David Krakauer (MM '80, clarinet) spent 10 days in Poland in June working with local klezmer musicians.
He shares some of his thoughts and experiences with The Juilliard Journal.

Playing Eastern European Jewish celebration music (klezmer) continues to be one of the most exciting adventures of my life. As a kind of ambassador for the cultural heritage of my ancestors, I've had the opportunity to perform around the globe, record with many incredible artists, write my own music, and even be a participant in larger world trends - from the rise of Jewish consciousness in the late 1980s to Europe's recent struggles to embrace multi-culturalism.

Most important to me personally have been my travels to Poland, the center of Eastern European Jewish life before World War II. As a child, the city of Krakow loomed large in my imagination both as an important Jewish place as well as the city of my family name. When I played there in 1992 as a member of the band the Klezmatics, saying to the audience: "My name is David Krakauer, and welcome to 'my' city" represented a true homecoming for me. With each subsequent return to the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival (with my own band, Klezmer Madness!), I seem to find more and more clues to the portion of my past that was erased by the Holocaust.

Walking down the streets of Kazimierz (Krakow's old Jewish quarter) - with its empty houses, vacant lots, desecrated synagogues, pieces of the ghetto wall, and overgrown cemetery - one can sense the people who are no longer there. After one of the Krakow Festivals, I was invited by the Borderlands Foundation to give a workshop for Polish klezmer musicians. I found myself in the small town of Sejny where the foundation is based. There they are breathing new life into the formerly abandoned synagogue and yeshiva with concerts, theater performances, a study archive, and cultural center.

As our work continues, I returned this past June for a third visit, inviting several prominent American klezmer musicians to join me. The project came to be termed the "Musician's Raft" between New York and Poland. In inviting groups from Hungary, the Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus both to study klezmer and to share their own musical traditions, the sense of the "raft" was created. It's a way of going back and forth between the U.S. and central Europe, attempting to find on both sides pieces of a puzzle that have been lost for the past 60 years.