January 23, 1996
SECTION: Features; Pg. 31
LENGTH: 5160 words
HEADLINE: YIDLS WITH FIDDLES
BYLINE: Bob Morris
Surprisingly, no obvious Yiddishism exists to describe what the small dressing room behind the New School auditorium is like on a recent Saturday night, when it's occupied by the Klezmatics.
It's a balagan, certainly, with sheet music, instrument cases, coffee cups, and clothing strewn all over the place. It's a tummel, obviously, with the last-minute commotion of getting set lists together and instruments tuned and shirts on.
It's also, in many ways, a big tsimmes.
Literally speaking, a tsimmes is a sweet, simmering stew made of this and that. As a figure of speech, however, a tsimmes means a fuss or trouble, as in ''Don't make such a tsimmes.'' It's a word that suits the Klezmatics, who called their first album Shvaygn=Toyt (Silence=Death) after the ACT UP slogan, and their latest, Jews with Horns.
''This is my new fag look,'' Lorin Sklamberg is saying about his lumberjack-style mustache and beard, which has replaced the Queer Nation-skinhead look he had going for awhile. Sklamberg's the lead singer of the band, a crooner of impeccable Yiddish who wears black military boots and a studded leather s/m bracelet that looks nice when he's playing the accordion, singing ''Dyedle, dyedle-dye.''
''Don't get embarrassed,'' he says to Paul Morrissett, who's trying to tune a Tsimbl. ''You're dropping all your tools.''
Morrissett's too busy to be baited. ''How come nobody wants to talk to the only heterosexual Quaker in the band?'' he mutters. Millie Farrier, mother of violinist Alicia Svigals, the band's lesbian mother-to-be (her partner's expecting, and yes, the sperm donor was Jewish) storms in looking for her daughter.
''Where's my baby?'' she asks.
The room feels like a cross between a Gypsy camp and a small kitchen before a large seder. While a stage manager with a pierced nose calls five minutes to curtain, Tine Kindermann, a German who isn't Jewish, lifts her shirt to breast-feed her baby. Her husband, Frank London, the band's arranger and trumpet player (Jewish and wearing a Moroccan fez), is hassling over a contract he didn't see earlier because the band has just returned from one of its many concert tours of Holland, Germany, and Austria.
''Cologne was a high point this time,'' Sklamberg says as he wolfs down some vegetarian sushi. ''During the concert, I made a point of mentioning lesbians, gays, and Gypsies.''
Alicia Svigals bursts in. She's beaming. ''Ellen's showing!'' she says of her partner (who has since given birth). ''This'll be the baby's first concert! I hope it's not too loud.'' She grabs her violin and heads to the wings.
''One minute,'' comes the call.
Sklamberg tucks in a collarless black shirt and looks at himself in the mirror. ''You're such a diva,'' London says.
A few seconds later, he's out in front of a multiracial, intergenerational, sexually diverse, psyched-up crowd, counting ''Eyns, tsvey, dray, fir'' with an intensity more head banger than haimish.
Haimish means friendly and homey, and homey is how many Jews like their Yiddish culture. Klezmer (which dates back to the Middle Ages and draws from religious and folk sources such as Hasidic blessing-dances and polkas, as well as ragtime and jazz) is Yiddish party music. After thriving on the Lower East Side in the earlier part of this century, it began to die out as Jews assimilated, and by the 1950s, it was relegated to the musical trash heap of weddings and bar mitzvahs. In the late '70s, klezmer was rediscoverd by Jewish folk musicians who'd been inspired by Alex Haley's Roots and were looking into their own culture. A klezmer revival began.
While most of the young klezmer bands that have evolved since the late '70s play the old, schmaltzy standards, the Klezmatics won't have anything to do with that. Avoiding the vast repertoire of Yiddish songs that evoke a false sense of a sweeter, simpler time in the old country (which was often a horrendous place to live), they sing socialist work anthems. They homoeroticize lyrics. They gender-bend Hasidic songs about the Messiah. They find the musical edge to a song and work it.
''I'm neither Jewish nor gay, but they hit me right between the eyes when I first heard them,'' John Schaefer, the music director of WNYC and ''New Sounds'' guru says about the Klezmatics, whose albums sometimes share Billboard's World Music charts with artists such as Ofra Haza, Bob Marley, and the Gypsy Kings. ''I grew up on the Rolling Stones and the Klezmatics' sound has the chutzpah of rock music.''
Not to mention chutzpadik politics.
