Like my parents

Like many kids (particularly children of the 60's?) I thought for sure I would never live a life like my parents.....my mother a school teacher, my father a (not very successful) small businessman.   So after years of working in left movements, I settled down into what I thought of as a straightforward technocratic career in occupational safety and health.

But then  I ended up  working as a faculty member at West Virginia University training local union members in health and safety, and eventually founding a soft money institute to support improving health and safety conditions at work.

So in the end....a teacher and a small businessman.

Ode to a newly purchased C Melody Saxophone

You sit in mostly mystery in the rocking chair
I could not bear to hide you in your battered case
Not for the batteredness, but for the intheclosetness.

A few shrieking notes from my mouth
A fine piece of 19th century engineering
Rods, pads, pivots, springs,
modifications to tonalities and overtones

On the low notes I feel the vibration right in my hip

On the high, I note that tone is not just a matter of your mechanics

But our mutual understanding and singing (currently lacking)

Like a new lover, I dare to wish for the music
That we might take and make together

Will we go there?
Will you help me?
Will we practice?
Or...will I betray you for accordion once more

Do you love me?
Do I love you?

hmmmmm
hummmmm

More Nign of Reb Mendel

I continue to listen to this cd.   My first reaction to the music was that the chassidic singer Eli Silberstein reminded me of my grandfather Emanuel (Manny) singing in my home.   He lived with my family till he died when I was about 15.   He was a gentle soul and free spirit.   He loved to tell stories and he loved to sing.   I have a tape of him singing, and sadly, on tape he refused to sing in "jewish." but only sang American songs.   But in person he often sang in yiddish.

My next experience of this CD is the doubling of voice and clarinet.   That's not common in current klezmer, but Rubin says it was not uncommon in an earlier period.   My experience here,  is that there is a l joining of the word and wordless.....ways to spirit.   That joining is powerfully compounding.

I have generally experienced this CD as joyful, but tonight it evokes sadness.   It's taken me a while to track that....and in fact I started this blog entry to help find the sad roots.   Well the music is taking me back to the places in Europe where jews lived, came from, and no longer are present.   But I am not one to romanticize shtetl living.   People were poor, oppressed, and in many ways narrowed.  Romanticization aside, I believe I'm experiencing the contrast with American culture, the restlessness, the drive to almost always be someone else, be somewhere else, do something else.   Lately I've been finding my own ability to just sit still and absorb the present to be heightened.

But back to the music.   The string that is touching me is the lack of this restlessness, this seeking to be other, and a settledness into the music as set in place, in religion, in daily life.       And my sadness: the difficulty in modern life to find that same sense of settlement....  the word authenticity comes to mind, but does not really do justice.....

And so in some way my image of Manny Miller speaks here.   My father regarded him as "simple."   meaning in his terms not an intellectual.   But Manny (in my memory) was settled.   He loved music, he loved his grandkids, he loved to eat, he loved to tell stories, he loved to sing.   I think when he was younger he also loved women and he loved to dance.   At an unsettled time in my life, I am wishing myself back onto his knee as he sang Oy Avram.   Thank you Joel and Rabbi Silberstein.   And granddaddy, thank you for this gift......which took me 50 years to notice.

Simon Rawidowicz on The Jewish Diaspora

I've been wishing to understand today's jewish diaspora and its relationship to the state of israel in a more historical manner.   I've been reading State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity, by Simon Rawidowicz a famous scholar who chaired the dept of New Eastern and and Judaic Studies at Brandeis.  In an early essay in the book he takes strong issue (1949) with naming the new state Israel, rather the Eretz Yisrael (land of israel) because it implies that diaspora jews are not part of Israel.

In the last essay in the book he eloquently states the following:

"There is no quarrel here with kubbutz galuyot, the ingathering policy of the new State.   It is difficult to predict how this process of kibibutz gauyot presently reduced, will develop in the near future.  May that policy one day arrive at its fulfillment.   All I am saying is that as long as a complete kibbutz galuyot has nether happened nor is visibly imminent, 'Israel' means nothing less than the totality of the Jewish people.   Moreover, the total identification of the State with 'Israel' carries dangers to coming generations of Jews born in the State that we dare not ignore.   It can lead to a distortion of the meaning of the Jewish past and present in the world and only serve to intensify the cynical attitude on the part of Jewish youth of the State toward the galut Jew.   It must inevitably give rise to an Israelism or native chauvinism, tendencies that are certainly meanacing to the future political structure and spiritual character of the young State."

