Honoring the music that defied the Holocaust
Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" may seem like an unlikely resistance song, but that's what the 1926 Broadway hit became in an even unlikelier place and time -- the Jewish ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe.
In discreet cabarets in Warsaw, Vilnius, and other cities, Jewish entertainers crooned the quintessential ode to optimism not only to entertain but as an act of defiance against the Nazis and the grim reality they had imposed. It was, some scholars say, part of a heroic but under-discussed Jewish resistance.
"The story of the Holocaust is often the story of people who went like sheep to the slaughter," said Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, a Jewish chaplain at Tufts University who doubles as an ethnomusicology professor there. "But we don't know the story of the people who were artists and musicians and dancers who insisted on, as best they could, living their lives and resisting and making art in the face of Nazi oppression."
It's a story that the Jumbo Knish Factory, a 10-person Tufts University klezmer band, along with actors from the school's drama department will explore tonight and tomorrow in "Cabaret at the Edge of the World," a program of songs and skits performed in English, Yiddish, and Polish. Both free shows, to be held at the Tufts Hillel Center, will be followed by a discussion with Summit and the performers.
The Tufts program is the latest incarnation of an idea conceived by Summit, one that brought his faith and profession together to research "the role of music as spiritual resistance during the Holocaust."
In the early 1990s, at the request of Hillel, the national Jewish college campus organization, Summit began developing an educational guide for universities to use to create performances exploring music played in the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps. Summit, a David Grisman fan who plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin, enlisted Hankus Netsky, a music professor at the New England Conservatory of Music and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and Philip Bohlman, a Jewish music expert at the University of Chicago.
The three came up with about 20 pieces of music to which they added historical commentary. More than 10 schools have adopted the guide over the years, the Tufts production being a collaborative effort between Jumbo Knish Factory director Michael McLaughlin and a pair of drama professors at the Medford school, Laurence Senelick and Barbara Grossman.
"The show goes from light to dark," said Senelick, an international scholar on European cabarets who brought into the Tufts production many of the dramatic skits that were performed at the time, and also linked the individual pieces with commentaries read by performers to provide context. The show opens with anti-Nazi songs and sketches from before the time Hitler came to power, then moves into music taken from the ghetto cabarets and concentration camps. The show closes, however, with "Never Say," which became an unofficial resistance hymn.
"That's the whole purpose of this play. It speaks to a notion that humanity will survive," explained McLaughlin, who said he got involved in the project not only to indulge his affection for Eastern European music, but for a chance to learn about the entertainers and their lives. "By looking at their art, you get insights into the kind of life they were leading," he said.
Consider "Yisrolik," a song "about a street kid who manages to put up a brave front and is very streetwise, but at the same time he's very vulnerable," said Senelick. The Yiddish song, translated here into English, reflected the saga of countless ghetto children whose parents had been killed or died of starvation or disease.
Confronting, and sometimes even flaunting, the reality of their harsh existence through song was, for both performers and audience, less an expression of cynicism and more an act of defiance.
"Music was one way to show Nazis could kill people's bodies, but they couldn't kill people's spirits," said Summit.
Yet music during that time wasn't always a form of resistance. The Nazis built the Terezin concentration camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, to look like a pleasant city complete with a cultural scene they could present to the world as evidence they were treating Jews well.
Musicians, artists, and writers were brought to the camp and forced to play, paint, and write as part of what McLaughlin called a "grand fraud."
Summit acknowledges that the Nazis used Jewish entertainers for their own purposes, and says that, too, should be further studied. Still, he argues, the Nazis' exploitation of Jewish musicians doesn't negate the fact that Jewish musicians also created music beyond Hitler's control, and that helped people survive the war.
"I think one of the best ways we best honor the memories of the people who perished is to deeply understand their spirit and their talent and character," he said.
