January 24 • 2019 47
jn
Press, Slobin writes about the Jewish
love affair (including his own) with
the violin: “For the Jews, the violin lit-
erally had a special resonance. It was
the lead instrument in the traditional
klezmer dance bands for weddings
… It was not just an instrument,
but a voice, a tool for meditation
in the slow pieces played around
the tables at a celebration. Then the
fiddles kicked in and got people up
and dancing. As the older folkways
faded, the enormous success of Jewish
virtuoso concert artists like the ones
I heard at the Masonic Temple only
raised the violin to a new height of
enjoyment and pride.”
MUSIC IN THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
“Jews were completely fragmented”
during the 1940s-1960s, he said.
There were Orthodox Jews, Soviet
Jews. There were labor unions,
Zionists. “They fought over every-
thing,” he said. “But it was interest-
ing to look at how the subgroups
expressed themselves musically in
synagogues and Yiddish theaters.
Classical music became the civil and
cultural identity of Detroit Jews.
There was an outreach musically to
the rest of Detroit, which, at the time,
was among the most anti-Semitic cit-
ies in the country.”
Slobin did a lot of his research for
the book using the Detroit Jewish
News Foundation William Davidson
Archive of Detroit Jewish History,
where he searched through the pages
of the Jewish News to see what the
community was doing.
“
A lot of what the Jewish communi-
ty did was outreach through ecumen-
ical concerts — projecting themselves
into the life of Detroit,” he said.
Yet classical music remained at the
heart of Jewish Detroit.
“During the early 1950s, the
orchestra was threatening to unionize
and businessmen had pulled out their
support. Jews stepped in to keep the
orchestra going and saw the sympho-
ny through several difficult times.
Musicians banded together to keep
it going, including my own violin
teachers.”
In the 1940s, he writes, Julius
Chajes was brought in to run the JCC
orchestras and did some astounding
things. “It was the most elaborate
cultural programming of any Jewish
Community Center in the country,”
said Slobin, who shares the stories in
his book.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS’
ROLE
The Detroit JCC had a school of
music, and the Junior Music Study
Club at the JCC did a lot to promote
musically talented youth, said Slobin,
who also studied at Cass Tech, where
he played in the orchestra, “which
produced a lot of musicians, including
Darwyn Apple, a pioneering African
American orchestra player who had
a long career in St. Louis. Also, the
Barnes brothers, Robert and Darrel,
who worked in the Boston and
Philadelphia orchestras later.
” After
high school, he headed to University
of Michigan, where, except for a two-
year break studying at a New York
conservatory, he earned bachelor’
s,
master’
s and doctorate degrees.
According to Slobin, “Many
Jewish classical musicians came out
of Detroit. The educational system
believed in music as not just a leveler,
but a career path in those days … The
public-school system in Detroit had
a long-term effect on the dozens of
children who went on to active lives
in music from Detroit.
“Some musicians got on a career
highway that might well take them
away from Detroit, whereas others
went back to their neighborhoods,
becoming, for example, major polka
band leaders who could use their
skills in ensemble and arranging
within their communities. It’
s one of
the fascinating and little-known sto-
ries about the musical life of Detroit
at its peak of civic striving.” ■
“Th
e music fl
owed from Jew to gentile,
from black to white … it was the cultural
agent of the city.”
MARK SLOBIN, AUTHOR, MOTOR CITY MUSIC
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