An imaginary music program

Full text

An imaginary music program:
“A NIGHT IN PONAR”
A Music Program and Play
By K. Ingrid Kroboth
PROGRAM NOTES
It is the evening of January 18, 1942 in the Vilna Ghetto. The audience (about 50) on stage is
standing in silence. Some are holding “Yellow Papers”. Every word, every sound recalls the
victims of Ponar by name, as names are echoed in the background. There is the orchestra. Some
of the musicians are from the Vienna Conservatory, some others are from the local artist
community.
The concert in Ponar is controversial. It is because the concert takes place a few weeks after the
“Night of the Yellow Papers” (they are German identification certificates that entitles bearers to
at least temporary survival) Three thousand papers were issued, and the remaining 15,000 Jews
were hunted down. They are taken to the Ponar Woods and shot. Herman Kruk, the Ghetto
chronicler of Vilna, says: “One does not play musical theater in a cemetery!” There is
significant foreboding in the songs, feelings of uncertainty, danger and ultimate despair. Liuba
Levitska decides to express them with all her singing in the Vilna Ghetto tonight.
Part One
1. “Funeral March” by Frédéric Chopin
2. “S’g’lust Zikh Mir Vaynen” (I am moved to Weep). Choral recitation by Chaim N.
Bialik, includes cantor Josef Eydlson (a student) who sings “Eli, Eli, Lomo Ozavtoni” (O
Lord, Why Hast Thou Abandoned Me)
3. “Yisrolik” by Misha Veksler
4. “Di Nakht” (The Night), words by Aaron Domnits, music by Mikhl Gelbart, N.Y., 1929,
performed by Liuba Levitska
5. “Dina’s Prison Lament” from Abraham Goldfaden’s opera Bar –Kochba sung by Liuba
Levitska. Under the direction of Wolf Durmashkin.
6. ”Tsvey Taybelekh,” (Two Doves) - a song by an unkown author performed by
Liuba Levitska.
7. “Ikh Benk Aheym” (free transl. “I long for my home”, direct transl. “I am at home”),
words by Leyb Rozental (1916-1945) performed by Jacob Koussevitksy. Director
Rozental (piano) wrote plays for revue theatres. He was drowned by the Nazis. The
music to “Ikh Benk Aheym” is by an unknown composer.
At the end of “Tswey Taybelekh”, we see how the songstress and others are being led away.
Hilde Degner had ordered her to remove her clothes and she refuses. It was said that Liuba sang
all the way through the Vilna village on the drive to Ponar and kept on singing as she was led to a
pile of bodies where she was to die. We see how she is being carried away on a wagon. The
song she sings as she gets shot by Hilde several times is still “Tsvey Taybelekh.” (Interrupt the
song several times by gun shots and as the actress sings. As she falls, she still sings, and
eventually it is quiet, but the orchestra takes over after a short pause, first only the soprano
recorder, then the oboe, with a faint melody repeating stanza, building into one last uproar of
voices from the choir and their full orchestration) before the pianist starts a very slow version of
the song “Ikh Benk Aheym”. Liuba’s resistance to the Nazis through her beautiful singing
becomes legendary.

Part Two
Among the crowd is Abraham Sutzkever, Poet, and Shmerke Kaczerginski, composer, who has
the initial lyrical idea to “Shtiler, Shtiler”, a song he writes and finishes in 1943. The music is
originally by Alec Volkoviski. Among the crowd is also an 8-year old boy named Alexander
Tamir. Later, in 1943, a song contest will be held in the ghetto. The winning song, "Ponar" is
written by Tamir who will make his way to Israel and become a renowned pianist. He is at
Ponar, listening by the empty fuel pits at Ponar.
1. “Poem” by Abraham Sutzkever
I lie in this coffin
the way I would lie
in a suit made of wood,
a bark
tossed on treacherous waves,
a cradle, an ark.
(dated Vilna, August 30, 1941, translated by C. K. Williams)
2. “Froyen”(“Women”), words by Kasriel Broydo (1907-1945) performed by Kasriel
Broydo on piano and vocal. In the middle of the song, Broydo asks Misha Veksler to
come up and play “Yisrolik”. The the 8-year old Aleksander Tamir (serving as the
child peddler) steps forward and starts to recite words from “Ponar”- a song he later
submits to a song contest. Broydo was an author and director of theatre revues and
concerts in the Vilna ghetto. He was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to a
Latvian concentration camp. The music of Froyen is unknown. The song is about…..
3. “Yisrolik” by Misha Veksler. This is a song about a child peddler in the ghettos.
Misha Veksler was a composer and pianist, born, 1907. He died in Ponar in 1943.
Veksler conducted the Jewish theatre orchestra in the Vilna ghetto.
4. "Du getto main" ("You, My Ghetto"), sung in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania,
early 1940s, in a make believe performance by Jacob Koussevitsky. Jacob, one of ‘The
Four Koussevitsky Brothers’ did not actually perform at that concert in the ghetto. He
was in London at the time already and later emigrated to Canada. It was said that
Jacob was the best 'Ba'al Tefillah.' The implication is that he made a greater impact
with the way he interpreted the words. His usage of the traditional melodic lines
(Nusach) doesn't mean that he didn't have a fine voice - he certainly did, (he was
actually a lyric tenor), but Jacob had a very different voice.
'Ss is baim getto hel und lichtik
baim toier poliziantn zwei,
un fun Savalne bisn geto
yidelech a ganze rei.
Refrain:
un du main libsster gelber schain.
Du libsster main,
du gelber schain,
on dir--is in Ponar arain.
A schanss hot haint geschapt a yidl,
opgenart di polizei.
A poliziant schlogt dort a meidl
un do glitscht sich durch di rei.
Un di yidn ongepakte,
glikliche arain in schtaig,

izt faifn sei schoin oif di vladse
un schteln sei aroiss a faig.
Du getto main,
du heimland main,
men lost in getto haint arain,
oib hosstu nor gelt --
abissl glik,
dan macht men sich nit seendik. (words to “Du Ghetto Main”)
Songs is about:
The "Funeral March" of Chopin, as played in the concert room, is an adaptation of the
slow movement of Chopin's second pianoforte sonata in B flat minor, op. 35. The
work is so familiar as to need no description. As “Music With Ease” unkown authors
write: The circumstances under which Chopin wrote Funeral March as told by M.
Ziem, are of interest in the program. Ziem, the artist, had been one evening to the
studio of Polignac. There was a skeleton in the studio and among the Bohemian
whimsicalities, Polignac placed it at the piano and guided its hands over the keys. In
Ziem's own words: “Some time later Chopin came into my studio, just as George
Sand depicts him -- the imagination haunted by the legends of the land of frogs,
besieged by nameless shapes. After frightful nightmares all night, in which he had
struggled against specters who threatened to carry him off to hell, he came to rest in
my studio. His nightmares reminded me of the skeleton scene and I told him of it. His
eyes never left my piano, and he asked : 'Do you have a skeleton?' I had none ; but I
promised to have one that night, and so he invited Polignac to dinner and asked him to
bring his skeleton. Chopin held the skeleton close to him, and suddenly the silence of
the studio was broken by the broad, slow, deep, gloomy notes. The 'Dead March' was
composed there and then from beginning to end." Frédéric ChopinFrédéric François
Chopin, March 1, 1810– October 17, 1849, Polish pianist and composer. He is widely
regarded as one of the most famous, influential, admired and prolific composers for
the piano.
5. "Papirosn" [Cigarettes] was originally written and composed by Herman Yablokoff
following World War I in Grodno. In 1932 it was introduced in America and gained
immediate popularity. "Papirosn" is the cry of an orphaned child peddling cigarettes
on the street. The boy, like the author, has lost everything and everyone in the
difficulties caused by the First World War. He has lost his hope as well.
Buy my cigarettes!
Dry ones, not wet from the rain.
Buy real cheap, buy and have pity on me.
Save me from hunger.
Buy these wonderful matches and you'll delight an orphan.
Useless are my cries and my running around,
No one wants to buy from me.
I must die like a dog
Shmerke Kaczerginski collected two alternative versions. The first, written by Rilke Glezer,
depicts the ghettoization and mass-shooting of the Jews of Vilna. These ugly events are combined
with the beauty of nature. The song ended as follows:
Now it's another beautiful Sunday,
Sumptuous smells abound,
And we are anguished
And suffer in silence.

