The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye(General Encyclopedia) was a 16-volume set published between 1930 and 1966, with Yiddish and English volumes, some on Jewish topics and others for general knowledge. But that dry description really can't capture the many twists and turns the project took over three decades.
I had a fantastic time chatting with Barry for a book talk sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture. I hope you'll give it a watch. He is a wonderful historian and a really engaging speaker.
(And while you're watching the video, make sure you subscribe to the Congress for Jewish Culture YouTube page.)
The men who launched the Algemeyne project hoped:
"...to add a sophisticated Yiddish language encyclopedia to the already blossoming global genre of Jewish encyclopedias in world languages. The Entsiklopedye’s central tension lay between those who felt the goal should be to offer world knowledge for Yiddish readers, and those who urged the Entsiklopedye to educate Jews about their own history. It was a tension that would linger across the Entsiklopedye’s many twists and turns.
For more on the wild history of Yiddish reference books, see my May column, Encyclopedic Knowledge.
Cantors, khazones, and nigunim were central to the work of the Ansky expedition, carried out in the heart of Hasidic Ashkenaz. In contrast with the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, who found the redemption of Jewishness in books and other texts, the Ansky expedition privileged the sensory and sensual, ephemeral and ghostly traces of what they perceived to be a disappearing, pre-modern existence.
And how do you capture a Yiddish ghost? Not with a proton pack, khas v'sholem, but with an Edison wax cylinder phonograph. The expedition made 500 such recordings (in addition to collecting 1,000 melodies and 1500 folk songs.) AvromRekhtman's memoir of the expedition notes many funny and fascinating (and at times, disturbing) encounters between the expedition team and shtetl residents, mediated by this spooky new piece of technology.
A hundred years later, Jewish modernity is still being shaped in the encounter between Jewish researchers and their Hasidic neighbors. I recently caught up with Jeremiah Lockwood to learn more about his research in modern khazones. As we talked, bright lines of connection emerged between the work of the Ansky expedition team and Jeremiah's own work recording the rebel cantors of contemporary Hasidic Williamsburg.
That new record is called "Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today." But "Hidden Melodies Reveled" - the name of his upcoming Rosh Hashanah concert event with Because Jewish - resonates just as much with the work he's been doing with these Hasidic cantors.
What I discovered in our conversation is that in 2022, Hasidic Williamsburg is not some romantic source of "authentic" Yiddishkayt to be "collected" by objective scientists. Rather, it is a community that, in some surprising ways, is just as alienated from its own past as a child of 1980s Jewish American suburbia, such as myself.
The "hidden melodies" in this case are the recordings of Golden Age khazones, made a hundred years ago by men who prized improvisation and artistry. In order to access this tradition, the Hasidic artists whom Jeremiah recorded had to do their own kind of salvage ethnography. Indeed, one of the cantors got into this repertoire after finding a cassette tape of Golden Age khazones underneath a washing machine! ...
...many cantors took new names when they performed for non-Jewish audiences, at the opera, for example, or even in vaudeville. “Name changes,” he said, “reflect the polyglossia of modern Jewish life. Jews weren’t satisfied with just code switching, they had to change the very substance of their beings. They’re like Jacob wrestling the angel and receiving a new name. It’s the angel of history now, instead of the angel of the Lord.” Lockwood pointed me to the cantor Pierre Pinchik as a particularly vivid example.
Pinchik was born Pinchas Segal somewhere around 1900 in Russia. He went from the Hasidic yeshiva world to the Kyiv conservatory....
...after he had immigrated to the United States, he released an album called Two Sides of Pinchik (1962). The cover features two pictures of him, one, in his cantorial garb, the other, in his incarnation as a suave artist of the world. This duality is also reflected in his song choices. One side of the album is liturgical and the other is traditional Yiddish songs.
There’s something intriguing in theTwo Sidesconcept. Though he has changed his name to the continental-sounding “Pierre,” Pinchik is not hiding anything, but rather, he’s putting his various selves into conversation, perhaps even inviting us to imaginemany sides to Pierre Pinchik. ...
I'll conclude by going to back to Shneur Zalman: "the language of melody is concise."
I recently had a friendly argument with Jeremiah about whether you needed to understand the words of a song to enjoy it. He came down pretty firmly on the "don't need the words" side, a take which, I'll admit, scandalized me, as a writer of words. But it also reminded me that in approaching khazones, it's ok to not worry about the meaning so much and to simply let yourself listen once in a while.
