Mima’amakim (translating as Out of the Depths) is the title given to a small Yiddish pamphlet containing 20 folk songs from the camps and ghettos of Poland that was published in a small print run of 500 in 1945. The pamphlet was divided into three sections: Despair; Hope/Safety; Battle and Victory. Understandably, the third was the shortest.
The songs within had been collected by Yehuda Eismann and a woman known only as Olga R, and very few editions now survive. So when Olga R died in 2013 in Sydney, at the age of 98, and her family discovered one of the surviving pamphlets among her possessions, it piqued the interest of two Australian academics, Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher.
They quickly realised that Eismann and Olga R had collected the songs in Bucharest while they were assembling testimonies from Holocaust survivors passing through, many in transit to Mandatory Palestine. That particular important collection, known as the Bucharest Protocol, is now held in Sydney.
Mima’amakim is dwarfed by the still untranslated 436-page Songs of the Ghettos and Camps by Shmerke Kaczerginski, published in 1947. Some of Kaczerginski’s own lyrics appear in Mima’amakim, including Frilingslid (Spring Song), his response to the murder in 1943 of his partner, Barbara Kaufman, and the great Ponar, better known as Shtiler, Shtiler (Quiet, Quiet), its heart-piercing melody the work of the precocious 11-year-old Aleksander Wolkowyski, who in Israel became Alex Tamir. Eight of the songs in Mima’amakim do not appear in Kaczerginski’s collection. Some them are classics of the genre. Zog nit keynmol (Never Say) is one of several whose melody was borrowed from the Soviet canon.
Mordechai Gebirtig’s Es brent (It Burns), as the authors point out, is wrongly described by Eismann in the pamphlet as a reaction to the first slaughter in the Krakow ghetto in 1942. In fact, it was written in 1937, in response to a pogrom in Przytyk. Unter dayne vayse shtern (Under your white stars), a setting of a poem by the great Abraham Sutzkever, includes a number of variants from the original poem, as the poet himself noted.
Veynt in the original’s “veynt di merderishe ru” (cries the murderous stillness), become krikht (crawls), demonstrating, to quote the authors, “how an object such as Mima’amakim can amplify the fluidity and reach of oral transmission, distorted by the chaotic nature of documentation in the immediate postwar period”. Homer’s works doubtless underwent such transformations.
Homer also nodded and so, occasionally, do Toltz and Boucher. It was not Ceaușescu who expelled Romanian Zionists in the late 1940s (he did not come to power till 1965) but his equally ruthless predecessor Gheorghiu-Dej, and to say that “according to some sources” Paul Celan’s famous Holocaust poem Todesfuge (Deathfugue) was named Todestango (Death Tango) in its earliest versions is to cast doubt where there is none.
The first publication of Todesfuge was not in German but Romanian, under the title Tangoul Mortii (Death Tango), in a translation by Celan’s childhood friend, Petre Solomon.
Nonetheless, the presentation of the songs themselves, together with their translations and commentaries, is generally first class. Also laudable are the unsparing efforts of the authors to trace their writers and composers. This is a book conceived and written in passion, and it shows.
One of the book’s highlights, the very beautiful, and to my knowledge as yet unrecorded, Dos Eybike Lid (The Eternal Song), employs the musical mode used when chanting the Book of Lamentations on Tisha B’Av.
It includes the line, “You should not forget, that you are a Jew: sad melodies should continue”, words which resonate today as the international Jewish community is once again attacked and threatened by Antisemites using the same tropes as those that fuelled the Holocaust.
Out of the Depths – The First Collection of Holocaust Songs by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher is published by Manchester University Press
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.