Yiddish song as metaphor for Yiddishkayt: Stephen Merkel, David Krakauer and Joyce Rosenzweig
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., Aug. 1, 2000) - On Monday night at Hevreh of Southern Berkshire, in a recital of Yiddish music, Cantor Stephen Merkel of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., said that the English word that most describes Yiddish, the language and the culture, is “irrepressible.” It certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying on the part of many - Jews and non-Jews alike -- who would repress Yiddish, which for hundreds of years was the everyday language of Eastern European Jews.

In a program featuring text by Rabbi Zoe Grashow Klein and with musical accompaniment by clarinetist David Krakauer and pianist Joyce Rosenzweig, Merkel set out to portray the indomitable spirit of Yiddishkayt in story and song. And if the show’s thematic intentions were only partially realized, that didn’t lessen the dramatic impact of the musical performance itself.

Merkel’s recital, given the clumsy title “Klezmer and More: Songs of the Jewish Life Cycle,” had a dozen-odd songs framed and connected by narrative, fables and anecdotes that Merkel read from a script.

The narrative loosely followed the path of a human life, as the program indicated, through “childhood, study, love and loss.” But early on, it was apparent that the life being traced was the history of the Yiddish language and culture itself.

Taking in a good thousand years, beginning with the language’s birth along the Rhine River, moving eastward to the Pale of Settlement and then back westward across the Atlantic Ocean, it’s an ambitious chunk of history. It’s a tragic, poignant history, too, in that what Hitler’s Germans could not accomplish on a global scale, the twin forces of assimilation and Zionism eventually did.

It was also a lot of weight to support using lullabies and folk songs like “Viglid” and “Oyfn Pripetshik,” even given Merkel’s dramatic and at times overwrought treatment of the material.

With tasteful, superb accompaniment by Rosenzweig and Krakauer, Merkel delivered most of the numbers, which were sung in Yiddish with English translations provided, as operatic recital pieces. His baritone was strong and expressive on top, less so on the bottom, where it flattened out and lost its luster. He made only moderate use of cantorial ornamentation - the bends, twists and hiccups that characterize Ashkenazic liturgical music and klezmer - even when the compositions’ Yiddish modes invited a krekhts or kneytshn.

In stark contrast to Merkel’s classically-oriented delivery was Krakauer’s playing. No less a classically-trained musician is he, but in his solos and his accompaniment, Krakauer was the very embodiment of the spirit and artistry of the Yiddish klezmer.

Combining a rich earthiness and an emotional investment that belied his rigorous technical gifts, Krakauer -- easily the greatest living exponent of klezmer clarinet -- channelled all that was truly poignant and spiritual in the music. Where Merkel, with polish and finesse, acted his way through his numbers and literally read the script, Krakauer lived it, improvising in the moment through the doinas, free-metered instrumental stories, and freylekhs, or dance tunes.

Without words, Krakauer’s playing spoke eloquently of the kheyder boys learning their alef-beis, of the husbands and wives separated by an ocean between them, and of the triumph of nationhood and redemption out of the ashes of the Shoah. If one came seeking the metaphor for Yiddish, or Yiddish itself in its revival or “arrival” mode -- as the program unintentionally but revealingly termed it -- it was in Krakauer’s irrepressible clarinet.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 3, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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