SONGS SAVED FROM THE FIRE (a review)

[MaxwellSt]

I just read this review and thought it would be of general interest.  (Lori @ MAX) SONGS SAVED FROM THE FIRE SONGS NEVER SILENCED by Velvel Pasternak, with translations by Lawrence Berson, based upon Lider Fun Di Ghettos Un Lagern, by Shmerke Kaczerginsky, Tara Publications. Owings Mills. MD. 2003, 192 pages, plus compact disc. $59.95 Tel: 1-800-827-2400      Internet: jewishmusic.com Reviewed by Rabbi Jack Riemer     Velvel Pasternak's contributions to the musical heritage of the Jewish people are enormous. For many years now, he has made available treasures from the past and introduced us to artists of the present. He draws no lines between Jews, and pays no attention to labels, only to talent. He has produced the works of Chassidim past and present, and he has produced the works of contemporary folk singers, with no distinction as to whether they are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or New Age. I cannot imagine where we would be as a musical community if it were not for him and his Tara Publications Company, but we would surely be much poorer, spiritually, without him.     I don't know how many hundreds of tapes he has produced and distributed by now, or how many books of music he has edited, or how many hundreds of talks on Jewish music he has given—to professionals and to ordinary Jews, and yet I dare say that this, his most recent work, Songs Never Silenced, is the most powerful of them all. I thought that by now I had heard whatever there was to hear of the music that came out of the concentration camps, and I thought that by now I was emotionally inured to the whole subject, but this new book took hold of my neshama and would not let go.     The story behind this book is this: in 1948, a survivor named Shmerke Kaczerginsky who lived in Paris wrote down the songs that he remembered or that he could gather from others. The book consisted of the lyrics for two hundred and twenty songs, together with the hand-written, melody transcriptions of a hundred of them. His book nearly disappeared after a while and the few remaining copies of it can only be found on the dusty shelves of second hand bookstores.  But Velvel Pasternak somehow discovered it and has given it new life in this new edition which contains those hundred for which there were written melodies, and he has added a few more songs from other sources, and a small section of songs without melodies that were simply too powerful to leave out. The songs are full, not only of pathos, sadness, and feelings of helplessness, but of hopefulness, and visions of a brighter future as well. When Pasternak, (or as everyone I know calls him: 'Velvel') discovered this book he realized what a mighty spiritual treasure house it was, and determined that it should not be allowed to disappear into oblivion, as so many of the composers in it had. Somehow he came into contact with Lawrence Berson, who had done a translation of these songs into English and they teamed up together to bring this book into being.     The book begins with a translation of Kaczerginsky's wonderful introduction, written in Paris, just after the war. In this introduction, he predicts that the songs which the Jews of the ghetto sang when they went to work, when they stood in line for a bit of soup, when they fought, and when they were taken to the slaughter, that these songs will someday be a valuable addition to the war histories. And he was right. Whoever reads these folksongs or listens to them, as they are sung on the accompanying cd by some of the great artists of our time, like Sidor Belarsky, Chava Alberstein, Leon Lissek, Paul Zim, and the others, will have a glimpse into the holy of holies that existed midst the destruction.     At a time when there was no way for words, much less music, to cross over the barbed wire and get to the world outside, these people wrote and sang songs: songs of faith, songs of blasphemy, songs of hope, songs that were cries for justice. The old distinction between sacred song and secular song became irrelevant in the ghettos and in the concentration camps. Any song that was sung there was a sacred song, for it testified to the human being's capacity to sing, even then, even there, in the darkest part of Hell. The songs in this collection were sung by mothers soothing their babies to sleep, by partisans lying on the ground in the forests, waiting to attack, and by street urchins and orphans, who found themselves in a world so impure, so contaminated, and yet who sang.     Who knows how many songs there were that did not survive, that did not make it into this collection? And who knows how many songwriters and song singers there were whom we lost there? Who knows how many Kafkas, how many Einsteins, how many Streisands, how many Bob Dylans, how many Singers, Agnons, and Roths, how many Bellows, Malamuds, and Mailers, how many Spinozas and Freuds, how many Soloveitchiks, and Schneersons, how many Carlebachs and Kaplans, how many Spielbergs and Chagalls, how many Sterns and Perlmans there were there? Who knows? No one does, but at least we have these songs, and these poems, to warm us , and to make us comprehend the incomprehensible fact that some of our people stayed sane, stayed human, and even sung, even then, even there     Emanuel Goldsmith,  Professor of Jewish studies, City University of New York, correctly calls this book "a magnificent treasury of the most recent sacred songs of the Jewish People. It is a new Book of Psalms and a Book of Lamentations combined." We are grateful to Velvel Pasternak for rescuing these songs from oblivion and for bringing them to a new generation. Rabbi Jack Riemer is the editor of Volume Three of the World of the High Holy Days, just   published by the National Rabbinic Network.