A collection of Yiddish songs of defiance and despair, newly edited and translated for living performance.
Music of longing.
Sometime in the last months of World War II, a group of Eastern European writers assembled a book of songs. Drawing on folk and learned traditions, this collection surfaced only a few years ago. This book by Toltz, an ethnomusicologist, and Boucher, a migration scholar, offers a translation and commentary on these songs. More than that, it provides a nuanced history of the artistic yearnings of Holocaust victims. These are poems of despair, of loss framed with a “gallows humor.” They are also songs of faith and hope: cries to continue in the face of fear. And there are also songs of politics—marches and hymns to be sung while fighting. The Yiddish is fluently translated here, conveying that blend of humor and resolve that never lets the singers fall into self-pity. “No more grieving, no memorial,” asserts one. “I shake my fist at the sky” says another. One stirring march offers this defiance: “Stop the wailing, halt the crying, miracles may soon be flying.” It ends: “Although countless lives are lost, a song of suffering soon emerges, for next generations, light for all the nations.” These songs straddle the inherited folk melodies of Jewish life and the newly fashioned rhymes of men and women wrenching their vernacular into heartfelt lyric. Readers who know little of the Holocaust will be jolted into empathy. Yiddishists will find these songs a valuable addition to the growing body of personal writing in a language newly studied in the 21st century. One contributor to the book thought of the work as a “tombstone” to the dead. Instead, we should consider it a libretto to keep hope alive.
A collection of Yiddish songs of defiance and despair, newly edited and translated for living performance.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781526165671
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A graceful debut.
A series of essays cohere into an evocative memoir.
In her first book, Zoffness, winner of a Sunday Times Short Story Award, gathers thoughtful pieces on themes that include motherhood, anxiety, and Jewish identity. Raised by extraordinarily fearful parents and worried about bequeathing her own anxiety to her son, the author studied medical journals and textbooks “to learn parent-child transfer.” She tries to assuage her 6-year-old’s fears, she tells her therapist, by putting up “a shield of faux calm.” The therapist referred her to a nearby doctor: “Maybe,” she suggested, “if you talk to her you can respond to him with real calm instead of faux calm.” Her 4-year-old son, too, incites her worries because he is obsessed with becoming a police officer. Zoffness is dismayed by “the heraldry of dominance and toughness that my boys can’t help but inhale,” and she finds it difficult to talk about injustice and brutality with such young children. She comes to realize, though, that the child is not drawn to violence; as the younger sibling, he just wants to exert some power. In “Ultra Sound,” Zoffness reflects on her tense relationship with her own mother, a deeply private woman who refuses to share details about her past as a performer. “Holy Body” merges the theme of motherhood with Jewish identity: Zoffness chronicles her mikveh, or ritual bath, intended, in part, “to help Jews of all stripes honor life transitions or commemorate occasions.” Zoffness acknowledges her momentous transition from childbearing in contrast to a friend, a mother of three, who has become a gestational surrogate, an act of altruism the author finds both selfless and mystifying. In other sharp pieces, the author recounts teenage angst and a friend’s betrayal; a visit to an astrologer recommended by a therapist; and confronting evidence of the Holocaust in the idyllic city of Freiburg, where Zoffness was teaching.
A graceful debut.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952119-14-9
Page Count: 165
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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