Wolf Krakowski's Electric Shtetl-Rock
by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTHAMPTON, Mass., Winter 1998) -- Wolf Krakowski is puttering around the kitchen of his home, a half-hidden-behind-trees, rambling affair that seems oddly out of place on a cul-de-sac of some stately suburban development. For one, there is the color of the house -- what he mischievously calls "oxblood" -- a dark, gloomy shade of red which would probably be banned if the big MACHERS could get away with such lifestyle restrictions in this hyper-progressive college town. Secondly, there is the peaked tower in one corner of the house, an architectural incongruity that grates against the placid, flowing, Spielberg-like quality of the surrounding neighborhood. Throw in a beat-up old pickup truck in the driveway and a porch full of empty beer bottles awaiting redemption, and it's clear that whomever lives here marches to the beat of a different drummer. Having finished pouring tea and retreated to the adjoining den -- a room dominated by CDs, videotapes and the machinery needed to bring the hidden sounds and visions therein to life -- Krakowski, a small bear of a man in spite of his name, settles into an easy chair, looks around the room, and smiles knowingly at the irony of his surroundings.

It is a long way from the Saalfelden Farmach Displaced Person's Camp in Austria (U.S. Occupied Zone) where Krakowski was born -- and an even longer way from Czenstochov, Poland, the hometown of Krakowski's mother and, coincidentally, his visitor's grandmother as well.

What has brought them together today -- the bridge, so to speak, between past and present, between Czenstochov and the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts -- is Krakowski's new CD, "Transmigrations" (Kame'a). The album teams Krakowski with an ensemble of some of the region's finest musicians on a collection of a dozen Yiddish folk and pop songs given a contemporary twist. Old World meets New World in Krakowski's electric shtetl-rock, which combines the sound of the American roadhouse with mournful, vintage Ashkenazi melodies to create a self-styled "Yiddish world-beat soul" fusion.

While in the wrong hands, such musical miscegenation could sound forced at best or a novelty at worst, Krakowski pulls it off successfully, perhaps because he himself is the very embodiment of Old World meets New. Shortly after his birth Krakowski's family moved to Sweden, where they lived for six years before permanently settling in Toronto. It was there, in Toronto's multi-ethnic, inner-city, West End neighborhood -- known as "the Junction" -- where Krakowski would be confronted by many of the dualities that would later inform his life and work.

Not the least of these was the fact that the shul in the Junction sat literally across the fence from the railroad track, so that to this day the sounds of cantillation and the lonesome train whistle co-exist inside his head -- as apt a summation as any of the extraordinary fusion at the heart of "Transmigrations." For much of his early life, the figurative train whistle drowned out the khazones. He dropped out of high school at 17, when he literally ran away with the circus, sharing a room with a sideshow pinhead named Schlitzie and his "keeper," a hard-drinking French-Canadian Gypsy prone to outbursts about the "Jew" Roosevelt ne Rosenfeld. "I took it all in stride," says Krakowski. "It beat the hell out of high school."

The ensuing years were a blend of Jack Kerouac-inspired, cross-country travel, all-night jam sessions with pickup bands, stints on a commune and with a Cambridge street theater, and jobs as a carpenter, sheetrocker and guitar-maker. Says Krakowski of that period, "I styled myself in the mold of the hard-livin', hitch-hikin', guitar-playin' vagabond-poet. It worked for me." In 1981, the native Yiddish-speaking Krakowski began documenting Holocaust survivors on audio and videotape -- years before Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah project, for which Krakowski worked in 1994-95. Krakowski's own videos include "Vilna," which he calls "the first post-World War II Yiddish music video," and "My Name is Stella: An Oral History," the first-hand testimony of the survival of a Polish-Jewish nursing student. More recently, Krakowski has returned to music, his first love. He traces the roots of "Transmigrations" -- which contains a dozen Yiddish folk, theater and popular tunes written by the likes of Benzion Witler, Mordkhe Gebirtig, Max Perlman and Shmerke Kaczerginski, rearranged by Krakowski variously as rootsy country-, blues- and reggae-influenced tunes -- back to his childhood. "My life did not include music lessons or the New England Conservatory," said the self-taught guitarist. "It did however include playing with Canadian folk legends Mendelson Joe and Daisy DeBolt and all-night jams with bluesmaster Big Joe Williams. It started even before then -- with my Mom's Yiddish folk songs and Hebrew liturgy, mixed with the sounds of Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers on the radio."

What is perhaps most surprising about "Transmigrations" is how effortlessly the Old World overtones -- the melodies, phrasing, indeed, the Yiddish language itself -- blend with the New World touches -- the sinuous electric guitar leads, the chunky Rastafarian-styled rhythms, the gospel-style choruses, the Latin dance beats, the honking, blues-drenched saxophone solos. In Krakowski's hands, the combination seems logical and downright organic.

"My sound represents what is best, and more importantly, honest, about the whole folk and pop experience as filtered through my experience and sensibilities," says Krakowski. "Not as mere 'pine-reproduction furniture' music. It is not a studied thing. It is a thing of the heart and soul.

"This stuff just came out the way it did due to the 'bridges' I happened to sense in the songs....I don't groove to those East European grooves. What have I to do with mazurkas, doinas, quadrilles and polkas -- the stuff klezmer is based on?

"I dig blues-based music above anything else. And it took a lifetime to have it all come together to the point where my experience and evolution both as a person and musician enabled me to find the bridges in the songs and the melodies without messing with them or turning it all into a novelty or a joke.

"I am a transcultural person. I am as at home in the world of I.B. Singer as I am in the world of Willie Nelson and Bob Marley. I am as far as I know the only son of a survivor from Czenstochov to have made a Yiddish record.

It is empowering and reflects back to me who I am and where I've been. And it connects me to those who shaped me only by their spiritual presence -- the perished.

"Without being corny, I sing through them and those that were silenced sing through me. It is as if all the people who I left behind somehow 'transmigrated' over here, and their stilled voices, cloaked in the raiment of R&B, blues, country-rock and reggae, act as a bridge from the Old World to the New, through me."

[This article originally appeared in similar form in the Winter 1998 issue of Pakn Treger, the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]