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Available for the first time in English translation, this collection of songs is a powerful memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
In June 1945, before the full devastation of the Holocaust had emerged, a team of researchers embarked on a remarkable project. While documenting the experiences of Jewish refugees, they began to collect songs composed and sung in the Nazi camps and ghettos. The resulting book, Mima’amakim (Out of the depths), was published in a short run of 500 copies. Today, only a handful survive.
Out of the depths: The first collection of Holocaust songs presents the contents of this extraordinary document for a new generation of readers. Based on a copy of Mima’amakim discovered in 2013, it contains not only the songs’ melodies and lyrics, the latter in a new translation by Joseph Toltz, but also short biographies of the composers, drawn from painstaking original research. Introductory essays provide historical and musicological background, deepening our knowledge of this terrible event and the creative means by which the Jewish people responded to and endured it.
Described by the original editor, Yehuda Eismann, as a ‘memorial stone for Polish Jewry’, the songbook is a timeless document of a people’s despair, hope and strength.
‘An inspiring contribution to the vibrant history of Jewish culture. This book is both vitally important and gut wrenchingly sad.’
Anne Sebba, author of The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
‘We still see the traces of the Holocaust more than we hear it. This crucial collection of Jewish songs offers a rare window into the soundscape of those who lived through it – and, with expert scholarly contextualisation, a revealing source for studying early Holocaust remembrance.’
James Loeffler, author of Exceptional Hatred
‘A book to cherish. Not just the songs themselves, but the story of their survival and the research that the authors have done to bring them to our attention, are all remarkable.’
Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
‘Out of the depths is a remarkable collection of songs composed in the ghettos and camps. For Jews under Nazi occupation songs were the most accessible form of cultural self-expression and carried all possible feelings, from despair and fear to hope and religious faith. Anyone interested in Jewish culture during the Holocaust should read this.’
Samuel D. Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History?
‘Out of the depths is nothing less than a treasure. In vivid terms, it tells the story of an immensely meaningful text, beginning with its rediscovery in our own times and travelling back to trace the chain of events that led to its production. A gem for those interested in the Holocaust, in music and the rebirth of documents, buried and unknown.’
Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita, New York University
‘This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand East European Jewish life during the Holocaust. This superb collection of contemporary Yiddish songs is lovingly edited and contextualised by the editors. Powerful and deeply moving.’
Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of History, University of Southampton
‘Cogently argued, academically sound, often compassionately written, Toltz and Boucher's pioneering single source study amounts to a critical edition of an important if little known anthology of Shoah songs. Future scholars will find in it a model by which to examine the social, cultural and historical contexts that shaped the mission to document and publish folk creations that memorialise experiences of trauma and war.’
Bret Werb, Musicologist and Recorded Sound Curator, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
‘A fascinating anthology that highlights the human spirit in the face of unimaginable horror. No serious student of the Holocaust will want to be without this book.’
Adam Gorb, composer
'Readers who know little of the Holocaust will be jolted into empathy. Yiddishists will find these songs a valuable addition to the growing body of personal writing in a language newly studied in the 21st century. One contributor to the book thought of the work as a “tombstone” to the dead. Instead, we should consider it a libretto to keep hope alive.'
Kirkus Reviews
'What emerges is a remarkable story of post-war Jewish migration (contributors were found as far away as Johannesburg and Madrid), and a vivid portrait of the grassroots cultural life of the camps themselves.'
Claire Allfree, The Telegraph
'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.'
Mark Glanville, The Jewish Chronicle
Joseph Toltz is a Jewish music researcher and administrator at the University of Sydney. He is also a composer/arranger, Synagogue conductor and producer.
Anna Boucher is an Associate Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Gender, Migration and the Global Race for Talent.
Introduction
Preface: Yehuda Eismann, 1945
The history of a small songbook
The songbook and postwar Jewish migration
The custodian
Interlude
The collector and the designer
Yiesh (Despair)
Song 1: Frilingslid (Spring song)
Song 2: Der driter pogrom (The third pogrom)
Song 3: Lid fun yanover lager (The song of Yanover camp)
Song 4: Treblinka
Song 5: Dos eybike lid (The eternal song)
Song 6: Shotens (Shadows)
Song 7: A farurteylter (A condemned one)
Song 8: Lager marsh (Camp march)
Bitokhn (Hope and safety)
Song 9: Khvil tsaytn andere (I want other times)
Song 10: Dos lid fun a shnayderin (The song of a seamstress)
Song 11: Unter dayne vayse shtern (Under your white stars)
Song 12: Di gele late (The yellow patch)
Song 13: Ikh vil aheym (I want to go home)
Song 14: Tsur mamen (To my mother)
Song 15: Ponar
Kamf un nitsokhn (Battle and victory)
Song 16: Es brent (It burns)
Song 17: Partizaner marsh (Partisan march)
Song 18: Tsu eyns, tsvey, dray (To one, two, three)
Song 19: Yugent marsh (Youth march)
Song 20: Partizanerlid (Partisan song)
Index