James O'Brien
Madison is not known as a hotbed of Yiddish language and culture, but its flagship research university is hosting a major festival that celebrates the school’s role in preserving the history of Yiddishkayt in the United States.
From May 1 through May 5, UW-Madison will present “Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music, Literature and Theater,” the first of four festivals around the world celebrating recently unearthed works by Jewish artists. (UW hosted a one-day “pilot” festival last fall.)
“Out of the Shadows” and its sister festivals are a component of Performing the Jewish Archive, a multidisciplinary research project undertaken by scholars on four continents that showcases works once thought to be lost or that have been collecting dust in obscure corners of archives. The project, led by the University of Leeds, is funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
As it turns out, Madison is an appropriate setting for such a major event. The UW was the first university in the country to offer Yiddish language instruction, starting when professor Louis Wolfenson taught his first Yiddish class in 1916. One hundred years later, UW is a leading center of Yiddish cultural literacy, thanks to the 2009 launch of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture and the 9,000 historic Yiddish and Jewish sound recordings donated to the university by educator and Jewish music fiend Sherry Mayrent.
One of Madison’s contributions to “Out of the Shadows” will happen on May 2 when Henry Sapoznik, director of the Mayrent Institute, will lead a presentation on the institute’s recently acquired cache of wax cylinders made by the Chicago-based Thomas Lambert Company around 1901, thought to be the oldest, rarest Yiddish sound recordings in existence. These Yiddish recordings were part of a bigger stash of Lambert cylinders — all in remarkable condition for their age — obtained by music historian/sound engineer/collector (and UW alum) David Giovannoni.
Ron Wiecki
The UW’s Mayrent Institute houses the Lambert cylinders, the world’s rarest Yiddish recordings.
Although the Lambert cylinders were a huge score for UW and Sapoznik, the festival is mainly about performances. Teryl Dobbs, associate professor and chair of music education at the UW School of Music, is the main organizer of “Out of the Shadows” and the lone U.S.-based scholar on Performing the Jewish Archive’s diverse core research team, which includes musicologists, performers, historians, educators and even a psychologist. Dobbs notes that a number of the compositions being performed are either world or U.S. premieres.
One of the composers featured on the program is Gideon Klein, who was an up-and-coming Prague musician until the Nazis herded him into forced labor in the nearby Terezin concentration camp, also known as Theresienstadt.
“As soon as he got there, he started organizing musicians into this cultural community that started to blossom clandestinely,” Dobbs says. The Pro Arte Quartet and Madison Youth Choirs will both be performing Klein compositions at the festival.
Another highlight of the festival is the world premiere of several piano pieces written by Josima Feldschuh, a young prodigy who was imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto. Dobbs learned of Feldschuh’s compositions, written when she was 10 or 11 years old, while visiting a colleague at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. “I stopped by to say hello, because he’s also on our advisory board for the grant, and he says ‘Teri, you gotta come and look at this.’ So I’m looking on his computer screen at the most incredibly beautiful hand-written manuscript by a child.”
How are the researchers managing to dig up these long-forgotten works after all these decades? Stephen Muir of the University of Leeds, the lead researcher on the project, says the stuff has been sitting around all this time just waiting to be identified, both in formal archives and in random piles in family members’ attics.
“Even in huge places like the U.S. Holocaust Museum with a long history and professional staff, there are vast swaths of things that no one’s seen, largely untapped,” Muir says. “And the Jewish museum in Prague has its own archive that’s not completely catalogued.” Muir says that’s where musicologist David Fligg, a consultant on the project, stumbled across a trove of previously unknown Klein compositions.
“But then there’s also these informal things as well, and you start to shift the meaning of the word ‘archive,’” Muir says. He points to a chance meeting with a rabbi in Cape Town, South Africa, who put him in touch with a woman who had a plastic shopping bag full of her grandfather’s papers. Those papers turned out to be a Russian sheet music collection of major cultural importance.
Feldschuh died of tuberculosis at age 12, and Klein died in a labor camp at 25. To Dobbs, the material being showcased serves as a reminder of how much was lost in the Holocaust, in both human and cultural terms.
“Had they lived, we can only imagine what they would have accomplished,” Dobbs says. “We have to remember what can happen and what we’ve lost. The fact that we get to hear their musical voices today is a testament to human resiliency.”
For more information, see music.wisc.edu. Abner Jacobson, a student at the University of Leeds, also contributed to this article.
