Hillcrest resident Yale Strom named KPBS-Union Bank Local Hero

By Monica Medina | KPBS

Listen to klezmer music and it will harken you back to another time. Rich with tradition, the haunting melodies are a testament to the Jewish people and all they’ve endured throughout the course of history.

One of the most passionate champions of klezmer music is San Diego’s own Yale Strom, a 2013 Jewish American History Month Local Hero honoree. Strom, who is an artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies program at San Diego State University, is without a doubt a renaissance man for the ages. Violinist, composer, filmmaker, author, photographer and playwright, he is an artist with a mind that exudes brilliance and a creativity that seems to be boundless.

To Strom, klezmer is more than just notes on a page. He sees it as a style of music steeped in history, one that robustly adds to our cultural tapestry.

“It’s a people. The music is as old as the language of Yiddish. It is as old as the words, ‘Jew’ and ‘Moslem,’ using ancient Semitic scales. Yes, it sounds Middle Eastern and it should,” he said. “Klezmer music is an extension of who I am and my culture, and a way to communicate to all kinds of people.”

In 1981, Strom, who is considered a revivalist and the world’s leading ethnographer-artist of klezmer music and history, founded his own klezmer band, Hot Pstromi (a play on his name). As the band’s website explains, Hot Pstromi has a sound that is “a fusion of traditional klezmer, new Jewish music, Gypsy, khasidic, world beat and Balkan music.”

Strom’s love for klezmer began early on. “I grew up with a broad range of music, classical, blues, labor songs [and] folk: Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly,” he said.

“The Jewish music came around the table Friday nights on the eve of the Sabbath, Saturday afternoons, holidays, and at the synagogue. When the klezmer revival began in the late ’70s and early ’80s, my father came home with a record of a band he saw play at Old Time Café, which used to be up in Leucadia [in North County]. It was one of the premier folk world music clubs in the United States.”

Working on his book “Wandering Feast: a Journey through the Jewish Culture of Eastern Europe,” which is an autobiographical account of the year he spent in the former Eastern Bloc, solidified his appreciation and knowledge of klezmer.

“Through my book, I was meeting people, particularly Holocaust survivors,” he said. “It took on a whole different texture as I got more into it, and I saw that I could communicate with people, not just Jews, through music. I got immersed in history and culture.”

What Strom said he loves most about music is its ability to connect with others in a way that language cannot. “Music is an international language of itself,” he said. “I’m lucky that I know music. I think my artwork would be so much different if I didn’t have my music as a close ally and friend.”

For all his success, Strom is most proud of having raised his daughter, Tallulah, with his wife Elizabeth Schwartz, who is a vocalist for Hot Pstromi. “Tallulah is an extension of who I am, who my wife is,” Strom said. “She will become her own person but there’ll always be a part of me in her, and that’s an ongoing creation.”

Strom’s latest project is a dance musical, “Chagall,” with renowned choreographer John Malashock, which will have its second series of workshop performances at the La Jolla Playhouse June 6 – 9 in the Playhouse’s Theodore and Adele Shank Theatre.

Strom’s unabashed curiosity and sense of wonderment is why he is able to achieve so much. “I’m always thinking of something new to challenge myself,” he said. “I’ve never written opera. I’m going to tell you this: I will before I leave this earth one day. Why not? Let me try. If nothing else, so I failed. If you don’t try then you’ve already failed because there’s zero on the page.”

Strom becomes introspective when he reflects on his work and many achievements. “I believe it’s my duty as a human and as a Jew to, through my art, enlighten a few other people,” he said. “Leave the world a better place than I came into it: ‘tikkun olam,’ which means to repair the world. It is the duty of every human, and as a Jew, to make just a little bit better, this world, my neighborhood, my home, my city.

“If I can just do that even a little bit, then I’ve achieved something.”

—Monica Medina is director of diversity, engagement and grants at KPBS, and oversees their Local Hero program. This story on Yale Strom first appeared on kpbs.org May 1.