Dnieper Shlepper

Welcome to Dnieper Shlepper!

2007-07-19T06:03:00.002-07:00

Due to popular demand (well, popular in my view) I present the latest member of the growing Cohen Dynasty of Blogs: Dnieper Shlepper. I have created this as a separate blog page to host blogpost reports from my trip down the Dnieper River in the Ukraine in May 2007. All of these posts were originally published on my regular blog Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere. The trip was also documented by a film crew from the National Film Board of Canada, who also maintain a blog about the event. The film crew included Canadian Film/Food Mastermind Barry Lazar, who really inspired me to document the unique flavors of the local chow... on film, at least. Concieved of and primarily organized by the prodigious Dolgin Family - especially DJ Socalled Josh Dolgin - a dozen or so of the world's best Klezmer musicians, and a delightful cast of travellers on the Klezmer Heritage Cruise from Kiev to Odessa in the Ukraine. I will soon add a few fresh postings to this blog on topics I left uncovered during my Ukrainian blog blitz of the spring. Enjoy...

Kiev for the Hungry

2007-07-19T06:03:00.001-07:00

Heading home from Odessa, we stayed a few days to enjoy Kiev. Kiev has a chain of self-service resturants that became my lifeline to lunch - good, filling peasant food for about a buck a plate. Below, in the Podil district.
We found these all over town - always packed, always serving fresh dishes, 100% Ukrainian... This next one is directly behind the Bessarabian Market.
Here is a $5 dinner: borscht, baked ribs, stewed cabbage, cabbage salad. I was worried about eating low carb meals in the Ukraine. Silly me.Blintzes, which Fumie eats as an afternoon snack. Cheese filled with sour cream and berry preserves. These were called "blintzy" which will forever cause my appreciation of blintzes as a Jewish heritage food to be filled with mirth and frivololity. Blintzy! Blintzy! Blintzy!
Fruit filled vareniky dumplings. No, I didn't try these, Fumie did, several time a day. She is much smaller than me. I am much bigger than her.

Salo is salt cured bacon fat. Often consumed raw with onions, salo is the stereotypical Ukrainian snack, and the point of many Ukrainian jokes (i.e.: A customs official asks a Ukrainian traveller "Do you have any Drugs?" The Ukrainian answers "Yes. I am carrying salo." "But salo is not a drug!" "Yes it is. When I eat salo I get high..." There is even the phenomenon of chocolate covered salo served in fancy resturants. Even Hungarians, who really love raw bacon and consume it daily, haven't quite made a national cult of pig fat. Bacon. We all love bacon, don't we? I am taking it that not too many frum Jews read Dumneazu, so I'll just say what we all think: bacon is treyf, forbidden, unkosher. And so good. Ukrainians agree, and eat their local version, known as salo, raw. That's right. Pig fat sashimi. Yes they have cured and smoked bacon as well, but there is nothing they love more than some raw pig fat. Given that Ukrainians make about EU 130 a month on average, I can only wonder who it is that chows dowm on all the caviar sold in the market. Most of the jars contain salmon caviar from farm raised fish, but for $10 you can chow down on fish eggs for breakfast in an amount that would set you back about $200 in a japanese restaurant.
Kvas trucks began appearing toward the end of the trip. Kvas is considered a summer drink, and tank trucks appear at city squares offering plastic cups of this fizzy fermented bread drink. It's fantastic on a hot day.
I am definately going to try brewing kvas this summer. Although fermented, it is so low in alcohol that is considered acceptable for consumption by children in Russia and the Ukraine. Horilka is the Ukrainian for vodka. And my, how people love their vodka. A bottle of pure grain based spirit was about $3, and as long as you didn't mix it with anything like beer or wine, one could wake up in the morning with virtually no hangover at all.

