Portrait of the Yiddish Artist.

Picture this: I've got klezmer clarinetist Michael Winograd blasting through my headphones when I run into the actual Michael Winograd, in the flesh. Instead of meeting in some dark Brooklyn club, though, we're trudging across a gigantic strip mall parking lot on a brilliantly hot Friday afternoon. We're both a bit dazedby the sunshine and by the proximity to so much big-box shopping.

Luck has smiled on the Jewish people and placed us in a hotel a few hundred feet from the largest Whole Foods I've ever been in. Half the New York klezmer world is also here, so it must be Yidstock, the Yiddish Book Center's annual summertime Jewish music and ideas festival. Strip mall shopping aside, Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley is in full summer bloom. Lush green hills and frequent cow sightings welcome weary New Yorkers and, if it isn't quite the Old Country, it's a whole 'nother country.

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