Yiddish Music and the Jewish Experience

Music is central to a person’s identification with their culture. Secular Ashkenazi Jews living in Europe, specifically the former Soviet Union and Germany, relate to Yiddish music differently from those in the US. Before the 90s, German Jews had had an aversion to everything Yiddish culture, before the World Wars and after (Eckstaedt 45). They were extremely assimilated to German culture and looked down on Yiddish as something only Eastern European Jews were a part of in their shtetls. Yiddish folk music had developed in Eastern Europe, but urban Jews there also had a fraught view of Yiddish language and music. Meanwhile, in former Soviet countries, Jews associated Yiddish with the tragedies of World War II (Shternshis 122). There is no unifying approach to Yiddish music amongst Jews. There are some similarities, but each Diaspora has a unique relationship to their ethnic Jewish identity, and by way of this, to Yiddish music.

Klezmer music is a specific style of music practiced by Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenazim (the plural word for an Ashkenazi Jew) are Jews who reside in or have roots in the Eastern European Diaspora. Klezmer in its purest form is instrumental music, often accompanied by dancing. Though, these days, more and more klezmer tunes include vocal music. There is also the concept of Yiddish song, often referring to acapella vocal music. In this essay I purposefully say “Yiddish music” rather than “Jewish music” because not all Jewish music is associated with and/or sung in Yiddish.

Aaron Eckstaedt describes the revival of Yiddish music in Germany through four phases in, “Yiddish Folk Music as a Marker of Identity in Post-War Germany” (2010). The first phase is called, “Yiddish song in East and West: Sense of responsibility and coping with the past.” Most of the musicians discovering the beauty of Yiddish song after World War II were not Jewish. Eckstaedt says they were mostly born after 1945, so they didn’t necessarily feel guilty for the atrocities committed by their country against the Jewish people. However, they did feel the need to fill in the gaps their childhood education did not give them. By paying homage to Yiddish song, they were teaching a more involved history to themselves, and the future generation. Eckstaedt also points out that the trend of singing folk music again was booming in the US while this was happening in Germany.

The second phase is “Klezmer Music in Reunited Germany: Liberation, Therapy, Folklore.” Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Germans were searching for a new identity. They no longer had to exist in the boxes of East and West. In my opinion, Eckstaedt fails to include the Jewish experience of a newly unified Germany. If Germans were excitedly developing a singular German identity, then surely Jews were excited to mend the Jewish community as well. As the 90s rolled around, Yiddish music shifted from “guitar-oriented Yiddish song, mostly connected to the Holocaust… to clarinet-oriented Klezmer style” (Eckstaedt 42). The new generation of musicians born between 1960 and 1980 were “looking for a musical identity” (Eckstaedt 42). They were no longer focusing on preserving the solemn memories of the Holocaust, and were invigorated by the fayerlekh, celebratory, nature of klezmer. These non-Jewish musicians were tapping into the spirituality of Yiddish music. According to Eckstaedt, they were deeply committed to their Yiddish research, and were not mindlessly appropriating klezmer (Eckstaedt 42). Even if this is true, I wonder if they were subconsciously trying to prove themselves as good Germans, rather than anti-Semitic bigots. After all, they were adding to the line of German musicians who were originally functioning under the premise of guilt – phase 1 of Eckstaedt’s study.

Phase three – “New Ways: Klezmer as World Music” – discusses the growth of klezmer as a brand, in Germany and internationally. Taken from a study he published in Berlin in 2003, Eckstaedt provides a quote from a saxophonist named Ludger: “Klezmer is a name, which nowadays covers plenty of music. That’s a problem, but also an opportunity” (Eckstaedt 44). The definition of klezmer in the late 20th, and early 21st century had become murky. The general public seemed to have an idea of klezmer, and knew what to expect from a klezmer show, but the concept of klezmer became an umbrella term for Ashkenazi Jewish music. On the bright side, academics and musicians started conducting serious research on Yiddish music! Expert klezmer players began teaching workshops at festivals such as Klezkamp (New York State) and Klezkanada (Quebec), along with lecturing at universities.

