or jazz musicians to get very high-level training in all kinds of musical skills. And the focus then and I think now is in developing a personal style. So, you get very intensive ear training. You take the same theory and musicianship classes as everyone else but it gives you tools for really figuring out what your personal music is. And I think that that is a thread which I've followed my whole life as a musician. And I think it's 24:00also something very, very much a part of the klezmer revitalization and Yiddish revitalization. I think you look at the people of any generation and they're finding their own way through these things. And I think that's really important. The other thing was when I went into New England Conservatory, I thought, Oh, I'll become a jazz musician, 'cause I had been playing jazz a few years. And I realized that I was quickly, once I really, actually was there playing with the kids who had grown up playing jazz, I realized I was not a native jazz speaker. (laughs) And I had a big foreign accent and it wasn't gonna get any better or not better enough. So, I was, Oh, that wasn't the plan. But I remember thinking, Oh, well, maybe I'll learn a lot about Jewish music. And so, what was going on in 1981 at the New England Conservatory -- Hankus Netsky was teaching, the 25:00Klezmer Conservatory Band had just started a year before. It was probably the best environment and place to go to college. It was like a Yiddish music conservatory for me. So, it was great and I started playing informally with Klezmer Conservatory Band. I made some money doing sound for them for quite a while, live sound. And so, it was a good environment for me. And being the strange amalgam of traditionalist and iconoclast and hopefully innovator, I just decided, Okay, I'm going to become a klezmer solo guitarist. And people said, Wait, that doesn't work. Play Ladino music. It's guitar. Play music from Spain, 26:00and all of this. No, but I had to become a klezmer solo guitarist. And I picked up mandolin again, which I played a little as a kid, in order to have kind of an instrumental lead voice. It wasn't so easy. I felt like I had to invent a style on guitar, really, for klezmer music. But the environment I was in was very good for that. I would listen to all different kinds of instruments and transcribe the melodies and get every detail of what these instruments were doing and then figure out how to play that on the instruments that I actually played. So, at the same time, as I mentioned before, I started going to shul, I started getting interested in all kinds of aspects of Eastern European Jewish culture. And then, 27:00I started getting serious about singing again and realized that I love Yiddish song and that -- I had been accompanying really good Yiddish singers. And I realized, Oh, I have to sing this stuff. So, I decided, Well, I really need to learn Yiddish. And so, I started --

PK:Is this while you were still at the conservatory?

JW:Yeah. So, there was a consortium with Tufts, so I took a beginning Yiddish class with Paula Parsky, otherwise known as Fraidy Katz, who was teaching at Tufts at the time. And so, I started there. And then, that was towards the end of my time at New England Conservatory. And after I graduated, I went to the Oxford summer program. So, this was '86. And I studied there with Elinor Leah Robinson and Dov-Ber Kerler. And then, continued to study through the years. 28:00What also happened in Boston, which was great, and Hankus introduced me to this, is at the [Yulin?] House, which was -- I used to call it the vertical shtetl [small Eastern European town with a Jewish community]. It was a place, it was Jewish community housing for the elderly. Boston has a really well-organized Jewish community. And so, there were these kind of high-rises where Jewish elders would live and a lot of them were survivors or people who had come over in the '20s but were native Yiddish speakers or a large number of Yiddish-speaking Soviet immigrants. And again, this was the '80s. And so, these people were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. Some younger, some older. And they had a really vibrant Yiddish cultural scene in this building. It was wonderful. And they had a meeting every Thursday that -- I would go as often as 29:00I could and play for their dancing and accompany the singers and speak Yiddish, so -- and then, afterwards, I would go and tape them singing songs. And there was always -- I mean, kind of very similar to what Aaron Lansky talks about. I mean, it's never just go tape a song. It was get tea, get cookies, get food, get candy, those great Russian candies. Oh my God. (laughs) And just speak Yiddish. And I just hung on and swam and my Yiddish got much better from that. And so, it was like having fifty bobe-zeydes [grandparents]. It was really great and I learned a lot from that. And also, accompanying the dancing, I wasn't dancing, but I learned a lot about how Jews of that generation dance or danced. So, that 30:00was the informal education and then, later, I -- my wife, Deborah Strauss and I went to the -- well, let's see, in '95, I taught, in English, not in Yiddish, at the Oxford summer program and then later, Deborah and I taught there together. We, in the late '90s, we went to the Columbia YIVO program and I studied with Avraham Novershtern and with Dr. Schaechter, olev-asholem [may he rest in peace], which was an experience of a lifetime. I'm so grateful I had the chance to study with them, and particularly with Dr. Schaechter. So, that was kind of Yiddish finishing school for me, and then, since then, my Yiddish has actually been getting better and better because I have a life where I get to use it all the time. And even now, in graduate school, I'm taking an advanced Yiddish 31:00class, which is a lot of research skills. And really, it's fantastic that I can do this. So, learning all kinds of skills, working with older forms of Yiddish, learning songs that were published in 1727 in Germany, in western Yiddish and things like that. So, it's really exciting.