Because even though they're two-thirds straight, the Klezmatics are squarely in the forefront of a groundswell of gay and lesbian interest in Yiddish culture. Nowhere is this presence more visible than at KlezKamp, a weeklong Yiddish folk-culture convention held during Christmas week at a Catskills hotel. KlezKamp is one of the original spawning grounds of Queer Yiddishkeit. The Klezmatics attend annually. And this winter, in addition to nightly same-sex dancing on a floor flooded with children, radical activists, Yiddish-speaking grandparents, and a few gentiles from Europe, the KlezKamp program included a one-woman show about a lesbian wedding and a lecture on queer subtext in Yiddish cinema.
The Queer Yiddish connection is surprising but not all that hard to understand. First of all, traditional Judaism condemns homosexuality. But Yiddish, the language of the home, not of study and prayer, is free of any religious taint. In addition, since the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, Yiddish (with its German roots) has become the poor stepchild of Modern Hebrew, which was created in the late 19th century to empower the Jews and change their weakling image. But precisely because it isn't associated with Zionism, Yiddish appeals to leftists, who don't like defending Israel on the Palestinian issue.
Jeffrey Shandler, who holds a PhD in Yiddish studies from Columbia University, thinks the ''alternativeness'' of Yiddish culture is one of its most attractive characteristics. ''It has special associations with women's culture, which is always associated with the non-elite,'' he says, citing a popular 16th-century Yiddish ''Women's Bible'' (men, and only men, used traditional Hebrew for study and prayer) and ''Tkhines,'' comforting 17th-century Yiddish prayers to the matriarchs. Schandler also says it's only recently that gays and lesbians have started to realize that sharing a sexuality isn't necessarily as interesting as sharing an ethnic history.
Klezmer, which literally means instrument or vessel of melody, is also a particularly appropriate vessel for a gay aesthetic. First of all, instead of hiding it, the music flaunts its Jewishness with a drag queen's abandon, something that the Wigstock generation can surely appreciate. Like the Yiddish theater that flourished in the East Village not long ago, Klezmer is campy in a low-rent sort of way, and like the Yiddish language itself, there's a sensual and tender quality to its sound that is almost effeminate in a stigmatizing way that closet Jews find embarrassing. Most importantly, perhaps, Klezmer is party music, the best kind of social glue. An effective bridge between generations, it has the raucous gumption of disco divas like Grace Jones and Bette Midler. For anybody who wants to get sweaty on the dance floor to something other than house music, Klezmer's an excellent option.
''This next song is adapted from the Song of Songs,'' Sklamberg is saying at the concert, where at least half the audience is an older Jewish crowd. ''The words mean 'Who's that coming across the desert? Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. How beautiful your love is, far better than wine.'' He's already slipped a few other gay references into the band's psychedelic ride through the old country that's more Mothers of Invention than Molly Picon.
While Sklamberg mines the passion in each lyric, Svigals makes her violin weep, gossip, and giggle. London has a tendency to pogo-dance when he isn't blowing dark, antic melodies through his trumpet. The band's other members, David Licht, Paul Morrissett, and guest Matt Darriau, push things on the drums, bass, and sax with the urgency of libidinous bar mitzvah boys; David Krakauer goes way out, then brings it all back home to the archetypal Jewish mother with his nervous and doting clarinet.
''This song is an old Yiddish socialist anthem,'' Alicia Svigals says from over her violin. ''For us it's about AIDS activism and Yiddish culture. The words mean: 'We're hated and pursued, we're afflicted and persecuted, only because we love.''' And on they go, just like they might at an alternative music club in Europe, a Jewish Community Center in Westchester, or at a lesbian commitment ceremony, where they performed a few years ago.
At intermission, men in leather jackets with hoop earings sit behind ladies with leatherette bags and clip-ons. Straight young couples nuzzle next to women with their arms around each other.
''They're not traditional, but I like them,'' says an elderly man from Long Island.
''Whenever I hear these songs, I think of Ernie,'' says a pocketbook-bearing matriarch. ''They were his lullabies.''
''Yiddish music and radicalism go back in my blood,'' says a grandmother who has just come from a National People's Campaign rally.
Two rows back, it's another world. A man is saying that he was expecting to run into more ''straight-identified'' friends tonight, but is mostly running into ''gay-identified'' friends. ''I loved hearing that homoerotic 'Song of Songs,''' he says. ''Because I'm queer, I've always imagined Jonathan and David together.''
Sklamberg returns for the second part of the concert in shorts and black construction boots. Holding his accordion, he looks kind of homo-Bavarian and gets a few cheers, perhaps because he has good legs, although it's hard to say for sure. The band performs its haunting score from the recent Hartford Stage production of Tony Kushner's adaptation of the Yiddish classic, The Dybbuk. (Sklamberg says Kushner recently told him the Klezmatics changed his life.)
