Apr 22, 2025
INTRODUCTION
In March 2023, In geveb and Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies announced a call for proposals with the goal of unlocking and activating the Yiddish-language materials in the archive’s nearly 12,000 hours of audiovisual survivor testimony. Together we sought to fund meaningful scholarship and creative productions based on these unique Yiddish oral histories. This blog is one in a series from our 2023 In geveb/Fortunoff fellowship cohort. Each fellow writes about the unique and innovative ways they engaged with the Yiddish-language material housed at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
How can one ethically use recorded Holocaust testimony as the basis for musical composition? What are the limits of such usage, particularly when recontextualizing the voices of witnesses? These questions form the basis of this arts-based research project and are addressed both through the video pieces I created with this material, embedded below, and in this text. A central premise of this project, and more broadly of the field of arts-based research, is that artistic practice can be an epistemological tool to engage with questions that are traditionally addressed through written, scholarly texts. 1 1 Artistic Research, Practice-led Research or Arts-Based-Research as a field has developed in the last several decades, largely as a result of the integration of arts schools into university structures. While defining this field is often contentious, it is agreed that interdisciplinary work situated between the academy, the arts world, and the media sphere is central to the discipline. See Danny Butt, “Artistic Research: Defining the Field,” in Artistic Research in the Future Academy (Bristol: Intellect, 2017) and Robin Nelson and Suzanne Little, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Video interviews from the Fortunoff Archive proved to be compelling material with which to explore such questions.
Though Yiddish material from testimonies has been used artistically in a variety of contexts, recordings of Yiddish witness voices in the form of testimonies have been incorporated into musical compositions only in a limited capacity. 2 2 Of notable exception is Brave Old World’s concert program and recording Dus gezang fin Geto Lodzh / Songs of the Lodz Ghetto, (2005) which incorporates witness testimony extensively, and strongly influenced my own conceptions about Yiddish music. Also, Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) while built on English language testimony, is an earlier composition that incorporates recorded testimony. Reich uses short phrases from witness speech as the basis of melodic material, which in turn forms the material from which the composition is built. This technique of using pre-recorded documentary audio in live setting has been adapted and used by other composers in the concert music context, but Reich’s Different Trains remains unique in its approach to fragmenting audio recordings of Holocaust testimony. In my project with the Fortunoff Archive’s Yiddish language testimonies, I wanted to experiment with using spoken, not sung, testimony as the basis for musical composition. In doing so, I explore the limits of such usage, considering the challenges of using witness voices in works of art. In this short essay, I contemplate the ways that witness testimony is, in the words of Noah Shenker, “not simply a matter of retrieving the past, but also of recording the ways by which one reenacts that past”. 3 3 Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press: 2015), 192. This question of reenactment has become particlarly pressing in the current political context.
I began working with the material from the Fortunoff Archive in late 2023, and worked on and off with the material with varying intensity until September 2024. The witness voices wove through my mind parallel to the images I was seeing daily from Israel/Palestine. Sentences such as “men iz antloyfn fun di bombes, me hot nit givist avi tsigayen/ we fled from the bombs, but we didn’t know where to go” (Luba Z, HVT 1457), or “s’iz geven an exodus, mentshn hobn genemen a valiz un… gegangen/ it was an exodus, people grabbed a suitcase and fled” (Julia P, HVT 774) seemed to apply to the images of long lines of refugees carrying their belongings in makeshift bags, navigating a path through the debris of war.
Keenly aware of the heated and emotional debates around the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies, I tried to disassociate and separate these voices from the present catastrophe, knowing that to use or reframe survivors’ voices to speak explicitly to the present political situation would imply a false equivalency. Yet, despite my own misgivings, the legacy of Holocaust memory has been excessively recalled in the political discourse following October 7th. “Nie wieder ist jetzt / never again is now,” visible in advertising campaigns throughout Germany 4 4 “Allianz | Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt.” Allianz, October 23, 2023. https://www.allianz.com/de/med...; and Austria 5 5 APA. “Plakatkampagne ‘Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt!’ Gegen Antisemitismus.” Salzburger Nachrichten, December 4, 2023. https://www.sn.at/kultur/allge...; has been a ubiquitous constant, a mantra intoned by wide swaths of the political spectrum. It has become central to the discourse of the present moment, intentionally blurring the present with the past, intentionally framing “us Jews” as the blameless victim. Over and over again, in the synagogue, at lectures, at concerts, the horrors of October 7th were retold in excruciating detail, with no mention of the existence of Palestinians or of Palestinian suffering, and often ending in the slogan #neveragainisnow. The Shoah was constantly invoked, as if awakening that trauma could help us understand the present traumas, as if one trauma could justify another.
