Grandma and the FBI

Isle of Klezbos

The political activities of the late Dr. Adele Sicular caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. By the late 1940s, Hoover, the former FBI director, had ordered his Bureau to keep tabs on tens of thousands of suspected subversives. For her involvement in the Citizens’ Committee for the Upper West Side and progressive stances on racial integration and socialized health care, Dr. Sicular, a Russian immigrant, was being watched as a possible Communist.

“J. Edgar Klezmer: Songs From My Grandmother’s FBI Files” is a multimedia presentation written by Eve Sicular, the drummer and bandleader of Metropolitan Klezmer and Isle of Klezbos. Sicular, who obtained her grandmother’s dossier through the Freedom of Information Act, premiered the show to a sold-out audience at Dixon Place in New York in November.

Sicular will put on the composite live theater, music, and visual presentation at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck on Saturday, Feb. 28.

“Half the show’s historical content is from the [FBI] files themselves, and half the show is what turned up in the newspaper, the kinds of things that would have put her in the sights of J. Edgar Hoover,” said Sicular, who previously served as curator of Film & Photo archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

“What her ideas were I can only know a certain amount, but she was part of the Citizens Committee for the Upper West Side,” Sicular said of her grandmother. “Whether or not it was a [Communist] front organization, they had rallies and would go down and testify in D.C. and organize unity days that were anti-racism and pro-integration.”

Sicular’s grandmother came under heavy surveillance in 1947, when the Barnard-educated physician-turned-psychiatrist took a job on the Veteran’s Administration psychiatric staff. “I found transcripts in these FBI files of interviews done by FBI agents of every single person in [my grandmother’s] residential building, every single maid in her office, every single person in her old residential building,” said Sicular.

The FBI never arrested or detained Dr. Sicular, but it did save her granddaughter the trouble of putting together a family history.

Said Sicular, “Thank the FBI for assembling this scrapbook on my grandmother’s activities.”

The younger Sicular’s interest in history began at Harvard, where she earned her degree in Russian history and literature. She worked on a series entitled “Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in 1994 published “The Celluloid Closet of Yiddish Film,” an exploration of homosexuality in Yiddish culture, in the Jewish Folklore & Ethnology Review.

“I’ve done all these different things that were to some degree academic and to some degree bringing scholarly information into the popular culture realm,” said Sicular.

“J. Edgar Klezmer” binds Sicular’s academic and musical pursuits. She started playing drums as a child, perpetuating her family’s musical heritage.

“My father was a fantastic pianist, and my grandmother had stopped playing piano before I was born. I knew that the musical performance side was from that part of my family,” said Sicular.

“I’d been playing the drums since I was 8 years old, and I first heard klezmer my senior year of college. Both my grandmother and her aunt apparently could have been concert-level pianists but did other things, and so I just took klezmer as my main specialty.”

Sicular founded Metropolitan Klezmer (metropolitanklezmer.com) in 1994 and Isle of Klezbos (myspace.com/klezbos) in 1998. Some of Sicular’s bandmates — Pam Fleming (trumpet/flugelhorn), Debra Kreisberg (clarinet/alto sax), and Melissa Fogarty (vocals) — accompany her in the “J. Edgar Klezmer” ensemble.

Special guest Shoko Nagai (accordion/piano) rounds out the band. Actor/writer Moe Angelos (The Five Lesbian Brothers), described by Sicular as the “token non-musician,” performs many of the speaking parts.

The show also features PowerPoint presentations and multimedia. Even the music is diverse — styles include klezmer, jazz, baroque, boogie-woogie, gospel, and others.

“The show is a little hard to describe, since we put so much together on all these different levels, but I would say it’s musical documentary theater,” said Sicular.

“It has everything from classical to klezmer and boogie-woogie and some R&B, and many styles that come up organically within the different sides of the stories.”

Indeed, the 59 pages Sicular retrieved from the FBI contain no shortage of stories: her grandmother, who died when Sicular was 15, had connections with former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, expatriate Communist journalist Israel Epstein, and a bevy of colleagues that ruffled Hoover’s feathers.

They’re stories, Sicular said, with modern relevance.

“They went after a lot of people back then who were subversive, and now there’s the same thing — threatening people [and] problems with habeus corpus,” she said.

“It could be someone’s grandmother.”

For tickets and additional information, call (201) 836-3499, e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or visit www.puffinculturalforum.org.

Metropolitan Klezmer