The Excitement is Spreading

This morning, Henry Sapoznik and I gave the first session of our class introducing Living Traditions' online digital archive project to the world, and it was a great experience. We told the story of how the project came to be, which is also contained in an excellent article in this year's KlezKamp Zhurnal. One of the best moments was when I played "before" and "after" clips of a couple of tunes. The "before" clip was from the kind of transfer of a 78 rpm record that is commonly circulated among interested parties who don't have access to professionally remastered reissues; the after clip was from the transfer made by the engineer for this project, Chris King, who is a genious at making both words and music intelligible. Jaws dropped in a very gratifying fashion.

I was also able to share images of some of the beautiful labels on these old records. Here's an example of one particular colorful image from a recording of Belf's Rumanian Orchestra made in Rumania about 1908. The writing is in cyrillic, which is the alphabet used by Russian and Ukrainian.

This project, which will make as many extant Yiddish recordings as I can locate widely available at nominal cost, feels almost as important a contribution to the preservation and dissemination of Yiddish culture as KlezKamp itself, and it was clear from the reactions of the students in class today that they immediately "got" this. There can be nothing more gratifying. I can't wait till tomorrow's class, where we're going to be playing examples of Eastern European khazns (cantors) accompanied by choruses.

Putting the Zhurnal to bed

I've just about finished work on the KlezKamp Zhurnal, our annual magazine that features articles about Yiddish culture, Living Traditions, our faculty, and this year, for the first time, a crostic puzzle created especially for KlezKamp. Editing the Zhurnal is one of my favorite responsibilities in my role as KlezKamp editor, archivist, and house grammarian.

Just to whet your appetite, here's the table of contents:

• A Tribute to German Goldenshteyn, z"l
• Digital KlezKamp (about a new Living Traditions online music database)
• Hasidic Creativity on Cassette, by Miriam Isaacs (in English and Yiddish, for those practising reading Yiddish)
  
• Hasidic Klezmer in Israel, by Henry Sapoznik
• Our Other Talented Faculty (a look at visual artwork by our crafts and children's faculty)
• My Uncle Zvee, by Isaiah Sheffer (about Zvee Scooler and the new Living Traditions CD of his rhyming radio commentaries)
• Meet the Scholarship Students
• The KlezKamp Crostic, by Rick Winston

It's been great fun putting this together. I was honored to be able to do something to commemmorate my friend, the late German Goldenshteyn, of blessed memory (a picture of us together, with Yitskhok Niborski on the left, is above). In addition, all the articles and features are lively and informative--and I got to do the crostic before almost anybody else (although it was LT Associate Director and puzzle maven Sabina Brukner who took it out for its first spin). But my favorite item of all is the scholarship students.

The scholarship program is now in its second year. Dan Peck, KlezKamp's Operations Manager, sorts through a stack of applications from dozens of interesting, involved young people, all of whom have terrifically compelling reasons for wanting to attend Kamp. From these he must choose only two to whom Living Traditions can offer complete scholarships, a program funded by generous supporters such as yourself. For the second year in a row, the scholarship students are incredibly inspiring. I find their insights and reasons for working with Yiddish culture moving. Here's a small taste of this year's recipients:

Polish student Alicja Głuszek, a PhD candidate who lists Abraham Joshua Heschel as one of her main influences and works as a staff member of the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków; and
Dina Gidon, an organic chemist from St. Petersburg, Russia, who has switched studies to become a collector of Yiddish folklore, particularly in Ukraine.

Add to these amazing accomplishments the fact that they are both under 25, and I'm sure you'll be as floored as I was. I can't wait to meet these two first-time Kampers when we get to Kerhonkson. You can read more about these two young Yiddishists in the Zhurnal (it'll be in your package when you get to Kamp).

If you want to learn more about the KlezKamp scholarship fund, call Sabina in the office; we would love to extend this program to be able to bring more of these inspiring young people to Kamp, to join with the KlezKamp community in our collective learning, and to make our hemshekh more complete.