Hawa Naschira! Auf! Lasst uns singen! (review)

There was little about the iconic cover of the 1935 first edition of Hawa Naschira! (“Come, Let’s Sing!”) that would fail to command the attention of Hamburg’s Jewish community. Standing on a podium constructed from the thick Hebrew and German script of the songbook’s title is a conductor, smartly dressed in the attire of a Jewish youth movement, presumably the Zionist Blau-Weiß, and with both hands raised, a baton in the right hand, an extended index finger in the left, leaving no doubt that the downbeat was imminent. On the cover of Hawa Naschira! exuberance was writ large, and the exuberance of the last major songbook published for Germany’s Jews diminishes not in the least when one opens the book. Its 244 pages contain numerous journeys across sacred and historical landscapes, across the traditions of the family and the rituals of the synagogue, across Hebrew songs with German and Yiddish variants, and German songs in new translations into Yiddish and modern Hebrew.

Everything about the songbook elevated it to the symbolism of a monument to the present and suggested that there was cause to celebrate. Was it the recognition of the “Rambamjahr”—eight hundred years since Maimonides’s birth—that the editors note in their preface? Was it the confluence of folk and modernist traditions that the songbook effected? Was it the success of the editors to win collaborators from Tel Aviv? Surely it was all these achievements, and surely it was also the paradox that such achievements were hardly to be taken for granted in 1935. Did Hawa Naschira! chronicle achievements of the past and present, or would the chorus of the future gather about it to sing from its pages?

The fact that the artistic activities of Europe’s Jews did not falter and eventually disappear during the Holocaust, but in some cases could thrive and achieve new levels expressing Jewishness, has perplexed virtually every approach to reckoning with the role of the arts in the Holocaust. Though increasing our understanding of the everyday and the extraordinary during the Holocaust, scholarly studies of the musical activities in the ghettos and concentration camps, some of them followed by the reconstruction of performances of operas and cabarets, or the completion of manuscript versions of folk-song anthologies or the sketches for entire symphonies, have done little more than scratch the surface of a pervasive disbelief. At one extreme, there are those who assert that the persistence of musical performance could only be further evidence of an assimilation so total that it blinded Central European Jews to the fate that was befalling them. At the other extreme, there are the assertions that the arts provided an ultimate act of recognizing and responding to fate, frequently referred to as “spiritual resistance.” Both extremes, nonetheless, are possible only if one neglects the arts and performance themselves, in other words, when one fails to see and listen beyond the politics of reception history. Ideological explanation wins out over aesthetic perception. There’s been no room for the exuberance of music-making itself.

The reprint of Hawa Naschira! gives full voice to the excitement with which its original editors, Joseph Jacobsen (1897–1943) and Erwin Jospe (1907–1983), had invested it. Unlike previous attempts to reprint or republish Jewish musical works from 1930s and 1940s Central Europe—not least among them an abridged and bowdlerized 1988 quasi-reprint of Hawa Nashira! meant to insinuate its way as Das Buch der jüdischen Lieder into Germany’s Yiddish folk-song revival—the modern editors, a collective of largely Hamburg scholars and publicists, plus one of the original collaborators, now living in Israel, Zev Walter Gotthold (b. 1917), have left the original volume intact. Songs that might seem to add little to...