Since that moment in 1994, Egger, 47, has been sharing her appreciation of her cultural and musical roots through KlezCalifornia, the organization she co-founded in 2002. The group hosts its third annual festival of klezmer music and Yiddish culture this weekend in Berkele

Klezmer, translated from Hebrew, the historic and liturgical language of the Jews, means "song-vessel," enjoyed a renaissance as a musical genre beginning with the so-called "Klezmer Revival" of the 1970s. Among the promulgators of this movement were the Berkeley ensemble the Klezmorim and New York archivist and instrumentalist Henry Sapoznik. They at first drew on early 20th century recordings of what had been called Jewish music, with instrumental configurations imported by immigrants from Eastern Europe, including violin, clarinet, piano, cymbalom or xylophone and bass.

The scales and ornamentations of the players reflected kinships with Turkish, gypsy and Eastern European folk music, as well as with the chanting of Jewish cantors. Mused upon in dreamy glides called doinas and danced in the lively rhythms of the hora and the freylekh (literally "happy"), klezmer emerged as an exotic world music transcending geographic, ethnic and generational boundaries.

Inevitably, klezmer absorbed elements from other contemporary genres and was in turn adopted and recorded by African American jazz clarinetist Don Byron and by Israeli classical violinist Itzhak Perlman.

When Egger took up the violin at age 7 in the New York public schools, "no one thought of (the instrument) as anything but classical," she said.

Her parents spoke Yiddish, the German-related language of Europe's Ashkenazi Jews, but didn't feel the need to pass the language or the formal aspects of the Jewish religion on to Egger or her siblings. Still, "we heard Jewish music at affairs, and we knew all the dances."

Egger met her Chicago-bred Jewish husband, Alan Weiler, after relocating to the West Coast in 1989. They lived in the East Bay before moving to Marin.

"The first five years of living in California, I didn't even play music," Egger laments. "I was busy getting married, getting pregnant, buying and living in a house, and raising two children." She also served as a special-education teacher, in Hayward and later in the Lagunitas School District.

Gradually, her violin made its way out of its case and back onto her shoulder, and she decided to take a leave of absence from her teaching duties "to just play music. ... It was a midlife crisis thing."

She retrieved her classical repertoire, "but also found myself playing everything I could -- jazz improv and some klezmer, playing in five or six different groups, trying to find 'it.' "

Her search took her and daughters Sarah and Hannah, then 6 and 4, to KlezKamp West, staged at Walker Creek Ranch in Petaluma in 1998. The event was modeled by klezmer pioneer Henry Sapoznik on KlezKamps he'd begun in New York's Catskill Mountains during the Klezmer Revival.

Egger describes the events as "a reason to bring old-timers together with new-timers so the music could be passed on in a way that it had been passed on in Europe, where there aren't family dynasties anymore." Among the results of the Nazi Holocaust, Egger points out, was the interruption of the flow of Jewish popular music until its revitalization three decades later.

For Egger, KlezKamp felt like she was finally home. Although she'd heard Jewish music as a child, and had hired members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band for her wedding, "I never thought it was what I would do. But it was the marriage of the two most important things in my life besides my family: my Judaism and my music."

The importance of all three has been symbiotically strengthened since. Egger and Weiler, a Fairfax software developer, are faithful attendees, with their children, of Gan HaLev, the Jewish congregation of the San Geronimo Valley. Sarah, now 13, was recently bas mitvahed, and her mother wants her and her younger sister "to have the Hebrew, to know the Torah stories, because I didn't have much of that."

Every year Egger attends a one-week Yiddish-language immersion program in Los Angeles and tests the results back home in Lagunitas. ("My daughters will shout, 'English, Mom!' -- but they understand everything I say.")

Egger teaches violin and has recorded with her klezmer band, the Red Hot Chachkas, who'll open for Veretski Pass on Saturday. Her daughters both play a little klezmer.

As Egger continues to enhance both her musical and her language skills, she's come to appreciate the interconnections, which she and a host of presenters will showcase at this weekend's KlezCalifornia event.

"A lot of the melodies are based on Hasidic nigunim (deeply spiritual chants), and they come also from the inflections of Yiddish," Egger says. "When you hear Yiddish spoken, there's a sense of a suffering. And when you hear the catch on the violin or clarinet, that comes from the catch in the cantor's voice. It's like a cry."

