Perhaps the most famous event in modern klezmer happened when Henry Sapoznik, 61, went to North Carolina as a young man to study banjo with oldtime player Tommy Jarrell. Jarrell, realizing that Sapoznik was Jewish, asked the younger musician, “Don’t your people got none of your own music?”That question helped launch the klezmer revival, a movement in which Sapoznik has played a primary role. In 1982, Sapoznik became the first director of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. A couple years later he and Adrienne Cooper founded KlezKamp, an annual Yiddish arts festival, that began as a YIVO program in 1984 and will celebrate its final gathering this December.

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