[Theme music plays]

Jen: Hi, it’s Jen Richler. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish women’s archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet. 

[clip of “Uncle Moses Wedding Dance” plays]

Jen: A lot of people love klezmer music, and know that it made a big comeback starting around 50 years ago. But not a lot of people know that the klezmer revival of the ’70s and ’80s was connected to queer Jewish liberation. 

Eve Sicular: These were not easy times to be gay, queer, lesbian, a dyke, you know, a fag. It was like, there was all kinds of, um, stigma in coming out, and also all kinds of really important political work being done. And to have this music turn out to be part of a culture, a scene, that really embraced all of that was so incredibly exciting and almost unbelievable. 

Jen: This is Eve Sicular. She’s the drummer and leader of Isle of Klezbos, an all-female klezmer sextet that just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The song you’re hearing is called “Uncle Moses Wedding Dance” and is from their latest album, Yiddish Silver Screen. 

In this episode of Can We Talk?, we’ll hear from Eve about how she got involved with klezmer, and how queer culture fits into the klezmer revival story. And of course, we’ll hear some great klezmer.

Jen: To understand klezmer’s revival in the 1970s and 80s, we first have to talk about its history. It’s not clear exactly when and where klezmer first appeared on the scene, but in the late 1800s in Eastern and Central Europe, it was a key component of weddings and other celebrations.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants brought the tradition with them to the US. But after World War II, klezmer started to decline, as Jews felt pressure to assimilate. They were more likely to listen to and play the music of other cultures, rather than Jewish music. 

It was only in the ’70s that the klezmer revival really took off, as Jews started to feel more comfortable with their status as Americans. Musicians started discovering old klezmer recordings and composing their own tunes.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band was one of the first klezmer revival bands. Eve heard them when she was a student at Harvard in the early ’80s and was immediately hooked. Klezmer appealed to her drummer’s sensibility—she’d been playing since she was 7. 

Eve: I loved it so much musically—the syncopation, the different kinds of beats that were going on, really danceable, really interesting. It totally excited me.

Jen: She also loved that it spoke to the Jewish part of her identity in a way that other kinds of Jewish music, like Israel folk, hadn’t. What she didn’t know yet was that klezmer would connect her to something else she really cared about: queer liberation. She first got a sense of that when she attended KlezKamp, an annual klezmer festival in the Catskills, in 1989. A friend told her she had to go.

Eve: She said, they have a group there that's calling themselves the Freylekhe Felker. And I knew just enough Yiddish at that point to sort of unpack that. So freylekhe, freylekh, meaning “happy” or “gay.” So it was like, you know, all this play on words, the Freylekhe Felker—you know, the happy gay people. And I was like, “Wait a minute, you are kidding me.”

[horn music plays]

Here was this thing that was this really amazing set of repertoire in so many ways and just…lit up my soul. But then on top of all of that, to have it be this really affirming context for—you know, I had already come out as a lesbian but, there was all kinds of, um, stigma in coming out, and also all kinds of really important political work being done in terms of people not feeling shame, people dealing with the AIDS crisis. And to have this music turn out to be part of a culture, a scene, that really embraced all of that was so incredibly exciting.

Jen: Klezmer and queer activism came together in a dramatic way with the release of the Klezmatics first album in 1989. It was called Shvaygn=Toyt.

Eve: “Shvaygn=Toyt” is literally the translation of one of the main ACT UP slogans, which is “Silence equals death.”

Jen: ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, was an activist group that formed in the late ’80s to fight for an end to the AIDS epidemic. They used the slogan “Silence equals death” on their posters to urge the government and people in general to speak up about the issue. 

Eve: During the Reagan-Bush eras, when, you know, the AIDS crisis first came to be, and the government was not only doing nothing, they were saying nothing. So the whole idea was “No, we are not going to act as though this isn't happening. We're not going to allow this to be something that is suppressed.” So silence equals death and, you know, action equals life. 

