When traditional Jewish music ambles from the stage at Hermann’s Jazz Club on Sunday, it will be played by two stagemates with a charged history.
Guitarist Lucila Nerenberg is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, while flutist Martina Peladeau was born to German parents who lived under Hitler’s regime.
They are joined in the group by Kate Rhodes (violin, viola), Alex Olson (mandolin, tambourine) and Barbara Pedrick Blied (bass).
For Peladeau, it’s catharsis. “It really means a lot for me to play this music, especially with Lucy,” she said.
While growing up in Essen, Germany, during the 1960s, Peladeau said, she learned about the horrors of the Nazi regime. She and her cohorts continue to carry feelings of guilt for the genocide carried out by an older generation.
“It’s really a hard topic for me; it has been all my life. If you talk to other German people, all of us have this guilt that has been there since our upbringing,” she said.
“Our parents, when asked, they said: ‘Well, we didn’t really know,’ or they said they weren’t aware of what was going on. That doesn’t really help us.”
Peladeau said she was drawn to klezmer, a form of music developed in Eastern European by the Ashkenazi Jews, when she heard it for the first time at 18.
“The music had this positive energy, despite everything that went on, which really humbled me,” she said. “Playing this music makes me heal and helps a little [as I] go through that forgiveness part.”
Peladeau, a travel counsellor, moved to Tofino in 1986 and spent 17 years there with her husband (Olson) and three children before relocating to Victoria.
She joined the Klez Galz in 2010, which evolved into the Klez this year. Its newest members are Nerenberg, Olson (a Victoria Symphony bass player) and Rhodes (a Victoria Symphony violinist).
Sunday’s concert will celebrate the release of the Klez’s first CD, A Nakht in Gan Eydn.
Nerenberg, who grew up in Argentina and is the only Jewish member of the band, said her parents didn’t speak much about the Holocaust. Her mother was fortunate to spend that time in hiding rather than a concentration camp, she said. And although her father was an Argentine, several of his relatives were killed in Europe at that time.
Her mother fled to South America from Communist Romania in 1948. Nerenberg moved to Canada six years ago after some time in the United States.
Nerenberg said she believes that history has helped inform the work that she does today as an addictions psychiatrist, often delivered through the Native Friendship Centres.
“So many ethnic groups have suffered genocide and discrimination. I think each experience is unique and many children of survivors find it meaningful to help other ethnic groups.”
Twenty years ago, she also participated in an organized dialogue between children of Nazis and children of Holocaust victims.
“I found it very inspiring,” she said. “I liked the comment of one of the Germans in that group, who said: ‘What happened was not our fault, but it is our responsibility to make things better.’
“I feel that way about residential school survivors, as a person who, myself, is of European descent. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I feel we all have a responsibility to help make things better for everyone else.”
And although she’s of Ashkenazi heritage, she has brought her love of Seph-ardic music to the group.
Sephardic music comes from the Iberian peninsula, with linguistic influences of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), medieval Castilian, Hebrew and Arabic, in contrast to the Yiddish influence found in klezmer.
She said she’s happy to play alongside Peladeau, who is “helping preserve” a Jewish cultural tradition. “I think it’s a message of hope.”