The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire

286 Pages·2010·2.404 MB·English

by  James Loeffler

The Most Musical Nation
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The Most Musical Nation
Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire
James Loeffler
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2010 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Ehrhardt Roman type by
Tseng Information Systems, Inc., Durham, North Carolina.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loeffler, James Benjamin.
The most musical nation : Jews and culture in the late Russian empire / James Loeffler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-13713-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Russia—Music—History and
criticism. 2. Jewish musicians—Russia—History. 3. Music—Russia—19th century—
History and criticism. 4. Music—Russia—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3776.L64 2010
780.89'924047—dc22
2009046398
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Rachel
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
A Note on Transliterations and Dates xii
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1. Emancipating Sounds: Anton Rubinstein and the Rise of the
Russian Jewish Musician 15
CHAPTER 2. National Voices, Imperial Echoes: Joel Engel and the Russian
Jewish Musical Fin de Siècle 56
CHAPTER 3. The Most Musical Nation: The Birth of the Society for Jewish
Folk Music 94
CHAPTER 4. Frozen Folk Songs: Modern Jewish Culture between Art and
Commerce 134
CHAPTER 5. The Neighbors’ Melodies: The Politics of Music in War and
Revolution 173
Conclusion 210
Notes 221
Bibliography 245
Index 263
Acknowledgments
As a young musician coming of age in the twilight of the Cold War, I was
fascinated by one of the unlikelier legacies of the Soviet Union’s collapse:
the sight of thousands of immigrant Jewish musicians swelling the ranks of
Israeli orchestras and busking on Israeli street corners. Where had all these
violinists and pianists come from? Why were there so many Jews involved
in Soviet classical music? And how could they have thrived in a regime so
overtly antisemitic? The search for answers to these questions led me fur-
ther and further back in time to the closing decades of the tsarist era. There,
alongside the klezmer fiddlers famous from Yiddish literature, I found to my
surprise that Jewish classical musicians had been even more prevalent than
in the Soviet period. As I sought the reasons behind this historical phenome-
non, I came to realize that the stories of these musicians revealed a larger set
of truths about art and identity, nationalism and empire, missing from our
picture of the Russian Jewish past. What began as a casual sociological obser-
vation about the end of the Soviet Union turned into something else entirely:
a cultural history of Jews and music in the late Russian Empire.
This book grew out of a doctoral dissertation written in the history de-
partment at Columbia University. There Yosef Ḥayim Yerushalmi patiently
ushered me into the study of Jewish history, in the process honing my ap-
preciation for the fine art (and flawed science) of history writing. Richard
Wortman introduced me to the riches of Russian history and the paradoxes
of empire, generously tolerating my early ignorance. Ezra Mendelsohn,
Jeremy Dauber, and Mark von Hagen each contributed invaluable advice
and feedback at both early and later stages of the writing process. Mark
Slobin opened my ears to the soundscapes of eastern Europe, and Jeremy
Eichler shared both his critical insights into classical music and his pas-
sion for the Russian Jewish violin tradition. Most of all, my advisor, Michael
Stanislawski, taught me what it means to read the past critically, with equal
parts intellectual skepticism and historical imagination. He also proved to be
a model teacher, a great mentor, and a good friend.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Other colleagues have also been generous with their time, comments,
and critiques along the way, including Leonid Butir, Judah Cohen, Alon
Confino, Nathaniel Deutsch, Walter Zev Feldman, David Fishman, Robert
Geraci, John Klier, Mark Kligman, Michael Leavitt, Klára Móricz, Benjamin
Nathans, Martin Peretz, Noam Pianko, Simon Rabinovitch, Evan Rapport,
Daniel Schwartz, Edwin Seroussi, Ludmila Sholokhova, Francesco Spag-
nolo, Shaul Stampfer, Moshik Temkin, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Theodore Weeks,
and Steven Zipperstein. Paula Eisenstein Baker offered constant and enthu-
siastic help from start to finish. Charles and Robyn Krauthammer passion-
ately supported the music research and provided a platform to share it with
a broader public audience.
Historians depend on the immense knowledge, resourcefulness, and
generosity of archivists and librarians. Rachel Becker, George Crafts, Leo
Greenbaum, Sharon Horowitz, Elliot Kahn, Ellen Kastel, Erin Mayhood,
