Millie and the Mentshn, a self-described "chamber klezmer" band comprising five area musicians-three of whom are Western Washington University professors-is trying to capitalize on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The local quintet is one of just five bands from the United States-and only 20 worldwide-to capture an invitation to the inaugural KlezFiesta music festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The nine-day festival takes place this fall, meaning Millie Johnson and her four mentshn (sounds like "mention" and is the plural for "mentsh," which in Yiddish means "a person of good character") have only a few months to raise the $6,000 they think it'll take to fly them the 13,930 miles to Buenos Aires and back.

Among the ways the band is trying to amass the necessary plane-ticket funds is by playing self-benefit shows. They have one-a dual concert with fellow klezmer band What the Chelm, which includes several of the same members-lined up for March 8 in the Fairhaven Auditorium.

Band members also plan to hawk their latest cd, which is selling for $15. The album, "Mentshn It!," is the group's second, after "Homeland to Heartland: The Journey," a live recording that was released in 2004. That album tells the story of Johnson's relative Morris Tenenbaum, born in 1896, who wrote and illustrated a journal that included stories of his life in Russian Lithuania, his family's immigration to America and his early life in the United States.

The album is the journal of my ancestors and the music that matches it from the area," Johnson said after a recent performance at the Spring Creek Retirement & Assisted Living Community.

Johnson, the group's vocalist, is an associate professor of mathematics at Western. Louis Lippman, a WWU professor of psychology, plays piano, and Kenneth Bronstein, a WWU accounting lecturer, plays the oboe. Other band members are Phil Heaven, who plays viola and violin, and percussionist Warren Palken.

Like Johnson, KlezFiesta founder Pedro Banchik is a klezmer musician with an interest in history.

"He found us," Johnson said. "He's really interested in the historical aspect and makeup of our band."

For a family reunion, Banchik created a documentary of his family history that eventually turned into a multiple-award-winning masterpiece.

Millie and the Mentshn are hoping to be able to show the film locally as part of its fundrasing efforts.

"He's very interested, as many people are, in his history," Johnson said.

Tickets for the March 8 show at the Fairhaven College Auditorium may be reserved in advance at Village Books in Fairhaven. Seating is limited.

Visit the Web site for Millie and the Mentshn at http://www.millieandthementshn.com.

"Did you know George Gershwin was a hoodlum and his name wasn't George?" Millie Johnson asks. She has researched Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and other composers that immigrated to the United States in order to chronicle Jewish music from late 1800s Russia to the influences of jazz and gospel on the new arrivals and her enthusiasm for their work is evident. Presented as a multi-media concert at Western Washington University on Sunday, April 22, "Songs Never Silenced" will be Millie and her band, the Mentshn, playing a range of music, as she says, "from rompin' stompin' klezmer, to folk songs from Jewish troubadour Eliza Greenblatt, plus classical, swing, jazz, and heartwrenching Holocaust songs."

This is Millie and the Mentshn's second foray into multi-media concerts with significant historical context. From "a little concert at the Whatcom Museum in 2002," remembers Johnson, where she read from a relative's early 1900s journal describing his immigration experience, Millie and the Mentshn created "Homeland to Heartland."The journals describing life in Russia and the boat that brought her relatives to America became a lens to amplify the changes in Jewish music through those times. Well received, Millie and the Mentshn performed "Heartland to Homeland" as far away as Minnesota and Alaska.

Having grown up in a ten-person traditional Jewish family exposed to Yiddish from her elders and Hebrew in Saturday School, Johnson sang opera in her 20s, even trying her luck in New York at one point. Practicality eventually won out over waitressing and working to make it in opera, so she finished her math degree and taught high school. Johnson went on to teach at Western Washington University, and is now in her thirty-fourth year of teaching.

Fellow WWU professor Lou Lippman learned Johnson sang and with persistent encouragement got her involved in What The Chelm, the klezmer group he played piano with. "What The Chelm brought back my childhood and I unearthed my grandfather's cousin's journals," says Johnson. Reading the vivid writing, "I feel like I can see what's going on and I can hear the music." Sometimes her relative even mentioned particular songs. She created Millie and the Mentshn with What The Chelm players and other musicians to explore the development of Jewish music Old World to New World. Her classical training was in use again.

The new concert, "Songs Never Silenced," will expand Johnson's family's experience to include the stories of other Jewish immigrants - and those who remained in Europe. Research led Johnson to poet Schmerke Kaczerginsky, who survived the Holocaust and in 1948 wrote down over 200 songs he remembered or heard from others. Johnson saw his book of lyrics with a few handwritten notations, and was inspired to revive some of the songs. "It's the hardest thing I've ever done - guesswork," she says, "trying to stay true to the spirit of the words and creating harmonies that won't overshadow those words."

Reviving a song in that way takes about a month of painstaking work. Johnson writes a line of music for Lou Lippman's piano, singing with it and modifying, then slowly adding Ken Bronstein's oboe, Phil Heaven's violin or viola, and Warren Palken's drums. The arranging and creating continues, until it feels right. When it is right, Johnson says, then "it's like meeting somebody I didn't know and this is just who I wanted to meet."

