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Nov. 25, 2011

Peretz honors singer

Banquet will feature Claire Klein Osipov.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY

In January 1952, Claire Klein Osipov – then just Claire Klein – first set foot in Vancouver, where she would eventually move. The “rising young soprano soloist of the [Toronto] Jewish Folk Choir,” reported the Jewish Western Bulletin, was coming with husband-wife team Emil and Fagel Gartner, conductor and pianist, respectively, of the renowned choir. They shared the stage at the Peter Pan Ballroom on West Broadway with three members of Vancouver’s United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) Drama Workshop. In the ensuing review, Klein was lauded as having proven “an able interpreter of Yiddish folk songs” and, when a larger troupe headed by the Gartners came to Vancouver later that year, the Bulletin noted that Klein, “who made quite a hit here last winter,” would be joining them.

Since her Vancouver debut, local and international audiences have been enjoying Klein Osipov’s interpretations of Yiddish music. For almost as long, the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture has benefited from her and her family’s many contributions. It is appropriate then that the centre will be honoring Klein Osipov at its annual banquet this year – though, on Dec. 4, she will have to sing for her supper, so to speak, as she will be performing at the banquet with her longtime pianist, Wendy Bross Stuart, and Saul Berson.

Born in Toronto, Klein Osipov was raised in a working-class, secular home. Her parents, both Polish immigrants, came to Toronto in the early 1920s. Her father was a pocket-maker at Tip Top Tailors, her mother, said Klein Osipov, had a beautiful voice, but never sang professionally – with five children by the age of 26, “she had her hands full.”

“They met at night school, my parents, which I always thought was very sweet,” Klein Osipov told the Independent. “We were poor, we didn’t have fine things in life, but they both knew that they wanted us to learn the Yiddish language, so they sent us to Jewish school, where we learned to read and write, and the history of the Jewish people.”

In addition to the school, Klein Osipov said, UJPO “had the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, they had a dance group, they had an orchestra and, so, the three girls joined the choir as teenagers and one of my sisters joined the orchestra and became a wonderful mandolin player. None of us knew how [to read music] ... but joining the choir and getting the musical script in front of us, we learned. At the age of about 17, my father and mother purchased a piano for me because they realized that I should get private lessons, which we couldn’t afford, but they did it.”

Klein Osipov studied voice for three years at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, while still belonging to the choir. She had a couple of recitals when she was 18, and participated, in the late 1940s, in UJPO’s first Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (it was not yet called Yom Hashoah).

Admitting to being very nervous before performing, Klein Osipov said, “Fortunately, I had my wonderful mentor, Fagel Gartner.... She was my mentor, she took me under her wing and really, really helped me with my interpretation and gave me love for the Yiddish song.”

When Klein Osipov sang with the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, it was in its heyday, with guest performers that included the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Paul Robeson, Earl Robinson, Jennie Tourel and Jan Peerce.

“I became the soloist of the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir in 1951,” she said. When she and the Gartners made that January 1952 trip to Vancouver – on a tour that also took them to Winnipeg and Calgary – it was Klein Osipov’s “first time ever away from home.”

UJPO was also in Vancouver, she explained. “They had a drama workshop and there were three people that were sent from that drama workshop – Nate Wiseman, Gert Snider (who was Tova Snider)  and Oscar Osipov – they met us in Winnipeg. They put on two plays separately from our program, and Emil Gartner sang solo, I sang solo, we sang duets together and Fagel accompanied us. Then we traveled with the drama group ... next stop Calgary, then Vancouver.”

Oscar Osipov’s brother, Lou, attended that Peter Pan Ballroom concert. “Lou was in the audience and, after the concert, he came backstage, introduced himself and the rest is history,” said Klein Osipov.

Lou Osipov promised to write when she returned to Toronto, “but he didn’t.” Eight months later, she was asked to go on another tour with the Gartners; this time with several other performers. This second tour went to many more cities across the country.

“I tell you, that was the best experience in my life, traveling by train and seeing Canada, said Klein Osipov. “It was wonderful.... We would rehearse on the train. It was great. People from all the coaches would come to hear us. Anyway, I got to the [Vancouver] train station on the second tour, and who’s there but Lou.”

