Kristin Keane

Paintings for the Future

October 30, 2019

It has been a dark winter: my mother’s cancer has spread rapidly. I come across Hilma af Klint: The Paintings for the Future exhibit at the Guggenheim when I visit a friend after months of bad news. The Ten Largest burst at their canvases’ edges. Shapes bump against sides suggestive of mortality, the afterlife. Forms escape their boundaries, go on unseen outside the frame—a circle begins, breaks at a corner, returns elsewhere.

It is spring and the flowers have arrived—patches of wet color, scraps of grass bursting green in sidewalk boxes. The park is verdant and pregnant with bloom, already tipping or about to tip into violet, azure. In af Klint’s art, color also works as energy: circles are blue as robins’ eggs, white becomes yellow and then orange and then—a color I cannot name. Like the lines, they too pour over the edges as if they could be caught in cupped hands.

The question of color and lines plagues me—what is the difference really between yellow and orange, purple or blue? Where is the border where one becomes the other? I am terrified of how quickly things shift shape. Things are alive and then—they are not. We’ve stopped tracking the edges my mother’s cancer has crossed. Of the spaces it takes up.

She loves flowers and presses them between pages of photo albums. I’m noticing more, she says. She means sky and color. She means things there are not words for.

Af Klint (1862–1944) was a spiritualist curious about the unseen world and reincarnation before her sister died during childhood, but the event marked a deepening interest in the realms beyond life. Many of spirituality’s adherents were also searching for deceased loved ones. The advent of x-ray and other technologies cracked open new possibilities then: what had been before invisible, could now very suddenly be seen. Energy transmitted. Af Klint began pushing her boundaries, she began stretching off the page.

It was during a séance with “The Five”—a group of women she founded to channel and record dispatches from mystics referred to as “High Masters”—when a message came over the medium. She was to make paintings on a transcendent plane representing immortality—a project which would span nine years and 193 works. The Ten Largest is the fourth group in the Paintings for the Temple collection which represent the stages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood, old age. Inside the museum over one hundred years after she painted them, they are sequenced, a varicolored wall tapestry each over three meters in length.

My mother communes with spirits—she too believes in what cannot be seen. She has her aura read, seeks counsel from telepaths. I do not practice these same beliefs, but the fear of losing her has turned everything upside down, it has strangled me with uncertainty. All my colors have begun running. How will I find her in death? Where will the line be between me here, and her on the other side of it?

It is during oncology visits with her tumors projected fat and white on screens when I begin imagining them filled with flower petals instead of disease. Congratulations, I want the doctors to say about each new growth, their stems stretching into nearby organs. You are so full of exquisite life.

Adulthood, Number 7, the signature painting of The Ten Largest, is a bulb opened to blooming. Biomorphic play typical of af Klint surrounds the form—a beetle could be a bird; a stamen perhaps a vine. The shapes are alive and tensile, unworldly and concrete.

*The Ten Largest, Childhood, No. 1,* 1907, Hilma af Klint, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

But it is Childhood, Number 1 that unfastens me. It vibrates with a blue as bold and dark as the sea. A mandala-like figure takes the center, two organic rings entwined like daisy chains hover above—the kind my mother showed me how to braid as a child using the rim of my thumbnail. It has a large message written in a conjured alphabet, at its center two ovum-like forms encased in a floral hoop reminiscent of lichen.

The painting is alive but it is also lifeless. Somber spheres in the shapes of coins line the bottom of the canvas surrounding a withered tree-like figure as if marking a grave. Is this meant to depict labor? A last gasp before the final push into life?

In birth, the thing a mother creates is put outside her, the burden and fear of death now everywhere: she understands the life she produced will now come to know of endings too. The other nine paintings extend across the gallery wall but I get stuck in this image. I think of my mother’s cells stretching the two of us into different dimensions, divided in half by a traverse-less sea. I am desperate to know how I will cross it.