Chana Mlotek, Fruma Mohrer, Peggy Pearlstein, Lewis Purifoy, Bret Werb,
and the staffs of the Columbia University and University of Virginia inter-
library loan offices helped me to locate and obtain rare publications. I owe
great debts as well to the Center for Jewish History; the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research; the Harvard College Library Judaica Division; the Dorot
Jewish, Performing Arts, and Slavic and Baltic divisions of the New York
Public Library; the African and Middle Eastern and Performing Arts read-
ing rooms of the Library of Congress; and the Library of the Jewish Theo-
logical Seminary.
Many of the documents and images used in this book came from a host of
archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel. I am most grateful to the staff at the
Gnesin State Musical College, the State Archives of the Russian Federation,
the Moscow Central Historical Archive, the Glinka Central State Museum
of Musical Culture, and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, all
in Moscow; in St. Petersburg, the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Rus-
sian Academy of Sciences, the Manuscripts Division of the St. Petersburg
State Conservatory Library, the Central State Archive of Literature and Art
of St. Petersburg, the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg, the
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)
of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian National Library, and the
Russian Institute for the History of the Arts; Kiev’s Institute of Manuscripts
and Judaica Division at the V. I. Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine,
the Ukrainian Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art, and
the Kiev City State Archives; in Jerusalem, the Jewish Music Research Cen-
tre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Central Archives for the
History of the Jewish People, and the Music Department of the National
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Library of Israel. I especially thank Lara Troyansky and Shelley Helfand of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives in New York,
Galina Kopytova of the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts, and
Gila Flam of the National Library of Israel for permission to reproduce
images from their respective collections. In Moscow, Ilya Kolmanovsky and
Nikita Bezrukov provided invaluable research assistance. Will Cicola artfully
translated a mass of unruly xeroxes into the neat musical examples that ac-
company the text.
Numerous individuals made my travels in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel
an amazing experience of friendship as well as research. Thank you to Anna
Abramovna Rivkina, Sam and Anna Amiel, Geoff Anisman, Lena Drozdova,
Konstantin and Tanya Filiminov, Leonid Finberg, Gila Flam, Rita Flomen-
boim, Alexander Frenkel, J. Arch Getty, Victor Kelner, Evgeny Khazdan,
Galina Kopytova, Mikhail Lukin, Larissa Miller, Maria Mikhailovna, Lud-
mila Milchakova, Miriam Neirick, Jascha Nemtsov, David Rozenson, Irina
Sergeeva, Edwin Seroussi, and Vladimir Tropp. I am also particularly grate-
ful to Eugene Avrutin, Michael Aylward, Ludmila Barsova, Natan Meir, and
Lynn Sargeant for sharing valuable nuggets of historical and bibliographic
information, including the whereabouts of specific archival materials.
Many organizations have offered generous financial assistance and intel-
lectual encouragement to this project. The archival research was supported in
part by grants and fellowships from the Center for Jewish History, Columbia
University’s Harriman Institute and Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies,
the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hays-Fulbright Doctoral Disserta-
tion Research Award of the U.S. Department of Education, the Memorial
Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Wexner Graduate Foundation, and the
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The final stages of research and writing
were made possible thanks to the assistance of the University of Virginia
Corcoran Department of History, Dean’s Office, Office of the Vice President
for Research and Graduate Studies, and Jewish Studies Program as well
as the Pro Musica Hebraica Foundation. The book’s publication was made
possible by the support of the Columbia University Institute for Israel and
Jewish Studies, the Cahnman Publication Subvention Grant, awarded by
the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Sidney and Hadassah Musher
Subvention Grant in Jewish Studies, awarded by the Foundation for Jewish
Culture.
At Yale University Press, Jack Borrebach, Jonathan Brent, William
Frucht, Keith Condon, Duke Johns, Joseph Calamia, Christina Tucker, and
other staff expertly shepherded the text from unrevised dissertation to final
publication. Susan Fels kindly contributed her professional expertise as an