In Vermont: When Woody Allen Meets L.L. Bean

By Sam Allis

Avram Patt shifts his straw hat and announces that the next song will be Wild Night in Odessa. Then he goes back to his drums, and all hell breaks loose. The six-member Nisht Geferlach klezmer band erupts into the raucous, sometimes haunting music that one member describes as "Dixieland meets Eastern Europe." Patt, 37, the soloist, explains every song in English before singing in fluid Yiddish, his language of record as a boy in the Amalgamated cooperative houses in the West Bronx.

Nisht Geferlach, which roughly means "no big deal" in Yiddish, wafts into the thick summer night from the steps of the white clapboard Grace United Methodist Church in Plainfield, Vt. The Yiddish folk music that originated in Eastern Europe carries across the lawn as children dance in ragged circles under the pines. Their parents sit on the old stone wall, clapping along with Lebn Zol Kolombus (Long Live Columbus), a staple of the old Yiddish theater that once thrived along New York City's Second Avenue. The music is as mystifying as it is exotic to most folks in these parts. "People walk up to us all the time and say, 'What the hell was that?' " reports Accordion Player Rick Winston.

Nisht Geferlach is the only klezmer band in northern New England, the only one, Patt proclaims with a grin, to play at the Knights of Columbus in South Burlington. And Patt, who is chairman of the Plainfield board of selectmen, is surely the only elected official around here who spoke Yiddish until he was five.

But then, how many Jewish sled-dog trainers can there be? Damned few besides Ed Blechner, 41, over in Addison. This mountain man was born in Queens and frequented an Orthodox synagogue in the wilds of Great Neck, N.Y. And what about the Beth Jacob Synagogue in Montpelier, where Orthodox, Conservative and Reform all worship together under the same roof? There's a Nobel Peace Prize in there somewhere. "Unfortunately, this is newsworthy in the Jewish world," concedes R.D. Eno, publisher of a bimonthly called KFARI, which means "my town" in Hebrew, and subtitled The Jewish Newsmagazine of Rural New England and Quebec.

What is this -- Woody Allen meets L.L. Bean? The American Jew is supposed to be an urban creature, not a New England rustic. Most synagogues are in cities and their environs. So are Neil Simon and the diamond district. "Our ghosts aren't there," explains Publisher Eno about the country. Rabbi Daniel Siegel of Hanover, N.H., recalls, "If someone wanted to have a garden, people would say, 'So go to Israel.' "

Northern New England, however, is alive with young Jews, mostly urban emigres, doing interesting things with their lives and their religion. "The pop American Jewishness, the Woody Allen thing, had no underpinnings," explains Ron Wild, a Montpelier resident from Atlanta who heads the annual Conference on Judaism in Rural New England. "It was easy to reject. A lot of people walked away from that." Many college-age Jews in the late '60s and '70s left the cities for the arresting landscapes of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont in the back-to-the-land movement -- a diaspora from the Diaspora, says Eno. After the novelty of clean air wore off, this Jewish Big Chill contingent confronted the harsh realities of isolated rural life, compounded by the gnawing issue of their lapsed Jewishness. "We're just at the stage of finding out what works," says Rick Schwag, 35, who runs the Para-Rabbi Foundation up in Lyndonville. Schwag's organization sends rabbis to Jews requesting instruction in prayer services and rites. "Individuals who have been isolated up here until now are emerging into a community." Adds Wild: "You can throw away the structure, but what do you do with the content? That's where we are now."

Moonie, Kona and Ed Blechner's ten other sled dogs lie inert in the August heat, dreaming, no doubt, of a 50-mile run at 20 below. Blechner, meanwhile, tries to explain his odyssey from Queens to Addison. He has not attended synagogue regularly since late childhood, when, in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah, he walked to shul, or synagogue, and avoided automobiles and telephones on the Sabbath. Then came varsity football at Union College and Outward Bound's Hurricane Island School and a world beyond Great Neck. "I used to feel funny among Jews," he recalls. "I had taken myself so far away that I was a stranger in my own house. I just got too assimilated."

Blechner's Jewishness is slowly surfacing in his solitary life on six acres at the foot of Snake Mountain. "I couldn't flush it out," he says. He wants a family, and he knows that children trigger the heritage question. "What are you going to do, send them to the Congregational church?" he asks. But he has more immediate concerns: "How do you meet a nice Jewish girl up here? There are no Jewish singles weekends. Are there women living similar life-styles? Whom do you relate to up here about that?"

Christmas in the country is a spooky time for rural Jews. "There's a lot of well-meaning ignorance up here," says Bruce Chalmer, 37, a Jew in Montpelier. "For many people, you're the first Jew they've ever met. They don't realize that experiencing Christmas could be inflicted." Rick Winston adds, "You're surrounded by all of these Wasps and Yankees, and at Christmastime, particularly if you have kids, you start thinking in totally new ways: Yes, I'm Jewish, and I want to talk to other Jews. Are you isolated too?"

Probably. There are five full-time rabbis, four in Burlington and one in Rutland, to minister to some 3,600 Jews scattered throughout the state. Most are clustered around cities like Burlington, which have sustained Jewish communities for more than a century. What's lacking for many is a sense of community -- a cultural, if not religious, bond. Eno's KFARI, published for the first time out of his house in Cabot last February, has already become a bulletin board for many Jews in the region. "The idea is that for Jews up here to make their Jewish life work, they have to do it themselves," says Rabbi Siegel, who travels around New England to synagogues without rabbis.

Many Jews of northern New England have by necessity retooled the structures of their religious lives in ways that would appall most mainstream Jews. Take Bruce Chalmer's Beth Jacob Synagogue in Montpelier. "We're decades ahead of New York in terms of coping as a Jewish community. We don't perceive ourselves as armed camps," he says of relations between the different movements of Judaism. Beth Jacob, with about 80 families, has no rabbi. The congregation practices what Wild calls "New Age Judaism." It must grapple with issues that arise in one-synagogue communities. "You can't say that the Reform temple down the street recognizes patrilineal descent and we don't," explains Rabbi Siegel. Adds Chalmer: "There's no institutional structure. You've got to be it. That's what's so exciting."

Chalmer, a computer consultant, and his wife Judith moved to Vermont from Buffalo in 1972 for the quality of life, built their own house in the country and lived fairly secular lives. Gradually, though, things changed. Unlike Blechner, they moved into Montpelier so they could walk to shul. They shun the telephone and the automobile on the Sabbath. Their kosher meat is shipped by bus from Albany. "I moved into town to walk to a shul, even though its kitchen isn't kosher," says Chalmer, enjoying this inconsistency, which would choke a purist. "A Jew is a Jew," he says, a yarmulke perched on his head, sitting on his porch one Sunday morning. "There's no such thing as Orthodox, Conservative or Reform." Rabbi Siegel puts it another way: "They're the most militantly individualistic people you'll find anywhere."