A Night of Jewish Wedding Music: Keeping the Old World New in the New World

Some of the pastries were sweet, some savory -- in the case of the blintzes, they managed to be tastily both, even if cold. Same for the music, though it was hot. It was an evening of Eastern European Jewish wedding music in a West Hollywood community center, a perfect way to kick off the Chanukah/Hanukkah/Khanike season, maybe even better than dreidels and latkes. Well, not many things are better than latkes, but still.

Aaron Paley, co-founder and chair of the Yiddishkayt culture and education organization, which sponsored the event, asked, "How many people here speak Yiddish?" in Yiddish. About half the 250 or so people in the audience raised hands, and not just the older immigrants from the Ukraine and surrounding lands but some younger people, too. "How many found out about this from e-mail?" he followed, and even more hands went up, not just the younger people but most of the older ones as well. Old world, new world, one world.

Onstage, musician Michael Alpert reminisced about childhood visits to this very room to hear the sounds of accordion and seven-string Russian guitars "played by a previous generation of immigrants from what was for them the Russian Empire." This night, Alpert, a member of the groundbreaking klezmer revival group Brave Old World, was flanked by immigrants from the Soviet era: clarinetist Isaac Sadigursky and accordion player David Kasap. The two have been playing together for 50 years since being roommates at a music conservatory in what was then Moldavia and is now the independent Moldova. Even in those post-World War II years, there was a strong Jewish community there, and on weekends, Sadigursky explained, the two would pick up extra cash playing at weddings.

With fiddler-singer-percussionist Alpert and American bassist Vic Koler, they reached into the bag of standards from those celebrations and the many weddings they've played since resettling in Los Angeles. The material went from the apprehensive, even sad tone of tunes accompanying the bride and groom being respectively brought from their old life to their new by their parents to the giddy numbers that brought about some spontaneous folk-dancing in the audience to accompany the skittering clarinet and accordion playing (yes, 'Hava Nagila' among them but in raw hyperdrive) to mournful (a good portion of the audience singing along, unprompted, to one old Yiddish hit) to appropriately sentimental.

"'Me without you, you without me is like a door without a handle,' " Alpert translated from one of the lyrics, quipping that it was the "perfect metaphor of desire and home improvement."

The notion of leaving an old life, and the melancholy tied to that, returned in two songs Sadigursky introduced as having been written to play at the train station while sending off family members emigrating to America or, more tragically, being sent most likely to die in the bloody Russo-Japanese war of 1905.

Sadigursky and Kasap departed at quite a different time under very different circumstances, leaving in the '70s when the Soviet, under great scrutiny and criticism in the west, allowed many Jews to leave. As Alpert alluded, when they arrived here it was to a community of people largely displaced in an earlier era, coming from various areas around Eastern Europe.

Naturally, then, the music they've been playing for that community since is drawn from several neighboring regions, and this evening's program sported old Bessarabian dances reflecting the Turkish modes and rhythms ingrained from centuries of Ottoman rule, a boisterous Romanian song sung by Kasap, songs from various eras of what is now the Ukraine. On some pieces Koler and Alpert sawed sharply at their bass and fiddle in the manner of Carpathian village bands, other times Koler slapped the bass evoking Hungarian Roma sounds.

If Sadigursky and Kasap were based in Europe and came to tour America, they'd be hailed as ambassadors from a rich cultural history -- on par with Fanfare Ciocarlia and Taraf de Haidouks, for example, representing Romania's gypsies. But that culture doesn't exist in Europe anymore and the chance to experience their direct link to this heritage, to get even a hint of the life they left behind through their stories and sounds, increases in value every single day. And they've been right here for years.

Only one thing would have made it better. As Alpert noted, "Normally we'd be doing this at long tables full of food and wonderful Bessarabian wine and that other clear liquid -- the elixir of life."

Anyone planning a wedding?