Magdalena Waligorska's book provides a compelling look at the complicated issues around the performance of “klezmer,” the dance music of the eastern European Jewish community, in contemporary Europe. Covering the period from 2003 to the present day, the book updates earlier studies, including Mark Slobin's Fiddler on the Move (2000), Ruth Gruber's Virtually Jewish (2002), and various other books and articles that have attempted to grapple with similar issues.
Limiting her study to the complex Jewish music scenes in Berlin and Krakow, two communities that have been pivotal to the resurgence of the genre, she documents a music that has been “marketed in ways that no Jewish music has ever been marketed before.” Rather than focusing on musical aspects of European klezmer, her volume is primarily concerned with a cultural and sociological analysis of issues around the performance of different types of music included under what ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin dubbed “the Klezmer umbrella.” These include current Jewish-themed Berlin cabaret, “heritage” klezmer, Yiddish folksong, and the various contemporary genres that fuse the klezmer instrumental tradition with jazz, punk, and rock.
Possibly to her detriment or possibly to her credit (depending on the perspective of the reader), Waligorska makes no attempt to evaluate the musical value of any of her informants' work. Instead she focuses on the stated intent of each artist, probably a wise move when dealing with a genre in which standards of quality are basically up for grabs; after all, in contemporary society, there are few barometers of quality when dealing with a culture mostly reconstructed from a pre-Holocaust template. Also, as Waligorska points out several times in the book, her study takes place after the “peak” years of the klezmer resurgence in the mid-1990s, which gives it the aura of a phenomenon that is well ensconced in both Berlin and Krakow as a permanent if somewhat marginal musical stream.
Nevertheless, klezmer still provides a livelihood to a surprisingly large cadre of musicians. Through an extensive series of interviews and detailed analysis, Waligorska carefully explores the relationship of these musicians to their audience, to their repertoire, to their Jewish, Polish, and German identities and, most ubiquitously, to the specter of the Holocaust.
This final connection carries a particular irony since, as Waligorska points out, klezmer in its eastern European heyday was generally anything but contemplative and was already very much on the decline in the interwar period (1917–1938). Also, by that time it had become marginalized as a musical style, not by Germans and Poles but by a large swath of the urban Jewish community itself, most members of which had embraced more urbane and “sophisticated” musical expressions, including tango, fox-trot, and various styles of jazz. It had been a victim of the various isms—socialism, communism, Bundism, Zionism, and especially assimilationism—that had eroded many of the traditional staples of eastern European Jewish culture, including the kheyder system of education, traditional khazones (cantorial music), the Yiddish theatre tradition, and Yiddish folksong.
Klezmer's initial resurgence in the late 1970s was the work of Jews who, contrary to the prevailing winds in the American, Israeli, and European Jewish communities, believed in the great beauty of a culture that had flourished for many hundreds of years, joined by Europeans who felt a void in their own cultural world that could only be filled by reinstating a “European” musical style that they considered indispensible to their own non-Jewish identities. While most of the music's older practitioners considered klezmer basically dead at that time of its resurgence, the revivalists saw the music for what it turned out to be: a richly colorful virtuosic tradition that was uniquely poised to appeal to an international multicultural audience—as well as to Jews, once they saw that everyone else was interested.
As one of the Americans who aided in that resurgence, leading a band that toured Europe seven times in the 1990s and performed at the Krakow festival three times in that same decade, I found the book quite compelling—and also somewhat troubling. Indeed, some of the same issues mentioned here were present even in the early days of Polish and German klezmer. As a Jewish klezmer revivalist, I especially related to certain topics discussed by Waligorska: her encounters with philo-Semitism, her presentation of the idea of the Jew as the “exotic other,” her analysis of the parallel between the klezmer phenomenon and the consumption of Native American culture, and her discussion of the concern among Jews about their culture being represented almost entirely by non-Jewish performers of Jewish genres.
Having grown up in an American Jewish musical family, in an atmosphere where klezmer was indeed “Saturday night's entertainment” (albeit only for those advanced in age), I found it a bit riveting to be confronted with a world where klezmer's meaning has become something very different, a political and social symbol that can be manipulated in so many different ways. We learn how, in Poland, klezmer has largely become a sonic background for a huge Jewish heritage tourism industry that prefers their klezmorim (klezmer performers) frozen in time as ghosts of the Jewish shtetl culture. In Berlin, Jewish culture has morphed into a fountain of cultural guilt and a point of departure for various types of postmodern musical projects in which Jewish performers confront their audience head on, and German non-Jewish performers find themselves subject to a kind of virtual antisemitism worthy of Richard Wagner (or, in the most extreme case, being congratulated after performances in Arab countries for their government's efficiency in killing Jews). Meanwhile, I found it fascinating to read of Krakovians who choose to identify as “Galicians” rather than Poles, and “Berliners” who are eager to distance themselves from their German identity in order to avoid some of the guilt inherent in participation in a non-Jewish klezmer project. At the same time it is somewhat heartening to read of klezmer's enduring value as a symbol of Jewish/non-Jewish reconciliation.
What remains unexplored here is the larger question of the European revival's contribution to Jewish eastern European cultural literacy, a major issue for many of us who have invested our life's work in klezmer and other Jewish musical genres. But, as Waligorska is apt to point out, in the context of cultural appropriation “we choose what we value, transform it to fit our needs, and reject what we cannot identify with. If the culture of the other serves [as] a reflection on the collective self, it is not the factual that matters but the functional.” (200). Klezmer's Afterlife gives its readers a great deal to think about—at least until the next update.