PK:Great. I'd like to fast-forward a little to how you met Deb.

JW:Ah, okay, this is a nice story. That's one of the many things that I owe to Henry Sapoznik and KlezKamp. I met Deborah here in the early '90s. And I was unattached at the time and kind of between relationships. And I saw her playing. It was at the old Paramount, where KlezKamp started. And this was my second 32:00home. I mean, I kind of lived all year for KlezKamp. It was where I -- this community was so warm and inviting and I had kind of grown up not feeling part of much of anything. And this was something that really felt like my community. And so, I would kind of get everything from KlezKamp. My relationships usually came from KlezKamp (laughs) and musical connections and everything. It was like this fantastic -- everything, it's just given me everything. So, I was between relationships and, as I say, and I saw this amazing violinist on stage. And I just couldn't believe, one, how she was playing, but also how beautiful she was. I mean, and still is. It was really like, Oh my God. Love at first sight may be 33:00officially a myth, but it wasn't in this case. It was really unbelievable. So, of course, being a resourceful person, I asked around and I found out the disturbing news that -- someone said, "I think she's going out with a friend of yours." Well, that was true. She was. And so, obviously, that wasn't going to work. But being the times and the way things were, I got into another relationship, which lasted for a year. But then, there was a certain point in which -- she and I were both single and we started talking on the phone. And she was in ethnomusicology school at University of Chicago then and I was thinking about becoming an ethnomusicologist. And so, there was a real reason to call her. There was a little bit of an ulterior motive. So, I was calling her 34:00ostensibly to ask her about ethnomusicology school and -- but we got to talking and then -- and once we both were single, or unattached, rather, I said to her, "Well" -- this just sounds so cheesy but it didn't feel like it -- but like, "Well, why don't you come visit me in Boston? We can play music." (laughs) And she said, "Sure, when?" So, (laughs) she came to -- and we played music. So, anyway, that's how we got together. And we spent a year figuring out where we were in life and we got engaged. And then, we spent two years planning the wedding and we finally got married. So, we've been married since '97. The story of the courtship was really great 'cause we decided to get married -- we were playing and teaching in -- I guess just playing then at the Krakow Jewish culture festival, where we're often at. So, the actual way we decided to get 35:00married was -- it was like a Yiddish folk song. We were walking on the banks of the Wisła, the Vistula, and just walking back and forth and working out how -- what our life would be like. And then, that conversation continued on a train from Krakow to Berlin. And -- long train ride. And we just talked and talked and talked. And I was madly in love with her, but I had fears about getting married. So, it's like, "Well, what if I want to move to Turkey and learn to play the oud?" And so, she would say, "So, you'll move to Turkey and learn to play the oud. Okay, we'll go to Turkey, whatever. Or you can go and, yeah, whatever, we'll figure it out," so -- which was exactly the right thing to say. And I never went to Turkey to learn the oud. But yeah, so everything worked out, thank God. And around the same time, we started playing as a duo, which was very 36:00natural, 'cause actually, when she did visit, we did spend time playing music, so -- and actually, your family has a connection to this because we came and we played at the Workmen's Circle, the Arbeter Ring. I had been booked by your dad, Mike, to play a solo concert. And Deborah was visiting, so I said, "Why doesn't Deborah play some, too?" And we did some duo stuff together and that was actually the beginning of our duo. And so, it's thanks to your family that that happened. And that's the answer, yeah.

