When November rolls around, many Jewish music and art lovers around the Puget Sound region often think about one thing as they prepare for Hanukkah and winter hibernation: KlezFest.
After taking a year off while Temple Beth Am, the host of the music festival, underwent construction on its Kehillah Center, KlezFest is back with many of the old sounds and activities attendees have come to expect, as well as some new ones, including a Russian component that debuts this year: Marina Belenky and New Age Flamenco, a quartet of conservatory-trained musicians from the former Soviet Union.
“We’re doing Russian gypsy songs, Russian folk songs, Ladino, some Hebrew — pretty much [an] international flavor,” says Belenky, former cantor at Temple De Hirsch Sinai, “but with a Jewish twist, of course.”
Joining Belenky are Oleg Ruvinov, a bassist (and occasional tuba player) who does most of the arrangements, Georgiy Babayan on lead and slide guitar, and rhythm guitarist Vidas Svagzdis.
The four (and often Belenky and Ruvinov as a duet), who play gigs together around town, many times in the Russian community, come from several former Soviet republics. Ruvinov and Babayan both hail from Baku, Azerbaijan, Svagzdis comes from the Ukraine, and Belenky from Russia. Their style tends toward “Gipsy Kings, Mediterranean, Greek — all these great tunes,” Belenky says.
Belenky herself has a rich musical history. Before emigrating to New York, she was sponsored by a cousin at a time when getting out of the Soviet Union was, at best, extremely difficult for a Jew — even one who knew very little about her history or religion —Belenky had been trained at the Rimsky Korsakov Conservatory in Leningrad.
Upon her arrival in the U.S., a cousin, who was a student at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, asked her to sing alto in the High Holiday choir at his temple.
“I [didn’t] know Hebrew, I didn’t know English,” Belenky told him. “He said not to worry, it’s transliteration.”
And from there she fell in love with the liturgy. So she applied to enter HUC, studied the prayers and Hebrew language, became a Bat Mitzvah, and then completed her cantorial studies.
“It was the best thing ever, really. I knew it was just my destiny,” she says. “It’s my passion.”
Belenky spent several years at Temple De Hirsch Sinai before departing in 2005, and has since been working as a musician, both performing and teaching. These days, she often conducts services at the Summit at First Hill and performs at the Kline Galland Home, as well as at other private Jewish events, sometimes with her band mates in tow.
“I perform the weddings, lifecycles, baby namings,” she says, “and I’m more and more involved with the Russian community.”
So when Wendy Marcus, music director at Temple Beth Am and KlezFest’s organizer, asked Belenky to perform, she jumped at the opportunity.
“I am thrilled that we have a Russian component to our musical lineup, because I feel the Russian community has a really strong musical tradition,” Marcus says. Belenky in particular “has her own little fan club,” she added, with residents of the Summit even renting an Access bus together to come see her performance.
In addition to New Age Flamenco, the musical performers this year will be names familiar to past KlezFest attendees: the raucous KlezKats, the more jazz-like Shawn’s Kugel, and the eponymous KlezKids, which takes youngsters of all ages from all over the community, and teaches them to perform Klezmer, “because we want to ensure the survival of this lovely music,” Marcus says.
Besides the music, KlezFest will feature an arts fair and bazaar, Yiddish Bingo, and a quilting area that will include demonstrations for kids, family heirlooms, and the healing quilt designed by Barbara Binder Kadden and created by employees at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle after the shooting at their building in 2006.
And then there’s the pickled herring. That’s likely the first aroma that people will smell as they enter the gym at University Prep, with a tasting of the briny fish being offered.
“The kind that we’re getting is from Olson’s Scandinavian foods in Ballard,” says Marcus. “Aside from the Jews, the other people that can make pickled herring is the Swedes.”
Perhaps it’s a generational thing.
In the end, Marcus keeps the ticket prices low and the volume high because what she wants, more than anything else, is for people to have a good time.
“We have a lot of unaffiliated people show up to this thing, and what they see is the power of a good party,” Marcus says.
KlezFest returns
