What If Jewish Life Hadn’t Been Interrupted?
What If Jewish Life Hadn’t Been Interrupted?
For Ilya Shneyveys, Jewish music is ingrained in his DNA
Ilya Shneyveys, originally from Riga, Latvia, plays keyboards in the psychedelic klezmer band, Forshpil, which he founded together with vocalist, Sasha Lurje, in 2003. The band’s first gig was on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and that was the beginning of his—albeit somewhat inadvertent—quest to reclaim his heritage. In addition to the questions most Latvians were grappling with as they adjusted to life after communism, for Jews, there were also questions of identity: what did it mean to be Jewish, and what did that mean in the context of a new and emerging world?
But for Shneyveys, there was another question: what would have happened to Jewish music had Jewish life not been interrupted by the Holocaust, communism, and immigration? That question is open-ended, and has been explored in myriad ways, but with Forshpil, he took a queue from the late-1960s Turkish psych scene, and reimagined Jewish music in a modern, heavier, noisier setting.
“I was learning and internalizing Yiddish music, but I also had the music I’d internalized growing up,” Shneyveys says. “If you grow up with folk songs, and you grow up in an environment with everybody singing those folk songs, you can either go away from it completely, or you take those folk songs, play them on your guitars, and make something out if it that is different, but connected.”
Forshpil’s recent release, Tsvey, came out in August, but that’s not Shneyveys only gig. He’s also a fixture on the European klezmer festival scene as both a performer and educator, a touring member of the Russian acoustic folk ensemble, Dobranotch, and a musical director with the innovative Caravan Orchestra. Spending that much time immersed in Jewish music has impacted his life in other ways as well.
“I am getting ready for my bar mitzvah, finally,” he says. “I’ve been thinking I should do one on my 39th birthday since that will be like the triple [3 X 13]. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but at the moment I am doing it more for musical reasons than religious reasons. Informally at least, that’s in the back of my mind. I’ve been helping my wife play music for services—my wife is a cantor at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn—and by now I have learned a lot of tunes. When I then play klezmer, I see how it’s connected.”
I spoke with Shneyveys about his almost accidental initial encounter with Jewish music, absorbing wisdom—along with copious amounts of alcohol—from many of klezmer’s modern masters, his efforts discovering organic fusions of Jewish music with modern sounds, and how playing Jewish music has reshaped his identity.
Did you live in Latvia when it was still part of the Soviet Union?
I was born in 1983, and I spent the first six or seven years of my life in the late stages of communist Latvia. I remember some things about it. I remember we had to stand in lines for a long time, and then, all of a sudden, we didn’t have to stand in lines. But everyone still had that reflex that you had to stand in lines, and they formed lines whether it was necessary or not.
Do you remember—or did you hear about—what the attitude was towards Jews at that time? Did it change as the country became independent.
Latvia has a dark history, especially concerning the Holocaust. I think there were 90,000 Jews before World War II and 20,000 after. Latvians have a complicated relationship with that because some Latvians took part in the killings. As a Latvian, you either acknowledge that or try to ignore it. There were also different kinds of Jews. There were Jews who were more into Judaism, who tried to preserve some traditions and to be Jewish in a Jewish context. My family was not very Jewish. They looked Jewish, but they were mostly Soviet Jews. My grandparents spoke Yiddish, but my parents didn’t. They understood some words, but they were not interested in the Jewish culture, because they grew up with Soviet values.
Did some people speak Yiddish or try to preserve the music?
Yes, they were to different extents. There were people who prayed illegally in the shul in Riga. Those were not my parents, but they probably knew some of those people. There were people who spoke Yiddish. But Latvia, like most Soviet republics, has multiple layers. Latvian Jews—who were not ethnically Latvian but historically Latvian—those families were from Latvia. But then, like my family, my grandfather came to Latvia after the War. The family came from Ukraine. He was another layer of being a Soviet occupant on top of being a Jew. It was good during the Soviet times, but then in post-Soviet times it wasn’t as good. The Latvians decided to get back at the “Russians,” and a third of the population didn’t get Latvian citizenship in the 1990s. That included my family, because they were occupants. If your family came during the Soviet occupation, you didn’t get citizenship right away, you had to pass an exam. It was a simple exam, but it was a big deal for many people.
And being Jewish was an additional layer on top of that.
Being Jewish was another level. There were not a ton of Jews. It’s a very small population, and especially compared to what it was. There used to be Yiddish-speaking towns with a 95 percent Jewish population before the war. That changed dramatically. The older generations remember that, and younger generations wouldn’t even know.
