Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy
By (Author) Gertrude Schneider
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Praeger Publishers Inc
30th January 2000
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Art music, orchestral and formal music
Social groups: religious groups and communities
The Holocaust
Second World War
European history
782.42092
Physical Properties
Hardback
224
Description
Mordechai Gebertig was one of the most influential and popular writers of Yiddish songs and poems. Born in 1877, he became a prolific poet and song writer, using everything he saw, heard and knew about people. His legacy, therefore, is not only one of melodies and lyrics, but also a treatise on Jewish life in Poland under the benign neglect of the Austrians, the ever growing hostility of the Poles, and the terror of the Germans, who destroyed the people, their culture, and to a great measure, their memory. Schneider's brings his work to an English-speaking audience, offering a collection of all of his major works, complete with the scores, transliterated Yiddish text, and English translation. Her book offers an insight into the world of Eastern European Jews, their culture and their music. Gebertig's most famous song "Es Brent" - It's Burning - was written in response to a 1938 pogrom. It became a stirring hymn for the survivors of the Holocaust, who felt that the words fit their own situation very well. Gebertig himself was shot in the Cracow Ghetto in June 1942. Neither he nor any of his close family survived the war. However, as this volume shows, his songs and poems remain an enduring voice for a Jewish community nearly lost to the Nazis. They consitute a precious legacy for anyone interested in the world of Eastern Europe Jews, their culture and their music.
Author Bio
GERTRUDE SCHNEIDER is the President of the Ph.D. Alumni Association at the City University of New York's Graduate School. Professor Schneider has lectured and written extensively on the Holocaust. Among her earlier books are Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945 (Praeger, 1995) and The Unfinished Road: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back (Praeger, 1991), which is the last in a trilogy. The others are Journey into Terror: Story of the Riga Ghetto (1979) and Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember (1987).
