A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early April, 1992 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early April, 1992 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-February, 1989 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-February, 1989 | Richard Grayson 

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-February, 1988 | Thought Catalog

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Mid-February, 1988 | Thought Catalog

Seventy Years Ago Today in Crown Heights: Our Parents' Wedding at the Park Manor - May 28, 1949

A 28-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-June, 1979 | Thought Catalog

A 28-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Mid-June, 1979 | Thought Catalog

A 24-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Late November, 1975 | Thought Catalog

A 24-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Late November, 1975 | Thought Catalog

Fifty Years Ago in Sheepshead Bay: Our Bar Mitzvah Reception at the Deauville Beach Club, May 30, 1964

Fifty years ago today, on Saturday night, May 30, 1964, our bar mitzvah reception was held at The Deauville beach club off Knapp Street and the Belt Parkway in Sheepshead Bay.  The property is now the UA Sheepshead Bay multiplex.

Our bar mitzvah had been held the Saturday morning before, May 23, 1964, at the Flatbush Park Jewish Center on Avenue U and East 64th Street in Mill Basin; it was a "modern Orthodox" synagogue our family belonged to although only the first half of the designation fit us.  Rabbi David S. Halpern, who taught us our Haftorah, the reading called Naso, we were shocked to learn, retired only a couple of years ago. Here are our parents and brothers.

With our two sets of grandparents and great-grandmother.  Yikes, we are now older than all our grandparents were then!

We once posted this "Mr. Wonderful" pic from the album on Facebook and three friends wrote us to say they had the same exact pic in their bar mitzvah albums.  And not all of them used Hunter Studios on Flatbush and Flatlands Avenues, either.

The Limbo.  It was 1964, the winter of the Beatles and the spring of the World's Fair.  On our 35mm bar mitzvah movies (now on VHS but not DVD or online) the opening shot with the title features the Unisphere.

The Twist was pretty old by then. A couple of years earlier, our grandparents had taken four of us -- two grandsons and two nephews ages 11, 9, 8 and 7 -- to see Chubby Checker perform , even then past his prime, at the short-lived, much-loved Bronx mammoth amusement park Freedomland, whose property was roughly shaped like the 48 states.

Even while the photographer was shooting this and told us what he was going to do, we knew it was wrong.

Our great-great-uncle, the greatest klezmer clarinetist of all time, Dave Tarras, played with his party band. When we were young, he tried to give us clarinet lessons, but we were hopeless. At the time, we stupidly didn't realize how important klezmer music was, although we all always loved the music of Uncle Dave, especially his doinas and the jazz-influenced album Danz! with his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, a great saxophonist, and his amazingly talented brother Ray Musiker, whom we last saw perform in 2011 at the annual Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival at Chinatown's Eldridge Street Synagogue.

In 1979, when we felt like a big shot because our first book got a nice notice in the Village Voice, it brought us down to earth when we saw our really famous and more talented great-great-uncle on the Voice's cover a week later. Anyway, here we are cutting challah at the dais and saying a brucha whose Hebrew we vaguely recall. (We were taught old-school Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation, with different vowels than today's normal Jews use: "aw," not "ah"; a "t" sound, not an "s" sound.)

Actually, being a bar mitzvah boy half a century ago seemed to involve a lot of cutlery and serving people food.

At least one of the three kids in our family learned how to dance (not the current bar mitzvah boy).  Notice the cigarette in the woman's gloved hand.  At the tables were luxurious round brown gift matchboxes engraved with "Richard"  in gold script so people could thank us for their carcinoma for years to come.

Our friends and some cousins.  Most of the guys up front and the two on the back on each side were also in eighth grade with us at Meyer Levin Junior High in East Flatbush.  A couple of our friends had girls from our class there, but most of us didn't.  As at least two women we went to junior high with kept telling us.  When we were seniors at Midwood High School in 1968, they did get invited to our middle brother's at Bensonhurst's La Perville, but by then of course, the Cultural Revolution had begun.  By 1974 and the last bar mitzvah, our parents decided this whole catered affair business was tacky and instead treated a much smaller group -- about 50 instead of 200 -- of close friends and relatives to a resort hotel in the Catskills for a winter weekend.  The older brothers were happy, since they got to share rooms with girlfriends, and it was just a lot more low-key and normal.

