Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age by Shandler Jeffrey

Author:Shandler, Jeffrey [Shandler, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Survivor Rywka Braun (née Akerman) displaying Lider fun payn (Poems of pain), her 1957 book of Yiddish poems, from which she reads during her VHA interview. Provided by the USC Shoah Foundation.

Sometimes survivors contextualize their performances in a language other than Yiddish, thereby marking the language, if implicitly, as postvernacular. Before singing “A din-toyre mit Got” (God on trial), a folk song attributed to Rabbi Levi-Yitskhok Berditshever, Michael Deutsch explains in English the song’s text, in which this important Hasidic leader during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries confronts God over the harsh treatment of the Jewish people. Deutsch then offers his reason for performing this song as exemplifying his own relationship with God, which is both critical and devoted.91

In other videos, performances take place within the survivor’s life narrative, linked in some way with a topic the survivor addresses at that moment. After Harold Weiss describes his bar mitzvah in prewar Vilna, Lucy Samorodin asks him if he remembers the speech he gave on the occasion. Weiss recites a few lines in Yiddish and then translates them into English.92 Over the course of her interview, Bronislavah Rabinovits recites from memory three Yiddish poems that she wrote. She launches into them in response to Mina Graur’s questions about Rabinovits’s life experiences, including her involvement in Jewish political youth movements before the war and her experience hiding from the Germans during the war. When Rabinovits offers postwar reflections at the conclusion of the interview, she recites the last of her poems, which takes the form of a letter addressed to God, demanding an explanation of the Holocaust. In this poem’s last lines, Rabinovits explains her choice of language as tautological, expressed in the use of the word yidish to refer to both “Jewish” people and “Yiddish” language. The language is bound up with her Jewishness and her relationship with God, whom she addresses with an emotionally charged urgency and also, ultimately, with reverence:

Ikh shrayb af yidish, vayl ikh bin a yidish kind,

Shrayb ikh tsu mayn yidishn Got take nor af yidish.

Vilst gevis farsteyn vos ikh vil un vos ikh meyn.

Antshuldik mir, tate, liber foter in himl,

Vos ikh farnem dir di tsayt mit mayn sipur.

[I write in Yiddish, because I am a Jew,

So I write to my Jewish God only in Yiddish.

Surely You understand what I mean.

Forgive me, dear Father in heaven,

For taking up Your time with my tale.]93

The associations that prompt survivors to sing spontaneously in the course of being interviewed are not all of a kind, just as the songs they recall suggest the varied repertoire of Yiddish song before and during the war. Describing his prewar life, Joseph Blitz remembers his first efforts to talk to girls when he was in his teens and sings a few lines of a folksong: “Ikh hob a maydl, iz zi shayn. / Ikh vil zi kishn, zogt zi ‘Nayn.’ / Nor dos tensl vil zi gayn” (I have a girl, she is pretty. / I want to kiss her, she says “No.

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