Severed from the world,
A ray of hope just awakening.
Many of the songs played and sung during the Holocaust were re-written. Some melodies were
lost and later composed again. Authors made veiled references to the original words but wrote
their new songs on different themes entirely. Finally, some of the most clever rewritings used the
older versions to strengthen their own. These particular ones survived by chance. The survival of
rewritten songs was aided by their familiar melodies and sometimes parallel structure.
Among the examples in the program, several models of rewritings can be discovered. Some
authors simply relied on existing melodies for convenience. These authors are able to express the
message without explicit statements. There is implicitly marking an absent, but culturally
resonant referent. Many of the poets used implicit contrast and metaphors (example: Funeral
March) of images to place their current situations in stark relief.
Contrast was also a key ingredient in the final category of recycled songs. Songs like “Papirosn”
are responses to pre-war songs in the sense that they make explicit textual reference without
relying on the same melodies. Not surprisingly, this category, much like the last one, requires
popular songs as starting points.
As Elyana Adler states, singing has become such an integral part of our collective mourning that
in addition to a number of published collections of songs of the Holocaust, there are even guides
to appropriate songs available to those planning commemorative events. All of this speaks not
only of the importance of singing during the war, but also of the ongoing power of the songs and
their stories. Adler says that given the popular association of the Holocaust with song, and the
continued resonance of the songs, it is somewhat surprising how little has been written about
singing during the Holocaust.
The musical “A Night in Ponar” by K. Kroboth depicts a historical event. The songs and poetry
performed in the program are a selection by the author and serve as a reminder of that particular
time. It may be performed in one or two parts.
References (draft):
Irene Heskes, "Jewish Music Resources for Holocaust Programming," in David Szonyi, ed., The
Holocaust: An Annotated Bibliography and Resource Guide (New York: Ktav, 1985)
Eliyana R. Adler, No Raisins, No Almonds. Singing as Spiritual Resistance to the Holocaust.
(Missing description of where the journal exists)
Taken From the Worl Wide Web: Chopin’s Funeral March, Music With Ease:
http://www.music-with-ease.com/chopin-funeral-march.html, November 2006

The cast (imagined)
Shannon Chase (as Liuba Levitska) is a visiting Professor, Choral Music Ed. Dr. Chase has a …
(BIO)
Lazaro Calderon (as Jacob, one of ‘The Four Koussevitsky Brothers’) (Bio)
Randy Moore (as Abraham Sutzkever) bio
Maria DeBacco (pianist) bio
A piano student bio ( as Misha Veksler)
Dave Evans (as Herman Kruk) Bio
Gonenc Hongur (Shmerke Kaszcerginki)
K. Kroboth (Bio)
Noah Ploderer (Alexander Tamir)
A student (as Hilde Degner)
A conductor or student conductor (as Wolf Durmashkin)
Janice Hammer (Conductor) Associate Visiting Professor of Music, Swarthmore Music Dept., in
residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt College of Music, the University of Memphis. Dr. Hamer
teaches Musicianship in conjunction with the theory courses. Her B.A. is from Harvard; M.M.
from Westminster Choir College, and Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at CUNY. She is the
recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard, grants
from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts, Meet the Composer, American
Music Center and ASCAP. She is the recent winner of two competitions--the Dale Warland
Singers New Choral Music Competition and the Miriam Gideon Award from the International
Alliance of Women in Music.
Recent performers and/or commissioners of her music include Orchestra 2001, the Dale Warland
Singers, BBC Singers, Contemporary Music Forum of Washington, DC, Bowling Green (OH)
Festival, I Cantori di New York, Double Image (UK), Pittsburgh Trio, Philadelphia Concerto
Soloists, Apple Hill Chamber Players, University of Wisconsin Concert Choir, the Kharkov
(Ukraine) Philharmonic, and the US Holocaust Museum resident ensemble. The large-scale opera
she is currently writing, Lost Childhood, based on a Holocaust memoir, is being developed and
commissioned by American Opera Projects.
The audience and the crowd: The University of Memphis Choir
The orchestra: Musicians of the University of Memphis Orchestra
Draft-abstract
1. Introduction of the musical play, background, descriptions of song content
2. Production/Staffing of event

3. Performance and performers
3. Marketing/PR/Publicity
4. Funding and venue
6. Copyright

Title: Shtiler Shtiler (Kaczerginski) --   ) )
Also known as: Ponar
Also known as: Ponar Lid
Also known as: Ponar Vig Lid
Author: Kaczerginski, Shmerke --   , 
Composer: Tamir, A. --    ,  
Genre: Holocaust/Place/Lullaby/ Vig Lid
Subject: Ponar/Hope
Song Comment: Music contest organized by Jewish Council of Vilna Ghetto won by 11 year old.
Origin: Kaczer 88/Alb V-001(a)/Alb B-003(a)/Alb B-011(a)/Alb V-001(c)/Vinkov 4 84
Transliteration: ML WAH 46/Alb D-004(n)/Alb G-005(b)/Alb K-059(c)/Alb F-042(a)/Vinkov 4
84
Translation: Alb Z-018(a)/Alb-004(n)/ML WAH 46/Alb K-059(c)/Alb G-005(b)/Alb V-001(c)
Music: ML WAH 46/Vinkov 4 84
On album: T-022(a) (Nizza Thobi Mir Lebn Ejbig)
Artist Thobi, Nizza
Artist Herchenhahn H. Quartet
First line: Shtiler, shtiler, lomir shvaygn, kvorim vaksn do.
First line:  , ,   ,      .'   ...
Track comment: Recorded in West Germany undr title "Ponar Lid"
Title: Shtil Di Nakht Iz Oysgeshterent --  ,    
Also known as: Partizaner Lid
Also known as: The Night Is Still
Author: Glik, Hirsh --  ,  ) 1922-1944 )
Genre: Holocaust/Resistance/Love/Historical
Subject: Resistance/Partisan/Combat
Origin: Kaczer 348/Alb V-001(a)/Alb Z-012(a)/Alb V-001(b)/Vinkov 4 142
Transliteration: ML WAH 86/Alb A-036(a)/Alb B-007(o)/Alb W-001(a)/Vinkov 4 142/Kaczer
428
Translation: Kalisch 70/Alb F-035(a)/Alb V-001(d)/B-007(o)/Vinkov 4 142/Schwatz 4
Music: Rub Treas 181/Z-012(a)/Vinkov 4 142/Kaczer 428/Schwartz 5
On album: T-022(a) (Nizza Thobi Mir Lebn Ejbig)
Artist Thobi, Nizza
Artist Herchenhahn H. Quartet
First line: Shtil, di nakht iz oysgeshternt. Un der frost - er hot...

First line (Yiddish):  ,     ,    -   
Track comment: Recorded in West Germany.
Language: Yiddish
Title: Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern (Brodno) --    
Author: Sutzkever, Avrom --  ,  
Composer: Brudno, Avrom --   ,  
Genre: Literary Origin/Holocaust
Subject: Faith/Prayer
Song Comment: Introduced in Vilna ghetto theatre-"Di Yogenish in Fas"
Origin: Kaczer 74/Alb V-001(a)/Alb D-004(g)/Alb V-001(c)/ML WAH 48/Alb N-026(a
Transliteration: ML WAH 48/Alb M-049(a)/Alb I-013(a)/Alb M-049(a)/Alb Z-010(g)/D-004(n)
Translation: Alb Z-010(g)/Alb V-001(d) ML WAH 48/Alb G-040(a)/Alb M-049(a)/D-004(n)
Additional song notes: First sung by Zlote Kaczerginski at Litter Art Theatre of Vilna - Ghetto.
On album: T-022(a) (Nizza Thobi Mir Lebn Ejbig)
Artist Thobi, Nizza
Artist Herchenhahn H. Quartet
First line: Unter dayne vayse shtern, shtrek tsu mir dayn veyse hant,
First line (Yiddish):     ,       ,
Track comment: "Introduced in Vilna ghetto theatre-"Di Yogenish in Fas"
Language: Yiddish
Title: Vilna --  
Author: Wolfson, A. L. --     ,  .  .
Composer: Olshanetsky, Alexander --   ,  
Genre: Place
Subject: Vilna
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/freedman/lookupalbum?hr=&catlg=T-022(a)
The Fiddle Rose
Poems 1970-1972
By Abraham Sutzkever
Translated by Ruth Wisse
Abraham Sutzkever Selected Poetry and Prose
Translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav*
December, 2003
http://yiddishbookcenter.org/story.php?n=10131
Essay by Ruth Wisse
Abraham Sutzkever is a great poet with great belief in the powers of poetry. Born in Smorgon in
1913, he came of age in the neighboring city of Vilna, when its Jewish youth was pioneering a
modern Yiddish culture in the newly independent Poland. Sutzkever was a child of his time: he
joined the Jewish scout organization, played soccer, hiked in the forests. Fatherless since early
childhood, he experienced both the independence and the economic hardship of a one-parent
family. Like quite a number of his friends and neighbors, he began to write poetry at an early age.

