Abandoning Representations: Holocaust Imageries in Late Israeli Art Music," Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust (2016): 1-19. (original) (raw)

Creating Beauty Out of Darkness: An Exploration into the Artistic Resistance of Jewish Music of the Holocaust

2021

When we think of the the Holocaust, we rightfully remember the atrocities committed by Hitler and his Nazi regime. However, we often fail to recognize the beautiful, albeit tragic, music that was composed in the concentration camps, specifically in Terezín. In this project, I study the Jewish composers and lyricists who contributed to this musical output, specifically Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, and Schmerke Kaczerginski. The goal of this study is to identify and examine specific components of resistance within these composers’ works and show how they come together to create a larger opposition to Hitler’s regime despite oppressive and exploitative conditions. In going about my research, I studied numerous musical scores written during the Holocaust. I then chose those that best represented this artistic resistance and elaborated on them. I also read articles, books, and documents that gave me a further insight into the art and life of this tragic period. Additionally, I...

Musical Expressions of Incarcerated Jewish Composers during the Holocaust

Gvanim, 2020

The final article in this volume turns to a more conventionally understood expression of Antisemitism, the Holocaust. However, Galit Gertsenzon contributes a perspective often overlooked when people think about Jewish responses to persecution. In her article, Gertsenzon considers musical compositions by three composers from 1936 to 1944 in order to delineate their respective musical aesthetics of resistance. She highlights not only the anger and calls for action in these works, but also the themes of hope, dignity, and redemption that make these pieces compelling responses to Antisemitism in their time and for today. Composers discussed include Mordechai Gebirtig (Es Brent), Gideon Klein (Piano Sonata, Songs Op. 1), and Pavel Haas (Al Sefod).

HOLOCAUST MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE

2016

This work treats the issue of the relationship between the culture of Holocaust remembrance and artistic music. The culture of remembrance comprises mechanisms of the social transfer of the knowledge about the past. Representation of the past and presentation of the artistic music, as a method of transcendence of the past, correspond at multiple levels. The aim of this work is to make a point of the possibility to reinterpret the past through presentation of artistic music. Both mechanisms have been based on the emotional dialogue between the identity created under various cultural conditions. The outcomes of these mechanisms can be contents and emotions which intensively transform the identity of the percipients overlapping it with the identity of the artists who authentically testified about historical circumstances of the Holocaust.

The Difficult Voice in Vocal Composition - Composers’ Aesthetic Responses to Secondhand Holocaust Experiences

This paper delineates a musical phenomenon, which I term the “difficult voice,” and observes its use in three vocal compositions by Jewish composers written in three different post-Holocaust time periods: Chaya Czernowin’s (b.1957, Haifa) plotless and wordless opera Pnima...ins innere (1999); Meredith Monk’s (b.1942, New York) theater-opera Quarry (1976); and Arnold Schoenberg’s (1874, Vienna - 1951, Los Angeles) cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). These compositions stage their climaxes through multiple moments of repetitions in which textures are often constructed through the simultaneous and homophonic play of several instruments, as well as the singers and/or the narrator. My analysis shows these musical phenomena to function as the drive of the “difficult voice.” The difficult voice does not sing but only vocalizes and speaks (while other parts of the composition sing). They are important because, arguably, they are the manifestation of these composers’ creativity to integrate the apocalyptic scene of the Jewish Holocaust that they have only learned through secondhand accounts with their own issues, whether indirectly relating to the Holocaust or something else. Scenes of “going to die,” exodus, and destroying are depicted, all of which project massive anxiety and anger. The composition of such scenes results from the unspeakable and incomprehensible representation of the secondhand Holocaust which their authors had never experienced but with which they wanted to identify. The case studies analyze the use of vocalization and of orchestration of repetitions in selected instances of the “difficult voice.” Several modes of the transmission of the Holocaust are located and explored: the unconscious, the general media, and communications that took place within the composers’ familial and public spheres. Beginning with a recent work, Czerowin’s Pnima … ins innere, this paper traces the difficult voice back to Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, both locating this work as an inception of this kind of aesthetic response and showing that Holocaust trauma and the transmission of this particular trauma have been an ongoing and, to some degree, homogeneous issue across generations.