Odessa Fish Market

2007-07-19T06:02:00.002-07:00

Just next to the Odessa Train station there is a huge, sprawling marketplace offering fresh produce, plastic shoes, Uzbek dried apricots, pink hair ornaments, just about anything that a happy Odessan could want. Including fish.Especially fish. Above are pickled mussels sold by a Korean pickle seller. Well over a half million Koreans live in the former Soviet Union, where they are known as Koryo-saram, and they have been there since the mid-19th century, mainly working as rice farmers. Through their influence, Russians are well acquainted with all kinds of radical kimchee and korean pickles - sea weed kimchee was available in every shop that sold fish, for example.Koreans from Russia were the first to introduce communism into Korean politics, and one of Russia's most beloved rock stars, Viktor Tsoi, was a Koryo-saram. Kim Jong-Il, the madman leader of North Korea, was born in the village of Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk, where his father, Kim Il-sung, commanded a battalion of the Soviet Red army, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles.
Sturgeon for sale. Russians and Ukrainians eat a lot of smoked sturgeon, and caviar is offered at every market, but this was the first time I saw whole sturgeon for sale. Sturgeon poaching for the illicit caviar trade is endangering populations in many areas, so I wasn't surprised that the sturgeon sellers weren't too happy about having their photograph taken. On the other hand, a jumping sturgeon almost killed a woman in florida in April, so let's not get to sentimental about them. They can be bad fish. Smoked fish. In American Jewish food tradition we retain a fondness for smoked fish in many forms - lox for our bagels, for instance, or "smoked sable" which is essentially Alaskan black cod smoked in an almost perfect imitation of smoked sturgeon. Smoked whitefish, which is a staple of New York's Jewish "appetizing" shops, obviously has its Yiddish roots in the Odessa fish market. In the Ukraine, however, most of the fish are either mackeral, herring or various unsavory looking fresh water species. We bought one of these smoked babies (foreground) to take home and try out. It was incredibly salty and just about inedible. Of course I ate it all. But when it comes to inedible... there is always one more border to cross...Dried fish, or vobla is a common Russian snack. Vobla is generally eaten with a glass of beer, which balances the salty taste of the fish. Vobla could be considered as raw fish, but it is, in fact, salt-cured. It is soaked in brine for two weeks and then is thoroughly air-dried for another two, which in the end acts as a form of chemical cooking. As my buddy Igor explains it "Vobla takes the role of chips when you drink beer." You strip bits of salty dried fish meat off the bones and chase it with a swig of beer. I bought a packet of pre-stripped vobla and gave it a try... and gagged. It was... incredibly... horrible. I met my match. I surrender. Vobla wins. I still have two packages sitting in the kitchen waiting for some homesick Russian to show up at my door... How about this: take the lowly pike, which confounds fish lovers by having delicious flesh but is riddled with lots of tiny Y-shaped bones... and give it the vobla treatment. Mmmm... dried salty Y-shaped bones...Basic pork butcher's offerings include blood sausage, bacon, pig's ears, and salo, a raw pig fat delicacy that Ukrainian love. Living in Hungary I'm pretty well versed in the art of pig sushi, so I wasn't at all surprised. I'll write more later on the Ukrainian cult of salo.Free range chicken? And next to that, some very large hares. Trucks offer live carp swimming in their tanks. The owner dips in a net, pulls one out, whacks it on the head with a club, and places it in a plastic bag. Often the carp are only stunned and jump to life while taking them home on the tram. Happened to me once in Budapest. I do not like carp much. At all. It is the number one fish consumed in eastern Europe, if not the world, but carp doesn't do it for me. Soft fatty flesh, tastes like mud, lots of floating Y-shaped bones. Basically, carp is a pig with fins. My opinion of carp can be summed up in one small linguistic pecadillo: the Romanian word for carp. Says it all...

Odessa

2007-07-19T06:02:00.001-07:00

Odessa. Few cities carry as much oral history to Jewish families as this beautiful Black Sea port. Russia formally gained possession of the area in 1792, when it became a part of Novorossiya ("New Russia") the vast south Ukrainian steppeland that had once belonged to the Ottoman Tatars. As in Kherson, the area was populated by a mix of colonists, including French, Spanish, English, Germans and Jews. French and Russian were the primary spoken languages, and Odessa - although located in the Ukraine - is primarily Russian speaking today. Waiters in cafes still often use the term rubel (instead of the Ukrainian name for the currency hrivny) when telling prices.

In 1905 Odessa was the site of a workers' uprising supported by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin. Sergei Eisenstein's famous motion picture The Battleship Potemkin included a scene where hundreds of Odessa citizens were murdered on the great stone staircase (now popularly known as the "Potemkin Steps"), in one of the most famous scenes in motion picture history.