Contact lenses were still in our future, so we tried to keep our glasses off most of the night.  But sometimes we failed.  Hang onto your yarmulkes, it's going to be a bumpy night.  Weird there's no photo of all the food, from the buffet with all the huh-luscious stuff of Jewish-American mid-century satire, to all the different courses, including my mother's insistence on intermezzo: all the great-aunts and great-uncles didn't understand why they were being served ices between the fish course and the filet mignon.  Oh, did we mention the Viennese table?  And as people filed out at 3 a.m. or so, everyone got a copy of the Sunday News, with the Dick Tracy comic on the front cover.  This whole thing cost over $10,000 half a century ago. That's over $75,000 in 2014 dollars, people!

From the viewpoint of 2014, it's glazed in nostalgia, of course.  But we remember our best friend from the time, who sat next to us during the dinner, would tell us many years later at a Manhattan dinner with him and his husband: what he most remembered the bar mitzvah boy saying all evening was, When is this going to be over? When is this going to be over?  

We've avoided attending every single bar mitzvah we've been invited to in the past 35 years.

Late Sunday Afternoon in Laurelton: Visiting Family at Montefiore Cemetery

 On our way from the beach, we stopped at old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens to see the graves of our Shapiro relatives for the first time since we went there and other New York cemeteries in the mid-1970s after Roots on TV got everyone, not just African-Americans, interested in finding their ancestors.

A 19-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From November, 1970 | Thought Catalog

A 19-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From November, 1970 | Thought Catalog

Thursday Night at Grand Army Plaza: Yale Strom & Hot Pstromi play the music of Dave Tarras at the Central Library's Dweck Center

We had a terrific time tonight in the Dweck Center of the Central Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, listening to Yale Strom and his excellent band Hot Pstromi peform the gorgeous music of Dave Tarras (our great-great-uncle, married to our beloved Aunt Shifra) and discuss Yale's book, Dave Tarras - The King of Klezmer.

Joining Yale Strom on violin were some amazing and versatile musicians: Peter Stan, who flew in from Zimbabwe this morning, on accordion;

David Licht, founding member of the Klezmatics, on drums/percussion;


Sprocket on bass;

and on reeds -- clarinet, saxophone, piccolo and about five other instruments, it seemed -- Norbert Stachel.

In between the fantastic numbers,

Yale talked about Dave Tarras' life and music. From what we've seen so far of Yale Strom's book about Dave Tarras, which we happily bought at evening's end, it's a great resource. We already have read about how Uncle Dave and Aunt Shifra took her little niece Ethel (our Grandma Ethel Shapiro Sarrett) when they fled Czarist Russia back in 1918, and how Dave's first job in America was working in his brother-in-law, our great-grandfather (who, based our experiences with him, was not such a nice guy). Tonight we found this 1931 or 1932 pic of our mom, Marilyn, as a baby with Grandma Ethel's first cousins, including Dave and Shifra's daughters Brauny (who married the brilliant musician Sam Musiker) and Rose.

Yale mentioned how in the Ternovka area near Uman in what's now Ukraine, the klezmer musicians like the Tarras family interacted with, influenced, and were influenced by the Roma, and the music of nearby Bessarabia, Moldavia (now Moldova) and Romania, as in this incredible "A Rumenisher Nign," performed by Uncle Dave in this recording:

Our old friend the clarinetist Bert Stratton of the Cleveland band Yiddishe Cup (who wrote this great Mother's Day op-ed column for the New York Times) has a ten-foot tall plywood cut-out/statue of Uncle Dave (created by the band's vocalist Irwin Weinberger) in his basement.

Here is a pic of Dave Tarras at our bar mitzvah reception at the Deauville, a beach club in Sheepshead Bay, on Saturday night, May 30, 1964. We were such ignorant kids then that we didn't realize how frustrating it must have been for this most brilliant of all klezmer musicians

to play stuff we listened to, like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You." But Uncle Dave and his band played everything, including the Beatles, really well. It was only when we got older that we realized his true excellence, as on our absolute favorite of his CDs, Tanz! With Dave Tarras and the Musiker Brothers, the brilliant, revolutionary 1955 blend of klezmer and swing.

Thanks to Yale Strom and his band,

tonight we were able to remember the life and music of Dave Tarras (and to meet his grandson Dr. Marc Tarras and his kids, our third cousins), and for that we're very grateful.

