Dan Carkner
alte.klezmor.im
Dan Carkner
@alte.klezmor.im
Klezmer music history researcher, library technician from Vancouver BC. Doing research into klezmer musician biographies & immigration, Indonesian left-wing history, music manuscripts, compositions & copyright etc. Wikipedia editor. Social justice minded.
I was polishing off my score for this weekend's klezmer jam for Sirba Popilar and was consulting KlezmerGuide (klezmerguide.com/guide.html) and realized a rather simplified version of the same tune appears as a honga in Kostakowsky's WWI era International Hebrew Wedding Music book published in NYC!
November 14, 2025 at 9:10 PM
I tried to make a comment through the online feedback form but it rejected it ... suggestions?
November 10, 2025 at 11:16 PM
yes, in some klez versions it was mis-rendered as Sirba Popular, hard to say if by mistake or wanting to get rid of that association. published Romanian dances were often "of such a and such group", once they did the obvious ones they moved on to more problematic or niche ones, no musical connection
November 9, 2025 at 5:46 PM
luckily I'm a digital hoarder so even though the Romanian national library is down I already saved a version of this score back in 2019 🕵️you can see by the cover art just how un-Jewish this tune was, lol, despite still being played by klezmer musicians 125+ years later.
November 9, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Wow I was looking for the original published score of Sirba Popilor (Romanian dance hit of the turn of the 20th century, popular among klezmer musicians) for an event and the Romanian national library website I found it before was down, but instead I found this ... 🤓 clasate.cimec.ro/detaliu.asp?...
November 9, 2025 at 4:34 PM
teehee never seen klezmorim as two words in transliteration

(From a 1923 Kale Bazetsn skit by Gus Goldstein, Library of Congress drive.google.com/file/d/1zGR4... )
November 8, 2025 at 3:50 AM
Josh belatedly sent me this photo of me looking at the choral materials in his office at McGill. 😅it's me
November 4, 2025 at 4:59 PM
it's in Indonesian, but Hilmar Farid co-edited a book of oral history back in 2004 with my old MA supervisor John Roosa & Ayu Ratih, interviews with survivors of the 1965-66 repression against the Indonesian Communist Party. the ebook is on the ISSI website: sejarahsosial.org/issi_pdf/tah...
November 3, 2025 at 3:36 AM
probably doesn't matter to many people since it's long gone, but John got back to me and told me another Indonesian expert on the PKI who he trusts said the former site was not in Pasar Minggu but on the site of this other mosque in Tebet, still in South Jakarta:
maps.app.goo.gl/hv5N9VrgULuu...
November 1, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Huh in my research for Wikipedia Asian Month just now I realized a partial run of the Indonesian communist magazine Bintang Merah were digitized and added to @archive.org maybe a year and a half ago.
Probably a bit of a dry read, but very useful for research purposes!
archive.org/details/bint...
November 1, 2025 at 1:40 AM
"I was told but I can't be sure that the academy building was on the spot now occupied by At-Taqwa Grand Mosque in Pasar Minggu. You can see it on google maps, 700 m north of pasar minggu station."
October 31, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Long shot, but people do this as a hobby... is there someone on here who lives near Woodbridge, NJ who would be willing to go to Beth Israel cemetery and photograph some graves in the Progressive Musical Benevolent Society section? I need to fill some gaps in my research about klezmer musicians...
October 27, 2025 at 5:52 PM
is it me or has the NYC Historical Vital Records site stopped working for about 24 hours? And before that was half working for a day or two? 😔
for me, the whole site isn't down but it fails to display any search results.
a860-historicalvitalrecords.nyc.gov/search
#genealogy
October 26, 2025 at 9:33 PM
this guy put Volin on his Declaration of Intention and Wilna on his Petition for Naturalization which is a confusing transposition lol (Volhynia vs Vilnius). just a minor figure in my cast of characters so I probably won't dig deeper unless he becomes important again for some other reason.
October 25, 2025 at 6:02 PM
My good friend Itamar who I work with at the Peretz Centre is giving this talk at UBC on Nov 17th: "Of Bubbies and Bundists: Re-approaching Modern Eastern European Jewish History"

In person, but there's a zoom option too.
ces.ubc.ca/events/event...
October 23, 2025 at 10:47 PM
according to the US copyright registry, this was Izzie Drutin's only official composition, with shared credit with Israel J. Hochman. a jolly tune. Though he probably composed others that he didn't copyright; that was done before making a recording.
search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AYTK...
October 21, 2025 at 2:06 PM
the good things you find on Ancestry 🤓 a calling card for Izzie Drutin (born Starokostiantyniv in 1884, died in Miami in 1954). a notable guy in old NY klezmer circles who shows up as a sideman on a bunch of classic recordings. I tried sending a message to the person who posted it, we'll see 🕵️
October 21, 2025 at 3:48 AM
I heard the Indonesian historian Taufik Ahmad (born 1976) passed away this week. He wrote a lot about social movements, revolutionary groups and politics in Sulawesi.

scholar.google.com/citations?us...
October 21, 2025 at 3:10 AM
was looking for traces of the Progressive Musical Benevolent Society on jpress (historical NY mutual aid society for klezmer musicians) and coming up with nothing, but I did keep finding Arbeter Ring Musical Branch 615 ads & coverage in the late 1910s into the 1920s.👀

cc @workerscircle.bsky.social
October 18, 2025 at 2:36 PM
I've been researching old Bundist songs for a workshop for a few weeks now and I can't believe I didn't know about this book till now. Arbeyt un Frayhayt, a collection of Yiddish songs mostly dating to 1903-05, published by Schmul Lehman in Warsaw in 1921.
www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/...
October 17, 2025 at 7:30 PM
The unexpected turns I always come to in my klezmer research, the son of Mogilev-born NY musician Louis Kutzik (1889-1967) Alfred J. Kutzik, though he was a musician into the '50s too, became a well-known progressive sociologist & was a diehard USSR defender in print right till it collapsed. 🕵️
October 14, 2025 at 1:42 PM
after Josh found some more photos he took, we discussed it and I went in and updated the post with a bunch more of them, and added back in some paragraphs from our discussion about different people who came to look at things in the building.🤔
October 12, 2025 at 8:51 PM
here's the article in the Brooklyn Eagle from 1935 that reminded me of Okryanetz. to show up as a child dancer among some of the greats of old Yiddish singers (Moishe Oysher!) goes a long way to explain the quality and range of her 1950s cassette album lol. Not to mention a lecture by Avram Reisen.
October 12, 2025 at 4:04 PM
coming across her (excellent) name in a benefit concert from 1935 in an old issue of the Brooklyn Eagle reminded me about Kitty Okryanetz (1925-2006), a small-time Yiddish singer & entertainer whose 1953 album I was charmed by years ago. (free account required to stream.)
rsa.fau.edu/album/36566
October 12, 2025 at 3:29 PM
October 11, 2025 at 2:55 AM