Klezmer musician Josh Waletzky sees Yiddish as a way of life, not as a language on the precipice of extinction — or as a culture best viewed through nostalgia-fogged lenses.
To illustrate how seriously he takes Yiddish, Waletzky recalled the first time his toddler son picked up a new language.
“I was thrilled because my son [then 4] came home from preschool speaking English,” said the Brooklyn musician during a recent phone interview. ” He must have learned it from his playmates.”
The 53-year-old pianist has been an integral part of the klezmer scene’s revival. He will be performing Yiddish songs with themes ranging from conflicts in the Middle East and Ireland to traditional love ballads on Sunday, March 17 in the 17th annual Jewish Music Festival, presented by the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center.
The concert at Berkeley’s Roda Theatre will also feature violinist Deborah Strauss and guitarist and mandolinist Jeff Warschauer of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band. The three musicians will perform works from their new CD “Crossing the Shadows.”
For Waletzky, immersing his family in Yiddishkeit has been an intergenerational endeavor. His parents spoke Yiddish on an everyday basis, and Waletzky made frequent weekend visits to Brooklyn’s Yiddish Cultural Center. Additionally, his grandfather was one of the founding members of the New York’s YIVO Institute, which is dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish culture.
A filmmaker by profession, Waletzky was the editor of the Emmy-award winning PBS special “In the Fiddler’s House” with Itzhak Perlman and the documentary “Partisans of Vilna,” which is also the only Yiddish language album ever to be nominated for a Grammy award.
Both of Waletzky’s children (his son is now 21, and his daughter 15) speak Yiddish fluently — a rarity among the already miniscule percentage of people who speak the language. Manifold obstacles impede the language’s survival, some of which Waletzky said come from within the Jewish community itself.
“A lot of younger Jewish people associate Yiddish with religion, and a lot of the older Jewish community view it as a relic of the ghetto. In Israel, and elsewhere around the Jewish world, there’s been a long history of Kulturkampf between Hebrew and Yiddish, which is really unfortunate because it denies access to one’s roots, which has always been an integral factor of survival.”
In fact, Waletzky takes a completely different spin on the matter of being well-versed in Yiddish. The filmmaker (whose wife was fluent in Yiddish before their marriage) maintains that by being fluent in Yiddish, his children integrated themselves into the mainstream, and not the reverse.
“In my son’s elementary school, the majority of the children spoke a different language at home, whether it was Spanish, black English, Greek or French. So he felt quite normal for having a different mother tongue, and he also gained a deeper and truer respect for other people’s cultures and languages.”
Surprisingly, given that Yiddish barely registers even on many Jews’ radar screens, Waletzky is sanguine about the future. He points to the upsurge of interest in klezmer, which he said has been growing steadily for almost 20 years. Yiddish conversation groups have sprung up all across the world, and the New York-based group called Yugntruf (“Call to Youth”) is promoting the use of Yiddish in everyday life — particularly among the younger generations.
Next up? Yiddish-friendly computers, according to Waletzky, who said that e-mails will soon to be able to express vey iz mir without setting off a spell-check alarm.
Ironically, Waletzky sees the origins of the Yiddish revival in the African-American experience. An active member of the civil rights movement, Waletzky said that when black people began to look inward and come to the conclusion that “black is beautiful,” they gave other members of that coalition tacit approval to explore their own histories.
“The TV series ‘Roots’ kind of blew the whole thing open,” said Waletzky. “After that, there was a huge priority placed on connecting with the past, and that desire will continue to get stronger.”
The concert is sponsored by the Sophie & Arthur Brody Family Foundation.