Yale Strom’s Search for Jewish Music throughout Eastern Europe

In retrospect, ethnomusicologist Yale Strom probably owes a thank you to the local klezmer band members who turned down his request to play violin with them.  That rejection prompted him to decide to form his own band.  However, he resolved that before doing that, he ought to search for material that other klezmer musicians weren’t playing.

Thus was born his idea to go on a research trip to Eastern Europe where he hoped he could spend a couple months learning old tunes that hadn’t yet made it into the standard klezmer repertoire.  A few months turned into 13 months, he told a meeting sponsored by the  Tifereth Israel Synagogue Men’s Club on Sunday, Dec. 12.  Through the medium of music, not only did he learn different tunes; he also learned about Jewish life, past and present, in Eastern Europe, leading to a career making CDs, photography books, and documentary films.

Oh, yes, he also formed a band after he got back, originally called Zmiros (Yiddish for songs) but later, with the pun intended, Hot P’Strom’i.  “Strom,” his last name, means “Stream” in Yiddish, a language in which he is fluent and in which he conducted interviews throughout Eastern Europe.

Interspersing his  lecture with five well-received violin solos, Strom told of his decision not to go to law school and instead to travel in the countries that in 1981 were still part of the Soviet-controlled Communist bloc.  He flew first to the western European outpost of Vienna, Austria, which then was a portal to Eastern Europe, making that city his base of operations.  The first country in which he conducted research was Yugoslavia, which today has been broken up into seven countries.  Specifically, he went to Zagreb, the largest city in modern-day Croatia.

At 10 p.m., one rainy Sunday evening, he knocked at the door of a Jewish home for the aged.  “A man came to the door and said, ‘I think your grandmother and grandfather must be sleeping,’” he related.  “I said, ‘My grandparents aren’t here … I’m doing research on Jewish music and I just need a place to stay the night, and I have my sleeping bag. Can I sleep on your floor?’ They said this is highly unusual and they closed the door and I heard some murmuring and then they opened up the door and there were these ladies in their nightgowns and one with her nightcap 0n, and she said: ‘We’ll let you stay tonight.  We have a room for you.’  So, they showed me a (regular resident’s) room and they said, ‘You can stay here for a week as long as you play music at lunch time every day for us,’ which I did and where I began asking questions.”

It was not the last time the itinerant musician and scholar would trade performances for money or accommodations.  More recently, he was asked by a homeowner at a party to climb onto the roof and play a melody on the violin in imitation of a modern-day “Fiddler on the Roof.” Strom said, “okay for $200”; the man replied “No problem” and the deal was done.  The roof had a slope, Strom recalled, so he had to carefully balance himself while playing.

Before and after his lunchtime duties at the old age residence in Zagreb, Strom questioned the residents about music.  Did he or she ever play an instrument?  If yes, what kind of instrument?  What kinds of melodies did you play?  If not, do you remember anyone playing for your family?  Maybe at a wedding?

Remembering weddings of their relatives or their own weddings, the residents at Strom’s urging would branch into discussions of what tunes were played, what kind of dancing was there, what kind of food was served, who attended the wedding, whether all the musicians in the band were Jewish, and if not, who the non-Jews were.  It turned out in many cases that the wedding players were Roma people, who originated from northwestern India. It was mistakenly thought in many countries that these people came originally from Egypt,, leading to them being called with the uncomplimentary name “Gypsies,” Strom said.

Music being a universal language, Strom was able to develop a rapport with the Roma musicians, learning from them how inaccurate the negative stereotypes about Roma were — just as negative stereotypes about Jews also are very wrong, Strom said.

While people in Yugoslavia were relatively relaxed about meeting and talking with an American musician — because Marshal Tito successfully had resisted the overlordship of the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin and his successors — Jews in other Eastern bloc countries were considerably more cautious, some even paranoid, about meeting with Strom.

For example in Romania, which had its own repressive regime led by Nicolae Ceausescu, one man he sought to interview declined to talk to him at the Jewish Community Center in Bucharest nor at his home.  The man insisted instead upon meeting at Strom’s hotel, where he was sharply questioned as he entered the lobby.  What was his business there?  Eventually the front desk called Strom to come down to the lobby, where he was asked what was his relationship to this man.  “He’s my uncle,” Strom answered on the spot, although of course that wasn’t true.  But it satisfied the interrogators.

Playing his violin often broke down barriers in Eastern Europe.  After hearing him play, Eastern European Jews could see for themselves that Strom really was a musician, not someone sent to spy on them.

After returning to the United States, and going to New York University for graduate school, Strom went back to Eastern Europe many times with a considerably broadened research agenda.  He wanted to know how culture influenced Eastern European music and vice versa.  Also, noting that some Jews had returned to their countries of origin, even after the Holocaust, he wanted to know why they had returned.

He had a list of some 20 questions to ask during interviews, but luckily the list was often ignored as discussions veered this way and that, as they so often do when people talk to each other.

Strom was impacted by the memories the people shared with him.  One day, a man told him that his mother had taught him folksongs, but from his father he had learned the Jewish prayers.  The man said, “My father was a ba’al tefilah (prayer leader) and he said any son of mine has to know the siddur (prayer book) by heart.  So, we practiced.  To this day, most of the prayers I still remember.”

After that, Stram recalled, “he began to cry, subsequently explaining, ‘You know Yitzhak (Strom’s Jewish first name), you made me think of my father and I haven’t thought of him in some time.  The last image I had of my father was I went right to work and he went left” probably to the gas chambers at a Nazi-run death camp.

On another occasion, he met a man in Warsaw at a kosher kitchen supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).  As they sat across the table from each other, discussing music, the man said to him, “Yitzhak, it is just by circumstance that your zayde (grandfather) went to the U.S. because if it had been in reverse, you would be sitting here, and I would be sitting there.”

Strom said that thought, “kind of hit me” — that he had the recipient of “luck, chance, circumstance, beshert (fated intention.)

“I was constantly learning throughout these travels,” he declared.