The essays were published in 1986, but undated.   Simon Rawidowicz died in 1957.    His unfortunate prediction has proved all too true.

The Nign of Reb Mendel

(Click on title for link.)

I highly recommend this new CD by Joel Rubin and Rabbi Eli Silberstine (and ensemble). These are hasidic songs in yiddish which strongly inform (me) in a major esthetic influence on the klezmer I play. They sound more or less removed from various regional eastern european folk styles. The doubling of voice and clarinet on most melodies strikes me as a powerful evocation of the spoken and unspoken ways to spirit.

On a bad day in Newark......

I lived on Huntington Terrace from about 1949 to 1954.  Our block ran between Eckerd and Renner Avenues.   The street was filled with two and a halves.  These were separate houses with three floors.   They were called two and halves because the third floor apt was smaller than the first two because it was under the roof and eaves.  They had self standing garages and just a little dirt around them.  The Macklesses were our landlords and lived on the first floor.  My father and I called them the Mackleberries.   We lived on the second floor.  Since they were landlords, I had to learn not to drop and thump my shoes on the floor.   The Goldbergs lived on the third floor, and were were the first to get a TV in our neighborhood and I remember intensely my first look at that kinda round screen.

Our apartment was very large.   In fact it was larger than the house we later moved into in Springfield.   Besides 3 bedrooms (parents, me, Granddaddy) it had a living room, dining room (we used it as family room and ate in the kitchen) kitchen, walk in pantry (where my father had his floor scraping business office) one big bathroom, a sun parlor with jalousie windows, and an outside screened porch.   The bathroom had a fancy shower with jets that also shot at you from the side.   I still have the bathroom cabinet with enameled steel top under which I hid the books I sneak read while on the pot.

 I had at least 3 good friends and several other boys in my grade on the block:   I can almost, but not quite remember the names.    Something like Ronnie Rosen,   Howie Redless, Larry Shtier.   So play usually meant going outside and seeing who was around.   Sometimes you might knock on a door to find someone to play with.   On a really slow day I would go around the corner to play with the kids whose houses backed up into ours on Schuyler Avenue.   That was pretty rare.   I didn't really have to go off the block very often.

As I got older I used to hang out with kids further away.   My cousins Ted and Paul Green lived on Wolcott Terrace.   That was all of 3 short blocks away.   I also had a friend Danny Schiff who lived one block down the hill on Osborne Terrace.

Our play had no parent input, no organized sports.   What did we do?  We played stick ball.   We played stoop ball.  We flipped trading cards.   We played mumblypeg (with pen knives.)  We played marbles.   We also did a lot of just adventuring around.   We'd climb to the roofs of garages and jump from one to another.   Sometimes we got into snow ball or mud ball fights with kids from other blocks.   The empty lot on the corner of Eckerd and Huntington was a good place for a fight.   I see from google street view that it is still empty.   If we were really evil we we put ice balls inside the snowballs, or rocks inside the mudballs.

Sometimes we got creative.  Several of us had gone to native american themed summer camps.  We appropriated some clothes poles and made carved and painted totem poles out of them.

I remember that a few times we went into the coal bins of the Redless house and played strip poker (details redacted.)

Street Fear

Huntington Terrace in Newark was not your bare urban street.   Both sides were lined with huge trees...so much so that we had a complete canopy over the street.   They must have been chestnuts (before the blight) because we had lots of brutal fights throwing chestnuts at each other.   I also liked to just hold them and feel how smooth they were.

One day, probably aged 5 or 6, I made a big careless mistake and somehow ran out into the street in front of a moving car.   I almost got hit......I think.   Anyway this act filled me with terrible guilt and fear.  I somehow got the belief that I was in big trouble, and that in fact that the police would now come for me for my crime.   I rushed up to our second floor apartment and dove into the bed, pulled up all the covers and hid in terror.   I don't think my parents knew where I was, so they're not part of the story.   Anyway, it felt like I lay in bed for hours.   I don't really remember the rest.   I guess at some point I just got up.   I do know I didn't go to jail.  I still remember, so you can get an idea how scared I was.