And with Yiddish, on the one hand, you could translate that literally—shvaygn is “to be silent,” toyt is “death”—but also in terms of Yiddish culture and in terms of, um, the decades that had elapsed, which saw a decline, you know, in Yiddish culture due to the Hurban, the Holocaust decimation, but also in terms of cultural developments that either assimilation or say, Soviet persecution of Yiddish culture—you know, all these different things influenced the fact that Yiddish was so not heard and so in decline.

So, Shvaygn=Toyt, meaning also that in terms of Yiddish specifically, that silence equals death, and the whole idea of calling a klezmer album with all kinds of, you know, amazing, vibrant Yiddish this name gave it all that many different levels of meaning and power. 

Jen: Here’s Lorin  Sklamberg of the Klezmatics singing a song off Shvaygn=Toyt called “Ale Brider,” or “All Brothers.” It’s a classic Yiddish folk song that was popular among Jews in the labor movement. The Klezmatics gave it a queer twist by changing the last verse to “We’re all gay, like Jonathan and King David.” 

[clip of “Ale Brider” plays]

Jen: Other bands have followed the tradition of merging klezmer and queer culture, including in their campy names—like the Canadian group, the Klezbians, and Gay Iz MIr, which formed in the ’90s and called itself the only LGBTQ klezmer “house” band—they were members of the San Francisco synagogue where they played. Like the Klezmatics, they put gay twists on old favorites, like “Kalleh-Kalleh Mazel Tov” — Mazel Tov to the Bride and Bride!—for a lesbian wedding, instead of the traditional “Chasen-Kalleh Mazel Tov.” 

Jen: I want to talk more about the connection of klezmer and queer culture. So for you, can you talk about some of the ways that they are connected? 

Eve: It's interesting, because on the one hand, it was not obviously encouraged to come out as a gay or lesbian or queer person when I was growing up. And also Yiddish was, you know, in many ways, in the kinds of, you know, places where I was raised, either ignored or derided or just seen as something, um, interesting, but kind of antique. And so the whole idea that there were still people who could actively read this and—you know there were just all these things that I had no idea of. I mean, my family—if I even went to the Lower East Side, it was because we were visiting somebody else's grandma or my motherwas getting really good deals on new linens.

 So both of these things, which I was so thrilled to discover, um, they were just things that were discouraged, things that were not valued. On the other hand, you know, to find them actively celebrated together was just amazing. And in a kind of homecoming way, you would feel—I mean, there's a saying that, you know, you can be nostalgic for a place you've never seen or a place you've never been before.

Jen: Eve felt this nostalgia at KlezKamp, and from then on she was all in. She did an intensive Yiddish course at YIVO. She launched a research project about the gay and lesbian subtext of Yiddish cinema in its heyday. And she started playing in klezmer bands herself, first as a substitute drummer.

Eve started Isle of Klezbos in 1998 as a spinoff to Metropolitan Klezmer, a band she’d formed a few years earlier, in which she was the only female. She loved the idea of being in a band with more women. And so, Isle of Klezbos was born.

Eve: One of the reasons that, for me, naming a band Isle of Klezbos did not seem—which it did to a lot of people in ’98, who you know, cared about me, cared about the idea of a music project like this—and “Did you really want to give it that kind of name? Don't you think you're shooting yourself in the foot?” And I was like, “No, I know this is going to appeal to people who I would like to reach. “

Jen: Over the 25 years they’ve been together, Isle of Klezbos has composed and played songs across many genres: traditional folk melodies, tangos, and what they call “late Soviet-era Jewish drinking songs.” They’ve played at countless weddings and b’nei mitzvah celebrations and released three albums. The latest one is called Yiddish Silver Screen, a name that highlights the band’s 25th, or silver, anniversary, and also the fact that many of the songs come from Yiddish films. One is called “Farlangen” and comes from a very well-known film made in 1937, The Dybbuk. It’s sung by Leah, about a man named Khonen who has left. 