KlezCalifornia was organized in 2002 to educate the public about Jewish culture, and to help people hone their knowledge of music, language, history, dance, literature and folk arts as they pertain to Jewish culture. It plans to spread its klezmer celebrations to other sites at other times of the year, aiming for Palo Alto in April and possibly Marin. "We're trying to go to all the Jewish community centers," she says.

Does Egger perceive any varieties of yiddishkayt, or Jewishness, around the Bay Area?

The stereotypical Berkeley Jew, described by Egger with a chuckle, "is progressive, liberal. The men have beards, they're old hippies; they're trying to have their kids have this progressive education but they're still connected somewhat to their Jewish roots and to healing the world."

Jews in Marin, she continues, "are like, 'Is today my day to be Jewish?' Whereas in New York, you're just Jewish! So my original goal with KlezCalifornia was to make sure my kids grew up with the kind of yiddishkayt which I'd grown up with, but in Marin County."

Julie Egger didn't have to journey to any fabled land of milk and honey to find her Jewish roots. Instead, the Long Island-bred violinist moved to Northern California, where in 2002 she co-founded KlezCalifornia, to share the celebration of her heritage.

This weekend, at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center, KlezCalifornia hosts its third annual celebration of Yiddish culture and of klezmer, the popular music of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. In addition to a Saturday night concert and dancing to the band Veretski Pass, the event will include Sunday classes in the Yiddish language and workshops in Yiddish music, theater and literature.

Klezmer is a translation of the Hebrew "song-vessel,'' but the term has become familiar in connection with a musical genre only since the so-called "Klezmer Revival" of the 1970s. Among the young Jewish promulgators of this movement were Berkeley's ensemble the Klezmorim and New York archivist and instrumentalist Henry Sapoznik. They at first drew on early 20th Century recordings of what had been called Jewish music, with instrumental configurations imported by immigrants from Eastern Europe, including violin, clarinet, piano, cymbalom or xylophone and bass.

The scales and ornamentations of the players reflected kinships with Turkish, gypsy and Eastern European folk music, as well as with the chanting of Jewish cantors. Mused upon in dreamy glides called doinas and danced in the lively rhythms of the hora and the freylekh (literally "happy"), klezmer emerged as an exotic world music transcending geographic, ethnic and generational boundaries. Inevitably, klezmer absorbed elements from other contemporary genres and was in turn adopted and recorded by African American jazz clarinetist Don Byron and by Israeli classical violinist Itzhak Perlman.

When Egger first took up the violin, at age 7 in the New York public schools, "no one thought of (the instrument) as anything but classical."

Like many left-wing Jews, her parents spoke Yiddish but didn't feel the need to pass the language or the formal aspects of the Jewish religion on to Egger or her siblings. Still, "we heard Jewish music at affairs, and we knew all the dances."

Egger met her Chicago-bred Jewish husband, Alan Weiler, after relocating to Oakland in 1989 and taking a post as a special education teacher in Hayward.

"The first five years of living in California, I didn't even play music," Egger laments. "I was busy getting married, getting pregnant, buying and living in a house, and raising two children." The couple relocated to West Marin after Egger started work with the Lagunitas School District.

Gradually, her violin made its way out of its case and back onto her shoulder, and she decided to take a leave of absence from her teaching duties "to just play music. . . it was a mid-life crisis thing."

She retrieved her classical repertoire, but also found herself "playing everything I could, jazz improv, and some klezmer, playing in five or six different groups, trying to find 'it'."

Her search took her and daughters Sarah and Hannah, then 6 and 4, to KlezKamp West, staged at Walker Creek Ranch in Petaluma in 1998. The event was modeled by Sapoznik on KlezKamps he'd begun in New York's Catskill Mountains during the Klezmer Revival.

Egger describes the Kamps as "a reason to bring old-timers together with new-timers, so the music could be passed on in a way that it had been passed on in Europe, where there aren't family dynasties any more." Among the results of the Nazi Holocaust, Egger points out, was the interruption of the flow of Jewish popular music until its revitalization three decades later.

