Buried Monuments: Yiddish Songs and Holocaust Memory

In 1988, Aaron Lansky published an article titled 'Collecting Yiddish Folksongs: a Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Amateur Yiddish Song Zamler'. Best known as the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center – or, more dramatically, as the 'man who rescued a million Yiddish books', as the subtitle of his recent book puts it – Lansky was extending his passion for the preservation of Yiddish literature to the realm of Yiddish songs, which also needed urgently to be 'transcribed, recorded and saved for posterity'. Lansky's intention in the article was to provide prospective zamlers (collectors) with the requisite techniques for collecting songs from anyone old enough to 'remember the songs they learned at their bobe's (grandmother's) knee, either in the "Old Country" or here in America'; the songs they collected were solicited directly for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Lansky lamented that although early twentieth-century Jewish ethnographic expeditions had yielded thousands of these songs, and despite the dedicated work of a handful of scholars in the decades since, the work of 'recording the living music of a world which is no more' remained far from complete. 'It is imperative', he insisted, 'that these surviving songs be recorded – right now – before they are forgotten and lost forever.'¹

In articulating the importance of collecting Yiddish songs in the late 1980s, Lansky was echoing a rhetoric of preservation and loss that had informed the field of folklore studies in general, and Jewish folkloristics in particular, for at least a century. In the Jewish case this rhetoric resurfaced with added urgency in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, when numerous independent initiatives were launched to 'gather and secure all materials and historical documents that would enable [us] to reconstruct the most tragic page in the history of our nation'.² In this critical post-war undertaking, as in earlier ethnographic work, songs were recognized as playing an integral role, both as historical sources that would enable future researchers to reconstruct what had happened, and as artefacts that could perhaps preserve the voices, and thereby the memory, of the victims. Although not overtly addressed by song collectors working in this period, the question of memory was always implicit in their observations. They made frequent reference to the value that 'historians', 'researchers' and 'future generations' would glean from the songs, seemingly making little distinction between notions of history and memory, or at least between formal historiography and popular (Jewish) remembering.

Fig. 1.

One of the two milk cans in which portions of the Ringelblum 'Oyneg shabes' archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto.

This article seeks to make explicit the link between music and Holocaust memory, exploring their relationship from the conceptions of the early song collectors to more recent trends, and gesturing tentatively to future possibilities. It explores how music functions as a mediator of memory, and considers the distinctive ways in which it might inform the process of memorialization. Music has from the outset functioned as a key agent or bearer of Holocaust memory, from the earliest commemorations amongst survivors until today;³ it is arguably one of the most important media through which ideas and attitudes about the past are constructed and shared. In recent decades, however, its usage has fallen largely under the limiting interpretive rubric of 'spiritual resistance', which associates it overwhelmingly with affirmative frameworks such as defiance, faith and heroism. As a result, and in the context of increasingly diversified ideas about how and why we remember the Holocaust, the article argues that music's distinctive potential as a memorial object has been underdeveloped: potential both for enriching and deepening the scope of popular memorialization and for challenging some of the unconstructive narratives that have dominated the memorialization process. The motivations of the early zamlers, and their articulation of music's value, offer a helpful starting point for rethinking how this relationship might be conceived.

The larger question of the relationship between music and memory has been relatively underexplored in historical, musicological and ethnomusicological writing. As Kay...