The relentless radical revisionism continues. During a traditional Hasidic number, in which Sklamberg refers to the Messiah as a she (and gets cheered for it) a dozen women dance around the auditorium like maenads. The sound engineer in the back rocks out at his mixer as if he were a Hasid at prayer with a finger stuck in the socket. He's slamming himself against the back wall.
''Sing along with us, whether you're religious or leftist,'' yells London. ''Whether you're bride or groom! We're all sisters! We're all brothers! We're all here! We're all Gay! And we're all going to sing 'Oy Oy Oy!'''
And from the oldest alter kocker to the youngest faygeleh in the house, they do.
Such a tsimmes.
It's Sunday, the day after the concert, and Sklamberg's in the lobby of Temple Shaaray Tefila on the Upper East Side, where a conference on the radical right sponsored by Jews For Racial and Economic Justice is just ending. Ruth Messinger's already come and gone. Progressive idealists, looking kind of washed-out from a full day of dogma, are filing out the door.
Sklamberg grew up a conservative Jew outside of Los Angeles. He sang Israeli folk songs. He became the cantor at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the Los Angeles gay synagogue. Eleven years ago, after dropping out of the music departments of USC and UCLA, he found himself moving to New York. He found a job as a graphic designer at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world's largest archive (outside Israel) of the civilization of Eastern European Jews. ''There were a lot of gay people working there and people who were politically progressive,'' he says, ''so it was a comfortable place.'' On his lunch breaks, he'd listen to old 78s of klezmer in YIVO's sound archives.
''I basically found my voice in Yiddish music,'' Sklamberg says. ''No matter how good I was at Israeli music, I'd always feel like an outsider singing it. There's a harshness to it that never felt right. One of the reasons it seems like a political act to sing in Yiddish is that everybody I grew up with told me that Yiddish wasn't valid.'' Yet, everything about the language seemed to suit him. ''Somehow the music and language have a coziness for me that I find very comfortable. In Yiddish, the term for a gay man is a faygeleh. That doesn't sound particularly harsh. It's kind of a sweet word that's never said with much rancor. When you hear old people using it, it's usually with just a shrug.
''I think there are more ways to express yourself in Yiddish if you're gay,'' continues Sklamberg, who gets by using his Yiddish in German leather bars. ''I love the range of emotions you can find in Yiddish music. People say that it sounds happy and sad at the same time. That's because it's modal. It changes from minor to major keys within a song. It has a certain ambiguity to it. It sounds like laughter through tears.''
Perhaps that's why Gregg Bordowitz used the Klezmatics' music in his recent, harrowing and acerbic AIDS documentary, Fast Trip, Long Drop. In it, the band sings the traditional Yiddish bulgar (a kind of mazurka) ''Give Me a Kiss,'' to footage of a 1988 Queer Nation ''Kiss-In'' demonstration. Over images of ACT UP ''Die-Ins'' in Washington and old footage of Jewish cemeteries, they sing about overcoming oppression. ''The point of remembering,'' Bordowitz says in the documentary, ''is to reinvent ourselves.''
Some gay and lesbian Jews are reinventing their spirituality to mesh with their political agendas. Others are reclaiming their traditional heritage from a religion that still condemns them. Sklamberg, meanwhile, finds himself as a kind of faygeleh Stevie Wonder, smoothing out rifts between generations by singing his heart out in the language of his ancestors. He doesn't necessarily think singing with the Klezmatics, which makes him feel both powerful and vulnerable at the same time, will attract the man of his dreams, but he doesn't rule out the possibility. ''If this doesn't do it, nothing will,'' Sklamberg says, ''because this is me more than anything else I do.''
The Talking Heads were born at the Rhode Island School of Design, R.E.M. at the University of Georgia. The Klezmatics began nine years ago in the East Village experimental music scene. They decided to put an ad in The Village Voice to find other musicians into messing with klezmer.
''We're into fucking with the music,'' Frank London, the band's trumpet player, says from the East Village tenement apartment he shares with his wife and two-year-old son. ''We fuck with its form and content.''
London's a hardcore, alternative kind of guy. He grew up a Reform Jew on Long Island who was into Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. After studying at the New England Conservatory of Music and playing with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, he came to New York in the mid '80s and got into all kinds of music. His Les Miserables Brass Band toured with David Byrne for a while. He's played with They Might Be Giants and L.L. Cool J. A few years ago, when avant-garde musicians such as John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, Marc Ribot, and others started turning to the speedy and neurotic klezmer sound, London had already formed the Klezmatics.