When I tell my husband I’ve visited the exhibit I say “Paintings of the Future” by mistake. Perhaps that moment in the room with the canvases lined up, it comforted me to see it that way—not as an expectation of time, but as a certainty within it.

For my mother I want our future to be filled with af Klint’s colors, to burst with a different kind of life. I have imagined many times that the indecipherable script at the bottom of Childhood, Number 1 is a note written just for me.

You will find her again, it says. I tell myself it insists.

Kristin Keane lives in San Francisco where she is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Normal School, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Phoebe Stone

Teapot in Turquoise

September 26, 2019

Hear the podcast: Phoebe Stone reads her memoir here.

I was with my mother at Christmas time in England when she found the tea set. It was late in the day, I was eleven years old, and there it was, sitting in a cramped low-ceilinged antique shop next to a pillar. I can see the tea set clearly now in the oval orb of memory where it floats, dusty and blue-green and delicate with gold edges around the scalloped cups and plates. My mother knew immediately that she wanted to buy it.

That was the year my mother couldn’t say no to anything antique for a table. Not here in this quirky, quaint country where she felt so isolated, like an island herself. Not when she wanted to go home to America so much. She often cried and told my father so over and over again. Many of their terrible fights were about money, money we didn’t really have, money my mother was spending on little English antiques that seemed to her so reasonably priced, they were almost free. Almost.

As my mother looked at the teapot, she imagined she would bring breakfast on a tray to my father in bed. Their lives would be transformed by the tea set. She imagined a morning as the sunlight hit the edge of the turquoise scallops. My father would look up at her as if in a painting. He would be lying among yellowed folds of linen, propped against a pillow, a tray on his lap overflowing with sunlight and this tea set tucked up with buttered toast and boiled eggs.

While my mother bought the tea set, I looked through the window. Outside the air was crinkly and bright with tiny Christmas lights along the cold nighttime street. Sweet shops and tea shops shimmered; the air was steeped in excitement and yet rubbed with a layer of anxiety, a layer of foreign snow, and unfamiliar Christmas carols about a mother in a blue robe hiding with her miracle baby in a barn from a cruel king named Herod in a desert country thousands of years ago…

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay

Memory and dream mix and mingle. It was Noel, the season of Good King Wenceslas in England and yet everything seemed dark, blurred with the cold colors of stone and gray brick, chanting choir music, the vaulted ceilings of cathedrals we had toured, and then Christmas lights, the twinkle of anticipation, the thread of magic, wonder, edged all in gold. There were thorns of holly, wreaths, crowns, and pricked fingers bleeding in the snow, drops of blood like berries falling from green boughs . . . . Once in royal David’s City . . . and the flaring eyes of King Herod, a Jewish king. And me—a Jewish girl or half Jewish. My teacher at school would drill past my desk, pierce holes in the air around me. “Christ was killed by the Jews,” she would say and then she’d look deep, deep, deep into me.

What did I have within? I was but a girl, eleven years old, who stood there holding back with her weightless, narrow body what was to come. I was but a small church with a blue ceiling and in the back next to the organ, hidden behind a door not yet opened, my pitiful Jewish father hanging by his neck from a rope, no, a bathrobe belt, his long boney and beautiful feet drifting above the floor, the soles of them almost touching wood, almost touching stone . . . almost.

Perhaps my mother and I drove home that evening with the box of turquoise dishes on the car seat. Or maybe we walked with the cold English night air blowing through our coats, my mother carrying the box in her arms. Where were my sisters? I cannot say. All that remains is this orb, this isolated oval of memory, a turquoise tea set floating there in the shadowed store.

For Christmas at school I was to be one of three angels in white alone on the stage singing, “Angels we have heard on high.” I had a white choir gown, ironed freshly, smelling of pressed cotton and steam and starch and soap. I was to kneel in front of the audience with the other two girls chosen. In practice, we sang, our voices quavering with high notes, clear and blue, like the interior of a chapel painted the color of sky. But do not open the door in the back next to the organ, for therein, you will find his legs, the pierced palms bleeding, the boney knees slumped above the long tender feet almost touching the floor.

