Music as a 'Paper Bridge' between Generations before and after the Holocaust

Kadya Molodowsky, in her 'Poem to the Paper Bridge', wrote:

O, paper bridge, lead me into your land,White and constant and mild.I am tired of the desert where manna was strewnMade of milk and honey and bread.

A simple people, with their earthen jugs,With children, with cattle, with tears,Constructed a paper bridge of such strengthIt withstands the destruction of years.

Built and adorned with numerous wings,A staircase hooked up to the sky.I sighted the bridge through a wing of the roof,Sukkah twigs, and apples hung high.

I heard its flutter, its rustle and rushIn a velvet-soft Torah scroll mantle,And I recognized its voice in the sound of a wordBy an old schoolteacher from the shtetl.¹

Despite the ancient Jewish legend in which the righteous Jews will safely cross a paper bridge to the Valley of Josaphat where the Last Judgement will take place, while an iron bridge will collapse beneath the non-Jews, Kadya Molodowsky writes of the bridge that ordinary people build 'with honest hands' and 'in pureness of heart'. This will announce the future, 'a new dawn'. This poem was written in 1942 when the Jewish past in Poland lay in ruins, and when, up to a point, the extent of the disaster could be gauged. Jews use the word khurbn for the Holocaust, the same term used to describe the destruction of the First and Second Temples. This allows living Jews to comprehend the vastness of what happened and to feel the connection with their entire past. Vilna, the 'Jerusalem of Lithuania', lay in ruins, although a handful of people survived who wished to preserve, in works of science, memoirs, belles lettres, poetry, and music, the mainly Yiddish heritage of the Jews of Vilna.

According to the 1931 census, 85 per cent of the Jews in Vilna gave Yiddish as their first language.² It is therefore understandable that the majority of Jewish institutions in Vilna in the 1920s and 1930s were both established by Yiddish speakers and aimed at them. Above all there were Yiddish-language schools, and their growth after 1918 to some extent forced the creation of institutions preparing a body of people to teach in them. Hence, on 11 November 1921, a teacher training college was opened in Vilna, with another opening a year later in Warsaw.

The first site of the Vilna Yiddish Teachers Seminary, which operated from 1921 to 1931, and from 1923 was named after Vladimir Medem, was the Jewish local community building at 7 Orzeszkowa Street. In 1926 my parents, Miriam Liberzon and Abram Feld-Szwarcman, were part of the student body, as was, a year later, one of my mother's sisters.³ To the end of their lives they never lost the spirit of that college, and it determined their friendships, careers, and attitudes. Everyone who trained the future teachers for Jewish Yiddish-language secular schools belonged to a group called Libhobers fun Yidish (Lovers of Yiddish). They succeeded in transmitting their dedication to the cause to their students, who then infused their own children with this cult of the Yiddish language. This spirit prevailed too in my own home. For my mother, music, or more specifically singing, became of prime importance, and her talent found not only a genuine outlet at the college but also suitable training. A former student, Arthur Lermer, who was a little older than my parents, wrote about this aspect of the instruction:

Music was very popular at our college. One of the teachers, [Yaakov] Gershteyn, infected us with his enthusiasm. Many of the students showed off their concertinas (miniature accordions), and we would pick up on the fly the songs that our splendid choir, famous throughout the city, was rehearsing.

For instance, every Saturday afternoon was opera time, which meant that the music teacher—a Russian émigré called Gałkowski—played arias on the piano, interpreting them with great feeling. And although we were very busy not only with our studies but also...