But while most of his contemporaries in the local writers’ and artists’ group Yung Vilne
considered art an instrument of social and political struggle, Sutzkever looked for the immutable
power within poetry that transcends the changeable human order. “Do not love grey time,” he
writes in one poem of 1940, and in another, laying claim to all the splendors that his roaming eye
can behold, “in everything/ I come upon a splinter/ of eternity.”
This faith in the transcendent potential of poetry acquired magnified importance when the
Germans occupied Vilna in June 1941 and began to annihilate its Jewish population. Forced with
his wife, his mother, and his fellow Jews into the constricting ghetto, Sutzkever claimed for the
poet ever greater moral and aesthetic powers.
I lie in this coffin
the way I would lie
in a suit made of wood,
a bark
tossed on treacherous waves,
a cradle, an ark.
(dated Vilna, August 30, 1941, translated by C. K. Williams)
In this small lyric the poet explores the artistic paradox of motion in stasis. Based on the actual
experience of hiding – in a coffin! – during a German action, the poem joins the speaker
imaginatively to the infant Moses in his bark and to a sister who died and is thus truly interred.
Song issues from the tomb; from a small and narrow poem sounds a resonant faith. Sutzkever’s
ghetto poetry discovers di groyskayt fun kleynkayt, the immensity of value in such a homely act
as warming one’s icy hands over a pile of horse manure, the intimation of freedom and beauty
when a butterfly penetrates a bunker of hunted children. The poet resists the degradation being
imposed on him not only through his ability to keep writing poetry, but by making aesthetic
resistance the subject of his verse.
Sutzkever’s poetry of and about the period of destruction made him famous throughout the
Yiddish-speaking world. When a partisan courier brought his poems to Moscow in the winter of
1943, a special plane was dispatched to an air strip near the Narocz forests to airlift Sutzkever
with his wife, who had escaped with a group of ghetto fighters, to the Soviet Union as a symbol
of the Jewish resistance to fascism. Some of his poems of the ghetto, such as “Teacher Mira” and
“On the Death of Yankev Gershteyn” commemorate its inspiring cultural personalities. The lyric
“Under Your White Stars” – a modern de profundis – was set to music and sung as a ghetto
hymn.
The enormity of the history to which he bore witness inspired Sutzkever to write epic poems as
well as lyrics. The narrative poem Geheymshtot (Secret Town, 1945-47), in several hundred
stanzas of amphibrach tetrameter, depicts a symbolic ten survivors who hide in the sewers
beneath Vilna. The epic poem Gaystike erd (Spiritual Soil) commemorates the arrival of
Sutzkever with his wife and infant daughter in Eretz Yisrael aboard the ship Patria. In each work,
a constellation of dramatic personages represents the human and ideological variety of Jews who
share a common fate – the crucible of destruction in the one case, and the reclamation of national
sovereignty in the other.
Sutzkever’s ripest and most remarkable works are the reflective lyrics of his later years, collected
under the title Poems of a Diary. Just as the title yokes the everyday prosiness of the diary to the
heightened occasion of the formal poem, so, too, the lyrics unite contrarieties, fusing all that is
normally divided. “A funeral by day, a concert by night/ to attend both is my fate.” This opening
line introduces a series of such pairings from light and shadow to woman and man, each
augmenting the theme that opposites must unite because there can no longer be innocence
without experience. Another poem demonstrates that “distance nears,” bringing the end within
sight of the beginning, compressing and cancelling out the separation between life and death.
When the poet receives a letter from his homeland with an enclosed blade of grass from the

beautiful woods of Ponar – the place of trysting that the Germans turned into the major killing
field of Vilna Jewry – he turns it into the baton of a symphonic offering to the Lord and Master of
the universe. Sutzkever uses rhyme to actualize these themes, creating an ultimate harmony, an
immutable form for mutability.
Perhaps more than any other modern Jewish writer, Sutzkever has lived the life of the romantic
poet-hero. He was at the center of the Jewish national tragedy in Europe, and in Israel on the eve
of Jewish national rebirth. He took great risks in rescuing Jewish cultural treasures from Vilna
and was the witness for Jewry at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. But he accords the
highest value to poetry in the way that the psalmist serves God through song. Without direct use
of religious language, his poetry translates the inherited faith of his ancestors into the personal
perception of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Ruth Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative
Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent books on literature are
The Modern Jewish Canon and I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture.
NOTE: Abraham Sutzkever celebrates his ninetieth birthday this year. To mark the occasion, The
Jewish Reader is pleased to reprint this essay from Pakn Treger, Fall 2001.
*This book is currently out of print.
Volk und Heimat: Race in the German Cultural Landscape
Verse:
'Ss is baim getto hel und lichtik
baim toier poliziantn zwei,
un fun Savalne bisn geto
yidelech a ganze rei.
Refrain:
un du main libsster gelber schain.
Du libsster main,
du gelber schain,
on dir--is in Ponar arain.
A schanss hot haint geschapt a yidl,
opgenart di polizei.
A poliziant schlogt dort a meidl
un do glitscht sich durch di rei.
Un di yidn ongepakte,
glikliche arain in schtaig,
izt faifn sei schoin oif di vladse
un schteln sei aroiss a faig.
Du getto main,
du heimland main,
men lost in getto haint arain,
oib hosstu nor gelt --
abissl glik, [End Page 135]
dan macht men sich nit seendik.
--"Du getto main" ("You, My Ghetto"), sung in the Jewish ghetto of
Vilna, Lithuania, early 1940s 40

Es war amol a Jüdin,
a wunderschönes Weib,
die hatte eine Tochter,
zum Tod war sie bereit.
"Ach Mutter, liebste Mutter
mir tut der Kopf so weh,
laß mich eine kleine Weile
spazieren gehn am See."
"Ach Tochter, liebste Tochter,
allein darfst du nicht gehn,
sags deinem ältern Bruderlein,
er wird schon mit dir gehn."
"Ach Mutter, liebe Mutter,
mein Brüderlein ist zu klein,
er schießet alle Vöglein,
die in den Lüften sein."
"Ach Tochter, liebe Tochter,
allein darfst du nicht gehn,
sags deinem einzigen Schwesterlein,
die wird schon mit dir gehn."
"Ach Mutter, liebe Mutter,
mein Schwesterlein ist zu klein,
sie pflückt ja alle Blümelein,
die an dem Wege sein."
Die Mutter fiel in Schlummer,
die Tochter ging allein,
sie ging solang spazieren,
bis sie zum Fischer kam.
"Guten Morgen, lieber Fischer,
was fischest du in aller Früh?"
"Ich suche des Königs allerjüngsten Sohn,
der hier ertrunken ist."
Da gab sie ihm ein Ringlein
aus allerfeinstem Gold,
da gab sie ihm ein Ringlein:
"Das soll dein eigen sein."
Dann stieg sie auf die Mauer,
stürzt hinab in den kühlen See:
"Leb wohl du liebe Heimat, [End Page 144]
wir sehn uns nimmermehr."
--"Die schöne Jüdin" ("The Beautiful Jewish Woman") 73
The story of "Die schöne Jüdin" describes the love relationship between a young Jewish woman
and a gentile, a relationship made impossible because the woman may not go out onto the street,
even to meet her lover. The story begins with entreaties from the woman to her mother to allow
her to "go for a little walk" (verse 2). The mother repeatedly refuses, rejoining that "you may not
go alone" (verse 3). After repeated attempts to find an appro-priate family and Jewish companion
to accompany the young woman's entry into the gentile world (the version here raises the
possibility of the little brother and sister), the young woman waits until her mother is asleep and
violates the rules of the community and family by going alone, in some versions jumping from
her window onto the street below. "Die schöne Jüdin" ends either with the conversion of the
woman as necessary preparation for marriage or with suicide by drowning (the case in this
version), whereby the woman does not cross the boundary into a gentile world, nor does she
reverse her exit from the Jewish community. The theme of homeland, in the end, proves

irreconcilable. The ballad ends as a Heimatlied with no homeland: "'Leb wohl du liebe Heimat,
wir sehn uns nimmermehr!'" ("'Be well, my dear homeland, never again will we meet!'").
As a German ballad, "Die schöne Jüdin" has one of the most distinctive histories of crossing the
cultural boundaries of modern Europe. The ballad was sung in both High German and in Yiddish,
with versions collected not only in Germany and German-speaking areas elsewhere, but also in
Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. 74 "Die schöne Jüdin" is therefore both a German and a
Yiddish ballad; its history, in fact, is at once German and Jewish. It has, nevertheless, a troubled
history, which symbolizes the difficulties of recon-ciling its two ethnic domains, which in turn
mark racial domains within the song itself. This history has defied the boundaries between
German Central Europe and Jewish Eastern Europe, entering the song canons of both. Variants in
oral tradition respond to the Jewishness of the narrative and its symbols in divergent ways,
ranging from anti-Semitic variants to those that carefully record the norms of Jewish law. 75 In
none of the German or Jewish versions of the songs do the boundaries between communities
yield to the lovers; entry into the German or gentile world--being seen on the street by non-Jews--
makes the decision to leave the Jewish community irreversible. Ultimately, the street outside the
Jewish woman's window, found in most variants, becomes a world open to Jews only when they
are no longer Jews.
Like the other songs experienced on the excursions in this essay, "Die schöne Jüdin" embodies
disturbing contradictions of modernity. It is, after all, a song explicitly about the moment of
passing from the traditional to the modern, but that moment offers no possibility of compromise.
Past and present confront each other as if the former may yield to the latter when the Jewish
woman sets foot on the street. In the song, however, it is not possible simply to pass from the past
to the present. Embracing the present means denying the past--either conversion or suicide.
"Die schöne Jüdin" refers to indistinct pasts and presents, and its sense of modernity depends not
on specific indices of real individuals. For the most part, the music one encounters on the streets
of modern Germany relies on such indistinct references to time and place.
See Philip V. Bohlman, "Die Vorstellungen vom Judentum in der 'Schönen Jüdin'," in Deutsche
Volkslieder, 79-81.
Philip V. Bohlman teaches ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. His books include The
Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (Indiana, 1988) and The World Centre for Jewish
Music in Palestine, 1936-1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II (Oxford, 1992).
He is currently working on Jewish Music and Modernity (forthcoming from Oxford) and Die
musikalische Identität der Deutsch-Amerikaner (forthcoming from Peter Lang).
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v001/1.1bohlman.html#FOOT40
This version is sung by Luise and Mina Federspiel in 1960 (Archival item A 208 485, Deutsches
Volksliedarchiv). For a complete discussion of the variants of "Die schöne Jüdin" see Deutsche
Volkslieder mit ihren Melodien: Balladen, vol. 9, ed. Jürgen Dittmar and Wiegand Stief (Freiburg
im Breisgau: Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, 1992), 48-84.
Als Beleg soll hier nur ein Beispiel dienen: Würde man heute einen x-beliebigen, selbst
überdurchschnittlich gebildeten, Bürger nach der Bedeutung der Bezeichnung Pharisäer fragen,
hieße die prompte und eindeutige Antwort: Heuchler. Dabei ist Pharisäer (auf Hebräisch
Peruschim) eine Sammelbezeichnung für die zu allen Zeiten verehrten jüdischen Weisen der
talmudischen Zeit. Wie kann man aber dieses Wort jemals in einem Kontext benutzen, ohne beim
"unvoreingenommenen" Leser sofort Negativassoziationen hervorzurufen?