The night of the Christmas performance at school my mother and father attended, all dressed up, my father in a neck tie, my mother’s face bright with tears and moisture and lipstick. They came into my school and sat in the audience…in our classroom? I cannot recall. All I remember is the moment before I went out onto the stage with the two other girls in white. That moment, I discovered a way to look like I was singing without singing. It seemed like magic to me. Oh, a trick I just invented! I will mouth the words and not sing, and no one will know.

And so, as I knelt there, I opened my mouth and pretended and I did not sing. There were only two voices of two angels, the third mimed the words and made circles and squares with her lips and was silent. It would have been a triumphant moment had I sung. I had, it seems to me now, a beautiful child’s singing voice, but I didn’t sing. I had a crowning moment within my reach, and I had dropped it, not realizing. I had broken it. Instead of clusters of glory, praise and passion and cookies dripped in green icing, my father was bitter with me after the performance.

“Why didn’t you sing?” he said. “I didn’t come here to listen to the others singing. I came here to listen to you sing.” He turned, buttoned his coat and walked away.

I didn’t know what I had done or what I had missed or even why I done it. My white choir dress lay wrinkled in my arms and we must have gone home then, leaving me with that single orb of memory, being in the glaring bright light, in the silence, the voices of the two girls singing, “Angels we have head on high,” my mouth going up and down, opening and closing and uttering not a sound.

My mother must have put the turquoise tea set in the kitchen in a cupboard. She might have used it after a dinner she created in the tiny dining room where the large upright piano stood. There was no window in that dining room, only a small coal fireplace and sometimes a table. We had a roast beef dinner there that holiday season with wine goblets and English silver crystal and heavy sterling forks. My father spoke with reverence about Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine and we each had a sip of it poured into our delicate wine glasses. It tasted harsh and burned like blood in my throat, thorns of holly, swaddled in folds of memory. We taught our fingers that night to go along the rim of the wine glass at just the right angle to make a high-pitched whine, a wailing cry, a keening siren sounding. A warning.

The roast beef was too fatty. I felt sick. The room too small, the silverware too heavy, the coal fire too hot. Did we have tea in the turquoise tea set after dinner? It seems now in my mind to have been threaded to that Christmas, as if those delicate turquoise Copeland Spode butterflies were in the air or passing lightly over our plates, hovering above a mandarin orange pie baked by my older sister, a butter crust such as I have never tasted since. And tiny tender canned orange slices, doll sized. Everything around us exuding mystery, as if even the air were wrapped in Christmas paper or in a kind of blue luminescence, tinsel at the edges all around the rims of my memory.

And then the next day, my father pulled me aside in the hallway, while my mother napped or vanished in her gray foggy raincoat to the park along the Cam down the street. She loved to walk along the river where the swans floated, her face awash with longing, flickering joy and homesickness, a conflicting blend, like the black watch plaid skirt she wore.

“I bought a Christmas present for your mother. Would you tell me what you think? Will she like it?” my father said. A secret moment between us, we stood together, he and I, leaning in and out, my father revealing his tenderness, his youthfulness, the young boy lying within behind the sad eyes. At that moment he was darkly romantic to me and anguished and pulled a tiny red leather box from his pocket. The light so bright, the little box in the palm of his hand trembling. Leaning towards the wall, he was the skinny poet, long legged and hopeful, a nervous suitor, a shy lover, all revealed, all pretense dropped. “Do you think she will like it?” he said. “It reminds me of her, the face of the woman.”

How honored I, as if bestowed with a gentle mantle, a mantle of trust, responsibility, adulthood, a tiny slice of what was to come, I stepped for a moment into the waiting body of my future self. My opinion? My father wanted my opinion. I, the fallen angel, the eleven-year-old watcher, I who looked down at myself in the bathtub, seeing my tiny breasts forming and pubic hair beginning in strands of blue against my milky child’s skin, all in the green water as I floated there, the curved porcelain tub holding me, lifting me into my new forming body stretching out under me, light as wood. Me the awkward singing angel who was silent? My opinion?