Eve: In this scene in the movie, she's singing what seems like a kind of traditional folk song about someone who's going away and, you know, the person left behind who's heartbroken that they are leaving. So, it's called Farlangen, which means—it's something in between longing and, you know, asking for what must be. So I decided since it was Isle of Klezbos performing it, that it would be wonderful, um, to have the language reflect the desire of a woman for a female object of desire. So instead of saying, Der vos iz avekgegangen, the one who has gone away being a male, it's Di vos iz avekgegangen.

[clip of “Farlangen” plays] 

Eve: There's another great song that's a really important part of our repertoire, which I didn't realize right away was a coming out song from, you know, 1940. And we just call it the “Muzikalisher Tango,” because, uh, there's no name for it. 

Jen: The song comes from the soundtrack of Edgar Ulmer’s screwball comedy Americaner Shadchen, or American Matchmaker. It’s sung by the film’s main character, the handsome Nat Gold, who plays the role of the matchmaker. 

He’s meeting with a female client he’s trying to set up with potential suitors, but she seems more interested in him. 

[dialogue in Yiddish]

Jen: What’s never said explicitly, but is hinted at throughout the film, is that Nat is a closeted gay man. So as the woman bats her eyelashes at him, Nat explains why he can’t return her affections.

[clip of song plays]

Jen: “I’m not angry at you for this sad joke,” Nat sings. “It was destined this way. I wasn’t worthy of you.”

Eve: The lyrics are just, you know, full of really clear—but still coded—you know, gay content. And the movie has all kinds of feygele double and triple entendres—that was the part I already knew.

Jen: For example, after hearing him sing, the woman tells Nat that he’s “musical,” a common code word for “gay” at the time. He explains that he gets that ability from his bachelor uncle, Shya, a character loosely based on the filmmaker’s gay cousin.

Here’s a bit of the Isle of Klezbos version of the song.

[clip of “Muzikalisher Tango” plays]

Jen: How do you think your modern queer klezmer band relates to klezmer's traditional legacy, tracing back to the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, being played at weddings, and that kind of interplay between the traditional and the, you know, the modern, and bringing it into today?

Eve: Yeah, I want to talk about that. And I also want to say…I wouldn't necessarily call the band, um, any one thing. You know, like, we had a great experience a number of times where Isle of Klezbos was brought into a setting that you might really say, “Wow, that's amazing that that particular synagogue brought you—you know, they seem very staid,” but they would be loving having this band. I don't really want to say there's no such thingas a queer band, but these are very fluid concepts. 

So anyway, yeah, it's really great to be also brought to play at many different kinds of weddings. I think that sometimes, people who brought us to play at a wedding that might be a guy marrying a woman, it would be sort of a gesture to say, “Yes, we're embracing tradition, but we want that tradition to not be something too rigid,” you know? 

Jen: What excites you most right now about things the band is working on or klezmer in general?

Eve: One of the things that's really exciting me is that so many people who are doing this now are just taking things to, you know, incredible places and coming at it from all the other experiences they've had.

Having music that you can relate to and continually reinterpret, you know, it gives people that much more ability to connect with each other and have dance parties and protest songs and songs of love, songs of— you know, ballads, tragic understandings. There are all these ways in which things are feeding back into having a vibrant, creative Yiddish culture now. And that is inspiring, and wonderful.

[clip of “A Glezele Yash” fades up]

Jen: That was Eve Sicular from Isle of Klezbos. You can find Isle of Klezbos on Bandcamp and at klezbos.com. 

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum.  Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You’re listening to “A Glezele Yash” by Isle of Klezbos. 

[song continues]

You can find Can We Talk? at jwa.org/canwetalk, or anywhere you get your podcasts. We’re also now on YouTube! Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

I’m Jen Richler—until next time. 

 

 

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