For Egger, KlezKamp felt like "I was finally home." Although she'd heard Jewish music as a child, and had hired members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band for her wedding, "I never thought it was what I would do. But it was the marriage of the two most important things in my life, besides my family: my Judaism and my music."

The importance of all three has been symbiotically strengthened since. Egger and Weiler, a Fairfax software developer, are faithful attendees, with their children, of Gan HaLev, the Jewish congregation of the San Geronimo Valley. Sarah, now 13, was recently bas mitvahed, and her mother wants her and her younger sister "to have the Hebrew, to know the Torah stories, because I didn't have much of that."

And Egger teaches violin and has recorded with her klezmer band, The Red Hot Chachkas, who'll open for Veretski Pass on Saturday. Her daughters both play a little klezmer.

As Egger continues to inhance both her musical and her language skills, she's come to appreciate the interconnections, which she and a host of presenters will showcase this weekend.

"A lot of the melodies are based on Hasidic nigunim (deeply spiritual chants) and they come also from the inflections of Yiddish," Egger explains. "When you hear Yiddish spoken, there's a sense of a suffering. And when you hear the catch on the violin or clarinet, that comes from the catch in the cantor's voice. It's like a cry."

Does Egger perceive any varieties of yiddishkayt, or Jewishness, around the Bay Area?

Jews in Marin, she's found, "are like, 'Is today my day to be Jewish?'" The stereotypical Berkeley Jew, described by Egger with a chuckle, "is progressive, liberal, the men have beards, they're old hippies, they're trying to have their kids have this progressive education but they're still connected somewhat to their Jewish roots and to healing the world."

Yiddishkeit West: KlezCalifornia offers full immersion in klezmer music and culture

by Marsha Gonick

Reproduced by permission from Strings Magazine (January 2004, Issue 115).
© 2004 String Letter Publishing. All rights reserved.
String Letter Publishing, P.O. Box 767, San Anselmo CA 94979
(415) 485-6946 :: Fax (415) 485-0831 :: www.stringletter.com

In klezmer, a little says a lot. At my first klezmer camp this past summer, we all sang the nign to learn its melody and rhythm before we attempted to play—with no printed music. In later sessions we learned the embellishments—or the deeper emotions behind the words—which included vibrato, krekhtsn (“moans,” or ghost notes played with the third or fourth finger), trills, and short downward slides. And we learned where to place them—always keeping the pulse, always going somewhere, always with a purpose.

We were instructed to play a phrase and pay attention to how it made us feel. In one short phrase, a string player can play legato, staccato, and marcato (“just like Jewish life,” instructor Michael Alpert remarked). And these melodic phrases—not the rhythm—drive the music. When necessary, Alpert, who is a leading scholar of Eastern European Jewish dance, invited us to lay our fiddles down and dance in a circle moving forward, in and out, feeling the important notes, bringing it all inside of our bodies.

Our goal was not to play a simple, trite tune but to make the music infinitely deep.

The first annual KlezCalifornia, a celebration of klezmer music and all things Yiddish, was held in San Francisco between June 22–27. From Sunday evening to Friday afternoon, musicians and nonmusicians, Jewish or not, participated in such classes as Rhythm and Jews, Creative Interpretation and Arranging for Singers and Instrumentalists, From Nigunim to New Jewish Music, Fidl-Kapelye, Yiddish language, the Enchanted Journey: Yiddishland in Song—just to name a few—all taught by renowned musicians and scholars who, it was made certain, are also excellent teachers.

While the adults immersed themselves in a week of intensive learning and discovery, their under-teenage children were kept busy and amused in the klezmer camp’s children’s program, which included music, language, drama, dance, and traditional arts and crafts.

Every day, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., we studied while playing, singing, and dancing. Between the morning and afternoon sessions we noshed and schmoozed, educating each other further from our own experiences and discovering how we all got to be there. And the evenings were full, as well, with either a concert, a song and dance party, or the final night’s performance at which we all demonstrated what we had learned.