My father opened the little box and inside a ring, a delicate gold band with red stones surrounding it, a tiny painting of a woman, a lovely face set among red jeweled facets of the ring. Oh, such a tiny treasure lying in his large, moving palm.

“Do you think she will like it?” he said again.

“Oh yes, Daddy. Yes, it’s beautiful, so beautiful,” I said, my little hand on his back, my eyes heavy, weighted.

On Christmas eve, I lay in my steely bed with my older sister, the cold night sky outside full of candles and songs of angels and clouds of fire, sharp green ivy and pine, blood red holly berries. Was I a Jew? Was Christ killed by the Jews? “What my teacher says, is that true?” I once asked my father.

“What do you think?” he said, turning away again, his face merging into shadow. My mother was not a Jew. My father was a Jew. What did it mean? What about the churches we visited all last autumn? Endless arched doors we had entered. Tintern Abbey all in shambles, grass everywhere inside it, grass climbing over the tombs, over the statues, the figure of Christ seen just barely through the broken stones and blowing soft green leaves. And then in bigger cathedrals the long statues of dead kings stretched out on top of heavy tombs, or the sad queens in marble lying cold with their beloved pets, a carved greyhound at the foot, a favorite dove nestled in hand. What about the line of choir stalls, the tearful red stained windows above the kneeling sorrow, the feet of Christ crossed at the bottom of the body, pierced with nails, the palms bleeding . . . long boney feet, the soles almost touching the floor?

I knew my mother did not like jewelry. I never saw her wear a necklace or bracelet or a lovely ring. She told my father over and over again, “I want a silver teapot for Christmas. Sterling for English tea.” Her face half turned to the window, the wan English light casting her profile in longing for home, for America.

That Christmas, that winter, as I lay in the long tub of green water in the large bathroom upstairs, dark linoleum underfoot, I drifted there in the water and as I drifted, I changed, transformed into a stranger to myself, tiny breasts grew larger, soft pubic hair thicker. I floated there unknowing. Asleep. Awake. Startled.

My father in early March in a rooming house in London tied a bathrobe belt around his neck and hung from the back of a door, his body dropping low under him, his long expressive feet almost touching the floor. Into the folds of yellowed memory, he disappeared. And never came back.

But who was to blame? Who caused it? No one. No one was to blame. It was not the ring, not the money for the turquoise tea set, not the angel with tied vocal chords who did not sing. It had been something already in motion, already set and ready, like a trap poised to snap or a teapot waiting to be filled on Christmas morning with warm, soothing, healing water.

Many years later on another Christmas morning, when I was in my twenties, my mother gave me a gift in a brown cardboard box. I would cry over it as it as it lay there in my lap, the turquoise tea set, each piece swathed in newspaper. I would see the butterflies through rips and holes in the wrapping. I did not know then that my life would be a kind of puzzle with a pattern. I did not know the pattern of the turquoise flowers and butterflies on scalloped white porcelain would somehow repeat itself or weave itself into my days, my months, my years.

And then one night in another Cambridge, in Massachusetts where I was living later, I had the tea set on the counter in the kitchen. And when a nail gave out, a cast iron frying pan fell off the wall suddenly and knocked the teapot to the floor and smashed it into pieces. I sat up all night gluing every single piece back together, every morsel of china so that when finished, the tea pot looked to be whole, although it could never hold water again.

It sat on a table glued together at breakfast. The repairs barely visible, the blue green delicate pattern overriding the cracks, the fissures. But when the light from the morning sun fell across the body of the teapot, casting shadows on hidden moments, you could see clearly the pure and the raw, the shatter of it.