Odessa was unique among Jewish communities in the Russian Pale of Settlement in that its Jewish community - 30% of the population - was not governed by a Rabbinical council, but by a secular Jewish self government. Jewish refugees of the pogroms flocked to the prosperous and relatively liberal city - including my Grandparents, who fled to Odessa from Bessarabia after the 1906 Kishinev pogrom. This led to the developement of a lively secular Jewish culture, the presence of hundreds of Jewish taverns and bars, and eventually to a whole genre of Russian language "Odessa songs" in a style that mixed Yiddish folk music, Russian estrade, and old jazz into a particularly local sound, beloved by Soviet Jews.Duringt he Soviet era, the Jewish population of Odessa assimilated into Russian speakers - according to Prof. Dovid Katz, who did a survey of Yiddish dialects including Odessa, today there are very few old people who still speak Yiddish. Still, the Jewish presence is evident in even the street names: Jew Street.. a major downtown thoroughfare...Just off of Jew Street was the main Synagogue. On a weekday, still used for Talmud Tora by what appears to be a Chabad Lubavitch dominated congregation. The old Jewish quarter, the Moldovanka, the focus of so much Yiddish song (In Ades, in Ades, af di Moldovanka/ Ikh hob gelibt a meydele, a greyser charlatanke!) is no longer what it once was. Most folk under the age of seventy could not even tell you where the neighborhood was. Eric, Drorit, yours truly, and Fumie in front of the old Synagogue.Jewish identity need not be a matter of solemn reflection and good taste. In the Odessa Jewish musuem we found what appeared to be a dancing Santa Claus doll dressed as a hasid, mechanically davening at the entrance to the Museum. Yes, this is the museum run by the Odessa Jewish community. You often find odd takes on Jewishness among assimilated Jewish communities in East Europe... one man's offensiveness is just another man's kitsch.Lunch was to be had at a small working class cafeteria... including pelmeni, which are small meat filled dumplings. Usually, in the Ukraine, these are larger and called vareniky, but such is the stubborn Russophilic identity of Odessa...Strolling around town, one gets a truly mediteranean feeling. The architecture is glorious...But the dancing hasid dummy... you have to see this in action. I actually did a shakey pan shot around the museum just to prove that this thing actually is an exhibit in the Odessa Jewish Museum. This clip actually was a Youtube hit when I first posted it...

Konsonans Retro: Best World Music Idea in Ages

2007-07-19T06:01:00.002-07:00

Christian Dawid is not exactly the kind of name one would associate with one of the world’s best klezmer musicians. Few Klezmer guys are named Christian, although a lot are named David. If you live in East Europe anyone named David (or, in Berlin, Dawid) is assumed to be Jewish. Christian isn’t, for purposes of ethno-pigeonholing, but listen to him play the clarinet and you might doubt you first assumptions. Christian plays with a lot of the best Klezmer bands internationally, and as a mainstay of the Berlin Klezmer scene, he really knows the music. His latest project is Konsonans Retro, in which he teams up with the Baranovsky family village brass band of of Kodyma, in the western Odessa region, Ukraine, right near the Moldavian border, and adds a heavy-handed touch of Jewish musical repertoire and aesthetic to their Ukraino-Moldavian folk style of wedding music, and vice versa. Here is the band as I first heard them – playing for the boat as it approached the port of Odessa just after breakfast in early May, 2007….
This is an approach that should have appeared years ago… someone with a full command of early and modern Klezmer styles working with local east European musicians who still maintain the folk style of local wedding music that fed the spring that made klezmer the world music phenomenon of the pre-WWI years in the suburbs of Odessa.
Odessa is the source city of so much Yiddish tradition. Unlike other ities in the Russian Pale of Settlement, it was Novorossiya at its best – the only city not where Jews were not governed by a rabbinical council. That meant that Jews were free to evolve into a secular, civil society. And that meant taverns and music. Even today the culture and dialect of Odessa is marked by the fact that before WWII over 30% of its inhabitants were Jewish. On the other hand, throughout its history Odessa has been a strong player in the Russification of the former Tatar lands of Novorossiya, and the result is that today there are very few speakers of Yiddish in Odessa. The Jews of Odessa mostly spoke Russian after the 1920s. And they made songs in Russian. Especially Jewish gangster songs. Such as the well known Odessa tune “Lemonchiki”

ja umeju malatit', omeju vimolatchivat'umeju shariki krutit', karmani vivoratjivat'

"I'm so smart and I have a good pair of handsI can empty your pockets outbefore you bat an eye"

oi limonchiki, vi moi limonchikigde rastjoti vi n mojom sadovoi limonchiki, vi moi limonchikivi rastjote v soni na balkonchike

"oi, limonchiki (millions of bucks)where do you grow, in which orchardoi limonchiki, you grow on sonya's balcony"

And Sonya had a hell of a rack.. (i.e., a balcony….)
My Grandfather, Moshe Onitiskansky, lived in Odessa for awhile after fleeing Kishinev (today’s Chishinau, capitol of the Republic of Moldova) after the 1906 pogrom. So did my Grandmother. And the rest is history.

