Re: Grigori Frid's "The Diary of Anne Frank"

[George Robinson <grcomm...>]

Interesting; I didn't realize there was a Russian CD. My only exposure
to the piece has been a recording of Pechstein and the production
currently running.

This exchange came at a useful time for me. I was about to sit down and
write a piece on Andrzej Munk, a Polish Jew who made several interesting
films in Poland in the 1950s prior to his death in 1961 in a car crash.
Munk's biography is something of a mystery -- he was a dedicated
socialist, lived through the war fighting in the Resistance and was an
active participant in the Warsaw Uprising -- not the Ghetto one, the
Polish one. What makes it more interesting is the ways in which his
films, almost all of which touch directly on the Polish war experience,
sidestep his own identity, even Passenger, the film he was shooting when
he died, which is mostly about Auschwitz but focusses on political
prisoners rather than Jews.

Having been forced to think about this issue in order to respond to
Bob's posting,  I found myself thinking about the ways in which Munk
negotiated what must have been fraught territory for an artist in a
country in which "anti-Zionist" riots were the norm (and a barely hidden
code for Jew-bashing). And, in fact, Munk finds interestingly subversive
ways of approaching the question. Several scenes in Passenger take place
in "Kanada" the warehouse in which the Nazis had prisoners recycling the
property of murdered Jews for use in the Reich; the Jewish imagery there
is utterly inescapable -- hundreds of coats with Jewish stars,
hanukiyot, tallitot in great piles. You can't watch the film and not
realize that the vast majority of the murder victims in Auschwitz are
Jews, even though the prisoners we actually meet are Poles.

The reason I bring this up is because I am trying to imagine what it
must have been like for Frid to read Anne Frank in 1969 during one of
the rare Brezhnev-era thaws. Undoubtedly, his own Jewish identity was
pretty minimal and this must have been a pretty shocking experience for
him. And making an opera out of the book took a kind of courage as
proven by the fact that he was unable to get it staged for years -- as
Bob points out, it was seen in a concert version in 1972 first and only
staged in 1977 in Kislovdsk, pretty far from the beaten track; he had to
have an visitor smuggle it out of the country to get it performed
anywhere else.

The questions raised by Bob are entirely valid ones, but I think we can
all agree that there is a world of difference between Grigori Frid being
reluctant to push the issue of Anne's Jewishness in the Soviet Union in
the 1970s and Hackett, Goodrich, George Stevens, et al., not doing so in
Broadway and Hollywood.

(The way that the American film industry has dealt with the Shoah is the
topic of a book I've been working on for a while in my spare time, and
it's a pretty deplorable record. But that's a topic for another time and
another list.)

George Robinson

The world is new each morning--
that is God's gift, and a man should
believe he is reborn each day.
                  -The Baal Shem Tov






Bob Wiener wrote:

>  Thanks for that response. My recording is in Fried's original
> Russian.  The English translation of the passage you refer to (not
> knowing Russian I assume that it is accurate -- it is similar to the
> French translation) is: "And I have nothing left, except prayer, and I
> implore, "Let this ring that is tightening, open and widen, that
> freedom may be granted us!" I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the
> version you saw added the "Adonai eloheinu" for its largely Jewish
> audience but that it wasn't in the original.  I also wouldn't be
> surprised if the original staging was also "non-Jewish".  (BTW, it was
> originally presented in a concert version.) In the booklet
> accompanying the CD Natalia Ziv writes, "The social theme in The Diary
> of Anne Frank, i.e., the protection of the human being from
> discrimination and persecution induced the composer to concentrate on
> the internal action, to elaborate the dramatic connotations of the
> character in minute detail, and to present the microcosm of her inner
> "Self", reflcting the most subtle stirrings of the soul." and "Anne's
> last words are that the human being is morally free as long as he can
> look at the sky without fear.  In these words Grigori Fried also heard
> the voice of his country, Russia, capable of looking into the future
> with confidence even in the most distressing situations." Nothing
> Jewish here. Bob