The dance workshop was in full swing, but disaster struck: no one knew how to make a four-pointed star.
I’m referring to a folk dance pattern that, as one of the least competent dancers in the room, I’m ill-equipped to describe. Suffice it to say that there are eight people standing in the “square” and four of them should put their hands in the middle and rotate clockwise (or was it counter-clockwise?), swinging each of the other four dancers. turn.
Things didn’t go well. I aimed for an elderly man in crisp khakis, but ended up on the arm of a college student in a Black Sabbath T-shirt. I kept bumping into people and I couldn’t figure out who was going wrong. (Probably me.)
In the rare moments when I had free time to look around, I saw that other eight-figure fields were doing the same. One couple had completely separated themselves and were wandering around the room by themselves. Steve Weintraub, the dancer who led the workshop and the creator of the klezmer flash mob, dashed around the room, correcting his steps and shouting things like, “Now the promenade!” Basically, promenading is just jumping in circles like the daughter of “Fiddler on the Roof” looking for a husband. It was an order that everyone could welcome with relief.
The 50 or so masked people gathered in the claw-like hall—some young, some old, who danced throughout the workshop, others retreated to the side to rest—had signed up to learn some not-so-basic Jewish folk dance. The arrangements created by Weintraub share many features with their European cousins; they will feel familiar to anyone who has been to a square dance or watched a Jane Austen adaptation. But the klezmer accordion music provided by Lauren Brody made these dances distinctly Jewish, a taste of how our ancestors might step and twirl at weddings and holidays in the old country.
When the music finally stopped, attendees went outside to cool off, drink water, and eat lunch from a conveniently located hummus truck. They didn’t have much time to kill because they weren’t here just for one dance lesson. They spent the entire weekend at Yidstock, an annual celebration of Yiddish music on the bucolic campus of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.
With low rooflines that mimic the feel of a European shtetl, long-published Yiddish books, and archives of oral history archives, the book center is geared toward preserving a literature and culture once thought to be in danger of extinction. Yet Yidstock is far from defending tradition for tradition’s sake. In its sweet informality and slightly sweaty seriousness, the workshop embodied one of the weekend’s main goals: to illuminate the clash between old and new customs, Jewish and non-Jewish traditions that shaped Yiddish culture long before festivals commemorate it.
“People can leave a concert today and say, ‘This isn’t traditional klezmer like I grew up with,'” said Seth Rogovoy, the festival’s artistic director. (Rogovoy is also a contributing editor at the Forward.) “But the klezmer you grew up with? It’s not traditional either .”
The Yiddish Book Center dates back to 1980, when Aaron Lansky, then a graduate student living in nearby Northampton, realized that American Jews, disinterested in their parents’ and grandparents’ Yiddish books, were destroying them en masse. Lansky founded a network of zamlers, or volunteer collectors, to find and restore endangered books—and soon became known as someone who would do anything to save Yiddish books.
Four decades later, the project is no longer the province of scrap metal volunteers. Supported by 30,000 volunteers, the Yiddish Book Center is one of the largest repositories of Yiddish books in the world. I opened the center’s unassuming doors to reveal a librarian’s fantasy, colorful Yiddish banners hanging above seemingly endless rows of books. But the center is still taking on new volumes. While I was chatting with David Mazower, the book center’s editorial director, a bearded employee came in to announce that “two boxes from Zamler in the Berkshires” had just arrived.
Yidstock itself began in 2011 when Susan Bronson, executive director of the Yiddish Book Center, brainstormed a new way to attract visitors.
“I really wanted to think about what we could do, where we could bring people from all over the country and where we could also promote the creativity of Yiddish music,” he said in a phone interview. “And I just thought a music festival would be a great thing.”
Bronson recruited musician and critic Rogovoy, who was based in the Berkshires, to compile the set list. In its first iteration, Yidstock consisted of a few concerts over the course of a day. Now in its 10th year, the festival has 400 and a long weekend of activities including film screenings, dance workshops and artist talks. Some acts, like the Klezmatics, are big names that draw festival-goers year after year. Others are relative newcomers: Tsvey Brider, a songwriting duo inspired by 20th-century Jewish writers and poets that formed in 2017 and has already performed twice at Yidstock.
I trekked up from New York on the first afternoon of the festival, just in time to make it to Hankus Netsky’s lecture. Wordless devotional melodies that typically originate in Hasidic communities, nigunim often find their way into synagogues of all denominations, as evidenced by the vigorous humming that erupted from the audience each time Netsky performed a segment. Netsky, erudite about Nigunim’s musical achievements, was nevertheless willing to have a little fun at their expense. Explaining a four-part nigun that is supposed to lead the singer to ecstatic communion with God, he quipped, “In the fourth stage, you become a disembodied spirit. How about music theory?”
The lecture was meant to prepare attendees for the first concert of the festival, by Hasidic cantor Yaakov Lemmer, whose performance turned out to be less holy than schmaltzy, featuring klezmer marches, a tribute to shalashuds (the third meal of Shabbat) and something called “Alcoholic.” Lemmer, flicking sheet music on an iPad and sipping water from a Hydro Flask, nonetheless radiated the old-fashioned genius of a Boršivövé dinner host. During livelier numbers, Weintraub led a group of young acolytes in improvised dances. In the rows of the audience, who did not want to scrub their belongings, closed sandals kept knocking.
For performers, Yidstock can be a uniquely welcoming venue for unexpected musical combinations. Anthony Russell, the singing half of the duo Tsvey Brider, recalled that for his festival debut he sang several Yiddish poems set to pop tunes. The audience ate it up.