When did you come to the States?
I spent most of my time in Latvia until I was 25, and then I started traveling, mostly because of klezmer. I went to a few klezmer festivals. I got contacts from there, and people would invite me to play in their klezmer bands in Germany and places like that. I traveled to Germany. That was about the time that Latvia joined the E.U., and I became a European citizen. For the last 10-plus years, I was living in between many places in Europe. I tried to live in Berlin for a while when the rent was cheap, but I was mainly living on tour. I was living at klezmer festivals and as a part of the bigger klezmer community. Then I came to the States. I got a green card three years ago, mostly because of my wife.
What was your introduction to klezmer?
It was a bit before I met Sasha, 17 years ago. I was playing in different punk and alternative rock bands at the time as a drummer. I played keys as well. I got an accordion, and I wanted to learn accordion for an acoustic gig we were supposed to do with the punk band. I didn’t want to bring a keyboard, so I borrowed an accordion and started learning it. That gig never happened—it was canceled—but by then I already had an accordion, and it was too late to go back. I was looking for things to play on accordion. My friend, Inna Raykhman, is a violinist and we were in a band together. I asked her if she wanted to play some music together. I was thinking something like tangos, or whatever is good for fiddle and accordion. But she had already been to a number of klezmer festivals in St. Petersburg, so she suggested that. I was not very excited at first, because I thought it was cheesy music, but then I got into it. It was easy in a way. I don’t know if there’s a genetic or cultural connection, but it was something. I learned a lot of klezmer in a short period of time, and I got addicted to learning tunes and playing tunes. It came easier than some other things, like jazz. I wouldn’t say that klezmer is easy, but for me it was very natural.
What was natural? The rhythmic feel?
Everything, the general feel of the music. I guess I was feeling some sort of connection to the culture even though I didn’t grow up with a lot of exposure to cultural Judaism or Yiddish or anything like that. I went to a festival, KlezFest in St. Petersburg in 2004. Part of it was the community. I met 60 people, and basically we had classes all day and jam sessions all evening and night. We did that for a week. It was a community of people, and especially since we were in Russia, we were also drinking a lot of alcohol. It was cool. And the more I learned, the deeper I went in it. There are many things I can talk about within klezmer, but the phrasing is something I am very fascinated with. Yiddish as a language was not something I was interested in 17 years ago, but I grew to realize how it actually is connected to the music. I also speak more Yiddish now. I've been learning it passively playing with a lot of Yiddish singers. I haven’t taken classes in Yiddish, but I learned German in that time, and I realized between Russian, German, and a bit of Hebrew, I sort of understand Yiddish. Yiddish is important to understanding klezmer, as well as nusach [liturgical style] and chazanus [cantorial singing]. Interestingly enough, those things are important for understanding for instrumental music. For example, the use of ornaments, and also certain modality and chord changes.
How did you meet Sasha?
Me and Inna, the violinist, started a duo, and she introduced me to klezmer. She was active in the Jewish community, and she was in a Yiddish theater, which was in Riga at the JCC. Sasha was also in that part of the theater. We did concert on November 9, which is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, where we had to put together some music with singing. I think the first song we played was probably “Mein Yiddische Mame.” I am not saying it is a bad song, but we both moved on to very different repertoires since then, but back then I didn’t know what was what.
Was your goal from the beginning to put a modern spin on klezmer?
It was my goal, for the most part. When I learned about klezmer, at first I didn’t like it, and then I went more into, and then I thought, “This tune could be punk rock,” and I even brought some tunes into the punk rock band that I was in at the time. I wanted to take those things and bring them into my rock environment. However, I first spent almost 10 years learning and trying to play as traditional as possible. I wanted to learn what was the most traditional way of doing it, so I could take it apart from the bottom.
Who were your teachers, were they the people at the festivals?
Yes. The first time I went to St. Petersburg in 2004, I met Michael Alpert (Brave Old World) and Lorin Sklamberg (Klezmatics). Christian Dawid was there, too. It’s a small-ish community of klezmer and Yiddish artists. It was also cool when I realized that I was jamming and drinking with some of the best musicians in the field. We were informally drinking. It wasn’t something where I could not talk to them. Also, I could talk to them because my English was pretty good for the average level of Russian English.
With Forshpil, do you see what you’re doing as a natural flow, as in, this is where klezmer would have gone had there not been a Holocaust, or pogroms, or immigration out of Russia?