PK:And it's worked out for you?

JW:Yes. We both played with Klezmer Conservatory Band for many years and that was great. And that was also a very formative experience, I think, for me and 37:00for Deborah, in different ways. Very, very, very important and another family, musical and otherwise. There were certain things that I wanted to develop that had to be done kind of in a different venue from the KCB. KCB's a really big band and not everything that everyone wants to do musically fits into that. It's just -- you can't have it that way. So, I wanted to develop as a singer much more. I did sing in the KCB but I wasn't -- I mean, Judy Bressler was the main singer. I did sing in some of the other groups I was in. But the duo with Deborah was really a way for me to, in large part, develop as a singer. And Deborah sings beautifully and she's singing a lot now in our duo. But for a while, I was basically doing most of the singing. So, it was really good for that. And, yeah, it's worked out. I mean, we perform together, we teach 38:00together, we perform separately, we teach separately. Deborah's an amazing teacher, and of all ages, and with a kind of a -- she's an amazing violin teacher and dance teacher, Yiddish dance teacher. And beyond that, she seems to have this kind of supernatural ability to teach kids. It's a little shocking. There's something unreal about it. It's just some kind of genius there, especially -- with everything she does but especially with kids, it's like she's a child magnet. It's amazing. So, that's really exciting.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

PK:So, I'd like to ask you, going back to Boston in the '80s, and the klezmer revival --

JW:Right. Right.

PK:Can you talk a little more about that?

JW:Well, I mean, there's a lot of talk about this and, I think, for good reasons. Think it's a really interesting moment in -- certainly of, obviously, for this kind of cultural movement, which is exemplified here at KlezKamp and at other events and the National Yiddish Book Center. And so, it obviously was an important turning point where people who had not been involved directly with Yiddish culture felt drawn to it. And that raises all kinds of interesting questions about why and how. The standard answer is it was part of a general awakening in the United States and I think, North America, too. Cultural roots. Stressing the word "roots" because people often link it to the famous television series, mini-series "Roots." Obviously, it's more complicated than that. All 40:00these clichés are more complicated. But I think that it's really -- that's actually true. (laughs) And I just think it's like, actually that's true, 'cause I remember feeling that way. I remember feeling -- and this is a cliché. I had grown up playing bluegrass and country and loving it and searching for something emotional in it. And yet, when I realized I could play Yiddish music and Jewish music, I thought, Oh, I actually can play my own music and, wow, what a thought! And it just seemed so obvious, such an obvious thing to do. It was one of those obvious things that was so obvious that it hadn't been apparent before. (laughs) So, that's what I did. And so, I think -- my guess is you're gonna get the same answer, more or less, from a lot of people, unless they grew up from within Yiddish cultural expression, instrumental or what -- that's a different story. 41:00And there definitely are people here like that. But I think I fall into the category of someone who was looking for something and was drawn to this because it filled something. There was a vacuum there.

PK:And what vacuum was filled by the KCB?