Being the youngest of five, Klein Osipov said her family was very protective. She told her suitor that it would only be fair if he came to Toronto and met her on her home ground. He borrowed money to make a 10-day visit and found a room to rent in a house near her parents’ home, using a Toronto Star he had bought from a store on Robson and a map of Toronto.

Once lodged at Mrs. Brown’s, he met Klein Osipov every day for lunch on Spadina Avenue. (She worked at a shmatte business.) She had let her parents know that he was coming into town “on business” and had asked that he be allowed to come to dinner every night. “So, he did that. Of course, my parents fell in love with him right away because he was a gentleman, he was bright and politically on the same page. So, after he was there for 10 days, I decided he was too good to give up, because I was never going to meet anyone like him ever again.”

When he asked her parents for her hand in marriage, the first thing her father said was, “Can you get a job here in Toronto?” Klein Osipov admitted that her then-future husband said he would try, but that, in reality, he never intended to leave Vancouver – he did not like Toronto, she said, and his profession was designing bridges and what better place to do that than Vancouver. Osipov was a structural engineer, whose many credits include the Granville Street Bridge, Georgia Viaduct and B.C. Place.

The couple married in Toronto on June 28, 1953, then returned to Vancouver, moving into Osipov’s mother’s house on 15th Avenue, near Macdonald: his brother, his wife and their new baby were living in the basement; his sister, Sally, was in another room.

Klein Osipov said it took time to adapt to Vancouver. “I’d walk the street, I couldn’t see one Jewish face. It’s a strange thing to say, but, in Toronto, I mean, everybody’s your lantzman.”

Rather than finding a job straight away for herself, Klein Osipov said she and her husband decided to focus on starting their family: Debbie was born in 1954, Martin arrived in 1957 and Lisa in 1962.

Soon after Debbie was born, Klein Osipov experienced what she called “a stroke of luck.” CBC had a TV program called Lolly-Too-Dum, which featured folk songs from around the world. George Calangis was the program’s orchestra leader and “one of the actors that [had] met us on the tour was Nate Wiseman. Now, Nate Wiseman had a cleaning establishment on Robson, which was pretty close to CBC in those days ... and George Calangis used to bring his cleaning into Nate Wiseman. So, George Calangis said to Nate Wiseman, ‘Nate, you know, we’re trying to feature – do you of any Jewish singers?’ Nate said, ‘Do I know!’ And he gave my name, and I auditioned for CBC.”

She got the gig, and sang a couple of Yiddish songs on the show – “Scared out of my wits!” she admitted – noting that television was all live back then, “no second take!” One of the producers (Gene Lawrence) of that program was also doing a production of Down in the Valley, and he asked Klein Osipov to audition. “Well, I had never done anything like that before, and, of course, Lou said, ‘Don’t refuse, do it.’” So, she auditioned, and she got a part – this was in 1956. “And the ball,” she said, “it began to roll.”

She did Lolly-Too-Dum several times and Down in the Valley, which also aired on CBC TV, then CBC Radio wanted her to do her own program, Music on the Menu. Her husband wrote the script, she said, “so the producers loved him, because they didn’t have to do any work! All they had to do was to tie in the songs and be behind the glass cage and cue me.”

In the 1950s, she formed a 13-person group called the Vancouver Folk Singers, which appeared on CBC Radio twice. Then, there was another CBC television program in the early 1960s – Come Listen Awhile – where, each week, they welcomed guest performers, including Klein Osipov.

“So, I was really fortunate,” she said. “Up until about 1965, I was on radio and television quite a bit. And, of course, between that, I was doing little recitals, little concerts here and there. And Lou was pushing me all the way.”

Earlier in her interview with the Independent, Klein Osipov said, “If not for Lou, I would not have ventured into singing professionally.” She explained, “He was a woman’s libber before his time, because he would always say to me it’s important for a woman to have her own place in this world, and not just say, ‘I’m a mother, I’m Lou’s wife.’ He’d say, ‘no,’ and he would correct me when people would ask me and say, ‘What do you do?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I have two ...’ – I had two kids then – I’d say, ‘I have two children and I’m a homemaker.’ And Lou would pipe up and he’d say, ‘No! She sings. She’s a vocalist.’”

For a variety of reasons, including to travel more with her family, Klein Osipov’s paid singing work lessened in the mid-1960s, but she continued performing. “There were so many things that I did,” she said about that period, including being invited back to Toronto in 1972 to sing with her former choir, at the behest of Searle Friedman – who later founded the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir, but was living in Toronto with his family at the time. Over the years, she has sung in many cities across Canada and the United States.