An imaginary music program:
“A NIGHT IN PONAR”
A Music Program and Play
By K. Ingrid Kroboth
PROGRAM NOTES
The audience (about 100 on stage is standing in silence in front of an open grave. Some are
holding “Yellow Papers”. Every word, every sound recalls the victims of Ponar by name, as
names are echoed in the background. There is orchestra moving and buzzing, they are tuning
their instruments, etc. Most of the musicians are from the Vienna Conservatory, some others are
from the local artist community.
The concert in Ponar in 1940 is controversial. It is because the concert takes place a few weeks
after the “Night of the Yellow Papers” (they are German identification certificates that entitles
bearers to at least temporary survival) Three thousand papers were issued, and the remaining
15,000 Jews were hunted down. They are taken to the Ponar Woods and shot. Herman Kruk, the
Ghetto chronicler of Vilna, says: “One does not play musical theater in a cemetery!” There is
significant foreboding in the songs, feelings of uncertainty, danger and ultimate despair. Liuba
Levitska decides to express them with all her singing in the Vilna Ghetto tonight.

1. Liuba Levitska sings “Di Nakht”, words by Aaron Domnits, music by Mikhl
Gelbart, N.Y., 1929
2. Liuba Levitska sings “Dina’s Prison Lament” from Abraham Goldfaden’s opera Bar
–Kochba.
BODY of SONGS cont’d. (This is where the question arises: WHAT COULD THEY HAVE
PLAYED AT THAT CONCERT??? WHAT DID THEY PERFORM?)
At the end of the show, we see how the songstress and others who studied on the Vienna
Conservatory are being led away. Hilde had ordered her to remove her clothes and she refuses. It
was said that Liuba sang all the way through the Vilna village on the drive to Ponar and kept on
singing as she was led to a pile of bodies where she was to die. We see how she is being carried
away on a wagon. The song she sings as she gets shot by Hilde several times is
Text/music: to
3. “Tsvey Taybelekh,” - a song by an unkown author. (Interrupt the song several times by gun
shots and as the actress sings. As she falls, she still sings, and eventually it is quiet, but the
orchestra takes over after a short pause, first only the oboe, with a faint melody repeating stanza,
building into one last uproar of voices from the choir and their full orchestration)
Liuba’s resistance to the Nazis through her beautiful singing becomes legendary.
The cast
Liuba Levitska, played by My professor
BIO
Piano: …………..
Bio
Additional Guitar: Lily Afshar
Bio
Violin: (Students in my class- get bios)
Folklore instruments: K. Kroboth
Bio
Conductor: Janice Hammer. Associate Visiting Professor of Music, Swarthmore Music Dept., in
residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt College of Music, the University of Memphis.
Janice Hamer teaches Musicianship in conjunction with the theory courses. Her B.A. is from
Harvard; M.M. from Westminster Choir College, and Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at CUNY.
She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Bunting Fellowship at

Harvard, grants from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts, Meet the Composer,
American Music Center and ASCAP. She is the recent winner of two competitions--the Dale
Warland Singers New Choral Music Competition and the Miriam Gideon Award from the
International Alliance of Women in Music.
Recent performers and/or commissioners of her music include Orchestra 2001, the Dale Warland
Singers, BBC Singers, Contemporary Music Forum of Washington, DC, Bowling Green (OH)
Festival, I Cantori di New York, Double Image (UK), Pittsburgh Trio, Philadelphia Concerto
Soloists, Apple Hill Chamber Players, University of Wisconsin Concert Choir, the Kharkov
(Ukraine) Philharmonic, and the US Holocaust Museum resident ensemble. The large-scale opera
she is currently writing, Lost Childhood, based on a Holocaust memoir, is being developed and
commissioned by American Opera Projects.
The audience, the crowd: The University Choir.
The Orchestra (also on stage): The University Orchestra.
DRAMA WARNS VIENNA ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM
•PRINT
•SAVE
By HENRY KAMM, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 28, 1985, Tuesday
In a theater that was once remodeled to install a ''fuhrerloge'' in case Hitler should attend a play
(he never did), Israeli and Austrian actors are performing an Israeli drama about the destruction
of the Vilna ghetto.
Joshua Sobol's ''Ghetto'' is drawn from the life and death of Lithuania's Jews under German
occupation. Its principal characters existed. The SS officer in the play who mows down the Jews
with his submachine gun was Hans Kittel, an Austrian who remains on the list of war criminals
sought by his country.
And a real cantor, Robert Singer, chants a prayer of mourning at the end of the performance.
When the curtain fell the other night, minutes seemed to pass before a stunned audience yielded
to the reflex of applauding.
''My dream is that they shouldn't applaud at all,'' said Joseph Millo, the Israeli director who staged
the production. Local and imported members of the cast, in separate interviews, expressed the
same wish, which has been realized once since the play entered the season's repertory at the
Volkstheater last month.
The production has received considerable positive attention and has served as a stimulus for
public debate. After a recent performance, Mr. Millo and some of the actors had a long discussion
with a group of 70 young lawyers who had requested the meeting to deepen their understanding
of events that are not extensively dealt with in Austrian schools.
Federal and City Subsidies

The Volkstheater, one of Vienna's major stages, opened in 1889 in opposition to the Imperial
Court Theater's conservatism. Now nominally owned by the Trade Union Federation, it is
subsidized by Federal and city authorities. The decision to stage ''Ghetto'' continues the theater's
tradition of using drama to instruct.
The play is intended as a warning against persisting anti-Semitism in Austria. According to a
survey conducted by Dr. Hilde Weiss of the Sociological Institute of Vienna University last year,
85 percent of the Austrians questioned admitted some degree of anti-Semitism, ranging from
''very strong'' (7 percent) to ''not strong'' (35 percent). Dr. Weiss said that 20 percent of the
respondents found some positive aspects in the Nazi extermination of Jews.
''Ghetto'' also illustrates the Austrians' role in the Nazi annihilation of Jews. ''The most important
part of the play is the end,'' says Hermann Schmid, a leading member of the company. ''One of
ours shoots them.''
Mr. Schmid, who plays the role of Hermann Kruk, a librarian whose diary survived him and
recounts the tragedy of the ghetto, said that he had refused at first to act in ''Ghetto'' because one
of its main themes, the role of the German-appointed leaders of the Jewish community in the
extermination of their people, was too sensitive to be treated by non-Jews.
''I wrote a statement of my views and read it to the rest of the company,'' recalled Mr. Schmid,
who considers himself ''a democratic socialist, not only an actor.'' He continued: ''I thought of our
sloppy way of dealing with our own history. We have not been so courageous in breaking the
taboos of our past.''
Integrated Into Germany
The actor explained that many Austrians view Austria as a victim of Hitler rather than a country
that voted in near-unanimity in 1938 to be integrated into Germany.
Mr. Schmid said he was persuaded to accept the role by Mr. Millo's approach. The director began
rehearsals with several sessions in which he outlined his views to the cast and answered questions
about the history of the Vilna ghetto, which was created in 1941 and eradicated two years later.
He also wrote a nine-page paper for his Austrian actors, citing published sources and describing
the methodical destruction of the 80,000 Jews in Vilna, a center of Jewish intellectual life and
scholarship. Between June 1941 when the Germans invaded and November of that year, 60,000
Jews were killed in the vicinity or deported and later killed.
Mass killings resumed in April 1943 after an increase of partisan activity, in which many
escapees from the ghetto joined. In August, transports began to concentration camps in Estonia
and Latvia, where few survived.
Ten thousand Jews remained in the ghetto on Sept. 23, 1943, when German and Lithuanian forces
surrounded it and rounded up all but the few who managed to escape. Abut 6,000 inhabitants
were killed on the spot or sent to extermination camps; the rest were deported to concentration
camps and the ghetto was razed.
Photo Exhibit in Lobby
An exhibition opened by the Austrian President, Rudolf Kirchschlager, has been hung in the
Volkstheater's main lobby. People crowd round at intermission to study the captioned photos that
illustrate the play's fidelity to history.

