There are a lot of interesting things - besides the music - in the documentary The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, shown last night at the Jewish Film Festival in Miami Beach. Not all the members are Jewish (Paul Morrissett was brought up Quaker) and none of them are able to support themselves solely through their work with the band. Each member is interviewed individually about how he or she makes ends meet; one of them mentioned that winning a Grammy got them no new work. In fact, their recording company went out of business not long after they won the award. To a writer, it all sounded sadly familiar, though at least they get to gather and make beautiful music together, while we have to sit and type in solitude.
I was also interested, of course, in the scenes of their trip to Poland. The violinist Lisa Gutkin is shown saying that she was scared before taking the stage in Krakow, so she took a walk, and on her walk she met an 18-year-old Polish girl who, she said, was "so sweet .. and so genuine." And the girl told her that she and her friends felt deprived growing up in a land that had been emptied of Jews, because for her Jewish culture and Eastern European culture were inseparable. It was the same sentiment I found when I wrote about Krakow's Jewish Cultural Festival in 1999.