Uzbek Food: Shashlik and Samosas

2007-07-19T06:01:00.001-07:00

While in the Ukraine I found a replacement for White Castle Hamburgers: Uzbek food. Big, smelly Central Asian Turkic nomads who have a strangle hold on the dried fruit and spice sections of Ukraines open markets. And Uzbeks like meat. Even better: Uzbeks like marinated lamb shish kebab - shashlik - grilled outdoors on a wood burning mangal grill.
Just before our ship was about to leave Sebastopol, we ran ashore to get a couple of bottles of mineral water at the central market. On board the ship, ordering a bottle of water with lunch cost a mere seven times more than showing up with your own bottle. Following the smell of meaty smoke, we turned a corner and found this shashlik stand behind the market, and immediately lost all our enthusiam for another on-board ship lunch.

Being on a low-carb eating regimen means that I don't get hungry easily, but it had been a while since I had really filled my belly and this was obviously the way to do that. I ordered a double portion of lamb shashlik and Fumie ordered the lagman soup.Fumie needs her Asian noodle soups, and this is as far west as we can get and still call this an Asian noodle soup. Thick noodles in a stewed lamb broth with eggplant and vegatables. Not content to remain seated in meat heaven, I nosed around the back and found an outdoor oven baking the unique Uzbek version of burek called samosa. Nothing at all like an Indian samosa, these were triangular bureks filled with ground lamb or cheese.
The Uzbek bread is called non (compare to Hindi naan) or lepyoshka (lepenje in Croat) and is always stamped in the center before baking.
Finding more Uzbek shashlik joints became my obsession dureing the rest of the trip. In Odessa we met some friendly Uzbek dried fruit sellers in the marketplace. My skeletal command of Turkish didn't work as well with Uzbeks as it had with Tatars, but it broke the barriers down enough to ask where the shashlik shack was...Shashlik stand, Odessa. A tin shack in the back of the junk market behind the vegetable market. Turkish karaoke blaring at full volume.
Happy diners after a very loud meal of plov and shashlik. Belly full, I can once again face the boat.

Moored next to us in Odessa was this:Aha! Now I know where they come from!

Crimea's Tatars: Yevaptoria and Bachiksaray

2007-07-19T06:00:00.001-07:00

In Yevaptoria we visited the Tatar Mosque. The Crimean Tatars are a turkic people descended from the Turkic speaking muslim Tatar groups that formed the main troops of the Golden Horde. For centuries they were independant, and during medieval times the Tatars were knwn as great slave traders, raiding for slavic christian slaves to be sold into sugar plantation slavery in Sicily and Cyprus, a trade that came to an end with the discovery of the Americas. So from the very beginning, the Russians were never very keen on the Tatars. Absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1475, the Crimea was annexed by Russia after the Russo-Turkish wars ended in 1783. For the next 150 years, Tatars began emigrating into a diaspora, moving to Anatolian Turkey (especially around Eskisehir, near Ankara) Romania, Bulgaria, and beyond. Those that remained were forcibly deported by Stalin during WWII, and sent to Central Asia. For almost fifty years the Crimea was devoid of its original inhabitants. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tatars have been coming home to squat wherever they find empty land. Today, more than 250,000 Crimean Tatars are living in the Crimea and another 250,000 are still in exile in Central Asia.
The Imam of the Yevaptoria mosque was happy to recieve dozens of unexpected Jewish guests. Most Tatars are bilingual Russian speakers, and many of the younger Tatars speak only Russian, but using my incredibly bad Turkish I was able to manage a basic conversation with the Imam and his assistants, who, it turned out, had taken some of their religious training in Istanbul. Tatar is not very different from Anatolian Turkish... about the same relationship as Portuguese and Spanish. I've always had a soft spot for Tatars, coming across communities of Tatars in Romania and Bulgaria I have always felt welcomed wherever my bad command of Turkish finds me. In Istanbul Tatars would walk up to Fumie and say "Look! You have eyes just like ours!" and offer us tea. History flung communities of Tatars far and wide - military settlements of Tatars were hired by Polish and Lithuanian Dukes to patrol as far away as Gdansk and Helsinki, where Tatar communities remain to this day. One friend of mine, a Polish Tatar, explained that the Tatars in Poland were enobled in the 18th century, and thus they are considered as noble Poles who "are not Catholic" - which is to say they are Muslim in an otherwise monolithic definition of Poles as Catholics. One of the first Mosques in New York City was founded by Polish Tatars in the 1870s. And the late actor Charles Bronson - born Charles Buchinsky - was a Polish Lipka Tatar.Bakhchisaray was the capitol of the Tatar Khanate, and is the location of the Great Palace of the Tatar Khans, the Hansaray. Preserved in no small part because of a fountain that inspired a poem by Pushkin, the building was a beautiful example of Ottoman architecture.We started to get a bit impatient with our guided tour - in Russia, you don't just wander around museums. No. There is a defined set way to experience a museum, and your tour guide will explain this to you. You will spend twenty minutes in this room. You will regard the ornaments on the wall, you will not wander off, you will not sit down. So we escaped, and found that the entire municipality of Bachiksaray was celebrating Soviet Victory day in the courtyard of the palace.And what is Soviet Victory Day without the March of the Much Decorated Veterans! When you ask to take one's photograph, they will pose with grace and pride - and usually offer to tell you then and there what they did to earn these decorations, even if you speak no Russian at all... And among them, the Afghantsi, the hardened veterans of the USSR's own war in Afghanistan. But all around - smiles and flowers for the foriegn visitors lucky enough to visit on such a proud holiday. We were treated like rock stars by the schoolchildren eager to practice their English on us. Being with a guided tour, we couldn't spend as much time as we would have liked in Bachiksaray... but if I had to choose a place to return to, this would be it.

