Photo © Nabis Filmgroup, Nevada Cine
The Klezmer Project
The Klezmer Project
Wedding videographer Leandro Koch is attracted to Paloma Schachmann, a woman performing at one of his gigs. She plays clarinet in a klezmer band, and to get her number, Leandro tells Paloma that he’s directing a documentary about klezmer. They fall in love, and he tries to make that documentary about the survival of klezmer music in Eastern Europe … until he learns that virtually nothing has survived.
Real-life Argentine filmmakers Koch and Schachmann are the stars and directors of a fascinating hybrid, The Klezmer Project. Their scripted (but not entirely fictional?) romance is woven into a documentary about making a documentary that captures unscripted footage of musicians and ethnomusicologists and family photo album memories (decayed by time), interspersed with a Yiddish tale narrated by the first and supreme villain of Jewish literature, Satan. The Klezmer Project is screening at 7 p.m., April 3 at the UWM Union Cinema, part of this year’s Latin American Film Series.
Klezmer has enjoyed a revival in the Jewish diaspora since the ‘70s, hence a young musician such as Paloma adopting the music as her own. The circle dancing, joyous melancholy of klezmer was a vital component of the Yiddish culture that flourished for centuries in those liminal lands contested by Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Hungary. The Nazis destroyed those communities, but other causes conspired in the dwindling of Yiddishkeit. The partial assimilation of diasporan Jews, whether American or Argentine, is implicit to The Klezmer Project. However, the film repeatedly turns to a third factor, the State of Israel, whose Zionist founders advocated Hebrew as the language of the new nation. For many Zionists, Yiddish language and culture were reminders of the bad old days and relegated to the dusty cupboards of suppressed memories.
Leandro and Paloma traveled to Ukraine, Moldova and Romania in the summer and fall of 2021, half a year before Putin’s invasion shook the region in the fourth bloody war fought in Ukraine in the past 110 years. They visit Ukrainian musicians playing melodies that could have been in the klezmer repertoire of old. When questioned, those musicians said they heard from grandparents that Jews once lived there, but that was long ago. Left unsaid was the helping hands some locals gave the Nazis. The Klezmer Project finds no synagogues or other evidence of Jewish culture, recording only echoes of the music.
As their road trip continues, The Klezmer Project becomes a fascinating travelogue of seldom scene places. An Eastern Orthodox cemetery that looks as if painted by Howard Finster stands on ground near a neglected Soviet war memorial and a lonesome statue of Lenin. A Moldovan wedding party dances on the village street to music cut from the same sonic quilt that once spread across the entire region, perhaps sewn together in earlier times by wandering Roma minstrels.
The Klezmer Project assumes an increasingly elegiac tone. Leandro hoped to find his family roots among the ghosts of klezmer, but the stumps had been torn from the ground and the branches burned. And yet, he discerns outlines and echoes from a past that can never be recreated, only imagined.
