Aug 08, 2024
Fiddler Cookie Segelstein of Veretski Pass leads Klezcadia 2024 participants in rehearsal for the festival finale concert. Photo credit: Brittany Cooper.
There’s a new entry to the summer klezmer/Yiddish festival circuit—Klezcadia! Based in Victoria, BC, but fully hybrid, the festival’s inaugural season in June 2024 was free and accessible to participants both in person (though numbers were limited) and online (via Zoom or YouTube livestream) from around the world. Klezcadia is the brainchild of Laura Rosenberg, who brings a wealth of experience from her first career as a classical music administrator, during which she built two original-concept festivals from the ground up. After witnessing the disruption of various festivals during the pandemic, including the struggle to keep them a meaningful experience when not all attendees could attend in person due to disability, immunocompromised status, and/or COVID concerns, Rosenberg saw the need for a safer space for aficionados of klezmer and Yiddish music and culture, and she created a welcoming festival with top-notch talent that has set a new bar for COVID safety and inclusivity.
I was fortunate enough to participate in Klezcadia’s inaugural 2024 festival, which included daytime workshops and evening concerts with a variety of West Coast klezmer luminaries and Yiddish teachers, culminating in a public group performance at a beautiful local park. The festival was unique in requiring daily COVID testing from every participant (faculty and registrants) as well as masking unless performing onstage. Unlike at residential music and dance camps, Klezcadia attendees were asked to mask up and limit their public exposure outside the festival since they were not boarding together in one location. The Vancouver-based community organization Masks4EastVan donated boxes of masks and tests, and a designated testing station in front of the venue provided a festive waiting area where attendees could schmooze while waiting for their test result. These requirements made the festival safer for those of us who are still quite COVID-cautious in our daily lives—of course no one can be 100% safe from such a contagious disease, but not a single positive test was recorded during the festival. And if anyone presented with symptoms of illness, they could still participate from home.
As a further nod to the need for inclusivity, each daily workshop/lecture (including hands-on music and language sessions as well as special topics lectures) included not only a Zoom host, usually off-site, but also a bridger, a person logged on in the lecture room who could interface between the presenter and Zoom attendees as needed. Too often I’ve attended a festival’s so-called hybrid session where the remote participants’ questions and sound issues are ignored by the people in the room; adding this designated helper meant that remote input and issues could be acknowledged and addressed right away. Klezcadia also included a full-time on-site tech person, who was available before and during every session to help make the sound and video smooth for all attendees. Having a dedicated multimedia expert available as needed made all the difference in the festival experience.
Throughout the week, after daily workshops and open/livestreamed rehearsals, participants were treated to evening concerts, including several world-premiere performances. The first of these included selections from the gorgeous new project by Bay Area band Veretski Pass (Cookie Segelstein, Josh Horowitz, and Stu Brotman) with clarinetist Joel Rubin, due to be released in fall 2024 on the new label Borscht Beat. The Peacock and the Sunflower features among other things old Ukrainian Jewish melodies from klezmer manuscripts collected by ethnographers before World War One and in the 1930s and recently published online by the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project, along with music drawn from early published sheet music, new compositions by Segelstein and Horowitz, field recordings, manuscripts from the group’s private archives, as well as early commercial recordings from the 1910s–30s of klezmer and Ukrainian music. Veretski Pass also helped usher in the sabbath with Klezmer Shabes, featuring selections from their 2011 album Klezmer Shul along with beautiful improvisations by Rubin.
On another evening, Vancouver singer-songwriter Geoff Berner presented selections from Second Fleet, an entertaining new Yiddish song cycle cowritten with humorist Michael Wex. Berner performed some of his other pandemic releases as well, including the timely “How to Build a Corsi-Rosenthal Box” (acted out live with great enthusiasm by festival director Rosenberg and her assistant and mentee Brittany Cooper-d’Orsay).
Yet another fantastic world premiere came from California singer and actor Jeanette Lewicki, who has extensively researched the works of turn-of-the-twentieth-century “drag king” Pepi Litman. Litman was well known on the Yiddish stage for dressing as a (male) Hasid and singing songs that poked fun at the stringent gender rules of the religion (though by all accounts she was an observant Jew herself). Over the course of the festival, Lewicki brought Litman’s songs back to life, not only through her daily workshops with input on Litman’s lyrics and melodies from Yiddishists from around the globe, but through her concert with Segelstein and Horowitz from Veretski Pass, augmented in a final number by Victoria community members associated with local group the Klezbians.