Phoebe Stone is a painter, poet, and author of seven novels for young adults—most recently Romeo Blue and The Boy on Cinnamon Street—and three picture books, including When the Wind Bears Go Dancing. Phoebe grew up in Vermont, in a family of poets and novelists, and has spent most of her life painting and writing. Before concentrating on creating books for children and young adults, Phoebe had a successful career as a fine art painter and exhibited her work in many museums and galleries all around New England and New York City. She is presently working on a series of memoir/short stories for a book. Read another excerpt here.

Nancy Geyer

Keeping Time with Bill Viola

April 16, 2019

Bill Viola—*Incrementation* (black and white, continuously running, 1996)

Bill Viola’s video Incrementation makes me uncomfortable, and yet I stick with it for a good long while. Viola himself is on the screen, breathing; nothing happens but that. His head fills the box vertically, cropped at the top where his hairline might be, or once was, and at the bottom, trimming his Van Dyke beard. It looks suffocating in there. And it’s unnerving the way the monitor is tethered, via cables, to a speaker on the floor and an LED counter on the wall above, the numerals a pulse-raising red.

Evidence of breathing is usually a reassuring thing. It’s what you’re listening and looking for as you lean over your child, your husband, your elderly parent in bed, the air preternaturally still. But Viola’s breathing is over-evident. It’s amplified, so it sounds almost labored. I can detect little rasps and gasps and an overall raggedness, just enough to reverberate inside my chest.

At first glance I assume the counter is ticking off the seconds, given the resemblance to a digital clock. But of course breaths are what’s being ticked off, each inhale/exhale a unit of time. A kind of breath-keeping clock. This clock has an upper limit of 900,000,000 breaths, I will find out later, equivalent to about eighty-five years of living.

Viola, who has spent a lifetime exploring birth, aging, spirituality, and death, has helped define and advance the field of video art since the early 1970s. But this is the first time I’ve managed to see a solo show of his work—this one titled Bill Viola: The Moving Portrait, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, where I live. The exhibit’s curator argues for a “new interpretation” of Viola’s art as (unsurprisingly) portraiture, which would make Incrementation a self-portrait. It’s true the work looks ego-centric on approach—an artist boldly presenting himself to the world. But to Viola, as the artist himself writes in the exhibition catalogue, the person in the video is simply “a man.”

Deep into middle age, I sense that the membrane between myself and the rest of the world is getting thinner, along with my hair, my skin, my bones. I’ve become less guarded, more physically and emotionally suggestible. As I stand here watching and listening to Viola breathe, it’s as if I, too, am tethered to that clinical-looking apparatus. I feel a transfer or a sharing of vulnerability, and I do nothing to keep the feeling at bay.

Two memories arise, seemingly drawn straight from my chest. I am five or six, anxiously asking my mother at bedtime: What if I forget to breathe while I’m asleep? And eleven or twelve, suffering a brief phase in which I’m hyper-aware of the in and out of every breath I take, as if what had been automatic until then was now my conscious responsibility. Indeed, Incrementation reactivates this phase when I find it interfering with my own rhythm. I feel compelled to keep time with Viola lest I be uncomfortably out of sync.

The exhibit is sparsely attended on this weekday morning, not long after the doors were opened, and no one comes to hurry me along. The counter keeps flipping its digits. How to square this luxury of time with the time that’s dwindling before me?

Incrementation has a companion piece of sorts, in another room all by itself. In Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality (18:13 minutes, also 1996), an image of a man—Viola again, head closely cropped as before—is projected onto a screen suspended from the ceiling, the wall behind the screen painted black. This time Viola repeatedly holds his breath for as long as he can. Again, my own rhythm is disrupted, for breathing normally is difficult when the person facing you makes a thing of not breathing at all. Absurdly, as if I’ve been issued a schoolyard challenge, I have to suppress the urge to see how long I, too, can hold my breath.

