The Klezmers of Kurenets were all members of one family, and all musicians, an entire family that controlled the town with their music playing. They were blessed with all sorts of talents and specialties. The head of the band was old Itzha Noach. He was known in town also as a humorist or comedian, and it is true that it was like twin sisters for him, comedy and music. During wedding celebrations, he would make jokes while playing music, truly entertaining the audience. They said about Itzha Noach that one of the butchers encountered him in the street and treated him with superiority, so Itzha Noach said, “Hear me, you have no right to disrespect me. My profession is nicer than yours.”

So the butcher said, “So let’s hear why you think your profession is more respectable than mine. Let’s hear it.”

“Ponder this,” said Itzha Noach, “when I go out to the street with my fiddle, who surrounds me? People. People who were born in the image of the holy. They all surround me. And you, when you get out to the street with a piece of meat in your hand? Who is surrounding you? Dogs. Beasts with wide open jaws accompany you.”

In the ninth of the month Av [a day of fast], it was a custom in Kurenets to go to the cemetery and cry and beg the people who had passed away to plead with God for the sake of the living that all would be fine in the coming year. Itzha Noach, his wife Nachama, and all their family members were all healthy, in good shape, but so that the Evil Eye would not take hold of them and so people would not say they were disrespectful of the day, they would also go, this old couple, to the cemetery. Many years before, soon after they were married, their first child died a few days after he was born. The wife of Itzha Noach looked for his grave and found it amongst the trees. She lay on the grave and begged and cried. She asked for his pity, pleading with him to go to the chair of the holy and speak to him on behalf of the nation of Israel, the house of Israel, and all the family members, and make him cancel any troubles and hard times.

When Itzha Noach realized what she was doing, he came behind her and said with a smile on his face, “Nachama, Nachama, everyone says you are smart, but did you lose your mind? Such a huge mission for the Nation of Israel you give to the hands of few days old baby? He will mix up the whole thing. You must stop crying. Let’s go home.”

When he was in good spirits his specialty was doing magic-like tricks while he was playing. Sometimes he would play Der Pastachal (The Little Shepherd), and he would play the whole story about how the shepherd came in the morning and would blow his horn to announce for the cows to come to the meadow, and all the little details that happened in that story found their _expression with his fiddle. You would hear the opening of the gate, the sounds of the cows mooing, and the sounds of the calves, the sheep, the goats, the rooster… And things he could not get out of the fiddle, he would use his throat and his lips. The audience would be roaring with happiness. I particularly remember the wedding of Chanka, the daughter of Nachama Shaina, whose family were neighbors of Itzha Noach. Since the families were close, he did a particularly good job at this wedding. I saw him play the fiddle on his back, Oifen Kleitza. He would put the fiddle on the back of his shoulders and play it on his back while making jokes.

But clearly not every wedding received such a wonderful performance. Here there was the long friendship and good neighboring that affected the party.

In each of the players there was something special, and during a holy day or during a party, you would like them not only for what they played but how they played. The first you would observe would be the very short Avramel, whose fiddle was bigger than he was. He played the batnoon (bass?) and I noticed that many times as if out of habit, for certain tunes he would stand on the tip of his toes. Avramel was an unhappy Jew. He had bad luck and all the bitterness of his life he carried quietly with a lot of internal pain. But what did we, the little children, know of all his suffering? A child who arrived at the age of 10 and became a little taller would stand by Avrameleh and quietly measure himself, and their hearts would usually fill with happiness because they were taller than Avramel. So he was used by the young boys as a measure of the time of passing from children to adolescents.

Avramel had a family and some sons. The glory of the family was his son Chaim Biyenish, a fiddler who studied tailoring and was loved and respected by everyone. One of his youngest sons, Velveleh or Zaev Fiddler, joined the partisans during the war and became renowned for his bravery.

A true artist among the Klezmers was Leibe, or the way he was known to us, Leibe Der Fiddler. He knew how to play classical concerts and serious music. He always got the role of Batzen Die Kalla (?), and the women in the audience, when they just saw Leibe starting to tune up his fiddle, minutes before he played, already would take their handkerchiefs out and started wiping their tears.

The son of Itzha Noach, Leibe the Tall, played the flute. There was a time when he was part of the Minsk Orchestra, and for that time he was known not as a Klezmer but as a modern, cosmopolitan musician. How I loved listening to his soft tunes on the flute in different variations. We, the children, loved him. He knew how to entertain us. We would surround him in big groups and would stand with our mouths open, as if we were swallowing every tune, and we would be in deep, up to the point of losing ourselves in a world of softness and beautiful sounds that the flute magically created. Leibe would trick us, and all of a sudden, as if to surprise us and remind us that there was a world of down-on-earth reality, he would bend all of a sudden and make a circular motion with his flute on our faces, and the sounds would be sprayed on us as if we were sprayed by a hose. We would wake up as if from a dream, jumping back, first from fear and later we would start laughing, and he would immediately stand straight and serious with an _expression almost of severity, as if this was part of the play, and the music and everything was in the notes he had before him.

The fifth among the players was Esar. He was also the son of Itzha Noach. He played the baritone. He wasn’t a truly professional player. There was no depth in his playing. The way he played, it seemed like he wanted to attract you with external effects. He was always very cleanly dressed and his instrument was so clean and shiny that you could hardly look at it because of the shininess. As far as we, the children, he would look at us with an _expression that said, “Don’t be scared by the loud sounds. It’s only the instrument that makes those sounds. In my hear I feel a lot of love for you children.”

His main job was to accompany the other instruments and to fill the empty spaces between the other instruments’ playing. He was almost like an announcer for the entire band, as if to say, “People, be ready! A wedding is happening in town. We are coming to you and you should also come towards us.”

A big crowd would gather to see the people who had just gotten married, and the goy women who would carry water, would come running with their buckets filled with water to receive the young couple and their families, who would be dancing in the market square. At that time, in our eyes music was not something you could learn. We were sure that there was some mysterious way a person would be gifted with musical ability. We knew that someone could study shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, and other professions, but we couldn’t understand that someone could learn how to play, although I had learned how to play the mandolin.