JW:I was a very committed musician. I mean, I really loved to play and I really -- it was very important to me to play music. And I decided to make my living playing music. So, again, I think it was that I had felt like, in a certain way, playing these other kinds of musics were satisfying but it wasn't fully filling the real gap that was there, which was a kind of a spiritual gap, an emotional gap. I mean, I'm one of those musicians, I feel like there's a tune in my head 42:00that I can almost hear. I get little glimpses of it. And every once in a while, I'll think of something or hear something that goes there and it's like a taste of that. In a way, it's kind of like a musical goles, it's a musical exile. There's this tune and it's just out of reach. And by living one's life musically and otherwise in certain ways, you take a step towards it. So, I mean, we talk about Shabbos as being a little taste of gan-eydn, a little taste of paradise, a taste of the world to come. That's kind of how I feel about Jewish music. I might not actually get there but it's like, when I hear these melodies that -- either in my head or things that speak to that gap -- that that feels incredibly 43:00powerful to me. More recently, as I'm getting more and more into learning about liturgy and davening and praying and -- that is another way to access that. So, I think your question, going back to the KCB, was I remember hearing people playing Yiddish music and thinking, Oh my God, I've got to do that. It was like water or air. I mean, I had to have it. So, a lot of the time I spent, I was in school, I was making a living, I was doing sound for KCB, which was a great opportunity. It was kind of frustrating. It was kind of like seeing -- well, I'm not comparing myself to Moshe Rabbeinu, but it was like seeing erets yisroel, seeing the promised land but not quite getting there, 'cause I was making it 44:00sound good when other people were playing the music, so -- but eventually, I got into KCB due to some changes in the band structure and it became a really wonderful place for me to express myself and develop as a Jewish musician. And first of all, as a side man and secondly as accompanying musician and then playing instrumental solos and then singing. And then, doing duo stuff with Deborah in the context of the KCB.

PK:Very neat. So, after touring with Deborah -- or when did you decide that you wanted to go back to school?

JW:Well, we have spent many years, really many years touring and performing and teaching all over the place. I mean, all over North America and all over Eastern and Western Europe, Soviet Union, Poland, Holland, Germany, Sweden. Really, really all over the place. The UK, a lot, and in other contexts. Also, in Canada 45:00and in other contexts, in Mexico. And so, it's a wonderful, wonderful life. I -- actually, I'm in cantorial school and the beginning of that actually goes way back to when I first started going to shul. So, we're talking about in the early '80s. I was in my twenties and -- yeah, in my early twenties. And I found out that there was such a thing as a cantor. And it was like, Oh, wow, that sounds great. What an idea, to make a living and have a profession as a Jewish musician. And so, I was really fascinated with the idea. But for many years, I had other things to do in the meantime. But I kept on being interested in it for about twenty-five years. And then, I think that some of it was just things I 46:00wanted to learn for all that time that I needed to learn. I had been wanting to go to school in general for quite a while because I'd been teaching so long. And a couple things happened. I think, for a lot of people, when you teach and teach and teach, it's wonderful but you want -- some people just want to be the student again. It's really wonderful. And the other thing is, being committed to teaching, I started to feel like I needed to learn some new things to teach. It was like I needed more raw material to -- because teaching is a two-way process. I mean, through teaching, one learns and through preparing for teaching, one learns. And so, I needed some basics. For example, my Hebrew needed to get a lot better. My knowledge of liturgy needed to get a lot better. So, a lot of going 47:00to JTS is Torah lishmah -- so, it's study for study sake. Some of it is, I mean, I just -- I love to daven and I want to be a cantor. I want to have other things to teach, as I said. And there's, obviously -- I mean, there's a practical aspect to it, too. Being a freelance musician is a very difficult way to make a living. Would be nice to have options for some security. The cantorate, when I was spending twenty-five years deciding to do it, for many years was a very secure profession. People would always tell me, There are lots of jobs. Yes, if you do it, you'll -- there's desperate need for cantors. Of course, like everything else, that's not true at all anymore. Typical, I'm getting into it when it's in crisis. But I see it as a job -- I see it as a career enhancement, not a career change. I want to always be part of Yiddish music and Ashkenazic 48:00Jewish music. And while I'm in school, Deborah and I are keeping everything going as much as possible. But I also want to have the option to work in a synagogue and work -- and I love working, teaching with communities and davening. So, I think it's a good fit and I think that -- my guess is somewhere, there will be a congregation that will be interested in hiring me to work with them, so --

PK:What do you see your place within this whole klezmer thing?