Upon releasing his breath in several throaty bursts, Viola desperately sucks in air as if he’s just come up from the watery deep and is about to go back under. Then he tries again. Would a superhuman ability to hold one’s breath be a way to suspend time—is that the idea? A way to keep Incrementation’s breath-counting clock from reaching its limit, or at least greatly slow the reckoning? Certainly time seems excruciatingly slow as I stand here, waiting for Viola’s breath to give out again.

After watching Viola make three attempts at immortality, I quit the room and continue through the exhibit, more populated now, like the videos themselves, which feature a variety of people, in pairs and in larger groups, as well as alone. Many of these works are more aesthetically pleasing than the two I’ve just come from—lyrical treatments of mortality and the workings of time, often incorporating the sights and sounds of water. Some are spiritual or mystical in a way that I, not being similarly inclined—not up to this point in my life, anyway—have a hard time getting into. Others are wrenching—flat-out portraits of grief. It occurs to me that Viola’s work, more than that of any other artist I can think of, depends for its reception on the life stage of the person viewing it. And so even in these darkened rooms—too dim to read the slim catalogue in my hands—I find myself sensitive to the ages and bearings of those around me, people I would normally try to tune out as I became absorbed in whatever I was looking at. Here, rather than distracting me, they enhance my experience of Viola’s art. They are “moving portraits” too.

As I exit the exhibit I encounter Incrementation again, largely blocked from my view by two women who appear to be in their late twenties. I come abreast of them just as one turns, wide-eyed and smiling, to the other, who responds in kind. They turn back to the video, moving in closer, and for a moment I see it through their eyes, or what I thought I’d just seen in their eyes—the comic absurdity of a man in a box doing nothing but staring straight ahead and breathing. I absorb these things in two or three seconds, or less time than it takes to breathe in and out.

♦

Nancy Geyer is an essayist and freelance editor living in Washington, DC. She is also the art editor at Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments. Her writing has appeared in Georgia Review, Iowa Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2015), Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 2015), and The Poets Guide to the Birds (Anhinga Press, 2008).

Peter Knobler

Dancing in the Dark

August 9, 2018

My mother taught me to dance. This wasn’t some white-glove ballroom foxtrot; my mom could do a hot lindy. She could shake it. Family lore has it that as a teenager she was prancing in front of the bandstand at Hunter College in New York City one night when Dizzy Gillespie looked down and invited her backstage to dance with him after the show. She chickened out, but that story gave her bebop bona fides for the next sixty years.

I love to dance. My mom taught me the basics and I was more than happy to add to her repertoire. I lost her with the Funky Chicken and the Boogaloo, but she could bop with the best of them. In the ’60s, I was widely acknowledged as the best white male dancer at Middlebury College. Faint praise, indeed.

When my mother was eighty-four years old she was deep into her Alzheimer’s. She had been a firebrand; a biting, caustic political speaker with a hard spirit and an agile mind who trusted no one. She used to read the newspapers and spit. Now her mind was at a crawl and she barely moved. Where she once had been fueled by radical passion, there was no fire behind her eyes. She hadn’t walked in several years. One morning she woke up and had stopped speaking. It was with tremendous effort that she was able to raise her hand from her lap, and when she finally got it to her face she had forgotten the reason for all that lifting. Her dancing days were over.

My mother was not an easy woman to satisfy; nothing was ever quite right. When I played her the first Bob Dylan album, enamored as I was with his smart and gritty folkiness and because I wanted her in my world, she said, “He’s no Pete Seeger.” When I played her the groundbreaking rock of Dylan’s electric Bringing It All Back Home she told me, “I liked him better when he was a folksinger.” The present was when nothing good happened. When I was 22 and needed to make my own decisions—when I needed to lead—I invited her off the dance floor of my life, and she never forgave me. Our life became a distant tango and we were always stepping on each other’s toes. She probed for bruises and dwelled on failure, so of course I told her none of mine, and she lamented our “pass the salt” relationship; as far as she was concerned, all I’d say to her was “Pass the salt.” “Pass the salt.” I heard it as “Past Assault.” If one of my books made the bestsellers list the phone would ring the first Sunday it dropped off, my mother wondering what had happened. The years immediately preceding her descent into her illness were not easy ones for either of us.