Hearing the Holocaust: Music, Film, Aesthetics

The presentation of Holocaust memory is a deeply contested topic that regularly appears in contemporary scholarly debates. Film has become particularly important in these discussions due to factors ranging from its use of diverse aesthetic mediums to its immense popularity in American culture. However, while Holocaust film has been the subject of a substantial body of literature, music, a key element of film, has gone virtually unnoticed. Unlike previous inquiries, my thesis addresses this lacuna, focusing specifically on the role of music in Holocaust film.

Two Ways: Representations of the Holocaust in Israeli Art

International Relations and Diplomacy, 2015

The subject of the Holocaust appeared in Israeli art from the establishment of the State and onwards. The integration of the Holocaust in Israeli art through the years was influenced by Israeli society and the Israeli art institutional attitude towards the subject and by local historical events. As a result, we witness a development of two directions in Israeli art concerning the Holocaust. One of them has two facets: a massive use of images emphasizing the enormous personal as well as collective destruction of the Jewish nation as the ultimate victim that "the entire world is against us"; While the other facet is that despite the Jewish people emerge battered and humiliated from the Holocaust, they built a country to be an immovable, permanent and safe place for the Jewish nation since "there is no one else except for us to do it". The other direction regarding the Holocaust that developed in Israeli art, examining in an universal approach the Israeli response to the Holocaust through the prism of local historical events occurring since the establishment of the State. Therefore, we see imagery that examines the aggressive impression of the Israelis, as an internal as well as external criticism of what seems as aggression and violence against another nation. In Israel, as well as in other Modern states, art is used as a means for expression of different viewpoints. In this article, I am focusing on the artistic references to the above approaches to the Holocaust.

"In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children": Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture

Slavic Review, 2014

This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Shostakovich’s 1962 Babi Yar symphony, I offer an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representation of the Nazi genocide in a now-forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 piano Trio, “In Memory of Our Perished Children.” I trace the genesis of this work in Gnesin’s web of experiences before and during the war in Leningrad, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Tashkent. Using a range of Russian and Yiddish-language archival sources, I examine Gnesin’s carefully deliberate strategy of aesthetic ambiguity in depicting death, Jewish and Soviet, individual and collective. Recapturing this forgotten cultural genealogy provides a very different kind of European historical soundtrack for the Holocaust. Instead of the categories of survivor and bystander, wartime witness and postwar remembrance, we find a more ambiguous form of early Holocaust memory. Rather than a mark of Jewish difference, Soviet music of the Holocaust emerges as an aspirational form of imperial belonging. Finally, the story of how the Holocaust first entered Soviet music challenges our contemporary assumptions about the coherence and legitimacy of “Holocaust music” as a category of cultural history and present-day performance.

Meyers, O. & Zandberg, E. (2002, v.24, n.3). The Soundtrack of Memory: Ashes and Dust and Holocaust Commemoration in Israeli Popular Culture. Media Culture & Society, 389-408.

The article investigates the 1988 music album Efer Veavak (in Hebrew: Ashes and Dust) that was created by Yehuda Poliker and Ya'akov Gilad, two Israeli--born children of Holocaust survivors’ parents. The article’s findings suggest that the Holocaust story as told through Ashes and Dust emphasizes individual aspects rather than collective lessons and there is a growing sensitivity to the issue of memory preservation. Moreover, Ashes and Dust highlights the notion that the survivors' children are now the bearers of Holocaust memory, and that it is through them that the Holocaust becomes an Israeli story about the present, rather than only a Diaspora story about the past. These tendencies are amplified by the fact that Ashes and Dust is a popular culture product. The public use of the songs through radio broadcasting has in many cases caused them to be assimilated into the mainstream flow and has blurred their initial identification as markers of a singular event, the Holocaust.

Continuities and Ruptures: Artistic Responses to Jewish Migration, Internment and Exile in the Long Twentieth Century

Introduction Displacement has been an integral part of the twentieth-century Jewish experience. Whether forced due to Nazi persecution, compelled by other oppressive factors, or entered into voluntarily in the hope of a new start, migration, internment and exile have affected musical, theatrical and literary output by Jewish artists in myriad ways. For example, members of the conference committee are currently researching topics including the music of Jewish immigrants to South Africa; the works of composers, playwrights and authors before, during and after incarceration in the Terezin/Theresienstadt ghetto; Holocaust songbooks; and Jewish artistic expression in the Soviet Union. They are also investigating the question: what does it mean to perform these works today, or even create new artistic works stimulated by them?