During the recent performance, a theatergoer familiar with a Viennese audience's usual
detachment was struck by the intense absorption of the near-capacity crowd.
While the Austrian actors appeared almost overwhelmed by the symbolic character of their
participation, the Israeli actors - Gadi Yagil, Israel Treistman and Miki Kam, who provides a
particularly affecting moment when she sings ''Meine Yiddishe Mamme'' in German - asserted
that they did not view themselves as bearers of a Jewish message to Austria.
Miss Kam said that the play's opening in Haifa last year was very different. ''In Israel there were
no Nazis. And here I think they are all around.'' According to Mr. Yagil, ''They are just another
public. But I want to tell them this story. Hitler, an Austrian, tried to destroy the Jewish people,
and here we are to tell them that we are a nation, our culture lives and we are here together with
Austrian actors.''
Ernst Cohen, in his tenth season as a member of the Volkstheater, plays the most ambiguous role,
that of Jacob Gens, the German-appointed Jewish leader. The only non-Israeli Jew in the cast, he
was born in Israel to concentration-camp survivors and grew up in Germany. For him, he said,
performing ''Ghetto'' in Vienna is a public prayer for the dead.
''As I play the role, I am saying through it, in devotion and reverence, Kaddish,'' Mr. Cohen said.
No Raisins, No Almonds:
Singing as Spiritual Resistance to the Holocaust
Eliyana R. Adler
University of Maryland
Abstract
This essay examines how songs functioned as a form of spiritual resistance during the Holocaust.
The importance of singing has long been acknowledged, and almost immediately after the war
scholars and survivors began collecting the songs Jews sang. Building on the fact that many of
the most popular songs were either written before the war or made reference to popular songs
from the pre-war period, this essay categorizes these recycled songs as either reused, rewritten, or
response and shows how the use of familiar songs, tunes, refrains and even references offered
Jewish composers and singers access to a particularly deep and subtle range of tools for meeting
the spiritual and emotional needs of their audience.
Singing is central to every public Jewish ceremonial commemoration of the Holocaust. Often
the intrinsic pathos of the music is further strengthened as the songs chosen are introduced by
the context of their performance in the ghettos or camps.1 Singing has become such an integral
part of our collective mourning that in addition to a number of published collections of songs
of the Holocaust, there are even guides to appropriate songs available to those planning
commemorative events.2 All of this speaks not only of the importance [End Page 50] of
singing during the war, but also of the ongoing power of the songs and their stories. Given the
popular association of the Holocaust with song, and the continued resonance of the songs, it is
somewhat surprising how little has been written about singing during the Holocaust.
Somehow, in conditions of mental and physical torture and deprivation, songs were continually
written and sung. Here is the quintessential example of spiritual resistance. Singing could not
influence the course of the war in any way. In addition, it was not necessary for survival. On the
contrary, writing and singing took valuable time and energy. And yet we know that singing was a
regular activity in these highly irregular circumstances. Who has not heard the heroic stories of
the Jews from Warsaw dying in the gas chambers with "Ani Ma'amin" on their lips or of the
partisans of the Vilna Ghetto electrified by the singing of "The Partisan's Song?"

On the whole, the major scholarly texts devoted to the Holocaust, insofar as they touch upon
resistance at all, tend to privilege armed resistance over its spiritual manifestations. In one telling
example Yehuda Bauer devotes a chapter in his A History of the Holocaust to the topic of
resistance. Although his analysis of events is very sophisticated, he does not offer a coherent
definition of resistance. The definition with which he opens the chapter seems to include all
possible forms of resistance, but the events discussed in the chapter include only armed
resistance. Bauer recognizes the potential breadth of the term, but then uses it only narrowly. The
exception is his closing paragraph, which could be read as a critique of the contents of the
chapter:
The main expression of Jewish resistance could not be armed, could not be violent. There were
no arms; the nearby population was largely indifferent or hostile. Without arms, those condemned
to death resisted by maintaining morale, by refusing to starve to death, by observing religious and
national traditions. Armed resistance is a marginal comment on the Holocaust but it is written in
very large letters indeed.3
Others scholars skip over non-violent resistance or treat it as an entirely marginal subject.
However, the importance of singing has been noted elsewhere. Several of the works devoted to
chronicling religious heroism during the war contain instances of singing as a form of resistance.4
In addition, not only have [End Page 51] many books of songs of the Holocaust been published in
the decades since the events, but general collections of Jewish songs almost always contain
several selections from the Holocaust.5 Finally, there are a few works devoted to this topic, and,
what is perhaps most important, the memoirs and testimonies of survivors often refer to public
and private singing.6
Of course, singing as a form of spiritual resistance is neither new nor limited to the Jewish
context. Anthropologists have noted the importance of singing for maintaining cultural cohesion
and expressing identity in many cultural settings. In describing an attempt to escape from slavery
in his memoirs, Frederick Douglas discussed the meaning and import singing had for him and his
co-conspirators:
A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of "O Canaan, sweet Canaan/ I am
bound for the land of Canaan," something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to
reach the north—and the north was our Canaan.7
Scholars have identified other African and African-American musical genres as protest or
preservation songs over the years.8
Even in the context of the Holocaust, the importance of music was not limited to the Jews. In a
brief but profound article Doris Bergen has suggested that music played an important,
normalizing role in the lives of the perpetrators [End Page 52] and bystanders, as well as those of
the victims, during the Second World War.9
That said, the situation of the Jews was obviously unique. This paper will seek to catalog and
discuss the mechanism of song recycling among Yiddish-speaking Jews during the course of the
war years. I will argue that the palliative, and even provocative, power of songs was heightened
in subtle and meaningful ways by their mnemonic underpinnings.
The present work would not have been possible were it not for the devoted efforts of the
individuals who collected and annotated the many songs that Jews sang during the Holocaust.
Most important in this regard is Szmerke Kaczerginski, who left his partisan group immediately
after the war and began touring the Displaced Persons Camps collecting songs. As a poet himself
and a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto he understood the importance of the many songs Jews sang.
Kaczerginski painstakingly transcribed several hundred songs, including musical notes and data

on the authors whenever possible. Lider fun di getos un lagern [Songs of the Ghettos and
Concentration Camps] was published in 1948 in Yiddish.10 This work, including the useful
introduction by poet H. Leivick, was among the first and undoubtedly saved many songs from
extinction. Others have drawn on Kaczerginski's work, as well as, at times, on their own
memories to publish a number of important collections.11
Leivick, in his thoughtful introduction to Kaczerginski's volume, notes that many of the songs
relied on older melodies, specifically Yiddish folk-melodies, tangos, and Soviet tunes.12 Mlotek,
Prager, Kalisch, and the prominent Jewish ethnomusicologist Ruth Rubin also mark this trend in
introductions to a variety of songs.13 Gila Flam, in her book on singing in the Lodz Ghetto, [End
Page 53] similarly found that notwithstanding the importance of Kaczerginski's work or her own,
the majority of songs her informants mentioned having sung were written before the Holocaust.
Even new songs created in the Lodz Ghetto were generally set to older melodies.14
Of course, the recycling of tunes and refrains from songs is a long-standing tradition in folk
music. The beloved Yiddish lullaby "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" [Raisins and Almonds], for
example, was actually constructed from older folk melodies and refrains for one of Abraham
Goldfaden's operettas.15 There are numerous other examples. In a chapter of her dissertation on
the songs of Soviet Jews Anna Shternshis points to a number of instances of older Yiddish songs
reinterpreted to fit the new Soviet reality. Her examples include both state-sanctioned songs and
subversive parodies. In the Soviet setting she concludes that the older tunes often lent the new
songs much needed Jewish authenticity.16
The recycling of songs is not obviously a creative form of expression. However, it is no accident
that so many of the surviving Holocaust songs are of this genre. Firstly, songs to well-known
tunes were far easier to remember and thus survived the war years. Secondly, rewriting with
cognizance of the original song could be even more meaningful than songs without this double-
entendre. Singers utilized three distinct modes in recycling Yiddish songs.17 These were reuse,
rewriting, and response.
Reuse
The most common form of recycling of songs was undoubtedly reuse. Songs from before the
war were routinely sung in all contexts. This was particularly true of youth groups, where
singing had always been an important group activity. One of Flam's informants recalled her
participation in the Gordonya youth group's hakhsharah, which was allowed to continue for
nine months after ghettoization: [End Page 54]
During weekdays we sat together, and in the evenings we sang songs by the light of a small
burner. Every evening we learned a new song. The leader of all that was Arieh Tal-Shir (Tishler),
of course. We sang in Hebrew without knowing the language that well. . . . He also sang many
songs in Yiddish, such as "by mayn fenster shteyt oyvn vayse toybn tsvay" [Above my window,
two doves are standing], but I do not recall the end of the song. This song is full of hope and
romance, and this was what nourished us. Because of our singing we could spiritually escape the
ghetto.18
Reuse of old songs was common in the religious community as well. Scriptures and the liturgy
contain many songs of hope and faith. The one which became emblematic of religious Jews
during the Holocaust is "Ani Ma'amin" [I Believe], taken from Maimonides' Thirteen Articles of
Faith. Like all of Maimonides' Hebrew writings the words are concise and powerful:
I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he may delay,
nevertheless I anticipate every day that he will come.19

