Spin the Globe World Music CD Reviews January 2005

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World Music CD & Book Reviews, January 2005

YALE STROM WITH ELIZABETH SCHWARTZ: A WANDERING FEAST-A JOURNEY THROUGH THE JEWISH CULTURE OF EASTERN EUROPE
Jossey-Bass

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This review includes quotes and information from an interview with Yale Strom and Elizabeth Schwartz aired on Spin the Globe on 10 December 2004

In 1981, Yale Strom had degrees in American studies and furniture design & art, when he went to a klezmer concert that changed his life. He was so enthralled with the musicians' improvisation on klezmer themes that he asked to become a member of the group. The band's refusal was a blessing in disguise, leading Strom to head to Eastern Europe to research the music at its source. This book tells the story, some twenty years after his travels.

It's appropriate that this is a travel story. Strom relates how travel has changed both the Yiddish language and klezmer music. "The DNA of klezmer is the musical scales of the Middle East.... Then you take that DNA... and add local indigeneous sound" just as Yiddish speakers built German and Slavic layers atop the language's Aramaic-Hebrew base as they traveled.

Strom, who has played violin since age eight, dove into his tour behind the mysterious Iron Curtain, hitting Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Romania. In each new town, he sought out the Jewish cultural center, or kosher restaurant, or some other vestige of Jewish life. What he found was a faint shadow of the height of Jewish culture - what he calls Yiddishland - from the 1890s through the 1939s. In that era, klezmer was a functional music played at dances and weddings to pay the bills. Strom had to scour the landscape for remaining musicians from that period - many had quit playing, emigrated, or been killed in the death camps of World War Two.

One of the few still-active klezmers is Leopold Kozlowski (nephew of Naftule Brandwein), who became the subject of Strom's 1994 film "The Last Klezmer." From Kozlowski and other (sometimes non-Jewish) musicians, Strom learned and collected old klezmer tunes. The book includes 15 songs - mostly previously unprinted, along with a couple Strom originals.

The book also includes food. "When you talk about Jewish culture," Strom asks, "how can you not talk about Jewish food?" The narrative relates what he ate, and some amusing and awkward moments arising from his vegetarianism. Elizabeth Schwartz has reconstructed recipes, some only through exhaustive research since Strom's descriptions of the food were sometimes incomplete. The most difficult recipe to reconstruct, she says, was the complicated Hungarian desert Flodni. Schwartz must have gotten it right in the end; a Hungarian-descended friend used as a taste-tester declared it "pornographically good." Also included are recipes for what Schwartz swears are "the best latkes I've ever had" and Zuppa Ogorkowa - Polish dill pickle soup. (So odd sounding, I had to make it; it was wonderful.)

The darkness is never far away from the storyline, however. Strom visits concentration camps, and feels the impact of the Holocaust in the lives of survivors. Sidebars give the Jewish history of each country, from the high points to the pogroms and discrimination. Strom makes a comparison with Jewish history and modern-day genocide in Africa: "3.8 million people have been killed.... How little the world has learned in 60-plus years since the genocide of the Jews and the Rom."

Two decades after his journey, Strom sees new life being breathed into Jewish communities in Easter Europe as more Jews are admitting their Jewishness. "It's almost anti-establishment," Strom says, "it's hip!" Still, he says, klezmers today have not grown up in an atmosphere like Yiddishland - they've had to learn it as a second language and culture. "You can't capture the past, that sense of Yiddishland, the language, the literature, the thinking. It will never be the same."

Yet at the same time, the thirst for klezmer is expanding well beyond Jewish communities. "One doesn't have to be Jewish to love Klezmer," Strom asserts. And today musicians like Frank London, Solomon and Socalled, The Klezmatics, and others are pushing Jewish music in new directions including jazz, hiphop, experimental, and avant-garde. Yet "no matter how many people come to this beautiful form of music," Schwartz says, "they're never going to make up for all the people who were forced to stop playing it."

It's a shame the book doesn't include an epilogue on such cultural changes since Strom's 1981 trip, though that's a small complaint sure to be addressed in his other projects. With the recipes, the music, the photos, and the stories of klezmers, apathetic border guards, decade-old secrets, and spontaneous music, A Wandering Feast is delicious through and through.

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