Dus gezang fin Geto Lodzh - Song of the Lodz Ghetto - is a musical performance piece by Brave Old World. It draws freely from both memory and imagination to reflect on the relationship between the rare Jewish music created between 1940-44 in the Nazi ghetto of Lodz, Poland, and our own experiences as performers of Jewish music today. The songs at the heart of this program were collected in Israel and the United States, among survivors of the Lodz Ghetto, by ethnomusicologist Dr. Gila Flam of Hebrew University, and published in her pioneering and moving book "Singing for Survival" (University of Illinois Press, 1992). Many of these songs were first performed worldwide in the post-WWII period by Brave Old World in the early 1990s. Dr. Flam is a daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors; her father was interned in the Lodz Ghetto. Among Dr. Flam's primary informants whose legacies are most represented on this recording are Ya'akov Rotenberg, heard on this recording singing portions of the most widely-remembered Lodz Ghetto song Rumkovski Khayim, Miriam Harel, and her own uncle, Ya'akov Flam, all of whom were teenagers when the Lodz Ghetto was created. While the more widely known songs of the Vilna, Warsaw, Krakow and Bialystok Ghettos flowed primarily from the pens of celebrated poets and composers, these Yiddish songs from Lodz are largely the creation of proletarian street-singers and folk bards. They render a vivid picture, by turns chilling, defiantly satirical, and uplifting, of everyday life - and death - during one of humankind's darkest hours, reaffirming the power of song to engender and manifest spiritual resistance in the face of overwhelming circumstances. Brave Old World's setting of this musical legacy fuses traditional and contemporary musical sensibilities, bridging the concert stage and folk creativity. The group's new Yiddish songs and compositions are interwoven with the songs from Lodz and traditional Jewish tunes from Central Poland, creating a musical journey that traverses the distance between pre-war Europe, the Holocaust, and our own time. Thus we explore not only the music of the Lodz Ghetto, but also our relationship to it as contemporary American and Jewish composers and performers. Juxtaposing past and present, we make our role as contemporary interpreters of the Lodz material an explicit and integral part of the performance. Most of the songs rendered here are the work of Yankele Herszkowicz, principal bard of the Lodz Ghetto. Herszkowicz performed in the streets, standing on a wooden box, at times accompanied by a violinist from Vienna until the Nazis confiscated all musical instruments in the ghetto in 1942. Crowds would gather around Herszkowicz, joining in the familiar refrains and clapping along to his most popular creations, in particular the song Rumkovski Khayim, named for Khayim Rumkovski, head of the Lodz Judenrat. A masterpiece of thinly-disguised social criticism and double entendre, Rumkovski Khayim has the veneer of a paean of praise to Rumkovski - sufficient to have kept the Gestapo and Jewish Police from squelching it - but was in fact a bitter cry of resentment and outrage. It is the song most universally recalled by survivors of the Ghetto. Some of Herszkowicz's songs were uniquely his own compositions, while others - like many of the songs composed by Ghetto singers -were newly-adapted versions of existing Yiddish, Polish and international popular songs from the pre-war period. Herzkowicz survived the Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz, returned to Lodz after the war and lived there until his death in 1972. His legacy is preserved by his son, Alexander. Also featured in Brave Old World's program is the song Winter 1942 by Miriam Harel, a 14-year old girl at the time. A tragic parody of the satirical Yiddish folk song Yikhes (Family Background), it describes the death and deportation of her immediate family. Harel also survived the war and lives today in Israel. A warm, optimistic woman, she once told us on the phone, "Zingtt mayne lider gezunterheyt, un zay tsufridn mit zey" - "Sing my songs in good health, and benefit from them."