According to the often-repeated story, the religious Jews of Warsaw entered the gas chambers
singing this song.20 A more complete version of the story is offered by Simon Zuker. In his
version it was Rabbi Israel Shapiro, the Rebbe of Grodzisk Mazowiecki, who upon deportation
from the Warsaw Ghetto spoke calm words to his followers in the cattlecar and then led them to
their deaths singing "Ani Ma'amin." Zuker adds that the particular melody used originated with
the Modzitzer Hasidim.21
Whatever the exact origin of the song and the story, both spread quickly. The symbol of Jews
dying with total faith in redemption was and is attractive to many. Some Jews from Warsaw
probably did sing "Ani Ma'amin" at their deaths. This in turn inspired others to do the same.
Maimonides' twelfth article of faith took on a new connotation. No longer only about the abstract
concept of awaiting redemption, it came to express the immediacy of faith and its own
redemptive powers.
Ghetto theater was another context for reuse of songs. Theater performances took place
frequently in the ghettos despite the conditions. One dramatic [End Page 55] example took place
on January 18, 1942 in the Vilna Ghetto. On that night, several weeks after a major Aktion, Liuba
Levitska, the "Nightingale of the Vilna Ghetto," sang "Di Nakht" [The Night] to her stunned and
mourning audience. "Di Nakht," written in America in 1929, is a song about darkness and
despair:
There's no one with me in the night,
Darkness alone is with me. On roads obscured by darkness dense,
Hollow stillness all that I can sense—22
Although the original context may have been personal tragedy, "Di Nakht" was easily
transformed into a song of national tragedy. All of the audience, whether they knew of the song's
origin or not, understood that it expressed their own loss and loneliness.23
Other songs entered the Holocaust repertoire without a formal context or story. Mordecai
Gebirtig was one of the most popular Jewish song-writers in Eastern Europe before the war. In
1938, following local pogroms in the Polish towns of Pshitik and Minsk-Mazovetsk, he wrote the
song "Es Brent" [It is Burning].24 This dramatic and insistent song chronicled the burning of a
shtetl with onlookers unmoved. Gebirtig's pre-war song was later sung in ghettos across Europe.
Although he continued to write and compose in the Cracow Ghetto, none of his later creations
gained the popularity of "Es Brent."
It's burning, brothers, it's burning!
Oh, our poor little town is aflame!
Angry winds full of fury,
Tear and break and blow asunder
Stronger still the wild flames,
Everything is burning!
And you stand there looking on
With folded arms,
And you stand there looking on
While our town goes up in flames . . . 25
Rubin points out that Gebirtig's later songs were far more hopeful than "Es Brent." Yet is was this
earlier song which captured the imagination of the [End Page 56] victims of the Holocaust and
became ubiquitous.26 Many people probably thought that it had been written during the war.
Kaczerginski's source, for example, does not mention that the song was from 1938.27 Like "Di

Nakht," "Es Brent" did not need to be substantially reinterpreted for the new circumstances. It
was an outcry against destruction and spread far and wide.
These examples of youth group, religious, theater, and communal reuse of songs could no doubt
be augmented by many other stories and examples. Probably most of the pre-war songs reused
during the Holocaust were recognized as such. Just as Flam's informant related the ability to lose
oneself in old songs and forget the horrible conditions of the present, many Jews must have
repeated their favorite songs. However, a minority of pre-war songs were subtly reinterpreted to
become true Holocaust songs. These include the religious credo "Ani Ma'amin" and Gebirtig's
"Es Brent." The content of these songs lent itself to reinterpretation and the expression of faith,
mourning, and pain in the face of the dark new circumstances. The following category of songs
was reinterpreted in more dramatic and concrete ways.
Rewriting
The majority of new songs written during the Holocaust were set to existing tunes. In many
cases this was simply a matter of convenience, and the provenance of the tune was not
significant. This is the case, for example, with the well known "Partisan Song" or "Zog
Nitkeyn Mol," which was set to a Russian march.28 The melody was a vehicle for the words. It
was the words of the song, emphasized by the tempo of the melody, which galvanized
listeners and caused the song to gain such popularity. There were other songs, however, which
were purposely written to particularly well-known Yiddish folk and theater songs. These
songs were essentially rewritten with an expectation that the audience was familiar with the
original words.
One example of this conscious rewriting is the song "Tsen Brider" [Ten Brothers]. The original
folktune tells the story of ten brothers who all die of hunger and deprivation. The last verse, sung
by the final brother, bluntly describes his situation: [End Page 57]
One brother only was I,
I traded in candles
Every day I die,
As I have nothing to eat.29
It was a well-known song in Eastern Europe which called up images of the many real difficulties
faced by Jews. Sometime before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942, a Polish-Jewish musician
confined in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp made this gloomy song into a truly horrific
one. Martin Rosenberg's version has the brothers murdered one by one. The song ends as follows:
One brother only I remain.
With whom shall I cry?
All the others murdered—
Do you even remember their names . . .
Yidl with his fiddle,
Moyshe with his bass,
Hear out my final song,
They send me also to the gas.
Ten brothers were we—
We harmed no one.30
The original "Tsen Brider" was undoubtedly a melancholy song. Rosenberg played on the
emotional tone of the original to create his macabre parody. The trials of poverty and starvation

portrayed in the old folk-song appear insignificant in comparison to the Nazi persecutions.
Eastern-European Jews would have easily recognized the tune and the format of the song from
the first couplet, which is identical in the two versions. The sudden switch from death by
starvation to mass murder, and particularly the heartrending final verses, would certainly have
created a strong impression.
The song "Tsum Hemerl" [To the Little Hammer] underwent a similar transformation in the Lodz
Ghetto. The original song, written by Abraham Reisen and composed by A. M. Bernstein,
described the hand-to-mouth existence of a poor cobbler. The cobbler sings to his trusty hammer
about his troubles. The tune is rhythmic and punctuated by hard beats to represent the hammer's
banging. [End Page 58]
Oh, little hammer, klap!
Don't slip from my grasp.
You are my sole provider-
Without you I shall starve.31
Gila Flam located a song from a telephone headpiece workshop in the Lodz Ghetto which follows
the tune, rhythm, and theme of "Tsum Hemerl" without mirroring the words as closely as the case
with the two "Tsen Brider"s.
Oh, little ghetto, klap!
We labor day and night,
Mr. President, our thanks to you.
Stay with us and long life.
Oy ghetto oy ghetto klap !32
This ghetto version was sung in a slave labor factory during the repetitive and never-ending work.
The workers offer the allegiance to "Mr. President" or Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish
Council. Rumkowski was known for his dictatorial policies and firm belief in the saving power of
successful workshops.33 Although the praise of the workers comes across as somewhat less than
genuine in the song, it is clear that they understood that allegiance to Rumkowski increased life
expectancy. Just as the cobbler's hammer was his key to survival, the workers knew that their
productive factory was the key to theirs. The pressure of labor is symbolized in both songs with
the onomatopoetic klap. Thus this song, for which Flam records no writer, harkens back to the
original "Tsum Hemerl," but in this case it is the survival of an entire community which is at
stake.
Both "Tsum Hemerl" and "Tsen Brider" were reasonably well-known songs.34 For conscious
rewriting this was necessary. For the audience to appreciate the double entendres, they must be
familiar with the bases of the later songs. It is therefore not surprising that the most popular
Jewish folksongs, [End Page 59] those that everyone knew, were rewritten numerous times
during the war.35 Ruth Rubin records two Holocaust variants of the popular lullaby "Rozhinkes
mit Mandlen." The most popular version of the original song was written by Abraham Goldfaden
for the operetta Shulamis in 1880; however, he was drawing on an older folksong.36 Goldfaden's
version or earlier variants were widespread in Eastern Europe and America by the twentieth
century.
In a corner of the Temple the widowed daughter of Zion sits, rocking her only son Yidele to
sleep. She sings a tender lullaby: "Under Yidele's cradle stands a snow-white kid. The kid has
been to market. That will be Yidele's calling, too—trading in raisins and almonds. So sleep now,
Yidele, sleep. There will come a time when railroads will cover half the earth and you, too, will
earn great wealth. But even when you are rich, Yidele, remember your mother's lullaby."37
The song, like many Yiddish folksongs, is in a minor key. It has a somewhat lyric and haunting
quality which make it simultaneously calming and vaguely disturbing. The words create further

