Tag: Al Glaser

I’m currently in New York where I’ve come to do some research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research about old NY immigrant klezmers, their life trajectories, families and professional connections. I received the Fellowship in East European Arts, Music, and Theater with the general topic of “Immigrant Klezmer Musicians during the Golden Age of Commercial Recording,” which leaves me plenty of wiggle room to figure out what I can from their archival collections.

Needless to say it’s not a great time to arrive in the US. I even boarded my plane on the day of the supposed impositions of tariffs against Canada, although Trump backed off of it, or maybe deferred it for a month.

I’ve been here a week so far, but the research space at the Center for Jewish History has only been open for 3 days of it, so I’m definitely still at the start of my work and trying to make sense of which collections I can use. I started with some obvious klezmer collections, like the papers of Dave Tarras and of the Al Glaser Recording Orchestra (more on those in a later post). But those aren’t the real reason for my visit, as they are made up of musical scores with minimal contextual or biographical information.

I’ll probably spend most of my time looking at landsmanshaft and mutual aid and cultural society papers, of which YIVO has a rich collection. The first I requested was the Glinianer Young Men’s Benevolent Association (a mutual aid society for immigrants from Glina/Hlyniany); I already knew that klezmer violinist Beresh Katz was active in it around WWII, as was rather briefly the ex-klezmer Jeremiah Hescheles. It was full of dates and receipts about musical events put on by the Association and I even found the meeting minutes when Katz vouched for the newly-arrived Hescheles to become a member.

That was an easy one, but I know much less about the ties of klezmers or old Jewish musicians to the many other mutual aid societies of old New York. For the rest it’s a matter of ordering boxes one by one and looking through their contents to see what connections I can make. I started with cities and towns that known NY klezmers came from; for example, Israel J. Hochman (see this old post about him) was from Kamianets-Podilskyi and his father was from nearby Zhvanets, so I looked at landsman or relief organizations associated with those places.

Some of the boxes aren’t of much use for music history research if they only contain non-specific invoices, cemetery documents, or cover a much later period than I’m looking at. So far I’ve found that the anniversary booklets, souvenir journals, etc. from the 1930s and 1940s to be the most interesting source because they usually contain at least one advertisement for a musician or orchestra. In the various Kamianets and Zhvanets books I’ve looked at so far, I didn’t find any Hochmans yet but I did find George C. Brandman, a Hochman relative and cornetist who I mentioned in my Hochman post, in a publication of the Kamenetz-Podolier Relief Organization.

Most interesting to me is if the musician is demonstrably a member of the association, as in the case of a member of the Radziviller-Woliner Benevolent Association, Harry Tepper, who appears in membership lists and personal greetings alongside his dentist brother(?) over a period of several years.

Other musicians who advertised in the Radziviler journals were definitely not members, like Naftule “Nat” Brandwein, or apparently not members, like Joe Magaziner.

My current plan is to continue going through YIVO’s collections of these mutual aid associations for traces of old musicians, and to start linking them to old genealogy-type records, musician’s union records and old newspaper coverage. We’ll see where the research takes me after that.