Music Raises Voices Of Holocaust Witnesses

The effect is immediate: the accordion and clarinet take a breath together to drop into a melody that instantly evokes sadness and strength. Then the singer enters, hitting the same tone. She’s singing in Russian, but the music is nearly powerful enough to convey the meaning. ​“Farewell, our native city / farewell, family so dear / farewell, precious mothers / farewell, to all our friends,” the singer sings. ​“Blindly, we walk down the road / not knowing what lies ahead / the ominous thought is growing / that awaiting us is death.”

The singer on the recording is Sasha Lurje, with Joshua Camp on accordion, Dmitry Ishenko on contrabass, and Dmitri Zisl Slepovitch on clarinet. The song in its current form was composed and arranged by Slepovitch. But the source for the song is a woman named Liubov K., born in Zvenigorodka, Ukraine in 1921. In a 1994 interview for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonials, she talked about the German invasion of Ukraine in June 1941 and her family’s ghettoization and forced labor. She talked about her father being shot, and watching her mother’s horrible murder. She ended up in a concentration camp in Zvenigorodka. She learned about the mass killings of Jews while there and escaped. She survived to testify against her mother’s murderer and wrote a memoir.

And, for the interview, she sang songs that were composed in the ghettos and the concentration camp. (Follow this link for examples.) Their lyrics are reporting from the past, about the brutal life in the camps, a particularly vicious prison guard, and the singers’ determination to survive.

They and several other songs and poems like them have a message to deliver — and this Saturday, March 30, Slepovitch and his ensemble will deliver that message, performing the songs at 8:30 p.m. at Sudler Recital Hall, William Harkness Hall, at 100 Wall St.

Slepovitch — a celebrated multiinstrumentalist, composer, arranger, translator, and music and Yiddish educator — first learned of the Fortunoff archive through a ​“dear friend,” Annette Ezekiel Kogan, founder of the klezmer-rock band Golem, whom Slepovitch had known for many years in addition to working with her through the New York-based National Yiddish Theater.

“She sent me this email that I might be interested because my expertise and skills fit the bill,” Slepovitch said, as he had a foot firmly planted in musicology as well as composition and performance. ​“It was suggested to just come to a conference about the archive at Yale University” and perform a couple of songs by Liubov K. Slepovitch agreed. That was last May.

Having been introduced, Slepovitch dived into the archive, going through more testimonials. ​“It is a treasure trove,” he said. ​“I started searching and discovered some gems.” Some were full songs that simply needed arranging. Others were poems that Slepovitch decided to set to music himself. Some of those he wrote in the style befitting the speaker, drawing from klezmer to German and Russian music to the classical music in his own background. ​“There was a poem, just a quatrain about hope,” he said. ​“I just composed minimalistic music — like Phillip Glass or Steve Reich — to play under her testimony.”

All told, there were easily enough to make an album — and enough for a musical performance. ​“I called, naturally, all my friends who I know could deliver,” Slepovitch said.

But the right person for the job was also Slepovitch himself. Born in 1978 in Belarus, he started playing music when he was five years old, starting on piano and also taking up clarinet. As a student at the National Music Lyceum and later the Belarusian State Academy of Music in Minsk, he immersed himself in Jewish music and folklore, ​“composing, directing, orchestrating, performing.” In the 10th grade, he met teacher Nina Stepanskaya, who mentored him through his schooling and then became a partner in research projects.

“We just really bonded as a teacher and student, and later two colleagues, for years,” Slepovitch said. ​“I had every opportunity to leave and study elsewhere,” including in the United States, ​“and I constantly did not, because every day I could do amazing research” right in Belarus.

When he moved to the United States, he brought with him a collection of Belarusian Jewish music folklore he and Stepanskaya had collected, in part through hundreds of hours of interviews. Slepovitch used this as the basis for Traveling the Yiddishland his multimedia concert program Traveling the Yiddishland. He used video interviews with songs that he and his ensemble played to create ​“ethnographic theater,” he said, ​“a crossroad of being a research scholar, performer, and culture bearer.”

So working with the interviews in the Fortunoff archive ​“felt very natural,” he said. ​“Any such project is a blessing and I’m grateful.”

He’s also grateful for his fellow musicians who will be performing with him on March 30. ​“The artist who came first to my mind was Sasha Lurje,” a singer from Riga whom ​“I had known from my past life,” Slepovitch said. Her mastery of Yiddish song and knowledge of Russian (of course), German, and other Slavic languages made her ​“my ideal candidate.” Joshua Camp is a fellow musician in the New York-based klezmer group Litvakus and Slepovitch’s ​“original bandmate when we came to the conference” last year, playing accordion and piano. Craig Judelman, also from Litvakus, joins them on violin, along with Ishenko on bass. ​“Every one of the musicians has great versatility,” Slepovitch said.

This reporter asked: To what extent does Slepovitch feel both the responsibility to be accurate to the source material and the need to stay creative?

“You just described my entire life,” Slepovitch said. ​“That’s all I’m doing!”

“Yes, I have to present it,” he added. But there is such a thing as being ​“too careful” — reverential to the point where the material becomes a little inscrutable to a modern audience. Connecting to the people he’s playing for, here and now, is just as important as staying faithful to the text.

“It took time for me to own this music as a modern artist, but now I have a sense of how to handle it,” Slepovitch said. ​“It doesn’t mean I should discard the history. But at the same time, you’re still a modern musician playing in a modern setting to a modern audience, and you’re remaining yourself. It helps to represent that music with a greater sense of authenticity — to be yourself.”

Slepovitch is planning on creating a recording of the first group of songs and is already looking to a second group, drawn from testimonials about the immediate years after the Holocaust. The concert on March 30 offers a chance to hear just how far along he and his group are — and to hear voices from a painful past brought to vivid life, in all their despair, defiance, and hope.

Songs from Testimonies at the Fortunoff Video Archive happens Saturday, March 30, at 8:30 p.m. at Sudler Recital Hall, William Harkness Hall, at 100 Wall St. Click here for more information.