“The world of Yiddish text, especially poetry, goes to so many places,” Russell said. “It seems unfair to limit it to a certain set of sounds.”
Lecturer Netsky believes that such music, and the wider Yidstock project, is alien to the mainstream Jewish community, which he says has never fully embraced klezmer since its revival in the 1970s. “The mainstream Jewish community hardly notices this because it’s not about Israel, it’s not about intermarriage, it’s not about synagogues,” he said.
Yidstock doesn’t exactly look like a renegade venture: the Yiddish Book Center’s tens of thousands of members, shtetl-chic interior and well-equipped performance spaces speak to a degree of mainstream success, at least in terms of fundraising. But the participants who made the pilgrimage to Massachusetts were certainly looking for experiences not offered by everyday Jewish life.
Samantha Cohen, 29, drove with her parents and grandparents from New York to Yidstock with food supplies in tow — at lunchtime, the family set up a picnic area in the bookstore parking lot with Coleman coolers and a gingham blanket. While klezma was a big draw, Cohen said, he was most excited about the opportunity to practice the Yiddish he learned in college.
Although New York is full of Jewish music, he said, “There aren’t that many events where you can speak [Yiddish] or listen to speakers.”
Jake Krakovsky, a theater artist from Atlanta, began learning Yiddish at the beginning of the pandemic when the Yiddish Book Center took his in-person classes online. Even as a beginner, she said, she realized that the language “is very important to me, probably for the rest of my life.”
Now, Krakovsky, 31, is a counselor at the book center’s summer Yiddish intensive, which has finally resumed in-person classes. He leads a large number of college and graduate students who find their way to the Center and Yidstock for personal, academic and political reasons.
“I see people who are very interested in klezmer,” Krakovsky said. “I see people who are interested in different aspects of Jewish history. I see people who really want to be close to Judaism, but are either shut out or alienated from the Jewish institutions central to Zionism.
One of Krakovsky’s co-defendants is Grayson Hawthorn, 20, a Smith College student who is studying Yiddish to help with his Russian studies research. Hawthorn said her parents were appalled when she announced her intention to spend the summer at a Yiddish camp — but then so was she.
“If you had told me two years ago, ‘You’re going to a klezmer music festival and there’s a lot of people who are really into it,’ I would have been like, ‘What are you talking about.’ ?” Hawthorn said.
As the folk dance workshop drew to a close, Weintraub paused to explain the origins of the shapes he had taught us. Some came from Hasidic dances, while other influences were much more modern—he cited the 1938 film The Dybbuk as one inspiration.
He then placed all the dancers in one giant square and had each side take turns dancing to the center of the room and back. I waltzed and stomped, shaking hands and making slightly awkward eye contact with people whose names I’ll never know. After an hour of stumbling through the complicated steps, they came naturally – maybe because they were objectively very simple, maybe because we’d all seen “Dybbuk”, maybe because despite how much they’d evolved over the years , they were part of it. our history.
“We’re allowed to take bits and pieces,” Weintraub said of his approach to Jewish dance. It might actually be the most traditional thing.
This article first appeared in the Forward.
What does flying mean in Song of Solomon?
In Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, flight is used as a literal and metaphorical symbol of escape. On the same subject : THIS WEEK IN ART | Live music, painting, yoga and more. Any character who chooses to fly in the novel is “flying” away from a difficulty or seemingly impossible situation.
What is the main message of the Song of Solomon? According to this interpretation, the songs celebrate the joy and goodness of human love between the sexes and the inner fulfillment and harmony with God’s creation that comes from such love.
How does milkman achieve flight?
A medium between Pilate and Solomon, Milkman achieves escape by leaving behind the limitations of his home in Michigan, be they spiritual, material, or human. This ultimate flight is achieved on the final page of the novel when she relinquishes control over her body and her life.
Who flew in Song of Solomon?
Susan also tells Milkman the story of Solomon’s wife, Ryna, who went crazy when Solomon flew off, leaving her behind. Read also : Lifestyle change is the topic of the diabetes support group | Properties | kpcnews.com. As a result, the old Indian woman Heddy raised Jake, the youngest of Solomon’s twenty-one children and the only one Solomon tried to take with him when he flew away.
Why should you read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison?
Is Song of Solomon appropriate for middle school? This is a rich yet intense book best suited for older teens who can maturely handle explicit passages. This may interest you : The Vinton community is shedding tears after losing a beloved music store to fire.
Why is Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison important?
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon demonstrates the need to connect with a personally important belief system in order to become self-affirming and empower oneself to overcome oppression.
Is Song of Solomon a good book?
Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon is one of those great works of literature that demands re-reading.
What is the Song of Solomon in the Bible about?
Summary. The Song of Solomon is a series of lyric poems organized as a long dialogue between a young woman and her lover. From time to time the lovers are approached by a third party or choir. The first poem is told by a young girl who longs to be close to her lover and enjoy his kisses.
What is the message of the Bible’s Song of Songs? The literal theme of the songs is love and sexual longing between a man and a woman, and it has little (or nothing) to say about the relationship between God and man; to find such a meaning, it was necessary to use allegory, treating the love that the Song represents as an analogy for love …
What is the purpose of the Song of Solomon?
Among the Jews, the allegorical interpretation regards the book as an allegory of God’s love for the Israelites, with whom he has made a holy covenant. Among Christians, the book is interpreted as describing Christ’s covenantal love for his church.
Who is the woman in the Song of Solomon?
The Shulammite (from Hebrew shulammit, “woman of Jerusalem”) is a central figure in the Song of Solomon (also called Song of Songs or Song of Songs) and one of the most positive representations of young womanhood in the Hebrew Bible.