Crimea: Sebastopol, Karaites, Tatars, and Jews

2007-07-19T05:59:00.000-07:00

After leaving Kherson, our cruise crossed the Black Sea and in the morning we pulled into the port of Sebastopol in the Crimean penninsula. Sebastopol is the home port of the Russian Black Sea fleet, which was divided between Russia and the Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet union, but Russia still mantains its fleet here by agreement, and Sebastopol was closed to foreign visitors until 1996, mainly because they didn't want people like ourselves strolling into Balaclava Bay taking photos of the Russian submarine fleet in dry dock... as seen below.
If anybody were to tell me that someday I would be pointing my cameras at the Soviet sub fleet in Sebastopol, and snapping the kind of Man-From-U.N.C.L.E pictures that would normally get you sent to Siberia for a long, cold vacation, I wouldn't have believed them. Nobody even tried to stop me. Heck, I'm not even allowed to take photographs in Newark Airport... sheesh, things have changed. Sebastopol was a beautiful port city, built in classical old style, which is amazing since it was almost entirely destroyed by the Nazis in WWII - only ten buildings in Sebastopol remained undamaged after WWII. Our arrival on May 7th coincided with the beginnings of Soviet Victory Day celebrations, and there were naval cadets at the Victory Monument at the center of town. Veterans were walking around proudly wearing their medals, and we met one old sailor who spoke to us in rapid fire Russian that I could not understand, except for the words "Khruschev," "Kennedy," and "Cuba." He had been in the Cuban missile crisis, which I remebered as a kid because we had to evacuate New York and, as I remember, I was only allowed to take one toy with me... I chose my Tonka Dump Truck. So this was the guy that scared the poop out of us! But in the end he shook our hands and called out after us "Mir!" Peace indeed.
Our big trip was to the rather down at the heels town of Yevaptoria, where our delegation was to help in the dedication ceremony of new Torak scrolls at the Synagogue, which is undergoing rennovations. The congregation seemed to be a mixture of Ashkenazim as well as some local Krimchak Jews - who speak a Jewish version of the local Tatar language.

