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

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.' "