December 7, 2011 | 12:18 pm

Klezmer Music’s Revival Still Going —  25 Years On

Posted by Tom Teicholz

From left: Frank London, Matt Darriau, Lisa Gutkin, Lorin Sklamberg, Paul Morrissett. Photo by Joshua Kessler

On Dec. 19, as part of their 25th anniversary tour, the Klezmatics will perform at Walt Disney Concert Hall for a Chanukah concert featuring both their well-known and new repertoire. On the program are songs by the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie — or, as he’s known in klezmer circles, American-Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt’s son-in-law.

The band has just released a double CD, “Live at Town Hall”; Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary, “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground,” featuring the band’s Town Hall concert, as well as performances in Poland and Hungary, is just out on DVD; and they are also working on a new album. There’s much to celebrate.

Klezmer — from which the band took its name — is the joyous, expressive music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, a sound inspired by Bessarabian Romania, as well as the Roma (Gypsies), and is often played at weddings and other celebrations. Originally purely instrumental, Klezmer is a type of music long admired by people of all faiths and performed in Enlightenment-era European churches centuries before becoming the soundtrack to Yiddish life. Its appeal comes from its unique mix of the seemingly conflicting emotions — comic, plaintive, happy, sad, mournful — while also being transcendental and spiritual. It’s an infectious idiom that, like Yiddish itself, is forever being pronounced dead or dying, or dismissed as an artifact of a disappearing Jewish life that, nonetheless, persists in growing and reinventing itself.

The Klezmatics got their start in 1986, when Frank London, who had been playing jazz and rock ’n’ roll, placed an ad in the Village Voice looking to start a Klezmer band. Among the respondents was Lorin Sklamberg, a Los Angeles-born, classically trained musician who had a day job at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. As Sklamberg recounted recently, he worked on the same floor where the sound archives were located.

“The YIVO sound archives have touched virtually everybody who plays klezmer music,” he said, “because it was the first place that people knew of that housed historical recordings of Yiddish music, particularly instrumentals for klezmer music. It’s really one of the catalysts of the klezmer music revival. I don’t know if the klezmer revival would have been possible without it.” Sklamberg was allowed to pore through the recordings and make cassettes of whatever caught his fancy. That was, Sklamberg said, “the band’s music education and my own.”

Sklamberg still works at YIVO, but today he is “the caretaker of the collection.”

“That’s very lovely for me,” he continued, “because now I know enough to help other people who are looking for material the way we were looking in the early days of the band. So it’s a huge privilege and responsibility.”

Or as London put it regarding the Klezmatics: “We see ourselves as links in this glorious chain that never stops growing.”

“Live at Town Hall” is about as good an introduction/sampler/greatest hits collection as one can imagine. Tracks include Klezmatics original clarinetist Margot Leverett joining the band on Abraham Ellstein’s “Bobe Tanz” from their first record, high-energy romps from “Rhythm & Jews” featuring clarinetist David Krakauer, selections from their collaboration with Tony Kushner for “The Dybbuk,” “Di krenitse” from their collaboration with Chava Alberstein (who is often referred to as the Joan Baez of Israel) and songs from “Brother Moses Smote the Water,” including “Elijah Rock,” featuring Joshua Nelson — the Jewish-African-American exponent of Jewish gospel singing. All this, as well as songs from “Wonder Wheel,” the aforementioned Woody Guthrie collection, which won the 2006 Grammy for best contemporary world music — the only Grammy ever awarded to a klezmer or Jewish-music band, as well as its follow-up, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah.” 

“It was so much fun to celebrate being together this long as a band, and to do it by getting everyone who has ever played with the band to be up on stage with us,” London said. “There was a lot of nachas — pride — out of the whole concert and CD. So much of what happens to the Klezmatics is more just about being out in the world and being available and open,” he said.

Some of this openness has led to collaborations with the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Woody Guthrie. “Who would have known?” London said, adding that he could never have foreseen that “Joshua Nelson has turned out to be one of the most enduring and fun collaborations.”

Certainly, no one could have predicted the hugely popular music festivals like the Jewish Music Festival in Krakow, Poland, where klezmer is played day and night, performed primarily by non-Jews to mostly non-Jewish audiences in a country that has few Jews.

Sklamberg is philosophical about this turn of events: “It’s part of where this music lives now. ... One of the things you are reminded of when you perform in places like Krakow, is that this is where this music came from.” Sometimes these foreign audiences have an immediate and gut reaction to the music that is missing among American Jews who weren’t raised with the music or have no connection to Yiddish, he said. “It’s funny that the music is heard with different ears and is felt in different ways by different people.”

