Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

This Sunday the Catskill Klezmorim  will play at the Friedman Center at 2 PM. The library doesn’t have their CD (yet), but we do have several items related to klezmer  music for those who would like to know more about the genre. Henry Sapoznik’s Klezmer! Jewish Music from old World to Our World won the Tayloy Award. This 300+ pages book from 1999 is heavily indexed making it easy to use as a reference book. Almost every third page contains an illustration, usually a photograph, making it visually appealing. But the strength of the book is the thoroughness of the text itself.  It provides an overarching cultural history of the past and present of the genre.

The other book on the topic we have is Seth Rogovoy’s The Essential Klezmer bearing the subtitle, “A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, from the Old World to the Jazz Age to the Downtown Avant Garde.” It came out a year later after Sapoznik book. Its 90 page long discography, glossary and series of appendixes make it a unique volume. Anyone who wanted to get a headstart of getting familiar with klezmer could start with it.

If you want to play this beautiful music we also have a score for you. “Klezmerantics, a Musical Heritage was arranged by Seymour W. Milstein for three violins, bass and guitar. Its five thematic section covers 13 separate songs