After lunch at the synagogue we moved on to visit some of the other communities in Yevaptoria, including the Tatar Mosque (more on that later) and the unique Karaite Kenesa, the central house of worship of the Crimean Karaites. Karaites are an offshoot sect of Judaism that broke off in the period during which the Talmud was being writted in Mesopotamia, and adhered to a fundamentalist reading tof the Torah. Karaite communities existed in the Crimea with offshoots still surviving today in Lithuania, Poland (to a small extent) as well as in the United States and Israel (present home to the Egyptian Karaite communities.) Turkic speaking Karaites (in the Crimean Tatar languagee, Qaraylar) have lived in Crimea for centuries. Their origin is a matter of great controversy. Some regard them as descendants of Karaite Jews who settled in Crimea and adopted a form of the Kypchak tongue. Others view them as descendants of Khazar or Kipchak converts to Karaite Judaism. Today Crimean Karaites deny their Israelite origins and consider themselves to be descendants of the Khazars. Modern Karaims seek to distance themselves from being identified as Jews, emphasizing what they view as their Turkic heritage and claiming that they are Turkic practitioners of a "Mosaic religion" separate and distinct from Judaism. On the other hand, many scholars state that the phenomenon of claiming a distinct identity apart from the Jewish people appears to be no older than the nineteenth century, when it appeared under the influence of such leaders as Avraham Firkovich.The Karaites are a people who are situated at, perhaps, the most sad and noisesome covergence of the debate on Jewish identity. I used to be on a Karaite mailing list - it was the most nasty and contemntious email communication I have ever experienced and put me off of email lists forever. Essentially, the Karaites claim, as our guide told us, to be "practicsing Judaism, but not Jews." Which is pretty weird for people who are incredibly kosher, keep the Jewish calender, and were slaughtered in the Holocaust. But in the mid 19th century, as Russian Jews were developing a written secular literature and its corresponding pursuit of history, the Karaites gave us Avraham Firkovich, a true piece of work, who played to Russian concepts of antisemitism, and while he was a respected scholar and Karaite leader in close touch with Russian Yiddishists such as Harkavy, was not above forging documents and even gravestones in his single minded pursuit of presenting the Karaites as non-semitic as possible. Firkovich was the first Jewish scholar to work on the discovery of the Cairo Geniza (which is mostly known through the work of Solomon Schechter.) In Firkovich's later years, however, he became obsessed with "proving" that Crimean Karaites were not Judean in descent, but rather Khazar; to this end Firkovich resorted to forgeries of tombstones and documents. Because of this, any document that passed through Firkovich's hands is considered academically suspect. His theories, caught on in the Russian imperial court, and the Karaites were excluded from the restrictive measures against other Jews.The saddest pshat of the story... was related by Prof. Orenstein... just before the Holocaust, the Nazis consulted with three of the most respected Jewish scholars alive in Europe. The Nazis asked whether or not the Karaites were Jews. Knowing the fate of the Karaites if they answered correctly, all three scholars answered that the Karaites were most certainly not Jews. This bought time, but not much. The majority of the Karaites were murdered alongside the rest of the Crimean Jews, but to this day they maintain the ancient forgery-based fiction that somehow they are not Jews... As we say, if you were there with Moses at Mt. Sinai... you have dos pintele yid... the spark of all the Jewish souls that will ever be. And yes, the Karaites were there. They have the spark.

Market Day in Kherson

2007-07-19T05:58:00.002-07:00

Kherson is a charming, if somewhat down-at-the-heels port town in the southern Ukraine Dneiper delta region, which obviously is off the tourist circuit. Historically, this is the region of "Agric Settlements" - when the Russian Tsars finally wrested control of this region from the Tatars of the Golden Horde, it was settled by farmers lured by the offer of land free from the yoke of serfdom. Large communities of Mennonites from Friesia setted here, from where they eventually emigrated to Canada and the United States. Jews also formed such settlements in a Zionist back-to-the-land movement which intended to make husky proletarian farmhands out of ghetto shoemakers and yeshiva buchers.

We found the central market in Kherson, and as we snapped photos, people didn't react adversely to us at all... in fact, they mugged for the camera.
The novelty of meeting "turisti" here overcame everybody's reticence.
Our first encounter with the more hillbilly side of dried fish... there was a pile of raw minows here with a little cup for you to spit the bones into after a taste. Even Fumie couldn't bring herself to try, and she is about as adventurous as human beings can get when it comes to raw fish. When I go fishing I have to watch that she doesn't start snacking out of the bait bucket.
Smoked whole catfish. Apparently, there is a whole cuisine involving dried or smoked fish and beer, condiered as a whole set meal in itself. You pick bits off of dried fish and swig beer, the fish playing a role sort of like chips... Old men would stand around piles of dried fish arguing the merits of one or the other. I bought a packet of pre-stripped dried fish. The stench was incredible, and no, I couldn't get more than two bits down the gullet before tossing the whole thing away.
The old Comintern Cinema seems to have seen better days...
Take out lunch from a supermarket: one US dollar gets you ten stuffed cabbage golubsi.

