The Last Klezmer
Welcome to this week’s look at Ukraine’s Jewish
Heritage.
Klezmer is a traditional Jewish non-liturgical music
with roots in Galicia. Like other folk traditions, klezmer music was passed
down from generation to generation.
Initially klezmer was performed at weddings because
structurally it corresponds to traditional Jewish marital rites.
The actual term «klezmer music» was coined by a Soviet
musicologist in the late nineteen thirties. It gained popularity in the west in
the nineteen eighties.
One of Galicia’s few klezmer musicians to survive the
Holocaust was Leopold Kozlowski. Known as the last klezmer of Galicia, he is a
passionate promoter of klezmer. Now 95, he lives in Krakow, Poland where he
teaches klezmer to non-Jewish students.
Leopold Kozlowski comes from a long line of klezmerim.
His grandfather, Pesach Brandwein, together with his 12 musical sons, founded
the most famous klezmer band in Galicia. One of Leopold’s uncles is clarinetist
Naftule Brandwein, regarded in America as the "king of klezmer.”
In 1918 Leopold Kozlowski was born in the Polish town
of Przemyslany, near Lviv. Due to the shifting borders of the war years, it is
now located in Ukraine.
Before the second world war, half of Przemyslany's
7,000 inhabitants were Jews. In September 1939, Poland was divided between
Germany and Russia, and the town became part of Soviet Ukraine. By 1941 the
town’s population had nearly doubled, as Jews fled there to escape the Nazis.
In July of 1941, the German army arrived in
Przemyslany. Within four months several labour camps stood nearby, and the
slaughter of the town’s Jews had begun. In May 1943, less than two years later,
Przemyslany was declared Judenrein, "cleansed of Jews."
When the Nazis came, Kozlowski fled east, along with
his father and brother. His mother stayed behind. She believed the Nazis would
not harm women.
The men got as far as Kyiv. The SS discovered them hiding in a cemetery the
outskirts of the city. They were freed after
Kozlowski’s father, Zvi, asked the SS if they could play something before
getting shot. As they played, Leopold recalls watching the Nazi’s rifles lower
bit by bit with the music.
The Kozlowskis returned to Peremyshliany, where
Zvi was shot along with 360 other Jews. Leopold’s mother and brother were
murdered soon after.
Leopold spent several months in Nazi labour camps. In
one he taught a Nazi officer the accordion in exchange for food. In another the
Nazis forced him to compose a "death tango" and to play it while
other Jews were led to their deaths.
After the war Leopold Kozlowski studied music, and
graduated from the Lviv Conservatory and Krakow’s Musical Academy.
He settled in Krakow, where he became a leading musical
figure in Poland. He conducted a military orchestra and established a
world-renowned Roma and Jewish music ensemble. He also directed the Jewish
Theater in Warsaw, composed music for stage and screen, and edited the Polish
version of Fiddler on the Roof.
Leopold Kozlowski is well known and revered in the
North American entertainment industry. He performed with Itzchak Perelman in
the film "In the Fiddler’s House” and even appeared in Schindler’s List in
the role of an investor.
He continues to perform, and intends to keep playing
until his last moment. Music, he says, is his life, and his revenge.
In 1994 American klezmer musician and film-maker Yale
Strom released a film documenting Kozlowski’s first trip back to Prezmyslany
since 1945. The title of the film is The
Last Klezmer: Leopold Kozlowski, His Life and Music, and it is on YouTube.