Published: 12 September 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
BY 1915, NEW YORK CITY was home to the largest single concentration of Jews in history. Klezmer, a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew — kle (vessel) and zmer (song) — was the traditional term for a musician who played the music the players brought with them.
Clarinettists, favoured over violinists for their instrument’s wider, dynamic range, were the foremost exponents of the genre. Landsmanshaftn — organisations set up to help the new, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, helped provide employment for klezmorim, many of whom were members of musical dynasties.
It is believed that the better, more successful musicians remained in the old country and that only the less sought after, more impoverished players emigrated.
Joel Rubin, a first-class klezmer clarinettist with a classical training, was opened up to his instrument’s expressive possibilities by the pre-war recordings of Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein.
They are the heroes of a book that flits between colourful accounts of its protagonists’ world and clinical analyses of the music they played, a reflection of the author’s own double life as performer and academic.
“A klezmer”, writes Rubin, “was atavistic, an instrumentalist of limited abilities, who was unable or unwilling to learn new styles of music or, perhaps, even to read musical notation.”
Review: New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century (Jewish Chronicle)
New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century, by Joel Rubin (The University of Rochester Press, £75)
Photo: Naftule Brandwein (second from right) and band: Lou Levinn, Mookie Brandwein, Abe Brandwein, Chester Brandwynne, Berish Katz
