Eclectic Company: Raising More Funds With Music

The 12th-Century Jewish sage and physician, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (also known as Maimonides, or Rambam) outlined a code of Jewish law based on the Rabbinical oral tradition of analyzing and interpreting the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) that Jews study, refer to and follow to this day. Rambam’s Mishneh Torah lists eight levels of charitable giving, ranking the ways in which we can assist others from the most to the least desirable/honorable methods. The highest form of charity we are told is to help a person avoid impoverishment by offering them a substantial gift in a way that is neither demeaning nor patronizing, or by extending a loan that can be accepted without loss of dignity, or by helping someone in need find employment or establish a business so as to make it unnecessary for her/him to become dependent on others.

The second highest form of giving is one in which the giver and receiver are unknown to each other, thereby avoiding any expressions of pity (by the giver) or shame (by the receiver). There are lots of ways that we all do this – we make annual gifts to organizations carrying on work we believe in, from Heifer International to our local chapter of the American Heart Association, we buy candy or hot dinners to support local youth groups, we donate items to or buy them from Goodwill or the Salvation Army or our own church’s thrift shop. One way I like to give anonymously is by attending fundraising concerts.

So at the end of last year, I went to the large-ish concert to Free Native American activist Leonard Peltier, as I told you previously, and to the Folk Music Society of New York’s micro-event at the People’s Voice Café, featuring Heather Wood, Joy Bennett and Chris Koldowey singing traditional songs individually and together about workers’ (especially sailors) plights. And just before Christmas, I took my mother to the medium-sized “A Kholem / Dreaming in Yiddish,” a celebration in memory of Adrienne Cooper, a central figure in the revival of Yiddish music, language and culture that attracts new speakers, readers and performers every day. In addition to Cooper’s educational and administrative work at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research that led to its extensive Yiddish music archive instigated and organized by Henry Sapoznik (and to Cooper’s co-founding, with Sapoznik, of KlezKamp, an annual week in the Catskills of learning and living music and stories in Yiddish, now in its 28thyear), and more recently to ten+ years as Cultural attaché to the Workman’s Circle, a Jewish social justice and Yiddish-language educational group, Cooper was herself a fabulous singer and interpreter of Yiddish song, with an all-embracing perspective on Yiddish culture.

Cooper’s reach was vast and deep – but I didn’t really get to know how broad her knowledge and interests were until I heard nearly 60 musicians and speakers reveal a small portion of the kaleidoscope of her life, performing a very few of her favorite songs and telling a few tales at “A Kholem,” which was billed as a celebration, and an opportunity to raise funds to carry on Cooper’s work. The concert lasted about two-and-a-half hours without intermission, but it felt so much shorter; crammed with 31 speeches and performances, it was overwhelming in its depth and breadth of the Yiddish cultural experience.

My mother smiled ear-to-ear throughout the concert, and afterwards told me she’d known many of the songs from her earliest years. I should mention that though my mother’s parents from Poland spoke Yiddish at home, my mother and her late sister Miriam, of the operatic voice and the decided stylish flair, learned only enough Yiddish from listening to them as was impossible to miss. Like many other immigrants, my grandmother Helen Bernstein Salzberg wanted nothing more than to fit in to America, and so Yiddish, the language of her former home, was for “greenhorns” or country cousins, and certainly not for the sophisticated American she intended to be.

Of the concert itself, it’s hard to pick out just a few beautiful meaningful moments. Perhaps all the expressive hand movements? There was celebrated vocalist Michael Alpert dreidling (twisting and spinning) his uplifted hand to emphasize the lyrics of “Di Mashke,” and Cooper’s daughter Sarah Mina Gordon lifting her hands as her mother would have on the traditional song “Who Knows One,” the Yiddish pianist and vocalist, Josh Dolgin, known by his rap moniker as So-Called, making traditional urban gestures, swinging his arm and dipping his elbow for emphasis, or the mini-theatre piece “The Memoirs of Glikl in Hameln,” with costumed performers shrugging shoulders and uplifting questioning hands.

A who’s who of Yiddish instrumental and vocal performers celebrated Cooper with some of her best-loved pieces, including filmmaker Josh Waletzky, fiddler Alicia Svigals in her uniform of red glasses and gown, the GRAMMY-award winning Klezmatics, an all-woman klezmer group, Mikveh, named for the Jewish ritual bath, featuring accordionist Lauren Brody, Svigals, and trumpet player Susan Watts (Cooper had been the group’s signature vocalist), jazz clarinetist David Krakauer, old-time Klezmer musician Pete Sokolow, Yiddish theater director Zalmen Mlotek, and so many others it’s almost impossible to list them. From traditional folk song, to art song, to theatre song, from old to new, Cooper’s partner pianist Marilyn Lerner, trumpet player Frank London, and conductor Michael Winograd pulled together an overwhelming outpouring of love and community. This was one memorial celebration that was emotional and full of sentiment yet never mawkish; it looked back on Cooper’s accomplishments yet refrained from nostalgia. A few short speeches and poems from Cooper’s younger brother Michael, from the director of YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center Jeffrey Shandler and from Michael Wex, and almost before we knew it, it was done, with a thundering ovation and almost no dry eyes in the packed house. The crowd surging out of the Kaye Playhouse of Hunter College swarmed the CD table to buy Cooper’s last recording, and to congratulate the performers. It was an incredible evening, the kind she would have organized and reveled in. Adrienne Cooper should have been there.

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