SONGS SAVED FROM THE FIRE (a review)

[MaxwellSt <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.