The Klezmatics’ documentary is not so much a concert film as it is an “Anvil! The Story of Anvil”-like tale of the band’s interpersonal, professional and financial travails, which came as a surprise to London. “If you had polled the band on what they thought the movie would be about, I don’t think any one of us would have said that.”

In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal declaimed: “While the new album marks 25 years, those who watch the documentary may wonder if the Klezmatics will make it to 26.”

I prefer the see the documentary not so much as the story of a fraying band, but of how, despite the challenges of this digital age, it persists.

It’s a matter of endurance, as well. Twenty-five years on, as both London and Sklamberg remarked to me, they still find inspiration in klezmer as their birthright and their heritage, but they also are still discovering ways to make it new. Their show at Disney Hall offers a chance to celebrate all that, and Chanukah, too.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward.

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September 13, 2011 | 4:33 pm

Mel the Avenger

Posted by Tom Teicholz

Actor Mel Gibson attends a hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles on Aug. 31. Photo by REUTERS/Kevork Djansezian/Pool

In the reaction to the announcement that Mel Gibson was going to make a film about Judah Maccabee, the discussion has focused on whether Gibson should be the one to tell the story of this Jewish hero.  I believe the concern should not be so much about whether he is the right person, as what story it is that Gibson is actually going to tell.

Gibson first announced (or threatened, as the case may be) that he was going to make a movie about the Maccabees when Jewish organizations were protesting “The Passion of the Christ.” What Gibson promised was the real story of the Maccabees.

The story of Hannukah may be a heart-warming miracle, but the Maccabees, in truth, were anything but that. One could argue they were the Taliban of their day, religious zealots who put to death those of their fellow Jews they found not to be sufficiently pious.

Despite the romance that has become Masada, and the young soldiers and tourists that are taken there to bond with Jewish glory, the Maccabees essentially organized a death cult, a suicide pact, that we might compare to other modern cults in Jonestown or Waco, and that stand out in marked contrast to Jewish belief, practice and history.

Gibson, over and over again, in his movies, be it “Braveheart” or “The Passion” or “Apocalypto” has put forward a belief that blood and gore, torture and murder lead to transformative, redemptive, even religious experiences. Gibson’s Maccabee movie, is to be written by Joe Eszterhas, who after penning “The Music Box” about a daughter who discovers her father was a Nazi collaborator, discovered his own father was a Hungarian Nazi collaborator, and has recently himself, found religion.

Gibson’s “Maccabee” could well be his response to his Jewish critics, giving them a dose of Gibson’s bloody medicine, payback for their criticism of him, his father (and in Gibson’s mind), his religion.

I have no idea whether this movie will ever get made (although Gibson still has enough money to finance it himself). However, if it does, I think it’s message will not be of how Jews are a light to the world, but rather a tale of how imperfect their heroes are in fact. Perhaps, in the end, that will be good for the Jews. But I doubt it.

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September 30, 2010 | 10:05 am

Tony Curtis, movie star and philanthropist to Hungarian Jewish life, dies.

Posted by Tom Teicholz

Tony Curtis died yesterday of cardiac arrest at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada where he had been living for the last several years.

Although I will be writing a obituary appreciation of Curtis for the next issue of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, condolences goes out to his extended family and to his many fans.

Curtis was one of the last great movie stars, a larger than life character, self-invented, who never took himself too seriously, and seemed to relish every moment of his fame and where his celebrity and talent had taken him.

He was born in the Bronx as Bernard Schwartz and after service in the Navy in World War Two became an actor whose career would span many decades and every genre, from his Oscar performance in :”The Defiant Ones” a prison movie, to his comic masterpiece of a performance in Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot,” to his dramatic performance in “Sweet Smell of Success:” and compelling performances in movies as diverse as “Houdini,” “The Boston Strangler,” “Spartacus,” “The Great Race” among many others (Curtis appreared in over 100 films).

He was also instrumental in the founding and support of the Emanuel Foundation, a charity that sought to preserve and restore sites of Jewish interest in Hungary and that was a leader in the restoration of the Dohany Temple in Budapest, and in the installation of the Holocaust memorial in its courtyard, the dedication of which in 1988 Curtis attended.

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January 28, 2010 | 5:18 pm

J.D. Salinger, novelist of modern anomie, dead at 91

Posted by Tom Teicholz

J. D. Salinger, the novelist whose “Catcher in the Rye,” was the gateway drug for a generation of teenagers, readers and writers resisting the social conformity, and who became almost as famous for being reclusive as he was for his novel and his collections of short stories, died at his home in New Hampshire, at 91. He last published in 1965; Salinger claimed that he continued to write and would no longer be published during his lifetime.