But, dutiful son that I am, I visited. Not often enough, no doubt. Not as often as my sister. My mother was at home with a full-time aide, and my time with her was a trial; the best I could do was try to get through it.

So I was sitting by her chair and holding her hand, going through the monologue of my week or month or whatever it had been since I’d last seen her: my son’s guitar playing, my work, the weather, the miscreants in the White House. I filibustered, but there’s a limited amount of time I can listen to myself speak. She had had her limits in that area as well, and after about ten minutes I ran out of things to say. I felt I had to be there for a while but couldn’t just sit in silence.

“Mom,” I asked her, “would you like to hear some music?” Already a study in irony; like asking a book if it wanted to be read. What was she going to say to me?

“Yes,” she whispered.

This was a surprise.

When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets; the turntable had died long before. This was a while ago; I put on a CD. I had to unwrap it, it had never been touched. The New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars.

We were never a klezmer family. While my mother had affection for what she called “deedle-dydle music,” which I suspect connected her to her Bronx ghetto roots, in my parents’ extensive record collection we’d never had a single klezmer album.

But I had seen these guys drive a crowd crazy at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which was why I’d bought my mom that music. They play a bizarre and beatific blend of klezmer, funk, and atonal fusion jazz, and the fans and fanatics in front of the Jazz Fest blues stage had found it impossible to sit still when the band turned up the heat. Sweating, twirling, jumping up and down, crowd and Klezmers had combined in a moment that had moved beyond music. If there is a God, He or She had been up and boogieing. Klezmer is how God gets down.

So I hit Play.

The clarinet was frenzied from the first note. A happy clamor. There was a party going on. The song was called “Freitog Nokhn Tsimmous.” (The CD cover translated that as “Friday Night Big Deal.”) I stretched out my arms, snapped my fingers and did a little Tevya as I walked back to my mom.

She was beaming.

Her eyes were open way too wide, her face almost bursting, as if desperate to tell me she was having a good time. She smiled. My mother smiled! As I sat down next to her, she leaned forward and began to rise from her chair. Only her physical limitations prevented her from hitting the dance floor. When she could propel herself no further she leaned back, her chin raised, and let the music pulse through her. She was alive. I looked at her hands, so arthritic, her fingers pursed, and she was tapping them on her leg—in rhythm! I looked at her legs. She was tapping her feet—on the beat!

The Klezmers brought my mother to life. The music went on for an hour and she boogied all the way through. During one number, when the saxophone and clarinet were wailing, the violin screeching, the accordion going wild, my mother spoke. Her head never moved, her eyes remained fixed; still, she said slowly, “This really gets to me.” It was the closest to a conversation we’d had in five years.

But when the music finally ended, my mom returned to her world. She slumped back in her chair, her chin lowered to her chest, her smile not so much snuffed out as evaporated. It left no trace. I put on her favorites, trying to reignite the flame. Billie Holiday. Nothing. Ella Fitzgerald. Bubkes. Frank Sinatra. Bobby-soxer that she was, she moved not a finger and spoke not a word.

To brighten her day I asked the women who took care of my mother to keep the music playing. My sister, who can’t abide klezmer, refused to put it on when she was around, which was much more often than I was. (She’s a good daughter.) But in the years before my mother died she and I had our routine; when I came to visit (not often enough, I know), we would put on our klezmer and we’d dance.

Peter Knobler has collaborated on the autobiographies of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ann Richards, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, Hakeem Olajuwon, former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, Sumner Redstone and Tommy Hilfiger. With James Carville and Mary Matalin, he is co-author of All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President. Knobler has written songs with Rock & Roll Hall of Famers Chris Hillman, Steve Miller, and the E Street Band’s Garry Tallent. He is the former editor-in-chief of Crawdaddy, the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously. Knobler is the journalist who discovered Bruce Springsteen.

New England Review