The "Songs Never Silenced" concert will combine stories, music, and a slide show of historical photographs. The music will include instrumentals, and Johnson singing in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, with translations of every song printed in the program. The group plans to include the recognizable, Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and the Depression-era "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" as well as those Schmerke Kaczerginsky writings for which Millie and the Mentshn have arranged the music.

In April there will be three opportunities to experience Millie and the Mentshn's musical connecting of the past to the present: April 4 through the Bellingham Music Club, April 14 as part of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, and the full "Songs Never Silenced" concert debuting at WWU's Performing Arts Center Concert Hall Sunday, April 22. See their website, www.millieandthementshn.com, for information about all of these. Tickets for the WWU performance are $5 or $3 students/seniors and are available from the WWU Box Office, Village Books, and the Community Food Co-op.

Laural Ringler

In his journal, Morris Tenenbaum relates the daily experience of family members who survived the pogroms in turn-of-the-century Lithuania. They escaped to America, traveling in the steerage compartment of a freighter. In their trunks and boxes and bags, they carried jars of chicken schmaltz mixed with hot water and hard bread, kosher food that would sustain them on their very long journey.

In their hearts, they carried the music that had always sustained them.

A generation later, when the Holocaust was beginning, Jews were herded onto the boxcars of trains going to unannounced destinations. They gave up their trunks and boxes and bags, but they did not give up their music.

Using music, stories and slides, Millie and the Mentshn, a Klezmer band, shows how Jewish music changed as it moved across time and space before, during and after the Holocaust. Campus visitors will have an opportunity to experience this journey when the band brings its multimedia concert to Western’s Performing Arts Center on April 22.

Millie and the Mentshn was formed in 2002 when Millie Johnson, a WWU professor of mathematics, began researching the lyrics and melodies that shaped the music so often remarked on in the journals written by her grandfather’s cousin, Morris Tenenbaum. Band members include Lou Lippman, piano, Warren Palken, drums, Ken Bronstein, oboe, and Phil Heaven, viola and violin. Johnson is the vocalist for the band and also writes the musical arrangements.

Lippman and Bronstein are also on the faculty at Western. Lippman is a professor of psychology; Bronstein is an accounting lecturer.

Following a chronological path, the April concert will introduce folk tunes starting from the late 1800s. The program will include a love song written in 1933 by Eliza Greenblatt. Her musically gifted family included son-in-law Woodie Guthrie and grandson Arlo Guthrie. Other songs from the Depression era will include “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” made popular by Bing Crosby.

The program will include a selection of songs written in the ghettos and concentration camps. Rarely do these songs address normal happenings— romance, children at play, the joy of learning. These songs chronicle families torn asunder. The lyrics, often narrative, are less soothing than the music. Dremlyn Feygl (Birds Are Dreaming) is a typical example of a lullaby.

Your cradle once did stand

Woven out of happiness.

And your mother, oh, your mother

Never will return. Hushabye.

The music began to change in 1941 as the partisan movement developed. Johnson says that "What distinguishes the music of this period is the march rhythm (4/4 time) and the themes, which changed from tragedy and desperation to courage, dignity and survival. Many resistors, and they included non-Jews, were living in the woods and using what weapons they could steal or borrow. The rhythm of the music evokes a feeling of strength and spirit."

After the war, as survivors immigrated to the United States, joy and hope tempered by grief fused together to form a new dynamic. The music that evolved was a systhesis of Old World traditions and the sounds of Broadway tunes and jazz that greeted them in the New World. Like the survivors, the music has adapted.

"Songs Never Silenced" has received generous support from the WWU Diversity Fund and from other campus organizations, including Hillel, Lutheran Campus Ministry and the Northwest Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Ethnocide Education.

The title "Songs Never Silenced" is being used with permission granted by Velvel Pasternak, editor of a book with the same title.

Dee Johnson

Like many Jewish immigrants, Morris Tenenbaum had a good story to tell. Born in 1896 in the village of Visoko-Litovsk in Lithuania, Tenenbaum kept detailed journals in which he documented his family's history from his parents' arranged marriage to their arrival in the United States. Millie Johnson, the granddaughter of Tenenbaum's cousin, was inspired by the journals, and so she decided to set the stories to music. Her musical ensemble, Millie and the Mentshn, performs "Homeland to Heartland," a narrated, multimedia concert that features Old World-style klezmer melodies - the group of classically trained musicians has been described as a "chamber" klezmer ensemble. Johnson, who by day is a math professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., began researching music in order to find melodies that must have been playing in the background throughout Tenenbaum's life.

"They had such incredible struggles, and yet music seemed to make their lives better,"

Johnson said of her family. "The descriptions were so vivid, and everything [Morris] described [involved] music and dancing."

With a slide presentation of family photographs as the backdrop, Johnson reads segments of Tenenbaum's journal throughout the two-hour performance, which will be presented in Anchorage and Fairbanks. The presentation leads audiences on a musical journey from Lithuania in the late 1800s: the family's survival of the pogrom, their ship voyage to Liverpool and their eventual arrival in the United States, where they settled in St. Paul, Minn. The story ends in the 1940s.

"I think that the struggles, the optimism, the strength, the love and the tradition of the Jewish people become transparent, or can be experienced, through the music, pictures and stories," Johnson said. "I hope that we might be doing a tiny bit in helping to keep Jewish culture alive. I believe that when the music and traditions survive, so do the people."

Sarah Kricheff