With Salinger’s death, the literary world awaits to find out, after more than 50 years of waiting, whether in fact,Salinger left completed work — stories, novels, even poems — and whether it is coherent and intelligible, interesting or out-of-date — whether any of it is good, or even perhaps, great.

In Catcher in the Rye created a teenager character who spoke the feelings of teenagers of all ages, in decrrying the behavior of “phonies.” In his subsequent short story collections, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter” Salinger described characters at odds with themselves — and though many readers found them plain odd, they found them compelling. “The Catcher in the Rye” remains one of the perennial best-selling novels, read in schools across the country and the globe, holding a special place on the bookshelves of many. But Salinger’s last published stories, increasingly influenced by Salinger’s own experiments in eastern thinking, give one pause about what direction his unpublished writing may have taken.  Hopefully we will know soon.

After Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, he was found with a copy of “Catcher in the Rye.” and various writers and filmmakers have expounded on the connections between the two. Readers formed great attachment to “Catcher in the Rye” and perhaps this as much as anything was reason for Salinger to remove himself from society and live as a recluse in New Hampshire.

Born Jerome David Salinger in New York City in 1919, his father Sol, worked in the food industry. One of the accounts I read online claims that Salinger’s mother was born Marie but called herself Miriam and it was only after his bar-mitzvah that Salinger discovered that she was not in fact Jewish.

Salinger attended everal schools in New York including McBurney before attending Valley Forge Military Academy, and several colleges including New York University and Columbia University’s evening program where he attended a writing class taught by Whit Burnett of Story Magazine who would publish some of his early work.

In 1941 The New Yorker Magazine accepted “Slight Rebellion off Madison Avenue,” a short story featuring a character named Holden Caulfield.

At that time, Salinger also courted Oona O’Neil, playwright Eugene O’Neil’s daughter, who was a teenager at the time — she would eventually marry Charlie Chaplin. The courtship is mentioned in Aram Saroyan’s “Trio”  his account of the young lives of Oona O’Neil, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Carol Matthau (Saroyan’s mother).

It is also reported that around that time Salinger worked on a cruise ship, and perhaps performed on board.

Salinger served in World War Two, landing in France on D-Day and fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. While in France, he met Ernest Hemingway, who impressed Salinger and who was in turn impressed by Salinger’s writing — they began a correspondence. Salinger also served in a Counter-Intelligence Unit that interrogated prisoners of war and he was among the first soldiers to enter a recently liberated concentration camp.  Shortly therafer, Salinger reportedly had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for combat-related stress in an Army hospital.

Upon his return to the States, Salinger continued to write short stories. “A perfect day for Bananafish” was published in the New Yorker and established Salinger as an important contemporary writer. At the same time, Salinger became interested in Buddhism and various variants of eastern religions and religious practices, which he would continue to explore the rest of his life.

With the publication of “Catcher in the Rye,” Salinger who was living in Westport, Connecticutt, moved with his then wife Claire to Cornish N.H., which continued to be his residence until his death. Salinger had two children, Margaret and Matt who survive him.

Salinger continued to publish stories in The New Yorker, many of them about The Glass family, until 1965, with ” Hapworth 16, 1924,” his last published story. After that Salinger claimed that he continued to write but would no longer publish during his lifetime.

At first, Salinger gave interviews to the local paper and high school but he stopped that after a certain while. For awhile, journalists would take it upon themselves to travel to New Hampshire and wait in town for Salinger to pick up his mail and then try and strike up a conversation. Salinger gave his last interview in 1980.

Over the last many decades several persons have written memoirs of knowing Salinger. These include his daughter Margaret, and writer Joyce Maynard who dated Salinger as a teenager.

Salinger was protective of his life and his work and over the years sued to block publications biographies, and unauthorized collections of his short stories, or works too closely inspired by his own.

My own Salinger experiences begin with “Catcher In the Rye,” one of four books a bookstore clerk insisted I needed to read, as a teenager, to educate myself (the other three were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” and “George Orwell’s 1984″ and Richard Farina’s “Been Down So Long”) — and yes, I became attached to the book.  Whenever I had a swimming meet against the McBurney School I thought of Salinger and his description of his fencing team adventure in Catcher — And when we thought of where to meet near Grand Central, we thought of the clock in the Vanderbilt Hotel.

When the New York Times Magazine published Joyce Maynard on its cover — I was not alone in developing a crush and felt validated in my attraction when it was reported that she had begun an affair with J D Salinger. The fact that Salinger was so much older didn’t matter — the creator of Holden was, no doubt, in touch with his inner teenager.