I found myself asking, given the massive politicization of Holocaust memory in the present context, what does engaging with Holocaust testimony today mean or imply? Or as Marianne Hirsch, reflecting on the field of memory studies, asks, “might the structures of remembrance our work has featured also have fueled the kind of existential fear of the Holocaust’s return that we are currently witnessing?”. 6 6 Hirsch, Marianne. “Rethinking Holocaust Memory After October 7.” Public Books, July 15, 2024. https://www.publicbooks.org/re...; Hirsch’s reflections, from the position of a major contributor to Holocaust and memory studies, are cogent and brave. How can we engage in retelling without retraumatizing? Especially when trauma and memory are so easily weaponized and manipulated? 7 7 Klein, Naomi. “How Israel Has Made Trauma a Weapon of War.” The Guardian. October 5, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us...;
Perhaps this is not the right time to engage with Holocaust testimony. Given the sensitivity of the material, the internal fissures in the field of genocide studies, 8 8 Cohen, Mari. “Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?” Jewish Currents no. Fall/Winter 2024, 2024. https://jewishcurrents.org/can...; and the general fragmentation of the left, particularly in Jewish communities, is engaging — and particularly artistically modifying — Holocaust testimony simply asking for conflict? Perhaps, we, or I would be better off following Yehuda Elkana’s long ignored advice: “we must learn to forget…and uproot the domination of that historical ‘remember/zachor’ over our lives”. 9 9 Elkana, Yehuda, “The Need to Forget.” Haaretz, March 2, 1988, via Myers, David N. The Stakes of History : On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2018, 103. How can we remember without letting narratives of the Shoah dominate and distort our perceptions?
These questions led me to engage in the testimonies at the Fortunoff Archive in specific ways. I was looking for critical perspectives in the archives, for sentences that spoke to the present, twenty-first century, moment and spoke to my understanding of the moment, for testimony that recalled specificities of the survivor’s experiences, without retelling trauma. I didn’t search for this material because I hoped, for example, that an anti-nationalist sentiment from a survivor would change anyone’s opinion on the present political moment. Rather, I did so because these were the voices that I felt were least susceptible to the type of weaponization I was witnessing. An additional benefit was that these voices helped me feel less alienated from Jewish history, and from the Jewish community at this moment.
In watching a large body of interviews, certain voices caught my ear or sparked my imagination. Often it was the timbre of a voice or the pacing of speech that made me want to listen more, to engage more deeply with the material. Other times it was what caught my eye that drew me to an interview. For example, in the interview with Julia P., one of the interviewers did not speak Yiddish, resulting in long gaps in dialogue where one interviewer translates in whispers to the second interviewer. This results in long shots of Julia P. waiting for the interview to proceed.
These are beautiful images, where Julia P. waits patiently and thoughtfully, fixing her blouse, looking at her hands, at the camera, and during which the listener has time to absorb what they have just heard.
It was with this interview that I began to consider the place of Yiddish in these testimonies. Julia P. emigrated from Poland to France as a teenager, and certainly spoke fluent French, yet she gave the interview in Yiddish, for reasons and circumstances not familiar to me. It seems likely she had not spoken Yiddish very often in the decades prior to the interview, which had a slow and halting pace, and resulted in a particularly complex tangle of translation: Julia P. recalling Yiddish words she had not spoken possibly for decades, the first interviewer translating it for the second, and the non-vernacular viewer, in this case me, translating the Yiddish as well. This web of translation is fragile and unstable, something that I have observed also in other Yiddish testimonies, recalling Saul Noam Zaritt’s conception of Yiddish as having an inherent “translational instability”. 10 10 Zaritt, Saul Noam. A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. New York, USA: Fordham University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781531509194 This instability is audible in the search for words, the grammatical inconsistencies and multilingualism in this and other Yiddish interviews.
In my first efforts to work with this material creatively, I used fragments and short samples of speech in extensive repetition, attempting to create some kind of narrative by weaving the different voices together. I found this extremely difficult work and the resulting pieces did not feel cohesive, so I chose to create shorter pieces focusing on one testimony. Concurrently I began to think of my work with the testimonies as less akin to musical composition, and rather closer to an act of curation and translation. I chose short, specific moments of testimonies, and used those as the basis for short musical pieces. All musical elements would come from the testimonies themselves and I would use repetition or processing of the sounds to create the musical material. This still gave me wide berth to explore different techniques and approaches and I tried to vary my approach in each video. This is my first foray into working with video, a form that I am interested in continuing to explore and perhaps exhibit in an installation setting.
To conclude, I would like to reflect on how this project and this past year have prompted me to reconsider my position as a Yiddish singer. I titled this project “Centering the Voice of the Witness” which perhaps serves as a corrective to past performances. Since becoming involved with Yiddish music, now over nineteen years ago, I have performed, recorded, taught, and composed songs that could be called “songs of the Holocaust” (a curiously flexible category). In the past years my own discomfort with performing such songs has increased tremendously: what distinguishes performing songs of survival and performing survival? In the present project, by removing my own voice and my own body, I wanted to remove the possibility of me standing in, or being misunderstood as standing in for survivors. My “third generation” status is neither a pedigree nor an obligation. My engagement, or my postmemory, to paraphrase Hirsch, should not be confused with a wish for “the status of victimhood”.
Benjy Fox-Rosen’s Video can be found below:
Julia P, Iz nisht (HVT 774)
Nationalism is not the same as patriotism.
One must not forget it.
I had to leave Poland.
Not because I was a Jew, but because I was human being.
One should not forget it.
Julia P, the Camera (HVT 774)
Julia reflects on her camera case, which was handmade by a friend.
Irene S, Thunder, (HVT 98)
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