Overlooked and Underanalyzed Source Material on Jewish Life in the Ghettos and Camps: Yossi Wajsblat's Dos Gezang fun Lodzsher Geto/La Ballade du Ghetto du Lodz

In 1994, some two decades after one-time Lodz Ghetto street singer Yankele Herszkowicz died by his own hand on March 25, 1972, Yossi Wajsblat, published in Paris the limited edition Dos Gezang fun Lodzsher Geto, 1940-1944/La Ballade du Ghetto du Lodz. This thin volume whose publication was funded by Wajsblat - a friend of Herszkowicz's from Lodz Ghetto, and later, a close companion in the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Braunschweig - appeared in print just two years after Gila Flam's Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto, 1940-1945¹. Acting as a kind of coda to the findings of Flam's research, gleaned from ethnographic interviews with survivors of the Lodz Ghetto on their memory of songs and singing in the ghetto, Wajsblat's publication solicits a decidedly different audience. Wajsblat's introduction to the volume "Yankl Herszkowicz un zayne lider" (see English translation from the Yiddish, below) addresses not the English-speaking scholarly types who might come across Flam's pioneering work in the context of research on Jewish life under Nazi occupation, but rather Yiddish speakers and survivors themselves who may have once had the good fortune to have crossed paths with Herszkowicz in a courtyard in the Lodz Ghetto. Wajsblat's publication is a yiskor book of sorts – a loving memorial for a remarkable man and dear friend who, in the course of his years in the Lodz Ghetto, touched so many, yet died in relative obscurity and despair decades after liberation in a city nearly bereft of its once-thriving Jewish community, where Herszkowicz had tried to make a life for himself and his family after the war.

Wajsblat's volume features thirty-three songs written and sung by Yankele Herszkowicz in the Lodz Ghetto – songs that Herszkowicz himself transcribed from memory after the war after surviving Lodz Ghetto and several concentration camps, and returning to the city of Lodz. Wajsblat explains how these transcriptions came into his possession in his introduction to the volume, translated from the Yiddish below. What is remarkable about this collection is both the way in which it corroborates the memories of survivors (those whom Flam interviewed in Israel in the late 1980s, some forty years after the events and the songs that comment on them occurred) – a testament to the power and resonance of Herszkowicz's lyrics, to the memory of survivors and to the importance of Flam's research) and the fact that it contributes material that was not remembered by the informants that Flam interviewed. Of the thirty-two songs written and sung in the Lodz Ghetto² in the Wajsblat collection, sixteen appear in Flam's collection in identical or variant form, while another sixteen offer previously undocumented material. Unlike Flam's collection, Wajsblat's collection of Herszkowicz songs includes the lyrics, but not the melodies for the songs it transcribes (the notable exception to this is the song "Ikh bin geven", reproduced below in Yiddish and in English translation, and analyzed briefly – which, Wajsblat's volume notes is to be sung to the melody "Belz"). As Wajsblat's introduction suggests, Herszkowicz was not a "musician" per se³; his incarnation as the most recognizable street singer of the Lodz Ghetto was a phenomenon that coincided with ghettoization. Like the majority of street singers in the ghettos and camps, his songs were primarily "contrafact" – that is, they involved the composition and setting of new lyrics about ghetto events to existing melodies. This permitted street singers to spend their energy on coming up with compelling original lyrics, rather than having also to supply original melodies. In addition, this permitted the new songs to be infused with contrast and parody as older, more familiar songs seeped into the memories of listeners⁴.

Thanks both to the scholarly ethnographic efforts of Gila Flam, and the lifelong loyalty and dedication of his friend, Yossi Wajsblat, we are fortunate to have a large repertoire of songs from the Lodz Ghetto that can...