Hello, how are you? I am almost shivering with emotion to share with you the interview with Bob Cohen. Why? I must tell you that my personal background, my family roots, are not connected to music at all and much less with these musics that were very difficult to reach more than 20 years ago. Moreover, I am from the periphery of Europe, a country where there are not Jewish people for more than 5 centuries, apart from the ones that came as inmigrants during the last decades.

In such a context, to discover in 1998 something like Di Naye Kapelye and their powerful rendition of Dem Rebns Tants would cause the piece to be marked in my memory.

And 22 years after, the man behind it is answering my questions with immense generosity and explaining us how the magical mix of commitment, effort, talent and ethics made all that work possible. Enjoy.

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The search where there was “nothing” left

I moved to Hungary in 1989 to teach English at the ELTE Law University and to study traditional Transylvanian fiddle style with friends in the Hungarian Tanchaz movement such as Csaba Ökrös.

I wanted to continue to learn Hungarian language and the difficult fiddle style of central Transylvania. My Mother was born in Hungary and left during World War II, but I still have family here and had visited and fallen in love with Hungarian folk music and the “dance house” revival of traditional music during family visits in the 1970s. (My father’s family originates in Bessarabia, today’s Moldova.)

I was raised in the Bronx at a time when Yiddish language culture was still strong among secular working class Jews. My parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish with each other, but they did not want the children to learn it (I spoke Hungarian with my mother.)

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Like many young New York Jews – Henry Sapoznik (who was with us in a previous edition) and Andy statman, for example – as a teenager I played bluegrass and also listened to a lot of the very active immigrant Balkan musicians in the New York area.

Around 1975 some of these musicians in the folk fiddle scene began to pass around cassette tapes of klezmer recordings at the Appalachian fiddle jam sessions held at the old Eagle Tavern on 9th Avenue. A lot of us folk musicians also went to concerts sponsored by the Balkan Arts Center (now the Center for Traditional Music and Dance) which featured early klezmer revival artists such as Zev Feldman and Andy Statman (in the picture on the right, that is from Discog), who also presented concerts of newly rediscovered Yiddish perfomers such as Dave Tarras.

I then moved to Boston where I became friends with musicians who would play in the Klezmer Conservatory Band (Frank London and I go wayyyy back… we met while jamming in a salsa band) although in Boston my musical life was mostly involved in Greek music, African music, and reggae.

I did not actively pursue Jewish music until I was living in Hungary and traveling to Transylvania to find older Romani fiddlers to learn the Transylvanian village style of violin. They would quickly identify me as Jewish (I had a beard) and begin to play Jewish melodies that they knew. I asked what these were, and they told about playing for Jewish weddings before the Holocaust, so I began to travel around Romania and Hungary actively seeking older musicians to ask if they knew any Jewish music. This led me to do the same when I was back visiting the United States – I went around Brooklyn and the Bronx visiting Orthodox Jewish communities and working with established Klezmer researchers like Michael Alpert and Zev Feldman.

I have lived in Budapest since 1989, and I am now a dual Hungarian-US citizen. I travel a lot, but most of my time is in Budapest these days. I live right in the middle of the old Budapest Jewish ghetto – 7th district – and there are synagogues, kosher butcher shops, and Jewish bookstores all around this area. Unlike Krakow, where the Kazimerz neighborhood is a highly visable monument to a nearly extinct Jewish past, the 7th district is a living Jewish area with little on the outside to show its Jewish connections. Budapest has at least 50,000 Jews, with 11 functioning synagogues, and three neighbohoods that can be considered “Jewish neighborhoods” with kosher markets, mikvehs, and synagogues. I can walk out my door and speak Yiddish any day – although Yiddish is no longer very widespread. I tend to identify with our local Orthodox community – as opposed to the larger more assimilationist Neolog community – however I am not particularly religious.

Nobody had sought out Hungarian Jewish folkore, as Bartok had with Hungarian folk music or with other groups. Jews were considered “cosmopolitan” and therefore did not, by the definition of early nationalism, have “folklore.” Hungarian Jews were granted full citizenship rights in 1867 – and defined themselves not as an ethnic minority (as in Poland or Romania) but as “Hungarians of Mosaic faith.” Hungary was a birthplace of the Zionist movement, and Yiddish was looked down upon by Hebrew language supporters. Among assimilated middle class Hungarian “Neolog” Jews, “folklore” was seen as superstition. The Yiddish speaking Orthodox community was concentrated in the rural East and North of the countryside, and had little interacttion with the educated Jewish elite of Budapest. And then the Holocaust arrived and wiped out 80% of Hungary’s Jews.

