It’s yellow and has 20 pages of listings. But don’t expect to find plumbers, body shops or pizza parlors in the new Gele Pages. Everything has a Yiddish accent.
The Gele Pages (“gele” is Yiddish for “yellow”) is a project of KlezCalifornia, the Bay Area’s annual Yiddish culture and klezmer festival. With so much Yiddishkeit available locally, the group’s brain trust hit on the idea of a comprehensive resource guide.
“This is 20 pages of people who are world class experts on all things involving Yiddish culture,” said KlezCalifornia co-founder Judy Kunofsky, “and all right here in the Bay Area.”
Compiled largely by Kunofsky’s colleague Howard Freedman, the Gele Pages features the whole megillah: listings of klezmer bands, Yiddish language classes, lecturers, dance and music teachers, artisans, youth programs, Yiddish choruses and more.
Some of the names are well known locally, such as singer Gerry Tenney, Cantor Richard Kaplan, professor Steven Zipperstein, storyteller Joel Ben Izzy and poet/translator Marcia Falk. Also included are area JCC’s, colleges and other institutions that offer Yiddish programming.
The idea of the Gele Pages emerged out of KlezCalifornia’s growing list of professional contacts. Kunofsky recalls sitting around the kitchen table last year with colleagues when they had a “Eureka!” moment.
“I said, ‘We’ll call it the Yiddish Culture Resource Guide.’
Icek Mozes, a native Yiddish speaker, said ‘Feh! That’s not a name. We’ll call it the Gele Pages.'”
Kunofsky swears he actually said “feh!”
Several years ago, she and her family attended KlezCamp back in upstate New York. The Yiddish immersion experience there stirred her Jewish heart. “I hadn’t read or spoken a word of Yiddish in 25 years at that point,” she recalls. “I felt so much at home [at KlezCamp] that I said, ‘I bet I can still read it.”
Thus began Kunofksy’s tsutshepenish (“obsession”) with the language. She soon launched a small Yiddish reading club with her husband, Mitchell. Not only did she regain her fluency in short order, she also became convinced the Bay Area would be the perfect place for an intensive Yiddish event similar to KlezCamp.
Along with violinist Julie Egger (leader of the klezmer band Red Hot Chachkas), Kunofsky launched KlezCalifornia. It started out as a five-day string of workshops held at San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School in 2003 and 2004. The last three years, the event has traveled around the Bay Area, bringing in huge crowds at the various JCC’s.
Those KlezCalifornia crowds make up the logical target audience for the Gele Pages. Kunofsky has amassed an email list topping 800 names, all of which get a pitch.
It shouldn’t be a hard sell.
The Gele Pages goes for a bissela gelt (about $3 a copy) and can even be downloaded free on the Internet (although it wouldn’t be very gele).
With a worldwide Yiddish revival in full swing, Kunofsky is glad she can help contribute in her small way, both with KlezCalifornia and the Gele Pages. Her Yiddish activism turns out to have much more personal motives.
“For me it’s a religious feeling,” she says. “I never feel closer to Judaism and God than I do when I’m reading or singing Yiddish. I associate it with my deepest Jewish identity.
Even if the Gele Pages made the New York Times Bestseller list, Kunofsky realizes that Yiddish is unlikely to become a widespread living language like modern Hebrew.
But that doesn’t mean she won’t speak Yiddish every chance she gets.
“I’ll say ‘kine horah’ at the drop of a hat,” she said.
The Gele Pages are available for sale at $3 each. For more information go to the KlezCalifornia Web site, www.klezcalifornia.org.