Jeanette Lewicki, in character as early 20th-century Yiddish theater “drag king” Pepi Litman, rehearses with fiddler Cookie Segelstein and accordionist Joshua Horowitz for the world première performance of “The Pepi Litman Project” at Klezcadia 2024. Photo credit: Brittany Cooper.
But wait, there’s more! For people less interested in hands-on instrumental workshops, Klezcadia presented daily Yiddish language workshops and lectures about Yiddish culture. As one of two West Coast Yiddish teachers on faculty, I led a series of “Yiddish through song” sessions, in which we explored the offerings of Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Workers Circle. I searched these archives for songs on various themes: Yiddish “chestnuts” (songs that everyone seems to remember at least a verse from childhood or a Yiddish class), family songs (that include names for different relatives), lullabies, and vocable songs (yi-di-di and the like). I began a discussion of each song by playing a classic version by a well-known artist, then projected the lyrics in transliteration and Yiddish letters for volunteers to read as I translated and commented, after which we sang the song together. I encouraged the Zoom attendees to sing along (muted), and we always had a cohort to sing in person as well. (My hope is that one day Zoom technology will evolve to have a true choir with no feedback!) Having a bridger in the room made it very easy to share the YouTube playlists I had created as well as links to the songs in the archive with the remote participants.
The other Yiddish instructor, Sasha Berenstein, another Seattleite and a member of my Yiddish Book Center pedagogy cohort, led hybrid classes in basic Yiddish conversation with materials from In eynem, which emphasizes the communicative technique of repetition and constant back-and-forth dialogue among participants. This technique helps students overcome whatever anxiety they may have about speaking a foreign language, and their pronunciation is bettered by hearing the teacher model it frequently. Participants learned how to exchange greetings and talk about basic daily activities in Yiddish over the course of the week.
One of the benefits of a fully hybrid festival is that lectures can easily be delivered remotely. In addition to on-site lectures by Andy Muchin, host of the weekly public radio program Sounds Jewish (speaking about perennial favorite the Barry Sisters) and independent klezmer historian Daniel Carkner (speaking about the Zimro Ensemble in Java in 1919), the festival featured off-site lectures by Christina Crowder of the Klezmer Institute (speaking about the KMDMP, tying nicely into the new material from this archive presented by Veretski Pass with Joel Rubin) and Joel Schechter and Diana Scott of the Northern California Workers Circle (speaking about the recently published graphic novel The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance).
In addition to the daily workshops and nightly concerts, Klezcadia included a Shabes evening cabaret, featuring the aforementioned Klezbians, Victoria’s own Kvell’s Angels, Vancouver cimbalom player Carkner, and Seattle multi-instrumentalist and neo-vaudevillian Mai Li Pittard. The festival concluded with the only “public” in-person event, a Sunday afternoon park concert with all of the above performing their own pieces along with a few mass-band melodies learned from Segelstein, Horowitz, and Rubin. Public attendees were separated from the festival registrants by a cordoned-off area in front of the stage; non-performing registrants danced in this area, and the public broke out into freylekh/line dancing around the seated audience.
To further reinforce both the hybrid nature of the festival and the theme of inclusivity, not only was the concert livestreamed, but the audience at the final concert was provided with a QR code to the Klezcadia website, where they could find lyrics for a group singalong of various Yiddish favorites: Daniel Kahn’s translation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (apparently a must for Canadian audiences!), “Abi gezunt” (“As Long as You’re Healthy”), “Di tsukunft” (“The Future”), and “Ale brider” (“We Are All Brothers”). Clearly the song choices reflected the tenor of the festival—that we’re all in this together, trying to keep each other healthy as we look toward the future—and many of the songs featured updated Yiddish and/or English lyrics by Josh Waletzky and Rosenberg to reflect our current tensions and realities.
My hope is that the need for vigilant masking and constant testing will fade with time, but that the care devoted to providing a safer space for those who continue to require this level of caution will remain. Klezcadia did a superb job in its initial outing of providing world-class entertainment and instruction to a community largely left behind as the rest of the world returns to a “normal” that unfortunately includes a lack of concern for the disabled and immunocompromised. Other klezmer and Yiddish cultural festivals would do well to learn from this model of radical inclusion. Making sure that people of all abilities are accommodated to the greatest extent possible can enhance the overall experience for all attendees, by ensuring that technology isn’t failing on- or off-site, by including voices from far-off lands that might not be heard otherwise, and by protecting the health of in-person participants so they can continue to engage in the arts in future settings.