JW:Well, I think it's a very American thing to constantly reinvent oneself. I'm like the Madonna of -- no, not really, but kind of -- I do think it's a great thing, people reinventing themselves. Again, first I wasn't gonna compare myself 49:00to Moshe Rabbeinu, now I'm not gonna compare myself to Itzik Manger. But Roskies writes about how someone like Manger reinvented himself. He invented a persona for who he was and this is something that happens again and again. So, I think it's a great thing; we live in a time when you can kind of decide who you're going to be to some extent. And I'm not saying it's all fake-y. It doesn't feel fake-y and it's not meant to be fake-y. It's meant to be an actual emesdike [true] outgrowth of who a person is. But I think -- well, first of all, I was Mr. Klezmer Guitar. Frankly, the things that I decided to do hadn't really been done. They were pretty obscure. So, playing solo guitar klezmer was pretty obscure and I did it. Also, I'm a good mandolin player. I think Andy Statman, 50:00for sure, is the preeminent klezmer mandolin player, Jewish mandolin player. But I have my place in it and so, I see myself as a performer, first of all of guitar and mandolin. And then, singing -- I've always been interested in ferreting out obscure material and kind of bringing it to light. And I'm interested in the combination of guitar and mandolin and voice. And I'm also interested in bridging the worlds between secular Yiddish culture and klezmer instrumental music and Yiddish song and religious song, both in Hebrew, Hebrew Aramaic, and Yiddish. So, that's something very dear to me. For sure, I'm not the only person, by any means, doing that. But that's something very important 51:00to me. So, that's -- as a performer, I think those are roles I've chosen to take on. As an educator, I think that, for both Deborah and for me, teaching is a big part of it. And so, for example, thanks to KlezKamp and Living Traditions, I've been teaching for many years. Most years, not all the time, but most years. I also have been part of KlezKanada since the beginning and was the artistic director there for many years, in one form or another, various times, part of the organizational structure and the artistic -- first co-artistic director and then artistic director for a number of years. And now, I'm the founding artistic director. I left that job to go to school, 'cause I couldn't do both. But I feel very close to KlezKanada, also. It feels -- a big part of my life. And of 52:00course, KlezKamp and all these other things, so --

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

PK:Well, I'd also like to ask you about your bridging gaps all over the place. What about in Europe?

