Category Archive

Melodías del destierro. Músicos judíos exiliados en la Argentina durante el nazismo (1933-1945). Silvia Glocer. Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical Ediciones. 2016.

Reviewed by Vera Wolkowicz

Argentina has the largest Jewish community in South America. The migrations (or, rather, forced exiles) that led to such a status began in the late nineteenth century, and would increase during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and through the Second World War. Silvia Glocer’s Melodías del destierro [Melodies From the Exile] delves into this history by focusing on the musicians who sought refuge on the other side of the Atlantic between 1933 and 1945. This book, written in Spanish and published in Argentina by Gourmet Musical, is the first to discuss and compile the histories and trajectories of exiled Jewish musicians in Argentina. While a large part of Glocer’s methodology relies on archival work (newspapers, concert programs, official documents, etc.) she combines it with methodologies driven from anthropology and oral history, such as interviews with some of these musicians, their families, friends and/or their students, not only exploring the history of exiled Jewish musicians during World War II, but tracing their legacies up to the present. Even though it is an academic text, its engaging prose and structure invite all kinds of readership (from scholars to the general public) without losing academic rigor, making it an invaluable contribution to the studies of Judaism, music and global history.

Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia. Hankus Netsky. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2015.

Reviewed by Phil Alexander

Musician and educator Hankus Netsky’s long relationship to klezmer music began in 1974, when, as a New England Conservatory undergraduate student, he braved “an assortment of attitudes ranging from enthusiasm to disbelief” (2) to begin an investigation into his own family’s klezmer history. Returning to his research twenty years later, and now at the head of a resurgence in full swing, Netsky found that Philadelphia was one of the few places that still had enough veterans willing to share their experiences. This book, built around the lively and honest voices of around 60 musicians, caterers, and descendants of musical families, represents the fruits of that work.

Klezmer scholarship thus far has largely focused on historical Eastern Europe, (Walter Zev Feldman), on the cosmopolitan scene of early twentieth-century New York (Joel Rubin), or on the varied routes that the klezmer revival has spawned (Mark Slobin, Magdalena Waligórska, Phil Alexander). Therefore, this book fills an important gap, offering both a deep understanding of local musical practice and a filter through which to understand “the entire Jewish immigrant experience” (3). There is, of course, a paradox here: how far can geographical specificity be simultaneously representative of the processes and transformations of large-scale migration? As a result, the most enlightening parts of this excellent and very readable book are those that focus on the rich—and occasionally anachronistic—particularities of Philadelphian Jewish musical experience.

Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884-1914. Vivi Lachs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2018.

Reviewed by Joseph D. Toltz

Vivi Lachs’ Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 provides a fresh perspective on the rise and fall of Yiddish in Great Britain. In this excellent and articulate study, the writer contributes a nuanced, historical examination of Yiddish life in London from the mid-1880s to the beginning of the Great War.

In this highly approachable and well-written book, Lachs—a scholar and musician who actively performs the Yiddish repertories that she researches—weaves through streets, music-halls, socialist gatherings and religious debates of the period to paint a portrait of a complex, conflicted community encountering modernity in the Anglosphere. Lachs describes how individuals both resisted and embraced Yiddish in many varied ways. She does so primarily through the analysis of song and verse, complementing this material with experiential narratives from audiences and performers sourced from reviews, articles and memoirs. Lachs filters the material through two distinct lenses—the manner of their engagement with the process of acculturation, and the way in which her subjects (both personalities and songs) reflect the transnational and transcultural nature of the Yiddish community in London. Throughout the work, her particular focus is on what would have been referred to by the Anglo-Jewish establishment as the three forbidden subjects of polite conversation: religion, politics, and sex. It is most refreshing to read an acknowledgement of the diverse nature of the construction of immigrant culture in an historical examination of pre-Holocaust Yiddish life.

Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. Judah Cohen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0253040206.

Reviewed by Jeremiah Lockwood

In his latest monograph, Judah Cohen offers a first deep dive into the overlooked music of a period in American Jewish history that has been the focus of increasing historic attention in recent years. In the brief summation of the period offered by A.Z. Idelsohn in the classic Jewish Music in its Historical Development, Idelsohn asserts that Jewish immigrants lost their sonic identity by adopting the musical norms of their new home. In contrast, Cohen reaches past reductive debates about “tradition versus modernity” to demonstrate why and how Jewish liturgical musicians made the stylistic choices they did.  Cohen explores how music offered Jewish Americans a means to express shifting social and economic identities through music. By looking at the music Jews made in their religious life, rather than comparing them to an imagined source of authenticity, Cohen challenges the monolithic paradigm of tradition that has bounded much of the classic scholarship in the field.