I had no idea I was “mak(ing) clear how well popular culture can entertain nostalgia, trivialize history, and relieve, without really working through, the traumas of the past.” Turns out that’s what Laurence Roth, a professor of English and director of the Jewish Studies program at Susquehanna University, wrote about a mystery story of mine. Roth’s very cool “Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories” came out from Rutgers University Press in 2004. I became aware of it just two weeks ago, through one of those delightful chains of connection that sometimes happen in life.
My short story, “Wailing Reed,” involves a missing klezmer musician, a young clarinetist for a group I named Klezmania. An older man, a dealer in rare klezmer recordings, asks detective Margo Simon to search for him. The story was published in the collection “Mystery Midrash,” edited by Lawrence W. Raphael.
I was inspired to write the story by my love of klezmer, the wild and crazy music of Eastern European Jews. Back when immigrants were all assimilating, klezmer became one of the strands of American jazz via cats like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. More recently, there’s been a klezmer revival featuring amazing groups like the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Brave Old World, Kol Simcha, and, in San Diego, Yale Strom and Hot Pstromi. (If you want to know more about klezmer, check out Ari Davidow’s Klezmer Shack.)
I became aware of klezmer for the first time in the early 1980’s, when I heard the Big Jewish Band, led by Ron Robboy. At least, I think that was the first time I heard klezmer. But I felt like I was hearing a long-lost tune, my earliest lullaby. The music grabbed my soul in its fist, and I remember sitting in the audience trying not to sob. BTW, my story opens, “Just because klezmer music made her cry … ”
Ron’s path and mine have crossed over the years. He called after he read “The Tin Horse” because he grew up in L.A. and had relatives who’d lived in Boyle Heights. Last week, he called and told me about “Inspecting Jews.” Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found the book and ordered it that day.
“Inspecting Jews” is a fascinating book. Roth takes genre fiction with the seriousness it deserves. He coins the phrase “kosher hybridity” to talk about, as I understand it, a mix of past and present, Jewish and American culture, and “imperfectly remembered Torah.” There are sections on gender (discussing Harry Kemelman and Faye Kellerman), memory, and “alterity” – Jewish otherness.
The section on memory is where he writes about “Wailing Reed,” with its focus on the klezmer revival and rare recordings. He frames the discussion in terms of the commodification of memory, the way we use objects “to put (our) hands physically on the past and take hold of its aura.” And he brings in the intriguing notion of postmemory, a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch, in which people “recollect” a past they haven’t personally experienced but nevertheless connect to deeply through stories, objects, and their imaginations … and where there’s the danger that this imagined past can be distorted.
Writing about “Wailing Reed” and postmemory, Roth says, “By using klezmer as a touchstone for the East European Jewish past, Steinberg’s short story asks readers to consider the mysteries of that past’s emotional and commercial tangibility. Klezmer, as an example of postmemory about Eastern European Jewish life, and as one of the sales champs of the American Jewish popular arts, is a perfect target for criticizing the romanticization and commercialization of the Ashkenazi culture to which klezmer gives voice, literally.”
I can’t say I did any of that consciously! But writing fiction is so intuitive, that to the extent any of those ideas were swirling in my awareness, they bubbled into my characters and the story. Though I also like the idea that none of what Roth sees was even remotely in my mind, and he’s done a jazz-like riff on what I wrote.
One of my favorite pieces of the four pages Roth devotes to the story (almost as long as the story itself!) is this comment about Margo’s visit to a club – part of her search for the missing clarinetist, who also plays in a punk-rock band. Despite feeling impossibly old (in her late 30s) to be there, she ends up liking the music, “an interesting if sometimes weird hybrid of rock and jazz, just as Klezmania’s music combined traditional and modern influences.” That quote is from the story, and I suspect it’s only partly coincidental that I used the word “hybrid” and hybridity is a cornerstone for Roth’s analysis. About this incident, he writes:
“The appeal of both contemporary youth music and the klezmer revival is their weird hybridity, their mixing of dissimilar but not dissonant sounds from the past and from the present. The result is neither nostalgia nor an over-hip smugness, but rather emotionally accessible music that, in the case of Klezmania, is capable of making Simon cry.”
BTW, there’s a good reason Roth particularly appreciated Margo’s response to the punk band. It says in his bio that he was a “guitarist and songwriter in several bands on the L.A. post-punk club circuit” and he still performs with a group with the great name Faculty Lounge.
It’s an amazing experience to hear from someone who’s read my work with care and attention. Any time that happens, it’s a gift. But discovering Roth’s extraordinary engagement with my story is like getting a carload of gifts… all of them exactly what I hoped for. Thank you, Laurence Roth, for your deep attention in “Inspecting Jews.” And thanks, Ron Robboy, for telling me about this wonderful book – and for making music that brought me to tears.
Tags: klezmer, Laurence Roth, mystery, postmemory, Tin Horse