An onslaught of klezmer music and Yiddish culture is about to hit the North Bay, and who better to lead it than Zalmen Mlotek?
One of the world’s leading authorities on Yiddish theater and music, Mlotek will be taking part in two klezmer-related activities during the week of Sunday, Aug. 9.
At 3 p.m. on the 9th, Mlotek will give a concert with local Jewish singer Sylvie Braitman at the Petaluma Summer Music Festival. The concert, titled “One Hundred Years of Jewish Theater Music,” will include Yiddish songs originally sung by a chorus of Petaluma chicken farmers some 50 years ago.
The concert will coincide with the opening of the KlezKamp West, a six-day celebration of Yiddish folk arts at which Mlotek will serve as a choral instructor. The KlezKamp will take place in Marshall, near Petaluma.
Mlotek, a New York pianist and conductor, composes Yiddish music and has performed throughout the world. Additionally, he’s produced and provided the musical direction for Broadway shows and at other regional theaters around the country. He was musical director for “Shlemiel the First,” which played at San Francisco’s ACT as well as in Boston and Los Angeles.
Recently, he could be found in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was carrying out his personal crusade to revive Yiddish music and theater.
The setting was KlezFest ’98, which brought together some 30 vocalists and music teachers from across the former Soviet Union — including such unlikely places for klezmer revival as Siberia and Uzbekistan.
In addition to master classes in Yiddish folk songs and klezmer music, participants attended lectures on Jewish cultural history in Eastern Europe and workshops on Yiddish folklore, dance and language.
The event was organized by the Center for Jewish Music of the Jewish Community Center of St. Petersburg and was supported by a grant from the New York-based Jewish Community Development Fund in Russia and Ukraine.
A three-hour concert attended by some 400 St. Petersburg Jews crowned the weeklong seminar earlier this month.
“I wished they played more and more,” said Irina Kozlova, a listener in her 50s. “I never thought this music could be done so professionally.”
The seminar, now in its second year, was first conceived as the Russian edition of KlezKamp, an annual event held in New York’s Catskills mountains at the end of December. KlezKamp West is also an offshoot of the New York event.
But unlike the New York festival, which draws music lovers and Yiddishists as well as professional musicians, the Russian version was mostly for professionals.
Like many other aspects of Judaism, klezmer has stepped into the limelight in recent years in the former Soviet Union.
Still, few people take a serious interest in the music; it is rarely played outside weddings and family parties.
“The klezmer tradition had almost died here,” said Leonid Sontz, leader of Simcha, the only professional klezmer band in the former Soviet Union.
“There have been three generations away from this tradition. Our goal is to bring these tunes, songs back to life,” said Sontz, whose band, based in the Volga region, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.
Most of the students at the seminar were Jewish musicians in their 20s and 30s who were attracted to klezmer as a new musical genre.
“In America, younger people come to klezmer through an interest in anthropology, their own roots, country music or jazz,” said Horwitz. “Here they are coming through classical music.”
Indeed, most of the KlezFest participants were classically trained musicians and singers, but they came with more than a professional interest.
“What really moved me was the depth, the understanding people here have naturally of this music, even without studying it, simply having come from the earth where it was born,” Mlotek said. “This music seems to be very much in their blood.”
Some students spoke about ways to combine the music with Jewish life in their home communities.
“This music is not only about nostalgia,” said Yefim Cherniy, a 39-year-old trained vocalist and guitarist who first learned about klezmer music from relatives who were cantors or performers in Jewish theater.
“Even when this music could not be played in official concerts in the Soviet times, it still was in my parents’ home,” said Cherniy, one of the few Jews from the former Soviet Union who grew up with klezmer.
Cherniy, who has devoted his career to Yiddish music, is now a leading performer on the Jewish scene in Kishinev, the capital of Moldava.
The music, he said, is “a crossing of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Those who cannot connect with religion can look for what this music and culture offer to awaken their Jewishness.”