The Klezmer Melting Pot

Only three players in this orchestra: Shloimke Beckerman on clarinet, Harry Raderman on trombone, and A. Nonymous on piano, but together they summon up the rowdy spontaneity of a full klezmer band. Not so unlike the rowdy spontaneity of a dixieland jazz band. In fact, Raderman makes use of the newly invented wah-wah mute here, as used by Kid Ory in his recordings with his Creole Orchestra. The imitation of the human voice laughing and crying – as well as singing and talking is just what the klezmer clarinet does so well too, with its swoops and vocalisations.

Beckerman had only arrived in the States a decade earlier, one of the thousands of Jewish immigrants escaping hardship and pogroms in Eastern Europe, leaving his home in Chudniv (Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire), travelling north to Hamburg to take the boat to New York. The writer Joseph Roth tells of this archetypal journey:

Then at last you travel by fourth-class rail to Hamburg. It takes six days. You spend another two weeks waiting for the ship. Finally you embark. And while all the other other passengers are waving their handkerchiefs, close to tears, the Jewish emigrant for the first time in his life rejoices. He is afraid, but he trusts in his God. He is on his way to a country that greets all new arrivals with a gigantic statue of liberty. The reality must somehow correspond to this enormous monument.

To some extent, the reality does correspond to the symbol. Not because they really are all that serious about liberty in the new country, but because they have people who are more Jewish than the Jews, which is to say the Negroes. Of course Jews are still Jews. But here, significantly, they are first and foremost whites. For the first time a Jew’s race is actually to his advantage.

[The Wandering Jews, 1927, trans. Michael Hoffman]

The irony of those last lines makes for uncomfortable reading a century later, but what of the promise of America as a melting pot of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities (the term coined by Jewish Londoner Israel Zangswill in the title of his 1908 play The Melting Pot)? The year 1922 saw the last gasp of the Ottoman Empire, which, like its multi-ethnic neighbour, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was finally put to rest by the power games of post-First World War nationalisms. In both conglomerations, Jews were afforded a degree of tolerance, but never full acceptance. And conditions in the former Russian Empire were worse. Maybe in the early twenties in the USA it did seem like a time of liberation for many immigrant Jews. Certainly the leading recording companies were keen to cater to the multitude of immigrant communities: Columbia had a separate department just to record ethnic and foreign-language tracks.

But let’s humour ourselves for a moment and think of klezmer as “melting pot music” par excellence. The same can be said of jazz and many other musical styles, of course, but there are few styles where so many national and regional dance tunes have been co-opted so openly: Bulgars, Terkishes, Romanisches, Serbskes, to name a few. Anything from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and beyond. All flavoured with typical Yiddish spices, but free from narrow-minded nationalist sensibilities.

And in this track, perhaps we can hear Raderman and Beckerman (who later played in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra) starting to add something uniquely American into the mix.

[Sis Freilech bei Yidden, Raderman’s and Beckerman’s Orchestra. New York, 1922]