Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman Hankus Netsky Walter Zev Feldman. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxiv + 413 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000333 As Jonathan Karp and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett note in the introduction to their seminal 2008 volume, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, "Much remains to be done if the arts are to figure more fully in Jewish studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines" (1). More specifically, within Jewish studies, Jewish music has recently been caught in the crossfire between the field's desire for scholarship compatible with its priorities (books and articles on contemporary American synagogue music or Israeli pop, for example) and the priorities of the many Jewish music scholars and activists who write about musical traditions that tend to resonate more outside the Jewish community. Throw in the landscape posed by the proliferation of such confusing buzzwords as "Ashkenormativity," and "postethnicity" (both regularly used in reference to east European Jewish culture), and those trying to figure out how to integrate the study of east European Jewish music into their curricula have been more likely to give up than to forge ahead through the increasingly foggy landscape. The recent publication of Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History and Memory gives those working in the field of Jewish studies an excellent opportunity to reassess their relationship with east European and other global Jewish ethnic musical traditions. Feldman, a multilingual scholar and virtuosic performer who spearheaded the reemergence of the tsimbl (the Jewish hammered dulcimer), is also profoundly respected for his work as a teacher of east European Jewish dance and universally acknowledged as originator of the English-language term "klezmer music" in the early 1980s, using it to specifically identify the virtuosic practice of east and central European professional folk instrumentalists who performed at Jewish celebrations. Feldman has long been considered the preeminent scholar in a field that has spawned numerous monographs in the era of klezmer's resurgence. Oddly, before Mark Slobin's pioneering work in the early 1980s, almost no English-language scholarship existed on the topic at all, despite the extraordinary musical accomplishments of its practitioners and klezmer music's ubiquitous position at Jewish celebrations for many hundreds of years in Europe and in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Until this book's appearance, the available literature on klezmer had focused primarily on the music's American incarnation and on the sociological implications of the recent (now over forty-year-old) klezmer resurgence, mainly zeroing in on New York's downtown scene and the bustling klezmer world of contemporary Europe. By positioning klezmer music as a significant component of a tightly interconnected European Jewish system that includes the world of Jewish prayer, hasidic gesture, Yiddish folksong, Yiddish literature, Jewish dance, Jewishthemed visual arts, and coterritorial revelry, Feldman offers a compelling argument for a total reassessment of the value of the klezmer genre as a major conduit of nonverbal cultural memory for Ashkenazic Jews. Feldman devotes over two hundred pages of this volume to providing support for that argument, including chapters where we learn about talmudic [End Page 248] study gesture as dance gesture; read richly ethnographic descriptions of Jewish dancing and music making culled from Yiddish literature; and learn about how Jews and their coterritorial neighbors interacted in constructing a culture that is arguably the most uniquely "Jewish" of any that ever emerged in the Diaspora. We read about a Jewish society whose members were bound together by shared customs that easily traversed ideological lines. Indeed, as Feldman observes, "The gradual demise of the klezmer—and with him traditional Ashkenazic dance—is a barometer of the increased polarization of Jewish society into various secular and religious camps lacking any shared aesthetic vision" (56). Feldman's much-anticipated volume is the product of over forty-five years of serious research, and, in putting the book together, the author has gone to great pains to parse through virtually all of the available literature in Romanian, Russian, Turkish, German, Polish, Yiddish, English, and Hebrew, not to mention an exhaustive selection of music folios...