An integral part of her performances is Bross Stuart, who has been her accompanist since the mid-1970s. The two first met in a 1971 Vancouver Jewish Community Centre production of the children’s musical A New Suit for the Emperor, with music by Joan Beckow and directed by Marjorie Morris. The next year, there was another JCC production in which Klein Osipov and Bross Stuart participated, but then the Stuarts left Vancouver for a spell. When they returned in 1976, Klein Osipov and Bross Stuart reconnected, and Bross Stuart first accompanied Klein Osipov at Debbie’s wedding that year.

In 1978, Lou Osipov financed the singer and pianist’s first recording together, which they did at Little Mountain Studio – “Because we were worried about what it was going to cost us, each song, one take,” said Klein Osipov. “We had rehearsed so well because we knew that we had to do that. The technician couldn’t believe it ... and that’s how we did that record, that was the first one.”

A good friend of theirs, Fred Katz, sent the record (Sing to Me in Yiddish) to CBC’s Clyde Gilmour, who featured three of Klein Osipov’s songs more than once. Requests came into Gilmour, who passed them on, and a lot of records were sold that way. “I’ve been lucky in so many ways,” said Klein Osipov, “because, I honestly have to say, I didn’t really have to work hard ... I didn’t have to knock on doors. I was not good at promoting myself, and I never felt that it was that important to me. Once I knew I had to sing, I loved it, but, I thought, if it happens, it’ll happen. It wasn’t a driving ambition with me, it just wasn’t.”

However, that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t worked hard at her craft. “I always said to Wendy, all the years we’ve been working together, I will not wing a performance. We either have good performances, rehearsals and we know exactly what we’re doing [or we don’t perform].... It depends on the emotion that comes out of me, so she doesn’t take her eyes off me, because I surprise her sometimes, and that takes a darn good accompanist.”

About how the music affects her, Klein Osipov said, “From the time my mother was aware that she had lost so many of her family in the Holocaust, she would cry a lot, and it would come into me, I thought, these people spoke Yiddish and ... these people sang these songs, so, when I sing a song, I kind of imagine I’m one of them that were singing this song.... And I think about my parents: I want to perpetuate the Yiddish language.” She said she sings in dedication to the six million who are no more and to honor those who survived, “hoping that, if the language dies, then let at least the songs live.”

Klein Osipov has retired from singing several times. One of those times was when her husband died in 1987. She was wooed back a few years later by Friedman, who was leading the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir he had founded about a decade earlier – with the temptation of singing again with Robinson, who was the guest performer.

She retired again in 2002 to spend more time with her family – which now includes eight grandchildren and three great-granddaughters – but has been convinced on more than one occasion to contribute her talents to various concerts and good causes, which she has done throughout her career.

“I really have been fortunate,” she said. “I haven’t had to rely on my singing to make a living.” This has allowed her to be more selective. “I wanted to know that I just wasn’t singing for any group. I wanted to make sure it was a group that appreciated Yiddish music and that I would feel comfortable singing for them. I’ve sung for the National Council [of Jewish Women], I’ve sung for Temple Sholom, I’ve sung for different groups, helping them to raise some kind of money, and I always – if they did pay me, I always – donated the cheque back.”

One of her main causes, of course, has been the Peretz Centre.

“The Peretz Centre’s been a big part of my life for 55 years,” she said. After settling in Vancouver, she was the musical director of the Peretz school’s children’s choir; she also was involved in the organization’s women’s auxiliary for many years. She is currently an alternate on the centre’s board, and is on the programming committee – but not for the banquet honoring her, as she was told to “butt out.” Regularly though, she said, “I’m in the kitchen, I roll up my sleeves, you know. I wear a few hats.”

Her husband was president of the Peretz for several years, and their three children went to the school. She added, “Fanny ‘Baba’ Osipov prepared the food for almost all the banquets (with the help of volunteers) from the sixties and into the eighties. Lou’s brother Oscar was also involved with the Peretz.” She described it as, “Truly a ‘family affair.’”

The Peretz banquet honoring Klein Osipov takes place on Sunday, Dec. 4, 6 p.m., at the centre. Tickets are $50/$25 and reservations are required, 604-325-1812.

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