Sort of. It’s a mental musical experiment. I wanted to go back to the traditional roots and build up from there. I was wondering what it would sound like had the chain of tradition not been interrupted. The whole breakdown started before the Holocaust. Already, at the end of the 19th century, klezmer was not what it used to be. Moshe Beregovsky is a musicologist who collected klezmer in the 1930s in the Ukraine. He wrote then that a lot of people didn’t remember how it used to be. It was falling apart before that. A lot of it was assimilation. That happened in America, too, where Jews didn’t want to be Jews necessarily, they wanted to be Americans. There was a big effort to Americanize the music and to Americanize the culture. To not have any Jewish element. Also, Israel came along, and you had another focus that you could build your identity around. It’s a separate topic if that’s good or bad, but it was specifically non-Yiddish for a lot of it. For me, I want to hear those Ashkenazi things. I want to hear old style chazanus. I like new nigunim, but also not. I am not a big fan of Reform music, especially because it doesn’t sound Jewish to me. I want to hear those weird scales and those augmented intervals and people going “Hoy Hoy Hoy.” I don’t want everything to sound like American pop music, because I can always listen to American pop music. Actually, one of the inspirations for Forshpil was Turkish music.
There are a lot of psychedelic Turkish bands.
Right. What happened in the 1960s and ‘70s were all these artists like Erkin Koray, Mogollar, 3 Hur El, Baris Manco, Selda—all these rock bands that were taking what was essentially folk music and playing it on different instruments. When I heard that for the first time—and I was already in the middle of my journey through Yiddish music—I thought it made sense. If you grow up with folk songs, and you grow up in an environment with everybody singing those folk songs, you can either go away from it completely, or you take those folk songs, play them on your guitars, and make something out if it that is different, but connected. For me, it is a bit of an experiment, as in, “What would this have sounded like if…” It is not a very pure experiment because it is not just ‘60s music, it’s more like whatever I went through. I grew up in the ‘90s listening to grunge and stuff like that, so there is a bit of that, too.
Have you found that playing this music has been a way to express or embrace your Jewish identity?
Yes, and it probably was something that I resisted at first. At first, my attitude was, “I am just in it for the music.” I don’t know if me being Jewish helped me understand Jewish music better. Maybe. I am not sure how that works.
Maybe it’s in your spiritual subconscious.
Maybe, but I do feel a strong connection. I’ve made this a big part of my identity, and to the point where I married a cantor, and I immersed myself in Judaism in ways that I could not imagine back when I first started. I want to understand Jewishness and Jewish culture. I wouldn’t call it “Judaism,” because it’s more than Judaism as a religion. I want to understand what it means to be Jewish. I feel that will help me understand how to play music more meaningfully, in more meaningful ways. In a way, I am still in it for the music, but if becoming more Jewish will help me play music better, I don’t mind becoming more Jewish for that reason.
You’re also in the band, Dobranotch. What’s the story behind that insane Rammstein cover they did?
That is a cover of the Rammstein song, “Du Hast,” but it’s in Yiddish, so it’s “Du Host.” The drummer had the idea to make a Jewish cover of a Rammstein song, and we did it. We filmed the video on tour, in Switzerland, traveling from Germany to Switzerland. We filmed the video, posted it, and then we were without internet for a day. We came back and it had about one million views [it’s now at 2.6 million].
It went crazy.
I am not sure what happened. It was probably the mix of a Yiddish cover of Rammstein and the naive authenticity of us jamming, and doing it in one take. We didn’t plan very much. We just stopped on the side of the road and did it.
Is Dobranotch a Jewish band?
It’s mostly a Jewish band, but it’s like a folk band. The cool thing is they play a lot of Balkan music and Russian music, although it is mostly a klezmer band. It’s a combination of having a very tight rhythm section, with melody players who can really play in the style. Everyone can improvise and everyone can play creatively. We met in 2004, and back then the band had a very different line up. I’ve been their tour accordionist, especially when I lived in Germany. I’d meet up for the tours.
Are you on the albums?
I am on the last three albums. We’d meet in Latvia, because there was a cheap recording studio there. We’d meet there and record for a few days while in the middle of a tour or something. They’re nice to hang out with. It’s good music and you can really see how you make people dance.
They do acoustic rave music as well.
Acoustic techno. The things that become most popular are usually jokes, and then people get into it. But it is a good thing that they didn’t build their identity over just doing covers of pop songs in folk style. Most of what they play is folk music, and good quality folk music. It’s different from Forshpil. It’s my place where I can play traditional music in a more or less traditional way. I also like that. I like doing weird experimental stuff with traditional music, but I also like playing traditional music as it is.
Photos: Top by Marlene Karpischek; with keyboard by Adam Berry
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