ambiguity. At first glance the song is about a mother telling her child about his future profession,
trading in raisins and almonds. Upon further reflection, the mother, Bas-Zion, and the child,
Yidele, become symbols for the past and future of the Jewish people. The mother, alone in a
corner, is the exiled people of Israel. This woman comforts Yidele, little Jew, the future of the
Jewish people, but her words waver between fantasy and foreboding. Thus the folktune itself,
although a lullaby, is not entirely comforting.
The two known rewritings of "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" take advantage of the melancholy tune
and laden words. The first one also takes the form of a lullaby:
And when you grow older, my little one,
May you remember this song:
How from thousands, but one Jew remained,
Oh, evil Germans, unjust murderers,
Who slaughtered your father, destroyed your mother . . . [End Page 60]
Oh, remember it, do not forget it,
You must never forget it!38
If the original song was somewhat disturbing to sing to a child, this one would be heart-breaking.
But whether it was written for children or adults, it is clearly modeled on "Rozhinkes mit
Mandlen." As well as sharing a melody, both songs are sung to Yidele about growing up. Both
also mention the importance of memory. The war version is a terrible amplification of the
original. It was clearly written to recall the earlier version and show the Jewish people's present
situation in all its horror. Interestingly, both versions contain a seed of hope for the future.
Rubin records another song to the tune of "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen." Kaczerginski located this
version from Axelrod, its author and a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto.39 This one makes no
pretense of serving as a lullaby:
In the Slobodka Talmudic Academy in the Lithuanian ghetto
There sits an old deacon alone.
He sits there saying his last prayers
Writing his testament for the fraternal home.
When you will be liberated, dear Jews,
Tell your dear children
Of our pain and hell,
Of our suffering and death.40
This Kovno version closely mirrors the original in format but switches the addressee from
'Yidele' or little Jew to 'Yidelech' or dear Jews. All three versions retain a ray of hope and
strongly command memory. The following popular pre-war song inspired even more rewriting
but with fewer references to the original.
The beloved song "Papirosn" [Cigarettes] was originally written and composed by Herman
Yablokoff following World War I in Grodno. In 1932 it was introduced in America and gained
immediate popularity.41 "Papirosn" is the cry of a orphaned child peddling cigarettes on the street.
The boy, like the author, has lost everything and everyone in the difficulties caused by the First
World War. He has lost his hope as well.
Buy my cigarettes!
Dry ones, not wet from the rain. [End Page 61]
Buy real cheap, buy and have pity on me.
Save me from hunger.
Buy these wonderful matches and you'll delight an orphan.

Useless are my cries and my running around,
No one wants to buy from me.
I must die like a dog.42
Yablokoff's powerful song about the destruction caused by the First World War was popular
in its time and rewritten at least four times during the Second World War.
Kaczerginski collected two alternative versions. The first, written by Rilke Glezer, chronicles the
ghettoization and mass-shooting of the Jews of Vilna. These ugly events are juxtaposed with the
beauty of nature. The song ends as follows:
Now it's another beautiful Sunday,
Sumptuous smells abound,
And we are anguished
And suffer in silence.
Severed from the world,
A ray of hope just awakening.43
Thus Glezer's version, although filled with pain and suffering, ends on a far more hopeful note
than the original. Beyond the haunting tune, Glezer does not refer to "Papirosn" itself.
Two of the other versions explicitly mimic Yablokoff's words. The first was written by Yankele
Hershkowitz, the bard of the Lodz Ghetto.
There are no food coupons for a dead person's cards,
Rumkowski one cannot wait;
By the time he gives us anything
We won't be alive any more.
The Main Office is doing very well!44
In this version, the specific situation in Lodz is implicitly contrasted with that in "Papirosn."
The orphaned child at least had cigarettes to sell. The Jews of Lodz are denied even ration
cards.
"Nishtu Keyn Przydziel," the Lodz version, was mentioned by two of Flam's informants. Both
attributed it to Hershkowitz, or Yankele, as he was [End Page 62] called. Yankele earned his
meager ghetto living as a street singer. He wrote numerous songs about the Lodz situation. All of
them were written to older melodies, some popular, others less so.45 Yankele's street songs relied
on humor to caricature the situation in Lodz. They were more entertaining than artistic and gained
him a large following.
If Yankele's version makes a veiled reference to "Papirosn," the version popular in Warsaw is
explicit. "Di Broyt Farkoyferin" is the story of an orphan trying to sell the black bread available
in the ghetto. Sh. Sheinkinder wrote it to mirror the original.
Buy from me a fresh loaf!
You don't know me, I am the pretty Itke
Buy from me a different bread,
I am Itke from Targowe,
I've been through it all.
See, my life is almost over—
Let me earn a few groshn
I've been standing here forever,
I will starve from hunger and exhaustion.46

What makes Sheinkinder's version unique is how faithfully he followed "Papirosn." Whereas we
have seen how other poets used older songs of struggle to contrast with the depth of their own
suffering, this version shows the World War I and World War II situations to be almost exactly
parallel. The Warsaw Ghetto is equated with Grodno in 1919.
Flam mentions but does not quote in full one other contrafact of "Papirosn,"47 and Mlotek and
Mlotek refer to several non-Yiddish rewritings.48 No doubt there were others. Like most singers,
most songs were lost. These particular ones survived by chance and in some cases because of
ubiquity. The survival of rewritten songs was aided by their familiar melodies and sometimes
parallel structure.
Among these examples, several models of rewriting can be discerned. Some authors simply relied
on existing melodies for convenience. Others made veiled references to the original words but
wrote their new songs on different themes entirely. Finally, some of the most clever rewritings
use the older versions to strengthen their own. These authors are able to express their messages
[End Page 63] without explicit statements, implicitly marking an absent, but culturally resonant
referent. Many of the poets used implicit contrast of images to place their current situations in
stark relief.
Response
Contrast was also a key ingredient in the final category of recycled songs. These songs are
responses to pre-war songs in the sense that they make explicit textual reference to them
without relying on the same melodies. Not surprisingly, this category, much like the last one,
requires popular songs as starting points.
Mlotek and Mlotek mention one response song in their explanation of "Unter di Grininke
Beymelekh" [Under the Little Green Trees]. The words to this song come from a poem by
Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Leo Kopf published music to the poem in 1914. Bialik's poem describes
a beautiful scene of Jewish children playing outdoors:
Beneath the little green trees,
Little Moyshes and Shloymes play.
This image was somewhat tarnished by a 1922 rewriting of the song by Shimshon Fersht.
Fersht's version takes into account the major pogroms sweeping Eastern Europe at that time:
Beneath the little green trees,
Little Moyshes and Shloymes are homeless
Like the songs above, this one used an old song to capture the change in conditions. Fersht's
revision is strengthened by the contrast with the original.
The Holocaust version of this song begins with a recognizable refrain:
Beneath the Polish little green trees,
No longer play any little Moyshes and Shloymes
but is based on a new melody. Anyone familiar with Bialik's poem or the song would have
easily known the referent for this line. The new version, written by I. Papiernikov with music
by I. Alter, thus refers to the past but makes a break with it. Bialik's peaceful vision is no more
and his sweet song has been replaced by a stark response.49

Isaiah Shpigs wrote "Nit kayn Rozhinkes, nit kayn Mandlen" [No Raisins, No Almonds] on the
occasion of his daughter's death. Like many songs [End Page 64] of the Lodz Ghetto, the music
was supplied by David Beyglman.50 As the title suggests, it is an inverse version of "Rozhinkes
mit Mandlen."
No raisins and no almonds.
Your father has not gone out trading,
Lu, lu, lu, my son.
Lu, lu, lu, my son.
This song is also a lullaby, although its melody bears no relation to that produced by
Goldfaden. The pessimistic opening is countered by the following closing:
There's no doubt that he will come,
To watch you, son, my only crown,
Lu, lu, lu, my son.
Lu, lu, lu, my son.51
In context it appears that the mother is reassuring her son obliquely despite the death of his
father. She suggests that he will still be able to watch over his son.
Although "Nit kayn Rozhinkes, nit kayn Mandlen" does not share the haunting tune of
"Rozhinkes mit Mandlen" it clearly draws on the folktale contained in this popular song. Shpigl's
version is about the loss of a father and husband. At the beginning of the song it appears that
traditional modes of coping no longer suffice. The mother is not willing to deceive her son with
promises of the future. However, by the end of the song she has lulled herself into believing that
her husband is still present in spirit. Shpigl's subtle commentary on spiritual survival is made
possible by reference to the ubiquitious "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen."
All of the songs discussed above combine aspects of reuse, rewriting, and response. However,
they differ in degree. The numerous pre-war songs that were reused without textual change
during the Holocaust often relied on subtle reinterpretation. In the two examples above the
traditional concept of redemption took on a more immediate meaning, and personal pain became
representative of communal struggle. No one articulated these changes, but they were obvious in
the context of the reuse. Singing had been a part of Jewish life since ancient times, and twentieth-
century Jews had an enormous repertoire from which to choose.
The second category of recycled songs, those that were rewritten, is also the second largest. These
songs range from convenient recycling of old tunes [End Page 65] to clever parodies of well-
known folksongs. The latter sub-group is of particular interest in that the new songs were capable
of presenting deep and subtle messages without resorting to explicit statement. The popularity of
this mode of expression suggests information about the condition of the Jews as well as about the
range of survival mechanisms at their disposal. Conscious rewriting of well-known songs allowed
for the expression of emotions that were either too dangerous or too painful to state openly.
Rewritten songs often also carried an element of response; however, the final category was based
on a need to respond to the past. The two examples above began with obvious references to pre-
war life, in the form of popular songs, and proceeded to show that the world had changed utterly.
Dark images and negative statements replaced fantasy and beauty as new melodies replaced the
old. Only very popular songs could be used for response of this sort. This requirement
circumscribed the size of this category.
What all of the categories and songs share, beyond some reference to the past, is a motivation to
help the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Each and every one of the songs mentioned above was
sung by suffering Jews to their suffering brethren. Some tried to uplift through the use of humor,