KlezCalifornia is the product of five years of hard work for codirectors Julie Egger and Judy Kunofsky. Egger, a native New Yorker, was reared in a not-so- religious-but-cultural Jewish family. Trained as a classical violinist, she discovered that klezmer offered her a way to bring her childhood memories and her musical talent together. After participating in two sessions of KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program on the East Coast, she was determined to bring Yiddishkeit to the San Francisco Bay Area and joined with Kunofsky to produce KlezCalifornia. Egger’s passion for klezmer was one story among many, many stories from Jews, observant and/or cultural, half-Jews, gentiles, folk musicians, classical musicians, jazz musicians—all of whom were fascinated by this age-old art.

Restrained Exuberance

My own story is that of a classical violist, daughter of an ethnically Jewish father and a Polish, once-Catholic mother. Always feeling like a Jew in a gentile setting and a gentile in a Jewish setting, I’ve tried to find ways to feel my whole self whatever the setting. During KlezCalifornia, I learned that klezmer, reputed to be a rather insular musical expression, is (like Yiddish) the product of many cultures—the main influence, besides the strong link with the Roma, coming from the gentile cultures of Eastern Europe. The klezmorim of the 19th century performed for any audience that had the money to pay, so they had to learn the songs and dances of their non-Jewish neighbors, the Ukrainians, Romanians, Russians, Poles, or whoever else lived in the region. And Jews and non-Jews played all this music together. This history and the expressiveness of klezmer speaks to me fully.

But now to learn how to play it! Oy!

Every morning all the student musicians—on strings, winds, accordions, and so on—joined teachers Michael Alpert, Deborah Strauss, Jeff Warschauer, Stu Brotman, and Kurt Bjorling for lectures, discussions, debates, and demonstrations on what the program’s brochure described as “how to make klezmer rhythm cook while letting the melody breathe.”

Not once during the entire week did we learn from a printed piece of music. We learned the old way, although in a more urgent, intensive setting. First we sang, then we danced, then we’d sing again, then we’d play—and over and over in all three musical expressions until we felt it and could then play it. We filled our bodies and our minds with the soul of klezmer and listened intently to the world’s best klezmer musicians display their years of study. Each morning was more fascinating than the previous one, and the analysis more rigorous. And each morning would bring us closer to embellishing, undulating, speeding up, slowing down, lengthening, and shortening our notes and phrases while always maintaining that all-important pulse, so that others could dance a bulgarish, hora, or sher.

In fact, we were encouraged to “dance on our instrument,” but as Alpert clarified, with “restrained exuberance.”

After a coffee break (and, of course, more schmoozing), the string players headed off for Fidl-Kapelye—or fiddle band—taught by Deborah Strauss, one of the finest performers of traditional Jewish violin. Strauss studied classical violin at Rutgers University and then ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. She has been studying, performing, and teaching klezmer since 1985. Her style is traditional and mesmerizing, reminding me of the violin music of Heinrich Biber. Each bow stroke or phrase imparts a specific emotion while connecting the audience to Eastern European Jewish history.

In our first session Strauss introduced us to a nign, a wordless melody, by writing out the syllables on the chalkboard, “ay day ya ba bay bum…” These syllables were our bowing marks. There is a common Yiddish saying: di fidl redt verter (the fiddle speaks words).

Step into a Shtetl

At the end of the week, the Fidl-Kapelye was the last to perform at the student concert. We had rehearsed our roles in playing melody, countermelody, sekund (double-stop chords in varying, syncopated rhythms), bass lines, and a particularly evocative transitional viola drone I created for myself in class. We invited the codirectors of KlezCalifornia to come and sit on the stage while we played. While a student brought each of them a bouquet of flowers, other more muscular students lifted them up in their chairs.

Meanwhile, the Fidl-Kapelye continued to play, while our fellow students in the audience unpacked their clarinets, accordions, and mandolins and played with us. The entire musical student body, led by the teachers, started one melody, then another, while everyone else danced, parading behind the still-raised KlezCalifornia directors. It was amazing! The room was transformed into a shtetl during a wedding celebration, and my fellow students, teachers, and I were transformed into a 19th-century kapelye.

And we couldn’t stop.

We just kept going and going from one tune to the next, playing all that we had learned during the week. The feeling was deep in a discovery of individuality and communality—from old to young, Jew and non-Jew, musician and nonmusician, in a revival of an almost extinct tradition—all caught up in a wondrous celebration of life. And I want to do it again and again.