''There is a spiritual power in the music,'' London says, referring to klezmer's Hasidic roots and the religious tradition of reaching god through ecstatic song and dance. ''But I don't believe you have to be Jewish to play klezmer. If that's the case, then Yo Yo Ma should quit cello.'' And Don Byron, a black clarinetist who also plays klezmer, should quit too.
It was London who came up with the idea of writing a homoerotic ''Song of Songs'' for Sklamberg to sing. ''I like to put things in your face,'' he says. ''And I hate the 'don't ask, don't tell' attitude. It's never served the Jews well. Two people in our band are gay. They have an out political view and they don't hide it. That's consistent with my worldview. If they were hiding something, I'd be uncomfortable.''
While London's into otherness, he reviles nostalgia. If you want to piss him off, ask him why the band doesn't play ''Romania, Romania,'' ''Bei Mir Bist Du Schon,'' or another schmaltz standard that paints life in the old country (where Jews weren't allowed to study in music conservatories and were legally smacked in the face by local priests on Easter) as sweet and easy. ''I hate kitsch and camp,'' he says as he stomps around barefoot in his cluttered living room. ''We don't do shtick. That whole self-deprecating, funny little Jew from the old country image is a form of Black Face, really.
It's almost midnight. Tine Kindermann, London's German wife, has just put the baby to bed and is painting a drafting table. She first laid eyes on London in 1988, when the Klezmatics were dazzling a crowd at an outdoor folk festival in Berlin. Kindermann thought London was cute, but she doesn't deny that she saw him in another way. ''The Jews are fetish objects in Germany,'' she says. ''In school, we spend a lot of time learning about the Nazis. We read books on mass psychology and watch documentaries about the Holocaust. It's very profound, but we spend all this time learning about Jewish death, never anything about Jewish life. The only music that German people heard until very recently was from the ghettos and concentration camps. Klezmer bands show the living side of Jewish culture.''
London would like her to convert, but as positive as she is about Jews and Jewish culture, Kindermann doesn't want to. She's not a practicing Christian, but like her parents, she feels religion is a personal choice that shouldn't be imposed on children. ''There have been times when we almost broke up because I wasn't going to convert,'' she says. ''It's complicated. But it's been an interesting trip.''
Despite his obsession with it, London won't call music his religion. ''My religion,'' he says, ''is Judaism.''
On Monday, the 50th anniversary of V.E. Day, the Klezmatics are crammed into a studio at WNYC-FM. They're going to be playing selections from the Kushner adaptation of The Dybbuk. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the soul of a dead person that enters a live person's body and renders him mad. The classic Yiddish play is about a bride possessed by the spirit of her dead paramour. Sklamberg, when he steps up to sing in the mournful voice of the bride, seems possessed himself.
''Mama!'' he cries, holding his ear so that he doesn't get distracted by the tendrils of London's liturgical-sounding melodies coming from the instruments around him. Using an old-fashioned microphone not very different from the kind used by LaGuardia, FDR, or Hitler, his ''Mama!'' seems of another era. One can almost see the Yiddish words streaming from his mouth, into the air, across the city and into walk-up apartments, high-rises, nursing homes, cabs, and hospital rooms.
''The living are dancing with those that they see,'' he sings, ''and only the dead will be dancing with me.''
''We're out Jews,'' Alicia Svigals says from the Upper West Side apartment she shares with her female partner, two cats, a dog, a piano, and a big Menorah. ''I mean, we're in your face. Silence equals death on many levels. If you don't speak a language, it will die. And if you don't speak up for others, those people die. So in my mind, homophobia and anti-Semitism are related.''
Svigals is as haimish as London is hardcore. She grew up in the predominantly Jewish community of Spring Valley, New York, and learned some Yiddish in a Woman's Circle after-school program. As a student at Brown, she came out of the closet and hooked up with the radical-activist community, where El Salvador and Nicaragua were the hip issues, not anything Jewish and especially not anything Yiddish. After hitchhiking around Europe, playing violin, she ended up back at school majoring in ethnomusicology. That got her into everyone's music but her own, and when she moved to New York in 1985, she ended up playing Greek music at nightclubs in Astoria.
''I noticed that for the Greek kids,'' she says, ''Greek music is not nostalgia. Their record collections are of traditional Greek music, but it's not considered campy.'' Eventually, she found her way back to her own roots. ''I love otherness,'' she says. ''You have to, to be a klezmer musician for a living.''
She also loves performing in Germany. ''Part of the progressive youth culture there is this philo-Semitism'' she says of the country that produced a gentile ice-dancing team who competed at Lillehammer in Hasidic-inspired costumes. Svigals says that, of course, it also feels a little weird to stand in front of a sea of worshipful German faces. ''It's weird to be treated like a cultural icon,'' Svigals admits. ''It makes you feel a little dehumanized. I mean, I like being an other. But usually I hang around with other others.''