A few years later, I learned that a friend of mine’s high school girlfriend had also had a relationship with Salinger which had developed by correspondence.  According to the gossip, third hand, Salinger loved to come to New York, much like any tourist, and have tea at the Plaza, see a show and visit friends at the New Yorker and in the city — by being a recluse, he had created anonymity for himself in New York — no one knew what he looked like, no one recognized him.

One summer in the mid-1970s I found myself in the Catalyst bookstore in Santa Cruz. There on the counter by the cash register were two paperbacks, “The Uncollected Stories of J.D. Salinger” volumes 1, and 2. Someone had taken all the stories that Salinger had published over the years in magazines that remained uncollected and published them. I remember holding them in my hands and poring over them, looking at stories I had never heard of.  Shortly thereafter, Salinger sued to halt what the publishers called a “samidzat publication”  — and those copies were not seen again.

Matt, Salinger’s son, is an actor and producer who has lived for many years in LA — I don’t know if he still does — I met him once (possibly twice) — he seemed nice and very unaffected. Given that his father wanted at some point to be an actor and/or entertainer — perhaps his father found some pleasure in his son being a working actor who turns up on TV programs with some regularity. In any event. please accept our condolences on your loss.

Although Salinger had one of his early stories optioned for film, the way in which his work was mangled for the screen convinced never to again option any of his work. Joyce Maynard once commented that the only one who could ever have played Holden was Salinger himself.

Holden is dead. Long Live Holden.

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December 22, 2009 | 3:19 pm

DISNEY ON ICE — A GREAT TIME HAD BY ALL

Posted by Tom Teicholz

I was a little concerned that my daughter and her friend, tweens already disdainful of all parent-chosen entertainment, would find the DISNEY ON ICE show, as they say, “boring!” or too babyish — but they were enchanted.

There was a Mickey and Minnie opening to the show that they could have done without but the retellings on ice of “Little Mermaid,” “Cars,”  “The Lion King,” and the after-intermission “Tinkerbelle” story really held them in thrall, particularly the moments of full on costume dance numbers (and remember this is on ice). Of course songs like “Under The Sea” and “Hakunah Matata” still resonate — and the opportunity to have a dinner of hot dog, soda, popcorn and candy is always appealing.

I went with another Dad, and we were discussing how much we still enjoy going to these shows. Truth is, that with very young kids, - and there were many, many young kids there, including some adorable young girls who came in their princess costumes (cute in the extreme) — there is more kid-management and less show enjoyment. You take them and they have a great time but the perfect sweet spot occurs when the kids are happy to be there and happy to watch, and even happy to let their parent also watch the show. I know — last night, I was there.

Here are some pics from the show:

The shows take place:

Staples Dec 17-20

Honda Center Dec 22-27

Citizens Business Bank Arena Dec 30- Jan 3

Long Beach Arena Jan 6-10

check out www.disneyonice.com for more info

For my friends at the FCC, let me repeat my prior disclosure of having been given free tickets by the show’s publicist—no doubt in the hope that I would write about the show,—which I confess that when I receive free tickets I do feel an obligation to write about more than if I do if I go to an event on my own dime and have nothing to say—and the hope that I would say nice things—which I don’t feel compelled to do if I don’t have nice things to say—I think part of my job is to provide my reactions, good or bad, and therefore let the people whose show it is, or venue it is, hear about what they are doing right or wrong, if there are matters that rankle or don’t appeal.

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December 21, 2009 | 7:22 pm

German prosecutors looking into whether Demjanjuk ran over a Jewish man in 1947

Posted by Tom Teicholz

I know it sounds strange but one of my trusted correspondents sent me this Jpost.com article:

‘Demjanjuk ran over a Jew in 1947’

By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Evidence that John Demjanjuk, 89, may have deliberately run over and killed a Jew while driving a truck in Germany is being studied by police, a prosecutor said Monday in a DPA report.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk is currently on trial in Munich over allegations that he took part in the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in 1943. He moved from Germany to the United States in 1952.

Read the full story at JPost.com.

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December 21, 2009 | 3:15 pm

Disney on Ice comes to the Southland

Posted by Tom Teicholz

As many of you are well aware I am a good audience for all things circus and ice shows — can’t say that it’s my ‘rosebud” but it has something to do with my childhood, no doubt, and the sort of entertainment that my father enjoyed and took me to as a child.

I have attended Disney on Ice in the past, and when the good folks promoting this event, offered me tix, gratis, I jumped (perhaps I should have used a ice skating metaphor there — and said I did a doubll gainer (sp?). Now having completed the sort of disclosure the FCC would like bloggers to engage in from now on — I will leave it to you to determine whether my integrity has been compromised, or is not to be had for the price of a few tickets. I know, I know, — it could go either way.

