Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. By Walter Zev Feldman.

Walter Zev Feldman’s present volume is the first full-length academic study since the 1960s to address the social history and musical structures of klezmer music in pre-Holocaust central and eastern Europe. Instrumental music played by professional musicians, klezmer comprises heterogeneous repertories that were the mainstay of the east-European Jewish wedding, yet were also performed for diverse non-Jewish audiences, across a long historical durée from the emergence of Jewish musical guilds in the sixteenth century until the decline of European klezmer music in the mid-twentieth century, and across a wide geographical region spanning from Moldova to east Germany.