Since her partner, Ellen Marakowitz, an anthropologist, has given birth, Svigals says she's stopped censoring her speech by hiding her sexuality behind coy, gender-neutral words when it's convenient. ''We can't do that,'' she says. ''It would be horrible, because it conveys to the kid that there's something wrong with us.''
After some concerts, says Svigals, who likes playing at Jewish senior centers as much as at the Knitting Factory, elderly people approach her to correct her Yiddish. They rarely complain about the tricky content of some lyrics. ''In the age of 'Oprah,''' she says, ''little old Jewish ladies are a lot more savvy than you think.''
Of course, not everybody is so homo-haimish. Just as there are gays and lesbians who resent being represented to the straight world by attention-grabbing drag queens, leathermen, and Dykes on Bikes, there are those Jews who don't like seeing themselves represented to non-Jews as anything too different--especially gay.
''YIVO is an institution that goes back to the 1920s,'' says Allan Nadler, the director of research at YIVO. ''A lot of people on our board are Eastern European Jews who aren't that enlightened.'' Although he is generally supportive of the gay and lesbian presence at YIVO, Nadler observes that if people are too ''in your face,'' it can cause problems.
He also can't help but scoff a little at the Klezmatics' surging popularity. ''Personally, I'm not a big fan of klezmer music,'' he says. ''It's wedding music. It's rather repetitive. People call it 'Jewish Jazz,' but it's not that interesting. In Eastern Europe, nobody would pay money to sit in an auditorium and listen to klezmer musicians play.''
On the other hand, Nadler, who has a doctorate from Harvard in the history of Jewish thought and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, is pleased by the infusion of new energy into the Yiddish world--homosexual, feminist, radical, or otherwise. ''Anything that perpetuates any aspect of Eastern European Jewish culture is definitely a force for good,'' he says.
He applauds the Klezmatics for being as out as they are. ''Silence=Death is certainly shocking to see in Yiddish,'' he says, ''but why not? I say: 'Be gay, be healthy, and be safe--Gey Gezunterheyt!'''
Gey Gezunterheit means go in good health. The word Gai is pronounced ''Gay.'' No pun intended, Nadler laughs.
It's Wednesday, and thousands of local school children are flooding the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for an inoculation of multiculturalism through world music.
Backstage, Los Pleneros de la 21, a Puerto Rican party band, dressed in white with straw hats, are eating bagels and getting ready to take the stage. They're on first and, like the Klezmatics, sing a lot of songs that have religious histories and choruses of ''ay, ay, ay.'' A guitar player in sunglasses from Queen Ida and her Zydeco Band is flat on his back, nursing a hangover, while a drummer practices against a wall. Queen Ida hasn't shown up yet.
The Klezmatics, meanwhile, are taking a serious meeting. With a Talmudic sense of detail, they're arguing about the 15-minute set they're about to go out and play. Perhaps because they think their audience is more likely to relate to black or Puerto Rican musicians than Jewish ones, or perhaps because they're nervous Jews who don't want to screw up, they're intent on getting things right. But they each have a different idea of how to present themselves.
David Krakauer, the bass clarinetist, is concerned about the wacky, speedy overture they usually play as a first number. ''The first tune we play should make a statement,'' he says. ''These kids have never heard this music before.'' They haggle awhile until they decide on another song. ''I'll just say to them we're the Klezmatics. This is Jewish music. Clap your hands,'' London says. ''Then we'll play 'Simchas Torah,' AABBCC, chorus.''
''I think it should be A once, not twice,'' Svigals says.
They haggle some more.
Less than a half hour later, onstage in the Opera House, London's in his trademark fez. He's killing a few minutes while the band sets up, and he's straining to make a show of enthusiasm, the way any good magician or clown would at a birthday party that could spiral out of control at any minute.
''Klezmer is the party music of Eastern European Jews!'' he's saying. ''We're going to sing in Yiddish, a language you might never have heard before, and we're going to ask you to sing along and clap your hands to the beat because that's what was done in the shtetls.'' He doesn't explain what a shtetl is. And it doesn't really matter. Because when Sklamberg yells out ''Eyns, tsvey, dray, fir!'' and the band starts to play, every little body in that audience is bopping up and down like a matzoh ball in a boiling pot of chicken soup.
''We're all brothers!'' London yells as the kids rush the front of the theater and start to dance. ''We're all sisters! We're all friends!''
He leaves the ''We're all gay'' business out this time. It's already enough of a tsimmes.