Klezmer’s Afterlife

Abstract

Klezmer's Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany Magdalena Waligorska Klezmer in Europe has been a controversial topic ever since this traditional Jewish wedding music made it to the concert halls and discos of Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. Played mostly by non-Jews and for non-Jews, it was hailed as "fakelore," "Jewish Disneyland" and even "cultural necrophilia." Klezmer's Afterlife is the first book to investigate this fascinating music scene in Central Europe, giving voice to the musicians, producers and consumers of the resuscitated klezmer. Contesting common hypotheses about the klezmer revival in Germany and Poland stemming merely from feelings of guilt which emerged in the years following the Holocaust, author Magdalena Waligorska investigates the consequences of the klezmer boom on the people who staged it and places where it occurred. Offering not only a documentation of the klezmer revival in two of its European headquarters (Kraków and Berlin), but also an analysis of the Jewish / non-Jewish encounter it generates, Waligorska demonstrates how the klezmer revival replicates and reinvents the image of the Jew in Polish and German popular culture, how it becomes a soundtrack to Holocaust commemoration and how it is used as a shining example of successful cultural policy by local officials. Drawing on a variety of fields including musicology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and cultural studies, Klezmer's Afterlife will appeal to a wide range scholars and students studying Jewish culture, and cultural relations in post-Holocaust central Europe, as well as general readers interested in klezmer music and music revivals more generally.

Regional professionals, American activists, and the Iron Curtain: transnational memory work during the Cold War in the Jewish neighbourhood of Kraków

“…Waligórska reminds us that originally the shtetl Jew with side-locks, in a yarmulke and a long black kaftan, stood for a plethora of anti-Semitic stereotypes, from uncanny business skills to a proclivity for ritual murder. 67 As such, it exemplified the threatening Other for ethnic Poles. In the postwar years, cut off from the sources of their angst as there were almost no Jews left in the country, Poles developed a more sympathetic variation of this stereotype.…”

“…69 Waligórska demonstrates that in the new vision of "shtetl-romance" those problems were disregarded and only the positive aspects of the past were highlighted. 70 The image of the "shtetl-romance" created in the Old Synagogue indeed disregarded uncomfortable historical truths and instead suggested the potential for peaceful cohabitation with a sympathetic, no longer threatening Other.…”

Creating a Cosmopolitan Past: Local and Transnational Influences on Memory Work in Schindler's Factory, Kraków

“…Importantly however, this was not an image of a Threating Other, otherwise widespread in the Polish culture. 74 Instead, the curators from the Synagogue insisted on presenting the historic Jews as a sympathetic community, a community with which a peaceful cohabitation was possible.…”

Ragged Houses and Candlelight. The Romance of the Jewish Past and Memory Work in the Last Decade of the Communist Rule in Kraków, Poland

“…She explains that originally, in peasant culture, the image of the shtetl Jew in a yarmulke, a long black kaftan, and with side-locks, was shorthand for several anti-Semitic stereotypes, connoting everything from uncanny business skills to a proclivity toward ritual murder. 32 However, she claims in the post-war years, when there were virtually no Jews left in Poland and thus Polish folk and popular cultures were cut off from the sources of that angst, that these images evolved, 'undergoing a re-evaluation, in which they [were] transposed into more "sympathetic" ones'. 33 Her interpretation does seem overly optimistic;…”

“…Waligórska, elaborating on the image of Jews in musical culture, has termed this kind of depiction 'shtetl-romance'. 35 The vision of the 'shtetl-romance' was presented most fully in the so-called 'Iconography Hall', one of the two additional expositions complementing the main exhibition. Whereas the first three rooms focused on religion and rituals, the two remaining ones were intended to present the history of Kraków's Jews.…”