7 - “The Newest Bulgar Out That Everyone Played”: New York Klezmer after 1929

Summary

Decline and Revitalization in New York Klezmer after the 1920s

The New York klezmer tradition began to decline in the 1930s. This decline paralleled that of the landsmanshaftn and may be attributed to a combination of factors, including acculturation among the American-born as well as immigrant generations, restrictive immigration legislation enacted in the 1920s, and the Great Depression. The immigration laws drastically limited the number of new Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, those who might have provided a continued audience for klezmer music. As Daniel Soyer has written, “The Jewish landsmanshaftn of New York were a onegeneration phenomenon. They had little attraction for most of their members’ American children, who had developed their own sense of Jewish- American identity and to whom their parents’ parochial loyalties seemed irrelevant at best. The fact that the aging societies continued to utilize Yiddish and Yiddish-accented English as their official language made them seem all the more old-worldly.” The same could largely be said about the relationship of the American-born generations to the continued performance of klezmer music at landsmanshaft banquets and other public and private gatherings.

The very paths taken by the American-born children of the New York klezmer families are a reflection of the acculturative processes within the Jewish communities as a whole. Although most of the male—and some of the female—children of the European-born players became musicians and carried on their family traditions to a certain extent, almost all were multimusical, often versed in klezmer music but perhaps already more at home in various American vernacular styles. An example of such a musician was Brandwein's nephew, the pianist Nat Brandwynne (1910–78), who accompanied Brandwein at weddings as a youth and later became a popular society dance-band leader and recording artist. Most members of the second American-born generation either left the realm of klezmer music or did not become musicians at all. As I discussed in chapter 1, a number of members of the Brandwein, Tarras, and Beckerman families became prominent musicians in other fields including classical, film, and entertainment music and were not necessarily personally competent in klezmer music.