JW:Yeah, I also feel very fortunate to be someone who has been -- I've had connection with the European scene for a long time. I worked for many years -- we're still dear friends, but I worked for many years in a duo and then a trio with Shura Lipovsky, who is a wonderful singer of Yiddish from Holland, from Amsterdam. And then, a trio with Shura and with Zalmen Mlotek, who is, of course, a very well-known expert on Yiddish song and Yiddish theater. So, I was lucky to do that. And what that meant was from the early '90s, I was spending 53:00probably a third of the year in Amsterdam and working in Europe all of that time. So, yeah, I considered Amsterdam one of my temporary homes, anyway, and to the point to where I was -- through Yiddish and knowing Yiddish and English, I was understanding Dutch pretty much. And I couldn't speak it, 'cause I don't know the grammar, but I could understand most of the time. And that was great because that was kind of the -- there had been Yiddish song, obviously, in Europe and Eastern Europe and in Western Europe for many years. But the kind of wave of this revitalization hit a little later. So, I got to experience it twice. And I would spend months at a time in Europe, teaching and performing and 54:00seeing, as you say, the gaps getting filled. So, we're talking in Holland and Germany and Poland from the early '90s on. And then, later, the former Soviet Union, et cetera. And I think that, as you said, a gap is a good word to use. I think that among non-Jews and Jews, of course, but speaking specifically about non-Jews in countries like Poland and Germany, I think there's a really deep feeling among many people that a very vital part of their culture is missing. And they have a very strong feeling, many of them, that they need to understand more about what was and what is and what could have been and what could be. So, I think that that's a reason for so much interest in Yiddish culture in Europe. 55:00And I feel really privileged to be a part of that. It's a complicated thing. I remember spending a lot of time in Europe with Shura. So, we had just gone to Poland and we had been a couple times and we went to the Krakow festival. And we came back to New York and we were presenting up at Circle Lodge, which is the Workmen's Circle summer camp, specifically for adults. And so, there are a lot of older adults there. And particularly at that time, there were quite a number of Yiddish-speaking survivors. And so, we were talking about playing in Krakow, at the festival. And a much older survivor starts screaming at us in Yiddish, "How can you do that? You're dancing on the bones of our brethren." And so, 56:00there was just silence in the room and finally, I think what I said, I'm sure or some variation of it is, "Look, there's no answer to what you just said. I'm not going to argue with you. How could I? I didn't experience what you experienced and it's obviously a very complicated question." On the other hand, what I can say to you with full honesty is that I feel that, in the main, what's going on in terms of this interest, in what's going on in terms of these festivals and things -- it's a good thing. It's some kind of tikn oylem [Ashkenazi Hebrew: reparation of the world], it's some kind of making the world a more whole place, a more -- it's some kind of healing that's going on. Yes, there are aspects that have to do with governments wanting Jewish tourists to come in, of course. That's part of it. Yeah, it's no question there's commercialization. But let's 57:00not let that totally obscure the good things that are going on.

PK:The final question --

JW:Sure.

PK:-- what advice do you have for future generations of musicians, of Yiddishists, of activists?

JW:Yeah. I think the people that I see doing the best job of this are following a certain kind of path, at least the ones that I find most interesting. People -- we have a lot of cultural choices. We live in a cultural smorgasbord that is expanding at a frightening rate. I mean, that's a great thing. I think the internet, I mean, I have to say, I love the internet. I think that it is -- as a researcher and someone who's becoming more and more of an academic kind of 58:00scholar, the tools that are available on the internet are amazing. So, there is so much at our fingertips now. And that just expands and expands and expands. And for a younger generation, even more so, because I think people who grew up with the internet are even more fluent with it and just able to use new tools and new technologies in amazing ways, which are absolutely wonderful. I think there's such a depth and breadth of things to study, it could be overwhelming. So, if I were asked for advice, I would say find a balance between going deeply and broadly into the traditions of the past, find out how you can master the tools that you need to really understand, as best as you can from the 59:00perspective that you have, of what was. And if you're a creative artist, then develop that fluency and then find your own ways to express it. So, that means -- I mean, an analogy is always saying learn the language of Yiddish, let's say really learn the language of Yiddish, learn the music -- if you're a musician, learn the musical language of Yiddish song or klezmer music or zmires [Shabbos hymns sung at the table] or nigunim or whatever and whatever you're interested in, all of them or one of them or whatever. Really learn that and constantly be trying to deepen and broaden your understanding of what the various traditions are. That's really vital. Learn the language of what you're working with. Learn the rudiments. Painters learn, they copy Rembrandt, they copy da Vinci. That's really important. But, at the same time, be who you are as a twenty-first 60:00century person. And the people who I find, just speaking musically, of the younger generation -- people like Benjy Fox-Rosen and Socalled and Dan Kahn and Michael Winograd, they've done their homework and they continue to do their homework. And they're brilliant musicians. And I think that what they do couldn't happen without that openness and understanding of what has come before and yet somehow managing to really -- and Dan Blacksberg -- to really make that a contemporary expression. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not an easy thing to make a living doing, either. But it's a really important thing to do.

PK:A sheynem dank [Thank you very much].

JW:A dank dir [Thank you to you].

[END OF INTERVIEW]