In 2002, I dragged my husband and our three tweens to Klezkamp at a hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, I was so ignorant about Yiddish music and culture that I don’t even remember how I knew that Klezkamp existed, and it’s still shocking to me that I pulled the whole trip together and willingly paid for it.
We had to buy a portable keyboard for my husband, Bob, to share with my son so they could both participate in non-concurrent piano activities. My boy ended up in a pick-up band led by a legendary musician, Ray Musiker, who was the soul of patience in his role as teacher to the ignorant young. All three kids took part in a rollicking, anarchic, ad hoc video production led by Jenny Romaine, one of those exceptional teachers who have the ability to work with adolescents.
Bob is a highly-trained, accomplished pianist who was almost completely ignorant of klezmer. At Klezkamp, he had lessons from the immortal Pete Sokolow and also took a class in “klez-midi”, which was really just an opportunity to create a klezmer-style digital composition. Bob wanted to write a klezmer song that would sound as if Bach wrote it. He composed a short piece, and I fell in love with it.
Meanwhile, I stumbled my way through the vocal workshops at Klezkamp, singing in a contentious choir, skipping the master class because I had nothing to present, and feeling several steps behind the Yiddish speakers who seemed to know all the folksong standards and genres. I spent even more money at the Klezkamp market, buying the full set of compilations by the Mloteks, which are now online (Mlotek Songbook Collection), as well as a compilation from Hebrew University. It would be another 15 years before I had the Yiddish and minimal guitar-playing skills needed to make use of these songbooks. Anyone who really knows me knows how extraordinary it is for me to spend money on something that I can’t use. I still can’t explain why I was drawn to this music and culture that was just as absent in my background as it was to every other Jewish baby boomer I know. It’s true that I was a klezmer groupie when I lived in New York in the early 1980’s at the time of the klezmer revival, but that was 20 years before Klezkamp.
Back home, I tried to assimilate the experience and understand what it meant to me. The one constant was my love of the short song Bob wrote. As a lay leader of synagogue prayers, I had been thinking for some time about the prohibition of a woman’s voice in Jewish law—an injunction known as kol isha, the voice of a woman. I wrote a poem about it in English titled “Don’t Sing, Little Bird”, which was published in 2009 in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. With a dictionary in hand, I translated a short version of my poem into Yiddish, replete with grammatical errors and devoid of rhyme, and set it to Bob’s music with the title “Zing Nisht”—don’t sing.
I showed the finished product to Annie Rose, the choir leader and mentor I wrote about in my Substack post, “In Praise of Mentors”. With her intuitive gift for arrangement, Annie soon had a four part score ready for our choir, Kol Halev. It was a crowning moment for Bob and me to hear “Zing Nisht” sung by our dear friends in our beloved choir with our cherished Annie leading. The song was well-received by singers and audiences, including on our choir tour in Argentina, where I introduced it in Spanish, another language that I didn’t really know. I think that part of the reason for the appreciation we got was that listeners and singers were simply charmed by the Yiddish. After I studied Yiddish formally, I corrected all the mistakes and Bob wrote guitar chords for the melody. The choir recording of the song is below, along with a recording of me soloing on guitar and a PDF of my poem that inspired the lyrics. Please comment!
I'm really proud of my sister. By no fault of hers, we were not taught yiddish as children. We are both second generation Americans and the most important thing in our grandparent's lives was to become a true American. Although they did speak some yiddish at home, they used as much English as possible to assimilate. I'm so glad the language is making a resurgence. It is the Language of my roots rich in poetry, theater and music. I'm glad my parents always had music playing at home (questionable choices) and gave us both a love of music. Beth is unbelievably educating herself in our shared love of our heritage and culture. So proud.
Your experience reminded me of my first KlezFest in St. Petersburg in 1999. I also bought one Mlotek book there. Not all, they were far too expensive.
The song is gorgeous. It's not Bach and I am glad it isn't - it's a perfect Yiddish song. I love your heartfelt performance.