Dr. Judit Frigyesi had done extensive collecting of Hungarian Jewish religious music before 1990, but official attitudes under communism had kept her research suppressed. So beginning in 1990 I began traveling on a regular basis to rural regions where Jews had been populous: in Romania, especially in Moldavia, Maramures, Crisana, Bucharest. I taped recorded interviews with older Jewish community members, and sought out older professional Romani musicians who remembered repetoire from the past when they had played for Jewish weddings.

I was incredibly lucky to meet the Yiddish writer and theater director Itsik Svarts in Iasi, who was born in 1905 and had taken an interest in Yiddish folklore in the 1920s and actually knew many of the key figures in 20th century Yiddish folklore, such as the poet Itsik Manger.

If you want to learn more, visit this link in KlezmerShack with a report by Itsik Svarts about Jewish Musicians in Moldavia

His wife, Cili, was the best Yiddish folk singer I had ever heard. Itsik guided me and mentored me and was my link to the world of Yiddish Southeast Europe before the Holocaust. 

I learned a lot from the musicians of the Manyo Band, also known as the Tecso Band, from Tyaciv, Ukraine. They were Hutsul (Ruthenian) Romani who still played many Jewish tunes they learned from their father. I ended up playing with them on tour a lot and brought them to festivals in Holland and New York.

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My Mother was born in Veszprem, Hungary. Her Mom was actually born in Travnik, Bosnia. She came to the USA in 1948.

My Dad’s family came to the USA in 1924. My Grandfather was born in Criuleni, Moldova (Krivlyany in Yiddish.) His name was Onitskansky, which was changed to Cohen (his Jewish/Hebrew paternal name) because the immigration officials could not spell it. Onitscan (nowadays, Onițcani) is a few miles south of Criuleni, and is “famous” as the historical occurrence of the first pogrom in 1726 on accusations of blood libel (killing Christian children for blood for Passover matzoh). 

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Just this month I received a message from a Jewish historian from Chisinau that they had discovered the grave stones of the Onițcani Jews and she was amazed to meet descendants of them.

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I visited Criuleni in 2008 while participating in Alan Bern’s “the Other European Project” (you can read about it on my blog…). My Grandmother came from the village of Telenesti in Moldova.

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Around 1993 I formed Di Naye Kapelye in order to play a “klezmer” music based on the descriptions I had gathered from the information on how Jewish music was performed in small towns and villages before the influence of 20th century technology, mass emmigration, and the holocaust. It was a reconstruction, but Itsik Svarts would coach me on how the band sounded – I would tape rehearsals in Budapest and play them when I visited Itsik in Iasi and he would offer his opinions. In this way, for example, we reconstructed the use of the cobza (Romanian lute) as he heard Romani bands using it for Jewish Purim celebrations in his Moldavian village before 1920.

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In Di Naye Kapelye our clarinetist and singer was Yankl Falk, who is an orthodox cantor in Portland Oregon and now an archivist of Jewish Music. He has a expert command of Jewish liturgical traditions and of living Hasidic repertoire, and also traveling with him always put us in touch with local Jewish communities (we have to keep our clarinetist supplied with kosher food). We also played several years with Jake Shulman-Ment, a young New York Klezmer violinist who is probably the best in the world without exaggeration. Jake spent a year living in Botosani in northeast Romania researching Jewish influences in Romanian folk music. 

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Although the full band of Di Naye Kapelye rarely performs in Hungary – with two members living in the USA we usually get together only for larger festivals and tours – the five Hungarian members of Di Naye Kapelye still play for Jewish community events (but not for Hasidic weddings after the orthodox ban on orchestras in 2006. We used to play a lot of those.) In Budapest I play with accordinist Adam Moser for monthly Yiddish dance parties sponsored by a Jewish feminist collective called “Esztertaska” which are taught by Sue Foy, an American dance ethnomusicologist who studied Yiddish dance in New York with folksinger Bronya Sakina.

I played in a small formation called “Shrayim” which was primarily for the Orthodox Jewish community some years ago – strictly “kosher” music (no secular love songs, for example, mostly Hasidic music and usually in Orthodox community spaces.)I also play with Daniel Kahn, Michael Alpert, Psoy Korolenko and Jake Shulman-Ment in “The Brothers Nazaroff” – a tribute to Yiddish folk singer Prince Nathan Nazaroff (here on the right it is the cover of their album). A documentary made about us called “Soul Exodus” is presently on European Netflix.

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• About the song Dem Rebns Tants, where did you find this or how did you develop it? I like it a lot!! 

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