In any event here is the info on the upcoming shows. I’ll let you know what I thought tomorrow. The big question being how my daughter and her friend reviews the show. The shows take place:

Staples Dec 17-20

Honda Center Dec 22-27

Citizens Business Bank Arena Dec 30- Jan 3

Long Beach Arena Jan 6-10

check out www.disneyonice.com for more info

Here’s the press release:

disney-on-ice-presents-worlds-of-fantasy-1217-110

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December 4, 2009 | 6:17 pm

A few thoughts on the first week of the Demjanjuk trial in Munich

Posted by Tom Teicholz

A few thoughts on the first week of the Demjanjuk trial in Munich:

One of the most interesting aspects thus far, to my mind, and little remarked upon, is that the co-plaintiffs in the case are Dutch and their relatives were transported to Sobibor from the Netherlands and murdered there.

I don’t know why I should find that surprising. Perhaps it’s because I associate Nazi extermination camps such as Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka as the place where much of Polish Jewry was murdered. Similarly, Auschwitz is known as the graveyard of French and Hungarian Jewry. Until now the fate of Dutch Jewry has not been much discussed. When the deportation and murder of the Dutch Jews is mentioned, it is often discussed in regard to Anne Frank, who after being arrested was deported to Westerbrook and from there to Bergen Belsen where she died of typhus.

Like Anne Frank, the majority of Dutch Jews, who numbered around 140,000 before the Holocaust, were sent to the Westerbook transit camp. From there, however, the greatest group were sent to Auschwitz. A few were sent to camps such as Theresienstadt and Bergen Belsen. What I did not know was that 19 train transports with more than 34,000 Jewish men, women and children were sent to Sobibor – they arrived between March and July of 1943 and most were murdered within an hour of arrival.

According to his Trawniki Nazi service ID card, Demjanjuk arrived in Sobibor in 1943 on March 27. Prosecutors have used the train transport records to calculate that 28,700 Jews were murdered while Demjanjuk served there.

Like any murder trial, the dead can not stand in the dock. It is the task of the prosecution, and in great part the purpose of the trial – to show that these people lived, that when murdered their lives were not erased. One unexpected aspect of the Demjanjuk trial is that it may open our eyes to the fate of Dutch Jewry.

It’s also worth noting that the German Judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, all born after the end of World War II, appear thus far to be undertaking their tasks in a manner that as one witness said, is a credit to the free democratic society that Germany has become.

Some of the co-plaintiff’s and a few observers took issue with the accommodations the Court has made for Demjanjuk’s health and age. But “Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.” The court going out of its way to be fair is a good thing.

The defense can be faulted for dragging out of its bag of tricks a whiff of threatening to put Germany on trial (much like Verges the defense attorney in the Barbie trial in Germany said he would put France on trial – it played well before the trial but made little impact inside the courtroom), and also for putting forward the objectionable and to my mind, tired notion, that there was somehow some equivalence between Demjanjuk and his victims at Sobibor. I’m not sure what the upside of these arguments which have no chance of succeeding are — perhaps they are mean to intimidate witnesses. In any event, the defense seems to be doing whatever they can – grasping at every straw possible – and doing their best to work around Demjanjuk’s denials and his behavior in court.

Finally, Demjanjuk’s behavior demands comment. Pulling a baseball cap over his head, lying on a stretcher, pulling a blanket over him, closing his eyes, moaning and mumbling prayers, being unresponsive to the Judge, all this strikes me as the behavior of a man desperately trying to block out where is and what’s going on. But he is choosing a way to do so that calls tremendous attention to himself, in a way that makes him look somewhat pitiful. It is a very passive, very passive aggressive reaction to confronting the charges against him. It is disrespectful of the court, the trial and the witnesses. It denies the plaintiffs the opportunity to truly confront Demjanjuk – he is very much trying to absent himself from the process – a quite cowardly reaction.

Demjanjuk’s back pain is said to derive from shrapnel in his back – and it bears saying that Demjanjuk’s Trawniki card that puts him at Sobibor lists among identifying details, Demjanjuk having a scar on his back.

Will Demjanjuk, due to his health and his antics, be successful at derailing the trial? It’s possible. At the Israeli trial – as the time of sentencing came closer, Demjanjuk voiced similar complaints. The Court allowed him to watch the trial from his jail room cell. In Germany, they have the possibility of actually holding the trial in the prison if necessary. However, there is no going back – nothing Demjanjuk can do can diminish the charges against him, the evidence against him, and the testimony heard this week about the Dutch Jews murdered at Sobibor.

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