By Andrew Silow-Carroll
Josh Dolgin, the Canadian rapper and klezmer musician who performs as Socalled, was nearing the end of a raucous, crowd-pleasing set earlier this month when he paused to introduce a Yiddish song about a frog, “Di Frosh.”
I was reminded of the Passover ditty “Had Gadya,” but I was also thinking of my own conflicted relationship with Yiddish culture. Dolgin is part of a postwar generation that wants to remember and resuscitate the explosive creativity of an Eastern European culture that produced music, poetry, literature — in sum, a Jewish civilization. But the unimaginable losses of the Holocaust hang over the project, and a farbissener — a sourpuss — like me finds it hard to forget the cruel twists of Jewish history.
Dolgin was performing at Yidstock, the festival of new Yiddish music held in Massachusetts at the Yiddish Book Center beginning in 2012. Some 400 people came to the center’s campus over the four-day festival this year. The mood was celebratory, and why not: Returning in person after two years of pandemic, the (masked) audiences were primed for concerts, lectures and workshops remembering what Yiddish culture was, what it still is and what it could be.
And, as it turns out, the pandemic was very good for Yiddish: Secular Yiddish institutions like the book center, YIVO and the Workers Circle clocked record attendance for their virtual Yiddish classes and lectures. Aaron Lansky, the Yiddish Book Center’s founder, noted wryly that a lecture on Yiddish poetry that might have attracted “a minyan” of 10 Jews in person drew more than 1,200 people online.
I was able to feel this quickening pulse even in the half-day I spent at Yidstock. Dolgin’s acoustic performance whiplashed from hilarious to poignant, from Leonard Cohen to Mordecai Gebirtig, the composer killed during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto.
In the line at the falafel truck, I chatted with Jake Krakovsky, an Atlanta-based writer and actor who performed the puppetry for a trilingual film based on a Yiddish children’s story. I also caught up with Aaron Bendich, not yet 30, who hosts an old-timey Jewish radio show and runs a record label, Borscht Beat, that promotes avant-garde Yiddish artists.
Music from its latest release was performed at Yidstock by the duo Tsvey Brider and members of the Bay Area klezmer trio Baymele, and showed the possibilities of reinvention by setting Yiddish poetry to spiky chamber music arrangements. Tsvey Brider singer Anthony Mordecai Zvi Russell is on the cutting edge of Yiddish reinvention, drawing on his Black and Jewish identities and opera background to make, as he once put it in an interview, “connections through time, space and history.”
Lisa Newman, director of publishing and public programs at the Yiddish Book Center, said Yidstock is very much in keeping with the spirit of the center, which grew out of Lansky’s monumental effort to retrieve Yiddish books that, as their readers died off, were otherwise headed for the dumpster.
As I stepped out of the center, I thought of the session given by Eleanor Reissa, the best-known Yiddish singer and actress of this generation. She and Rogovoy discussed her new family memoir, “The Letters Project,” and although her parents suffered in Hitler’s Europe, she doesn’t refer to them as “survivors.” She prefers “fighters.”
And perhaps that’s the way to think about the future of Yiddish: not in mourning, but in creative defiance.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News. Via JTA.org.
