When violinist Julie Egger gave a klezmer demonstration to students at Palo Alto’s Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School recently, one child raised his hand with a question. “Why are we doing Yiddish?” he asked. “It’s dead.”
Responded Egger, “Do I look dead?'”
Egger, like the Yiddishkeit she loves, is very much alive and coming to the South Bay for the annual KlezCalifornia, a two-day celebration of Yiddish culture and klezmer music running April 29 and 30.
KlezCalifornia is part concert, part workshop, part free-for-all, as attendees join in as much as the visiting scholars and entertainers. “We’re trying to touch all areas,” adds Egger, who organized the event. “We have music classes, culture classes, teen and children classes.”
Those classes cover everything from brush-up-your-Yiddish sessions to fiddle workshops to a clinic on Jewish hip-hop led by Tim Barsky (of “Bright River” fame). Performers include the klezmer trio Varetski Pass and Yiddish theater diva Chayale Ash.
This is the event’s first time in the South Bay. “We’re trying to touch all areas,” says Egger, “to keep building community in Yiddish culture.”
Helping that along is dance teacher Steve Weintraub, making his third appearance at KlezCalifornia. He specializes in the freilach and the sher, two dances that always get the crowd going.
“There’s a joyous dignity I associate with Yiddish dance,” he says. “You don’t want to look like a vilde chaya [wild animal].”
In recent times, when people thought of Jewish wedding dances, they thought of “Hava Negillah” and not of the traditional Ashkenazi dances of the Old Country.
“The dance tradition got corrupted,” says Weintraub. “Israeli dance became the default way of dancing Jewishly. But there has been a conscious revival.”
The same is true for Yiddish literature. Gabriella Safran is a professor of Slavic languages at Stanford, and a Yiddish literature scholar. At KlezCalifornia, she will hold a workshop on Yiddish literature, focusing on a short story by S. Ansky, author of “The Dybbuk.”
After her class, Safran hopes to join others in music and merrymaking. It’s all part of Eggers’ mission to bring Jews back to their cultural birthright.
“We’re so Americanized,” she says. “People forget where they come from. They think if you’re affiliated with a temple that’s the only way to stay Jewish, but it’s the culture that brings us back.”
KlezCalifornia’s concert and dance party takes place 8 p.m. Saturday, April 29, at Cubberly Center Auditorium, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. The classes and workshops take place 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at Kehillah Jewish High School, 3900 Fabian Way, Palo Alto. Tickets: $5-$25. Information: (415) 789-7679 or online at klezcalifornia.org.