Cleveland Jewish News Archives

February 22, 2001
29 Shevat 5761

Where klezmer meets corn

By BERT STRATTON Special to the CJN

Gigs in the boonies intrigue me. You know, the ones where the pick-up trucks outnumber the Jews. My klezmer band, Yiddishe Cup, calls these jobs "playing Siberia."

We've played Catholic colleges, Methodist retreats and towns so small they don't even have traffic lights. Take Richland Center, Wisc. No traffic light, but a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed warehouse. (Wright was born in Richland Center.)

Our Siberia gigs, no matter how remote, always have at least one Jew in the audience. Even if we play in Lancaster, Ohio, a Jew will show up. And for this sole Jew, we are the equivalent of secular Lubavitchers.

Another thing always happens at our Siberia gigs. The local Jew apologizes to us for his town's lack of sophistication and rugelach (rolled-dough pastries). The Lancaster Jew called his town "Lackluster." This sort of thing happens all the way up the Jewish food chain. Don't Cleveland Jews often beg forgiveness from New Yorkers and Chicagoans?

When Yiddishe Club played Richland Center, Wisc., we outdid ourselves; we had six Jews - each one intermarried and unaffiliated.

At Lakeside Association, a Christian Chautauqua-style retreat on Lake Erie, we had one actual Jew and a Methodist minister who said she had been a Jew named Rachel in a previous lifetime.

Philo-semites, like the Methodist minister, are just a small part of our audience. The majority are Middle Americans out for an evening of "multiculturalism." Typically, Yiddishe Cup is part of a subscription concert series: one week an Irish band; the next, an African dance troupe; then us. Alan Douglass, our keyboard player, said our van should have a bumper sticker, "We Brake for Ethnicity."

In El Paso, Texas, we went on stage the week after the Irish band. The real multiculturalism, for us, was the audience, which was 75% Mexican-American. The Latinos danced to everything, even "Rozhinkes mit Mandlin," a slow Yiddish lullaby, which was supposed to be a listening tune. Our klezmer dancer, Daniel Ducoff, called the concert "the Jewish-Mexican Woodstock."

On the Texas bandstand, I complimented the small but mighty El Paso Jewish community. The city's concert organizer said she had hired us specifically because of the local Jewish community's leverage. El Paso is a town of 5,000 Jews with a kosher deli, Corned Beef College.

In Rockford, Ill., after a concert, the organizing committee sponsored a reception for the band. We had cheese, crackers, wine and fruit. This, for a klezmer band that eats grilled salmon weekly? Our incredulous drummer, Don Friedman, said, "You serious? No desserts? What, no diet pop?"

Musically, our stage show differs at Siberia gigs from those at, say, JCC venues. Yiddish theater medleys don't make it in Siberia. "Tumbalalaika," too, is meaningless. Quotes from "Hava Nagila" and "Tsena, Tsena" work well. And because it's a small world after all, everybody understands it when I introduce Steve Ostrow, our trombone player, as a "guy who often plays in symphony orchestras, but now gets great satisfaction playing 'Dreidl, Dreidl, Dreidl.'"

To hedge our bets, we usually add a "country" tune - "16 Tons," which we explain "was written by that great klezmer composer Merle Travis." Then we break into Mickey Katz's parody, the one about "16 tons of hard salami." It ends with "I owe my neshoma (soul) to the delicatessen."

At colleges, we do our rock version of Sophie Tucker's "My Yiddishe Mama." Back home, this tune is played straight and makes the old folks cry. But on the road, our lead singer, Irwin Weinberger, takes the microphone off the stand and struts around a la Mick Jagger. At Cottey College - an all-women's school in Nevada, Mo. - the crowd intuitively understood the joke and shrieked and howled like they were at a Beatles' concert. At that show, the lone Jew was from Joplin, about 50 miles south of Nevada. And, by the way, that's Nuh-vey-da. Gateway to the Ozarks.

The peculiar thing is when we play for Jews who can outdo, or out-Jew, us ethnically. We've been to America's Jerusalem - Boca Raton, Fla.0 Everybody at the Boca Raton JCC understood our jokes - most, better than we did. We did a totally obscure comedy skit, "Essen," which is about eating too much food at a Catskills resort, and the crowd roared.

In Ohio we had considered dropping the sketch because nobody, including our own Cleveland Jews, could relate to eating too much herring and matzo brei at a hotel.

In Florida I asked the audience, "Anybody ever heard of Billy Hodes, the Catskills comedian who wrote "'Essen'?" Sure enough, an elderly man told me Hodes was dead. "Or maybe he's in his 90s living in Florida," he said.

After that gig we booked a series of concerts on the Florida-condo-and-JCC circuit. This could be a full-time thing for us, I thought. Miami Beach to Boynton Beach, rewind and do it over again.

Nah. We like Ohio. We like being part of the close-knit Cleveland Jewish community.

A concert organizer from Celina, Ohio, called recently. "You sure this music will go over here?" he said. "We're a bunch of German farmers."

"No problem," I said. Then I looked up Celina (Ceh-lie-na) on a map. It was nowhere I'd ever heard of, and I've lived in Ohio my whole life.

Our most Siberian gig? We're booked into the opera house in Calumet, Mich., this July. Calumet is not a suburb of Detroit, nor is it a baking-powder factory. It's an old copper-mining town, a four-hour drive north after you cross the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula.

Guaranteed, there will be at least one Jew in the audience. At a Detroit show, a concert-goer told me a certain Kohodes family has a string of retail stores in the Upper Peninsula.

Bert Stratton is Yiddishe Cup's director and clarinetist. His writing on music has appeared in Down Beat and Rolling Stone.