Dnieper Shleppers

2007-07-19T05:58:00.001-07:00

I still haven't completely absorbed the arrival home from the Ukrainian trip - the next slew of blog posts wil try and sort through some of the experiences and the slew of photos I took. As I said, being on a cruise ship is a new travel sensation for me - no rural Romanian train stations, no deportations, no hitch hiking in Bulgaria, none of the things I am accustomed to. Still, one could come to like this mode of transport. For one thing, there is breakfast. And not just any crawlouttabed and cramsumtindownmygullet breakfast, but a real hotel style brekkie... sitting next to, lets say, Prof. Dovid Katz who runs the Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish, self proclaimed "only Litvak born in Boro Park" and a man who knows enough to bring his own yoghurt. Another unique experience was to be on board a ship in which not only was the Yiddish language and culture the subject of the cruise, but Yiddish was also the living language and culture of a great many of the folks on board. And I'm not talking the Hungarian Satmar and Vizhnitzer Hasid-based Yiddish that I have been working with for the last ... well... since sobieski's zayt... no, these were mostly folks who had roots in the Ukraine or Poland, a lot like the people I grew up around back in the Bronx as a kid. A great many came from Montreal, where the Jewish community still maintains a Yiddish language High School, due to the peculiarities of the French-based Quebec school system. The result is that you have a large population in Montreal that speaks Yiddish without being Hasidic - which has a strong and positive effect on the status of Yiddish in the Canadian Askenazic Jewish identity. They spoke a Yiddish that still made jokes, still had songs about falling in love or getting a bit tipsy, still had words for food with something in it that tasted good. The Hungarian Hasids simply don't care about that stuff. A shame, but heck, glorifying Hashem and describing the taste of garlic varnishkes will never share the same episode of Eprah Vinfrei... Here's a good example of what we did on the boat. There might be a jam session with the world's best Klezmer musicians, or maybe a lecture with somebody like Prof. Eugene Orenstein from McGill University's Jewish Studies Program on topics like Jewish Culture in Odessa or Agricultural Setlemnts in the Dnieper Delta region. Some might chose to join Dolgini's Yiddish Choir, or maybe Hélène Domergue-Zilberberg's Yiddish dance sessions. But the best moments were entirely impromtu, like this amazing session of Yiddish Joke telling by the elderly Abe Bartel of Paris, France, translated by Prof. Orenstein (with as straight a face as possible) - you just do not find experiences like this very often in the 21st century...

Afterewards there was usually a session of late night singing and playing in the top-deck bar of the Dnieper Princess. Instead of a dry ethnographic approximation of a Yiddishe party, this was always the real thing. Along the way we picked up Arkady Gendler, the 84 year old Yiddish singer who now lives in Zaporozhye, Ukraine. Arkady came to the attention of Yiddish researchers some years ago and eventually made a CD which reflected his repetoire of rare or less well known Yiddish songs. He is one of the last really great Yiddish singers who picked up his repetoire before the second World War, and had once been an actor in amateur Yiddish theater - which shows. Here is a session he did one evening in the bar lounge - you can see he is more than a simple folk singer - this is a master at work among friends and chaverim.

Interestingly, the melody to this tune "Nokh a Gleyzele Vayn " (Another Glass of Wine) is identical to a solo men's dance played in Transylvania among Hungarians... ethnic connection begats enthic connection... and it all comes down to a tune. Arkady comes from Zaporozhye, which was one of the towns closed to foreigners until 1996, due to the fact that it was a center for weapons and rocket science. This is the town that made the stuff that scared the poop out of me when I was six years old. (Anybody around who can remember Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the UN and screaming "WE WILL CRUSH YOU!" ... I do. The man knew how to make an impression.) Since then, the city has opened up and is home to one of the Ukraine's largest and healthiest Jewish communities. It is also home to the largest hydroelectric dam in the Europe. No more famous rapids. And therefore no more Zaporozhye Cossacks. Don't forget the Cossacks. They like to jump on horses. Neat. Cool. Yee-haa!
I'll be posting more anbout Arkady soon, and more information about this fascinating man's life. But on the meantme, visit the blog page set up by the film crew doing a documentary about Josh and the cruise, and enjoy somethng of a rehearsal for one of the concerts, in which we musicians, out of rehearsal induced frustration, play something we like, instead of something we are actually going to play in concert (The Klezmer Konnundrum. Discuss among yourselves. Via Mark Rubin - a man who knows about Klezmer) Dave Krakauer, Josh Dolgin, and Guy Schalom recreate Dave Tarras' classic 1940s trio sound.

