Press Telegram: Long Beach woman revives the songs of Jews who lived in Europe’s Holocaust-era ghettos
The verses of a Yiddish song written in 1943 tell the tale of a young Jewish girl whose father was killed in Nazi-occupied Poland.
She is lovingly nicknamed “Sorele,” for Sarah, and has been sent into hiding with a housekeeper outside the Vilna Ghetto by her mother. Unlike so many others murdered by the Nazis, the two women lived to see the end of the war and migrated to New York.
Fifty years later, Sarah heard the song written about her by prolific Polish Jewish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski in Washington D.C.’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Hearing the melody unleashed a flood of emotions for Sarah and sparked new life for “Dos Elnte Kind,” an exquisite but relatively unknown Yiddish lullaby.
Years later, the song caught the attention of musical historian and performer Harriet Bennish, a Long Beach resident. She will perform the song and share the story of its creation at the Art Theater in Long Beach on Sunday, Oct. 6 — as well as other songs steeped in the love, loss and destitution in the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe during the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler’s Nazis.
In “Tears, Joy and Hope: Yiddish Songs Written in the Jewish Ghetto,” Bennish will perform more than a dozen songs in Yiddish, accompanied by accordion and cello, as a way to memorialize the Holocaust and its victims through music. English translations will appear on a video screen as she performs, along with historical photos.
The professionally-trained soprano, 68, grew up in Pennsylvania’s Orthodox Jewish community. She discovered “The Lonely Child” last year during a search for music to perform for Jewish audiences.
“I so deeply missed the music that reminded me of my parents and grandparents’ Eastern European roots,” she said during an interview on Thursday.
Read more at https://www.presstelegram.com/2019/10/04/rekindling-hope-and-heartbreak-in-each-verse-long-beach-woman-revives-the-songs-of-jews-who-lived-in-europes-holocaust-era-ghettos/