Through the generations

A few months ago The Times ran a rather simple, but surprisingly touching, feature about a man named Dave Levitt - a 40-year-old music specialist who now works at a largely Jewish daytime care program for retirees, but whose experience as a klezmer player is rooted in generations of familial experience. His great-grandfather, Max Levinsky, was a shtetl violinist who emigrated from Ukraine in the 1880s; his grandfather played the trombone with a group known as the Boibriker Kapelle, and his father headed the Marty Levitt Orchestra. As a result, when Levitt plays his klezmer before a few dozen aged men and women - some Jewish, and some not - he can draw on decades of accured familial experience. Or, to put it in rather sappier terms, his playing is both informed by, and gives voice to, his ancestors.

Over the past nine eight days, we've been lucky enough to enjoy weekend visits by all four of Cleo's grandparents. And while Cleo can't claim, like Levitt, a premature talent on an instrument - today she struggled with a whistle, emitting nothing more than a tiny whisper, before giving up - it's certainly clear that she's inherited an array of other sorts of gifts from them. Some are only nascent; some have not yet manifested themselves. But in years to come, she'll be, I don't doubt, her grandparents' child, in many ways.

Of course, in at least one sense, she already is. “I was brought up," Levitt told The Times, "with an elderly audience." And that's more or less what Cleo enjoyed, as well, these past Saturdays and Sundays. Whether she was riding the light rail, or taking a bath, or merely eating her yogurt, she had a warm and appreciative audience. But don't be too cocky, Cleo. Although they love to watch you, you need to remember that you are what you are because of, and only because of, all four of them. They're not merely audience, in other words; they're your past, and in many ways, your future. You'll get better, I'm sure, at blowing that whistle. But you'll never be the first, I can tell you now, to do it well.