
By EDITOR
Two important figures in the Yiddish cultural world were highlighted at recent events in the Cape Town Jewish community.
At the Yom Hashoah Vehagevurah commemoration in May, local Yiddish speaker, Dr Veronica Belling, read a poem by Abraham Sutzkever; and, more recently, visiting American Jewish ethnomusicologist, Dr Bret Werb, highlighted the music and Yiddish lyrics of Shmerke Kaczerginski. Werb, Musicologist and Recorded Sound Curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, has produced several recordings of ghetto, camp, and resistance songs.
Thanks to local musician, Zola Shuman, Werb’s extensive knowledge was shared with Capetonians. She explains, “Due to my Holocaust family music legacy, I correspond with Bret regularly and, when he told me that he would be coming to South Africa for an international music library and archives conference in Stellenbosch, I figured that, while here, he could hopefully give a talk at our Holocaust Centre too!”
Both Sutzkever and Kaczerginski became involved in the preservation of Yiddish and other Jewish cultural objects in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II. As part of ‘The Paper Brigade’, they smuggled rare books and manuscripts, saving them from destruction by the Nazis. As recorded by YIVO, “Theirs is an incredible story of cultural resistance in the face of almost certain death.”
Kaczerginski – the subject of extensive research by Dr Werb – wrote many songs during the War years, reflecting the harsh conditions of life in the Ghetto. “He understood the power of song to forge bonds of camaraderie, to lift spirits, to help cope with grief. And he had the talent to fashion such songs as the situation demanded,” Dr Werb explains.
In addition, after surviving the War as a partisan fighter, he began collecting songs from other survivors – songs that not only testified to creativity during adversity but offered evidence of German crimes that many feared the world at large would not believe.
In 1948 Kaczerginski published a book of the music, ‘Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps’.
As for Sutzkever, he is regarded as probably the greatest Yiddish poet of the Holocaust. Together with others in ‘The Paper Brigade’ he hid a diary by Theodor Herzl and some of Marc Chagall’s drawings in walls and concrete in the Vilna Ghetto.
Sutzkever escaped from the Ghetto in 1943, and also joined the partisans but made his way to Moscow. After the War, he emigrated to Palestine.
Sutzkever provided testimony at the Nuremberg Trials against Franz Murer, the Nazi overlord of Vilna, who was known as ‘the Butcher of Vilnius’.
“Kaczerginski and other collectors of Shoah songs realised the importance of documenting folkloric responses to the Nazi terror, the despairing and the mordantly humorous, as well as the heroic calls to resistance. In doing so they played a crucial role in preserving a Yiddish literary culture the Nazis had sought to destroy,” Bret concludes.
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