In phase four, Eckstaedt circles back to Germany with “Yiddish Music as Jewish Music: Jewish Identity in Germany.” German Jews had long negatively associated Yiddish culture with Eastern European Jews. Yiddish music was connected to the linguistic tradition of those from Eastern Europe and was not theirs. The Jews of Germany went so far as to call Yiddish a ‘jargon’ (Eckstaedt 44); it could not stand up to the refined German they spoke as cultured, assimilated Germans. This makes it more interesting that post-War Yiddish song and klezmer based in Germany were often pioneered by non-Jews. Eckstaedt writes, “At the turn of the millennium, due to a wave of immigration [from the Soviet Union], the Jewish community in Germany was the third largest in Europe, and it became more self-conscious. This led to a need for more open-mindedness on the part of German Jews. In order to contribute to the dynamic Jewish community, they could not continue separating themselves from their Soviet counterparts.

Also published in 2010 was Anna Shternshis’ “White Piano in a Shtetl: Material Culture and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Soviet Jewish Urban Community”. She compares different approaches by prominent Jewish musicians in the Former Soviet Union to reviving the public’s interest in Yiddish music. Like what was going on in late 1900s Germany, post-Soviet Moscow saw a renewed interest in Yiddish music among both Jewish and non-Jewish musicians in the early 2000s. I suspect the Yiddish revival in Russia came so much later because the dissolution of the Soviet Union was only in 1991, while the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. These two drastic political changes led to the mass questioning of any normalized ideals in the two regions. Critique of the respective countries’ politics made space for new ideas. New ideas are often spearheaded by artists, hence the Yiddish music revival.

In former Soviet states, there is a hard distinction between the memory of a shtetl (a small town primarily populated by Jews) Jew from the Pale of Settlement who has a Yiddish accent, and an urban, intellectual Jew who is seen to be more assimilated to Russian culture. This makes describing a Soviet Jewish identity in relation to music more complicated. Participating in the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, Shternshis describes her experiences interviewing Soviet Jews who survived WWII about Yiddish music sung during the war. She says her interviewees sang songs for her and spoke about their lives pre-war in Yiddish comfortably. But when she’d ask about the war, they’d automatically switch to speaking Russian. She says, “history and memory, here, are telling very different stories. Those songs [songs written during the War] did not survive into the memory, but they survived in the archive” (Shternshis, Yiddish Book Center). These folks are the parents of the urban Jews Shternshis writes about in “White Piano in a Shtetl”. It was hard for the older generation – the parents – to pass Yiddish down to their children because there was a sense of defeat. On a personal level, my maternal grandparents only spoke Yiddish in their Belorussian apartment when they did not want my mother and aunt to understand what they were saying. Yiddish was a reminder of how things used to be before the War; their kids did not experience the hardships they had, and Yiddish drifted away with those hardships. The post-Soviet Jewish engagement with Yiddish music stems from a nostalgia for the Yiddish-speaking world that they only got a glimpse of from their parents. A listener may not understand all the lyrics in a Yiddish folk song, but the familiarity of certain sounds is comforting, and often emotional.

Why do people still care about Yiddish music? Well, what is the point of participating in any custom? To feel connected to your family, ancestors, and culture. People connect to their roots in different ways, Jews in different countries do, too. There is a popular phrase amongst Jews: “two Jews, three opinions.” Those of us who interact with Yiddish music do so for a variety of reasons, which widely differ based on our countries of origin, which all have unique Jewish histories. While a post-Soviet Jew goes to a concert hall to hear nostalgic but grandiose arrangements of songs from the Yiddish canon, a German Jew listens to klezmer for the celebration of the Jewish community.

 

 

Works Cited

Eckstaedt, Aaron. “Yiddish Folk Music as a Marker of Identity in Post-War Germany,”

European Judaism, vol. 43, no. 1, 2010, pp. 37-47.

Shternshis, Anna. “Language and Memory: Interviewing WWII Survivors About Yiddish

Songs.” YouTube, uploaded by Yiddish Book Center. 29 August 2018,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_pEqewBei4

Shternshis, Anna. “White Piano in a Shtetl: Material Culture and Ethnic Identity in the Post-

Soviet Jewish Urban Community.” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2010, pp.

111-126.