Perhaps the most famous event in modern klezmer happened when Henry Sapoznik, 61, went to North Carolina as a young man to study banjo with oldtime player Tommy Jarrell. Jarrell, realizing that Sapoznik was Jewish, asked the younger musician, “Don’t your people got none of your own music?”
KlezKamp, the annual celebration of Yiddish folk arts, will hold its final gathering in December. The founder says it’s mostly succeeded — and he wants to take on new artistic challenges.
When musicologist Henry Sapoznik first stumbled across a cache of Yiddish radio shows from interwar America, he never suspected they would end up at the Library of Congress.
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Pete Rushefsky writes about Josh Waletzky and “Yaninke,” a song Josh learned from his father, Sholom Waletzky: