Diane Kaplan

It doesn’t feel right to me to start my story with “I was born in New York City……….” because I feel that my story started long before that, even if I am unable to recall it.  My parents were holocaust survivors. My mother was from Poland. She spent four years in ghettos and concentration camps and her entire family was killed. My father came from Germany.  He was sixteen when the war started and he spent the following years fleeing from the Nazis. He escaped to the USA, stayed there for one year, then returned to Europe as an American soldier for the last year of the war. My parents met in New York City, after the war.

 

By the time I was nine we had moved six times. I lived in four different states in the USA and spent a year in Europe. We finally settled down in Phoenix, Arizona.

 

At seventeen I picked up the guitar and began to ask people to teach me songs. I never took a guitar lesson. I had learned a bit of piano as a child, but I wanted to be able to accompany myself as a singer. I was influenced by the folk singers of my time – mainly Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. A vivid memory remains with me of  buying  Joni Mitchell’ s “Blue” album, putting it on the record player and not leaving my room (except for dire emergencies) until I had had it completely memorized. 

 

I left home for university in Northern Arizona, in a college town called Flagstaff, where I studied Biology because I loved nature. I also took as many art classes as I could. It never occurred to me to study music, as the two years of piano lessons as a child were about as much “formal training” as I could stand. I certainly didn’t want to be a classically trained singer and I trusted my ear and stayed in the realm of the folk music I loved. During my four years in Flagstaff I performed in bars and restaurants, alone and with others, and generally had a great time. During my last year of college my direction changed--Or maybe I just hadn’t had one yet.

 

I met some people who had spent time in Israel and they told me all about it. It seemed to me that some time spent there might answer some of the burning questions that I was dealing with as a Jewish child of holocaust survivors. So after graduation, off I went for a year in Israel.

 

I never came “home”.

 

Re-reading what I wrote in my diary during the summer of 1979, it seems I have answered most of the questions I had at that time and achieved most of my goals. It took about 30 years. (link to page: In Germany)

 

At first I lived in Arad, in the Negev desert for six months, attending the WUJS program. Then up to the green(er) north, where I accepted the only job offer that came to me, as a laboratory assistant at Haifa University. During my six years in Haifa I met my husband, Desmond. There Naomi, the first of our three children was born.   

 

A friend from work invited me to the “Jacob’s Ladder Folk Festival”

 

At the time “Jacob’s Ladder” was held in Kibbutz Machanayim. Although the festival has changed location several times over the last 35 years, it has never lost its wonderful character and I have performed there every year since.

 

At one of the music nights there, in 1983, in an old stone building serving as a folk club, I met Danny Sherban and David Ring, who joined me in the creation of the “White and Bluegrass” band, which lasted over 13 years and eventually brought our growing family to Moshav Yodfat, in Western Galilee. Edan and Mya were born there.