Kiev and the Triumph of Dolginism

2007-07-19T05:57:00.000-07:00

I have been back in Budapest for a few hours, still reeling from the experience of being on the Vast Dolgin Empire's Klezmer Heritage Tour of the Ukraine. For almost two weeks I have been a passenger on the Dneiper Princess cruise ship traveling from Kiev down the Dneiper river through the Ukraine to Odessa, stopping along the way to visit historic Jewish towns, many associated with the developement of the DNA that contributed to the mad genius of Josh Dolgin, the young Jewish musician known as DJ Socalled (although Yankl Falk calls him "Neo" after the guy on the film Matrix... You are the one, Neo... You will save us!) Although Josh has a serious Moyshe Oysher fixation, his roots are in the town of Zaporozhie, and one of the big themes of the trip were to meet with Arkady Gendler, the 84 year old Yiddish singer from Zaporozhie who may well be the finest living Yiddish singer of rare folk songs alive in the former Soviet Union today. The whole was being filmed for a documentary by a Canadian film crew - perhaps some of the most engaging folks on the cruise. (Click on the link for lots more - and better - videos of the trip...) If you need to know more about this menace to consonant music, I am willing to trade informations for food. I firmly believe Josh is a genius... and like many geniuses, such as Lex Luthor... he needs to be made into a comic book epic. And so for the next few blog entries, as I go though the hundreds of pictures I took in the Ukraine, I will attempt to prove to you the real menace of the Dolgin threat. With information from former Soviet sources... Dolgin will be revealed as the Mad Klezmer Genius that he is... Josh is a Mad Genius... backed by a family of less mad geniuses, and his parents - wonderful folks - managed to organize a huge Jewish Heritage cruise through the heart of the eastern Ukraine. Above is one such cruiser standing in Sebastopol harbor in front of the noble Dneiper Princess on Soviet Victory Day... more on Sebastopol later...
Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. When you are on Atkins you eat it. A lot. I did. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht. Borscht....
A typical cabin meal... when we didn't eat in the ship's restaurant... or even when we did, we managed to eat in our room. The ship food was bland and insipid, and ... not very Atkins friendly... so we made do. In the former Soviet Union, everybody has a way of making do. So we see here a fine meal of schmaltz herring, salad, horseradish, and vodka.

It. Does. Not. Get. Better. than. This.
Michael Alpert, possibly the finest of the younger (???) generation of Yiddish singers and fiddlers in the Jewish music world and a dear, dear friend and brother-in-klez, points out the relationship between the Ukrainian horilka (vodka) and the glass to a passing stranger in my shipboard room. Michael speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian, and was our embilical cord to the heart of Russian culture while staggering between Uzbek Kebab-and-Karaoke shacks in Odessa.
We'll get into the fantastic amounts of music experienced on this cruise, but much respect goes to David Krakauer and Alex Kontorovich for holding down the primas roles as lead clarinetists and musical maestros.
And last, but not least, the Ukraine. Amazing. Of course, it is independant, but maintains strong ties to its Russian/Soviet past. On May 1 we took our first stroll into Kiev... right smack into the Communist Party nostalgia rally. Does it ever get more nostalgic than this?

Back Home from the Ukraine

2007-07-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

I'm in the Ukraine!

2007-07-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

Blog posting will be very light in the next two weeks, since I will be in the Ukraine and not often near any internet access. I got called on short notice to participate in Josh Dolgin's (AKA DJ Socalled) Ukrainian Klezmer Music Heritage tour, a journey aboard a luxury liner on the Dneiper River from Kive to Odessa via the Crimea, with concerts and cultural events along the way. Two weeks of deep Ukrainian and Jewish culture. With Fumie along to make sure I behave. On a luxury river liner! Jeeebeezus! I've never been on a cruise before. I've never been to the former Soviet union before. Nor have I ever been to the Ukraine, but I guess if you have to travel through the eastern Ukraine during a political crisis, a luxury liner is the way to do it. Some of my best buddies are on board - Michael Alpert, Josh Dolgin, Eric Stein, David Krakauer... I expect to start laughing on April 29th, and end sometme around May 12. I'll tell you all about it later... it's been almost 90 years since anybody with my DNA has been back to the Ukraine...