others paralleled an idyllic past with a distant future, still others were filled with anger and
indignation. Whether they were performed in large clandestine gatherings, among friends, within
a family, or by a lone individual, these songs drew on memories, aural or descriptive, to try to
destroy the effects of the inhumane conditions. Jews were subtly or explicitly reminded of the
world that was and could, for a moment, forget their present miseries or at least join with a
community instead of mourning alone.
The work of researchers in the field of ethnomusicology, beginning with Kaczerginski and
continuing up to the present, has preserved and categorized these treasures of spiritual resistance
to Nazi persecution. Jews in Europe during the Second World War underwent daily trials of
unfathomable proportions. Under these conditions any affirmation of humanity was a strenuous
and important act. Singing was one way that Jews communicated their pain and their hope and
continued to live day by day. Understanding how and why Jews were nourished by singing and
other forms of spiritual resistance is the crucial task of current and future Jewish historians.
Eliyana R. Adler has served for the past two years as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Joseph
and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland after completing
her doctorate in Jewish history at Brandeis University.
Footnotes
1. For a description of one such event see Abigail Wood, "Commemoration and Creativity:
Remembering the Holocaust in Today's Yiddish Song," European Judaism 35:2 (2002):
especially pp. 45–48.
2. See for example Irene Heskes, "Jewish Music Resources for Holocaust Programming," in
David Szonyi, ed., The Holocaust: An Annotated Bibliography and Resource Guide (New
York: Ktav, 1985), pp. 221–51.
3. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), p. 277.
4. See for example Simon Zuker, The Unconquerable Spirit: Vignettes of the Jewish Religious
Spirit the Nazis Could Not Destroy (New York: Zachor Institute, 1980), pp. 27, 54–55; Moshe
Prager, Sparks of Glory (Jerusalem: Mosad harav Kook, 1954), pp. 35–40; Yaffa Eliach,
Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Avon Books, 1982), pp. 92–93.
5. See for example Eleanor Mlotek, Mir Trogn a Gezang (New York: Workmen's Circle
Educational Department, 1989)and Eleanor Gordon Mlotek and Joseph Mlotek, Pearls of
Yiddish Song: Favorite Folk, Art and Theatre Songs (New York: Workmen's Circle
Educational Department, 1988).
6. Josef Bor offers a fictionalized account of an actual event in his The Terezin Requiem (New
York: Knopf, 1963). In his "Tsen Brider: A Jewish Requiem," Musical Quarterly, Vol. 84,
No. 3 (2000): 452–474, Joshua Jacobson reconstructs another formal musical occasion. Gila
Flam has written extensively on this subject in her Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz
Ghetto, 1940–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) and most recently in a more
theoretical article, "The Role of Singing in the Ghettos," in Robert Moses Shapiro, ed.,
Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other
Contemporaneous Personal Accounts (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1999), pp. 141–153.
7. Frederick Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company,
1970), p. 215.
8. See for example Peter Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil
(Hanover, NH: University of New England Press for Wesleyan University Press, 2000); Veit

Erlman, Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996); Jon Michael Spencer, Protest and Praise: Sacred Music of Black
Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).
9. Doris L. Bergen, "Music and the Holocaust," in David Scrase and Wolfgang Mieder, eds.,
The Holocaust: Introductory Essays (Burlington, VT: The Center for Holocaust Studies at the
University of Vermont, 1996), pp. 133–147.
10. Szmerke Kaczerginski, Lider fun di getos un lagern (New York: Tsiko bikher farlag,
1948).
11. Moshe Prager, Min ha-metsar karati: shiri ha-geta'ot, mahanot ha-'avodah, hatserot ha-
mavet, ha-partizanim, ha-nakam veha-kerev (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1954);
Shoshana Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!: Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps (New
York: Harper & Row, 1985); Eleanor Mlotek and Malke Gottlieb, We Are Here: Songs of the
Holocaust (New York: Workmen's Circle Educational Department, 1983).
12. H. Leivick, "Introduction,"Kaczerginski, Lider, p. xxiv.
13. Ruth Rubin, Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, 1973), pp. 432, 441, 442, 457 note 8, and passim.
14. Flam, Singing for Survival, pp. 181–182.
15. Mlotek, Mir trogn, p. 4.
16. Anna Shternshis, "Soviet and Kosher" (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 2001), pp.
223, 224, 240, 247, 253, 257, 271, 275, 290.
17. It is important to note that not all songs of the Holocaust were in Yiddish. Some were in
Hebrew and others were in the vernaculars of different communities including Russian,
Polish, Ladino, German, etc. This study is limited to Yiddish songs, but the same methods
could no doubt be applied to songs in other languages.
18. Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 155.
19. The Complete ArtScroll Siddur, trans. Rabbi Nosson Scherman (New York: Mesorah
Publications, 1988), p. 181.
20. See for example Kaczerginski, Lider, p. xxxiv; Mlotek and Gottlieb, We Are Here, p. 76;
Rubin, Voices of a People, p. 425.
21. Zuker, The Unconquerable Spirit, p. 27.
22. Translation of first verse in Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!, p. 7.
23. Mlotek and Mlotek record a similar incident with the song "Eyli Eyli" in the Warsaw
Ghetto, p. 220.
24. Rubin, Voices of a People, p. 430; Mlotek and Gottlieb, We Are Here, p. 12.
25. Rubin, Voices of a People, pp. 429–430.
26. Rubin, Voices of a People, pp. 429–430.

27. Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 330.
28. For full text of the song see Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!, pp. 67–69; Mlotek and Gottlieb, We
Are Here, pp. 94–95; Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 3.
29. My translation. For full text of song see Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p.
122. The most detailed English language treatment of the song and its composer is in Joshua
Jacobson, "Tsen Brider: A Jewish Requiem," Musical Quarterly 84:3 (2000): 452–474.
30. My translation. For partial Yiddish text see Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!, pp. 48–57.
31. Mlotek, Mir trogn, p. 78.
32. My translation. For full Yiddish text see Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 165.
33. Flam's research shows that he appeared in many of the songs from the Lodz Ghetto. The
one song that every one of her informants mentioned was the ghetto hit "Rumkowski Chaim"
(Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 30).
34. These of course are only two examples among many. Eleanor Mlotek and her
collaborators mention others: Mlotek, Mir trogn, pp. 30–31 (Kaczerginski, Lider, pp. 161–2),
70–71 (Kaczerginski, Lider, pp. 139–140), 2–3; Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song,
pp. 16–17 (Kaczerginski, Lider, pp. 283–4), 78–80, 80–81, 86–87, 144–145, 153–4, 170–171,
173–174 (Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 132–133), 214–216, 234–236 (Kaczerginski, Lider, pp. 158–
160).
35. Another example is noted by Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p. 44.
36. Mlotek, Mir trogn, p. 4
37. This summary of the song comes from Mlotek. I have used it instead of line by line
translation in order to tell the story of the song briefly.
38. Rubin, Voices of a People, p. 441.
39. Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 306.
40. Rubin, Voices of a People, p. 425–6.
41. Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p. 267.
42. Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p. 268.
43. My translation from text in Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 8.
44. Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 95
45. Flam, Singing for Survival, pp. 36–7.
46. My translation from text in Kaczerginski, Lider, p. 110.
47. Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 96
48. Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p. 267.

49. Mlotek and Mlotek, Pearls of Yiddish Song, p. 6.
50. Flam, Singing for Survival, pp. 149–150.
51. Flam, Singing for Survival, p. 150.
Honorable Menschen, Boston's premiere
semi-professional Jewish a cappella group, is
auditioning for one tenor. Auditions will be held
Monday, May 22, 2006, 8:00-9:30pm (other dates may be
available by special arrangement).
Honorable Menschen was founded in 1997 as an all-male
a cappella group, and became co-educational in 1999.
Its membership consists of graduate students and young
professionals, many of whom have sung in collegiate a
cappella groups. Currently, our membership includes 12
singers: 3 each of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. We
generally rehearse one evening a week, 7:15-9:30pm
(currently on Sundays).
We have performed at a variety of local venues,
including MIT, Harvard Hillel, Temple Beth El
(Sudbury), the Tremont Street Shul (Cambridge), Ohabei
Shalom (Brookline), and Havurah on the Hill at the
Vilna Shul (Beacon Hill). We are also currently
working on recording our first CD, with an expected
release in 2007.
For more information on the group, including a demo
medley of live tracks recorded in the past two years,
check out the Honorable Menschen website:
http://www.honorablemenschen.org.