Echoes Of A Culture Nearly Lost

 by whiteray

We belonged to two record clubs in my youth: The first was the Musical Heritage Society, which released albums of classical works in mostly plain white jackets, with the occasional change-up of an album with a color picture on the front. My sister and I were about fourteen and eleven, respectively, when the records began coming to the house once a month – typical titles were Great Pages From French Organ Music or Trios for Flute, Piano and Cello – and we were, at best, skeptical. 

“Just wait,” our dad would say as he’d slide that month’s arrival onto the bookshelves where the others gathered. “There will come a day when you’re glad you have these.” And he was right. Though I hardly ever listen to Music of the Hunt and the others, I am glad the records have made their ways from his shelves to mine. They sit there partly as a reminder of my dad and partly as a library of fine classical music should I be in the mood to start up the turntable (and I am there on occasion). 

The other record club was more mainstream. It was the Record Club of America, and for several years, my sister and I were each allowed to select a record from the catalog every other month. 

It must have been in 1964 when we joined the club, as I recall that my first selection was the soundtrack to the James Bond film Goldfinger, which I owned before I had seen the film or read any of Ian Fleming’s novels. My sister’s selections were generally more pop-oriented, except she baffled me – and likely my parents – when she ordered one month a record called Traditional Jewish Memories, an orchestral/vocal collection of melodies that I found exotic and compelling. 

And when my sister got married in 1972 and went off to live her own adult life, she of course took her records with her, about fifteen very disparate albums, including Traditional Jewish Memories. Over the years, I got copies – first as LPs and later as CDs or digital files – of those fifteen or so albums for my own shelves. 

Three were challenges: Two by Leo Kottke – Circle ’Round the Sun and Mudlark – and Traditional Jewish Memories. In the 1990s, as I was doing the heavy lifting on creating a vinyl archive and was looking more closely than ever for my sister’s records, I could not find any of those three. I at least knew Kottke’s name. But I did not recall the artist or artists who recorded Traditional Jewish Memories. I recalled the cover: mostly white, with a yellowish photo of an older Orthodox Jewish man flanked by burning candles. 

I might not have remembered the name or names, but I remembered the music, the dramatic, poignant and exuberant melodies that obviously came from a far different culture than mine. And I kept looking. One day during one of my regular visits to Cheapo’s in the 1990s, I did find a copy of Traditional Jewish Memories and learned that it came from the Orchestra and Chorus of Benedict Silberman. It was marked as being in good condition. 

I took it home, of course, and was reminded once again that visual inspection of records does not always provide an accurate check of quality. The music was as moving as I remembered, what I could hear of it: The record played hissy at too many points to be easily listenable. It wasn’t the fault of the folks at Cheapo’s. They had so many records come in the doors each week that there was no way to listen to them all; they did their visual grading in good faith, and there had been times I’d brought back to their store records that had a hidden defect. That one, even though it was essentially unplayable, I kept, hoping to someday replace it with a better-sounding copy. 

And all through the record digging of the 1990s, I looked.  The two Kottkes came home as mp3s after I hooked up to the world in 2000 and then found the world of music blogs a few years later. And not long after that, two friends I’ve met through blogging each sent me one of the Kottkes on vinyl, in very good condition. 

That left Traditional Jewish Memories. While I was constructing my LP database in 2001 and 2002, I found several listings for the album in libraries – most notably in the on-line files of Dartmouth University’s Jewish Sound Archive – and some digging through the Warner Bros. listings at the Both Sides Now discography site gave me a release date of 1964. But nowhere could I find a listing for a CD release, nor could I at that time find a listing offering a better quality copy of the LP I had or any mp3 rips of the album. 

And then, during a summer a decade ago, it was like a switch had been flipped somewhere.  Suddenly, there were vinyl copies of the record offered for sale, and I found some listings for CDs. The CDs, however, had differing titles, though all were credited to Silberman – about whom I knew nothing, really, and now know nothing more than is contained in a brief and disorganized entry at Wikipedia – and listed some of the same tracks as on the vinyl I have. 

So I invested a couple bucks in a CD, but when I came, I found that it wasn’t quite complete. It was missing two of the fourteen tracks on the LP. Disappointed, I set it aside unopened and went back online, this time heading for a different retailer. And I found the album. Titled Hava Nagila & Other Jewish Memories, the 1996 CD had the same recordings in the same order as the LP my sister had ordered from our record club so long ago. (Later CD issues have changed the title to Traditional Jewish Melodies.) 

The notes in the CD package (augmented by one bit of information from the back of the LP jacket) tell me that twelve of the fourteen tracks are drawn from Jewish music prevalent in Eastern Europe as far back as the Sixteenth Century and are part of the Jewish tradition that resulted in, among other things, the musical style called Klezmer. (Silberman wrote one of the tracks himself, basing it on traditional themes, and the fourteenth track is “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” a Yiddish song written in the 1930s that was a hit for the Andrews Sisters in the latter part of that decade.) 

In other words, the music on the CD – and on the vinyl that preceded it – is in large part the music of a pre-Holocaust culture now gone. It’s true that that the professionalism of Silberman’s orchestra and chorus smooths out the rougher and more exuberant edges the more celebratory songs would have had in the Klezmer tradition, and the instrumentation is no doubt different, but still the songs remain. 

I’ve never known why my sister ordered Traditional Jewish Memories from the record club, and I never knew when I played the record in the late 1960s and early 1970s why those melodies from so long ago and so far away moved me so greatly. Knowing now quite a bit more of the tragic history surrounding nearly all of the songs on the album – and feeling more and more the weight of the Star of David I’ve worn around my neck for years as a memorial to the Six Million – I know now what it was I heard along with the music in the basement at Kilian Boulevard. 

I was hearing ghosts of a culture and a people diminished and nearly destroyed. 

Here’s “Rosalie” from Hava Nagila & Other Jewish Memories. (The 1996 CD had new artwork, but when I made the video, I used the artwork from the 1964 LP.)