Transmigrations: Wolf Krakowski's Yiddish Worldbeat in its Socio-Musical Context

Summary

INTRODUCTION: THE LAST YIDDISH BLUESMAN AND THE MUSICIAN OF LUBLIN

I LOVE Wolf Krakowski. His legendary CD Transmigrations—the first example of Yiddish worldbeat—is my favourite. I admit this freely, although I am by day a tenured full professor of Western classical music who swims in the sea of assimilation, Jewish self-loathing, and politely restrained antisemitism that is mid-western academe and for whom this confession might be received as ranging from eccentric to foolish to professionally risky. But, as the 1929 Michalesco recording says, ‘A yid bin ikh geboyrn’ (‘I was born a Jew’). Jewishness defines me whether I like it or not (and I do) and Transmigrations speaks to and for our generation of North American Jews like nothing else, whether we know it or not (and we should).

Wolf is one of my dearest friends. A copy of Transmigrations and the stream of Krakowski–Lubet email that flowed constantly between Northampton, Massachusetts, and Lublin kept me sane while I was living in Poland in 1999. Lublin, a Jewish ghost town, was home to the great Romantic composer–violinist Henryk Wieniawski, a personal hero, a nineteenth-century Jewish Jimi Hendrix who, like Wolf, was a man of eclectic tastes and strong popular cultural sensibilities.

It was also, of course, inspiration to I. B. Singer. Isaac Bashevis Singer Street is a single, empty block facing the ‘New Jewish Cemetery’, by far the worst-kept Jewish cemetery or memorial I saw anywhere in Poland, in the shabbiest part of town. If my woefully inadequate Polish served me right, the word żydowski protrudes accusingly from any sentence it inhabits; one of my futile attempts to enter the cemetery was met with ridicule by a couple of toughs in a manner that strongly recommended my swift retreat. Majdanek is a suburb of Lublin. Its western border is a forest of tiny dachas whose owners must somehow have arrived at some kind of peace with the 125,000 Jews murdered there. I will never understand.

This is the context in which I lived and taught Jewish contributions to American musical culture in 1999 at Marie Curie-Skłodowska University. Prior to that time I had negative interest in east European travel, regarding the region almost exclusively as Holocaust Central, hardly a unique feeling among Jews.