Klezmer’s Afterlife

Abstract

Klezmer has been a controversial phenomenon in post-Holocaust Europe, 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-Jewish audiences, it quickly gained the epithet of "fakelore" and was branded commercially-motivated heritage appropriation. The present book documents this remarkable music revival in its two European epicentres: Berlin and Kraków, investigating not only its roots and motivations, but also the consequences that performing Jewish music has had for non-Jewish klezmer revivalists. In the eyes of critics, the klezmer boom in Germany and Poland has been a symptom of guilty consciences and a simulacrum breeding "virtually Jewish" (Gruber) identities. This book, applying an interdisciplinary perspective and drawing on a wealth of over 80 interviews with klezmer musicians and cultural organizers, revisits the clichés about the klezmer revival and gives unique ethnographic insights into the mechanics of cultural appropriation and interethnic encounter via music. It is a book about cultural ventriloquism, and the search for the self through the music of the other. Describing the development of a very specific music scene, however, the book also addresses more universal questions about the creative nature of cross-cultural borrowing, appropriation as a vehicle of encounter and the transformative potential that the heritage of the other might have for the negotiation of collective identities.

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