Klezmer Memories of Uncle Dave Tarras

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Friday, September 21, 2007:

I have a post up at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn:

KLEZMER MEMORIES FROM RICHARD GRAYSON
Here's another terrific story from frequent OTBKB contributor, Richard Grayson. Read a great interview with him here.

Tonight (September 20) at Barbes, you can catch Andy Statman at the 10 p.m. show. The promo for his appearance says:

A truly extraordinary artist, Andy Statman began his career in the 70's as a virtuoso Mandolinist who studied and performed David Grisman, went on to study clarinet the legendary Dave Tarras and became one of the main architect of a Klezmer revival which started out 30 years ago and has since informed and influenced folk, Jazz and improvised music forms. Andy draws equally from hassidic melodies, folk tunes from new and old worlds alike and Albert Ayler-influenced free-improv. The result reads like a very personal search for the sacred based both on traditions and introspection.

The "legendary Dave Tarras" was my Uncle Dave, called by Wikipedia "possibly the most famous 20th century klezmer musician. . .known for his long career and his very skilled clarinet playing."

Uncle Dave and his klezmer band played at my bar mitzvah reception at the Deauville Beach Club in Sheepshead Bay back in 1964. Many years before that, he played the clarinet at the wedding of my great-grandparents back in Ukraine.

Although he was my great-great-uncle, he was only 53 when I was born (in my family, we marry young or not at all) and was around till I was almost 40. A couple of weeks after The Village Voice gave a nice notice to my first book in 1979, Uncle Dave trumped that with a Voice cover story that called him "King Klezmer."

Married to my grandmother's Aunt Shifra, Uncle Dave came to America with my grandmother and his in-laws, my great-great-grandparents, who'd later own a candy store on Stone Avenue in Brownsville.

At Ellis Island, they fumigated his clarinet and he was forced to work for his brother-in-law, my great-grandfather, a prominent furrier who'd been in America for years, until he could pay for a new one.

When I was a kid, Uncle Dave lived on Tilden Avenue in East Flatbush, just across the street from Tilden High School (closed last June and broken up into smaller schools). At one point my mother decided I should have clarinet lessons and Uncle Dave came over and gamely tried to instruct me.

But I have no musical ability whatsoever and I hated the taste of the reed in my mouth. Although I loved Uncle Dave and wanted to please him, whatever came out of my clarinet must have sounded like a catfight.

After just a few weeks, he said, "You don't like this, do you?"

I shook my head.

"What do you like to do?"

"I don't know. . . writing?"

"Then you should write." He went downstairs and told my mother the clarinet was not for me.

Uncle Dave had come from a musical family, and his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, married to my grandmother's cousin Brauny, was an ace on both the sax and clarinet. A friend of Gene Krupa who played in Krupa's band, Sammy brought jazz and swing influences into klezmer before his untimely death.

My friend Bert Stratton, a clarinetist with the Cleveland band Yiddishe Cup, once did research at the YIVO Institute and sent me a composition of Uncle Dave's entitled "Richard's Ba Mitzva," though I'm pretty sure it was done not for me but for his grandson Richard Tarras or his grandnephew Richard Shapiro. All of us were students at Meyer Levin JHS in the early 1960s, so the title could do triple-duty.

Although Uncle Dave was well-known in musical circles – he had a weekly show on a Brooklyn-based radio station when I was a kid – mainstream recognition came with the klezmer revival late in his life. In 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a Heritage Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to traditional music.

After Aunt Shifra's death, Uncle Dave lived with a widow whose family he'd known for many years. To avoid losing social security benefits, they had only a religious marriage ceremony, not a civil one. We celebrated their "wedding" at the Shang-Chai kosher Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue.

The last time I saw Uncle Dave, he gave me a gift: a signed copy of an LP by Enrico Caruso. I still treasure it.

Uncle Dave died at 95 and is buried next to Aunt Shifra in the family plot at Old Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens. A musical staff adorns their headstone.

Andy Statman is carrying on and extending the traditions of klezmer music. Catch him if you can.

UPDATE: The Internet Archive capture of the page is here. I also discovered that I apparently imagined that Richard Tarras was Dave and Shifra's grandson; apparently no such relative existed, and that Richard Shapiro, whom I did to to junior high with, is not our relative, so "Richard Bar Mitzvah Dance," found on YouTube and Spotify, was on an album in 1965, a year after my bar mitzvah, so I guess that I am the Richard in the title after all.