The Last Dekrepitzer

     He could hear the fiddle but couldn’t locate it as it echoed off the subway station walls. A young man in a tweed overcoat pushed through the crowds by the IND tracks. Just outside the turnstile, a gray-haired man with a full beard was fiddling by the stairs to the 59th Street exit. The fiddler’s strange music rose above the rumble of the trains passing below. He held his fiddle in his right hand and bowed with his left. Every so often his odd style caught the eye of a commuter rushing to the turnstiles who’d stop, listen for a moment and drop a coin in his open fiddle case.

     The young man lingered. The fiddler wore a black fedora, and between the hat and beard all you could see of his face were his eyes. He played gospel, blues and, occasionally, what sounded like Hasidic melodies. The longer the young man watched, every so often dropping coins in the case, the more frequently the man played Hasidic melodies. The young man stepped closer to the fiddler after one of the melodies and called out over the subway din, “Atzmos Yechezkel Yirkedu, Ezekiel’s Bones Will Dance.” The fiddler dropped his arms. His eyes opened wide. He stepped toward the young man and began raising his arms. But for the fiddle and bow in his hands, he seemed about to embrace him.

     “Wait,” said the fiddler, “wait.” He bent over, gathered up the coins and snapped his violin case shut. He nodded toward the exit and the young man followed him across Columbus Circle into Central Park. The fiddler sat down on a bench, rested the violin case beside him and motioned for the young man to sit down.

     “You’re the son of a Dekrepitzer, aren’t you?” the bearded man asked.

     “No. No Hasidic blood at all,” the young man said. The

fiddler buried his head in his hands. The young man looked at the bent figure beside him and over the man’s back at the park. It was midday and the park was quiet. Leaves blew across the path. He put a hand on the bearded man’s shoulder and he looked up.

     “How’d you figure I’m a Dekrepitzer?” The fiddler sounded

like a colored man with the accent of a Polish Jewish refugee. “How you know that?”

     “The left-handed bowing, you played Eliyahu Oile B’Aish, Elijah Went Up in Fire, a Dekrepitzer niggun,” said the young man, using the Hasidic word for melody.

     The fiddler stared at the pigeons. “How you know about the fiddling and niggunim? Ain’t no Dekrepitzers since the war.”

     The young man explained that he was studying music

ethnography at Columbia. He’d been studying folk fiddling in Poland between the wars, particularly the fiddling of Hasidic rebbes who led their followers, their Hasidim, in songs and dances.

    The fiddler started laughing. “The rebbes were the worst

fiddlers ever, the rebbes. There were Hasidim that could fiddle, but the rebbes, they was the worst.”

     “The Hasidim didn’t seem to think so.”

     “Everybody was fronting like the rebbes were wonderful, just because they was the rebbes.”

     “You played with the Brown Sugar Ramblers also,” said the young man.

     “Man, that was some time ago.”

     “I heard the recording by Alan Lomax from 1947 in Mississippi.”

     “Lomax,” the fiddler said. “Lomax came down to Leesboro,

said he was collecting music. Done thought I was colored. Told me I was one of the last Negro blues fiddlers. Had this recording machine. So how you know about the Dekrepitzer fiddling?”

     “There’s a recording in the Cultural Archives Collection in the Library of Congress recorded in southeastern Poland by a man named Fulder. All it said on the label was ‘Dekrepitzer-1935.’ It has these strange songs on it. One I heard you play in the subway, Eliyahu Oile B’Aish, the one I asked you to play, Atzmos Yechezkel Yirkedu. But the fiddling … it was very unusual. An expert told me the fiddler was playing with the fiddle in his right hand.”

     “That’s the Rebbe playing, my zeida, my granddaddy. He done taught me.”

     The young man studied the fiddler’s face. The bushy beard concealed his features and it was difficult to determine his age. The gray seemed premature.

     “So you’re the Dekrepitzer Rebbe,” he said in a hushed voice.

      “Ain’t got no choice,” said the Rebbe, looking at the trees shedding their leaves in the autumn wind. “I’ve been the Dekrepitzer since my pa and zeida got murdered with all Dekrepitz, everybody. I’m the Dekrepitzer nister, hidden. Best

to stay that way. How you know it’s me playing with the Brown Sugar Ramblers?” asked the Rebbe, turning to the young man. “They ain’t Hasidim. They colored blues players.”

     “The Fulder recording reminded me of the Lomax record. I listened to the fiddle on that Lomax record. Studied it. Lomax had a note on the record mentioning the left-handed bowing. There was also the phrasing, the same as on the Fulder recording. The same fiddler. I wondered how it could possibly be,” said the young man. “How did you come to play with the Ramblers?”

     “Long story.”

     “Rebbe, you are Reb Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher.”

     “Nobody done called me that in a long time. People call me Sam Lightup.”

     “Rebbe, to me you must be the Rebbe.”

      “I thought you were a Dekrepitzer. I been playing Dekrepitzer niggunim in the subways for years—West Side, Brooklyn, where the Jews be. Hoping maybe there’d be some Dekrepitzer who recognize the niggunim. … ” His voice tapered off. “I’m the Rebbe, but I ain’t your rebbe. … Can’t be your rebbe.”