The klezmer band performing at his granddaughter’s 2007 bat mitzvah sounded remarkably authentic to Salo Enis. The 92-year-old Springfield man found himself transported back to his youth in small-town Poland. In those days, he joyfully blasted out similar tunes on his cornet, harmonizing at home with his flutist father and violinist brother.
Klezmer—that whirling, clarinet-heavy music that plays whenever Jewish weddings are depicted in movies—came to America with waves of Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century. But by the time Enis moved here in 1948 after escaping the Holocaust, his klezmer-playing days were over. His family members had all been killed, and Enis didn’t have the heart to play with anyone else.
“I went through a great tragedy,” he says simply, “so music was not on my mind.”
But that changed that day in 2007, when Enis learned that the bat-mitzvah musicians were his twin grand-nephews, 17-year-old Jonathan and David Zaidins of Chappaqua, New York. A month later, Enis gave his nephews a treat: While they sat in awe, video camera rolling, the energetic nonagenarian sang or whistled every old tune he could recall. Many had not been heard in 60-plus years, lost with the victims of the Holocaust. After nearly an hour, Enis ended with a particularly melancholy song that held special meaning.
“I didn’t tell them I wrote it until they said, ‘It’s very nice,’” Enis says with a shy smile. He’d penned the tune in 1935 or ’36.
Jonathan was so moved that he decided to perform his uncle’s song in concert. “It was just a whistle on a tape,” he says, but he arranged it for the violin, baritone saxophone, guitar, bassoon, and piano. He dubbed it “The Salo Enis Klezmer Waltz.” Last year, the twins’ klezmer group debuted Enis’s masterpiece in White Plains, New York, with Enis beaming in the audience. “The only times it had been performed before were at a workshop and with his brother and father, never in public,” says David.
Rescuing a song that was nearly lost forever has tremendous value, says Highland Park resident Mark Kligman, a professor of Jewish musicology at Hebrew Union College in New York. “It’s like rediscovering an old book or document and giving it new life.”
Many of New Jersey’s klezmer bands—including the Princeton-based Klez Dispensers, Mt. Laurel-based Bobby Block and the Klezmer Kings, and the Columbus-based Odessa Klezmer Band—strive to preserve prewar songs. But to Enis, who teaches adult-education Jewish literature courses at the YM-YWHA of Union County and the Jewish Community Center of Central New Jersey, the genre is more than history; it’s part of his identity.
“I sing to myself,” he says, “and it comes out klezmer.”