Mordechaj Gebirtig

Mordechaj Gebirtig

Mordechaj Gebirtig (actually Mordche Bertig; born May 4, 1877 in Kraków , Austria-Hungary ; died June 4, 1942 in the Kraków ghetto ) was a Jewish-Polish poet and composer .

Life

Memorial plaque on Gebirtig's house in Krakow

Gebirtig's parents were merchants in Cracow. He received a traditional Jewish education in his hometown. He became interested in literature from an early age. He wrote his first texts in 1906 in the organ of the General Jewish Workers' Union , later he wrote reviews for a theater newspaper.

Gebirtig was a carpenter by profession . He repaired old furniture and lived with his wife Blumke and their three daughters in Krakow in the Kazimierz district , on ul. Berka Joselewicza No. 5. During the day he planed furniture and at night the Yiddish song, contemporaries say.

With regard to his literary education, Gebirtig was self-taught . He composed his songs on a small flute. His friends Julius Hofman and Baruch Sperber wrote down his ideas. In 1920 he published the first collection of songs, Folkstimlech . The “last Yiddish bard” left over 90 songs for posterity. “The spectrum ranges from a simple nursery rhyme to Bacchante drinking songs to demanding workers' songs. B. the 'unemployed march'. He wrote them in his mother tongue, Yiddish . It is not the romanticizing shtetl world that Gebirtig brings to life in his songs, but rather the life of the ordinary people in the Jewish district of Krakow, in Kazimierz from the time before the war to the Holocaust . ”He continued to write new texts until 1942 .

As the situation of the Jewish population in Poland deteriorated in the 1930s, the content of Gebirtig's songs changed. “They became sharper, more ironic and more political, but without losing hope and humor.” In 1938 he wrote the song “Undzer shtetl brent” about a trial against Jews who opposed a pogrom calls. And in retrospect, it sounds like the foresight of the imminent end of his world.

When Gebirtig had to leave Kazimierz in October 1940, he immortalized his parting pain in the poem Blayb gezunt mir, kroke : “Stay healthy to me [= Farewell], Krakow, this is the last time I'll see you and everything that is dear to me my mother's grave the heart has wept, it's so hard to walk. "

On June 4, 1942, Mordechaj Gebirtig was shot dead by a German occupation soldier on the street in the Krakow ghetto during a resettlement operation together with his artist colleague, the painter Abraham Neumann .

Mordechaj Gebirtig's music

First page of Gebirtig's handwriting of the poem Undzer shtetl brent (around 1938)

After the Shoah, around 170 of his works were preserved, including lullabies and lullabies, children's and love songs, as well as workers', anti-war and protest songs. About 90 of them were published during his lifetime. According to the Wuppertaler Edition Künstlertreff, Gebirtig's songs “survived and lost none of their topicality, they are hope and warning at the same time. They lead us in a haunting, even loving, way into the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, which was completely destroyed by the Holocaust. The love for people makes the complete works of this brilliant and extraordinary poet indispensable for civilization and the culture of remembrance. "

For example, the piece S'brennt (ס'ברענט) can be found in the repertoire of the experimental rock and klezmer music group Oi Va Voi and the songwriter Bettina Wegner , who also interpreted his song Hungerik dain Ketzele . An instrumental version of ufm oifn Sitz a maidl forms the last part of the piece Knöterich by SPILWUT. A version of S'brennt, recorded by the Israeli metal band Salem , entitled Ha'ayara Bo'eret (העיירה בוערת) sparked a national controversy that even reached the Knesset , where it was debated whether it was for a metal band is appropriate to play such songs. The Berlin klezmer band Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird recorded several songs based on Gebirtig's compositions for their album Lost Causes in 2010 . Likewise, the Viennese voices against , which started the 2003 unemployment march . In addition, Mordechaj Gebirtig is the author of the song Kinderjahre (Yiddish קינדער יארן), which describes the childhood of Jewish children in Krakow. Ensemble DRAj titled its CD released in 2006 after this song kinderjorn and recorded two other pieces by Gebirtig ( Wer der schter wet lachn and Awremele un Josele ).

In 2014 a museum was set up in the former home of Mordechai Gebirtig on a private initiative. The publicist Uwe von Seltmann was planning a film about Gebirtig, which should be released in 2017 on the 75th anniversary of his death. However, funding for the project failed and the film could not be completed.

Works

literature

• May fall: unacceptable lids. Lerner, Tel Aviv 1997
• My lids. Farl. Dawke, Paris 1949
• S'brent. Krakow 1946

Selection in an anthology

• Hubert Witt , compilation and transmission: Der Fiedler vom Ghetto. Yiddish poetry. Reclam, Leipzig 1966, most recently 2001 (only in German) ISBN 3379014834
  • some of it also in: My Jewish eyes. Yiddish poetry from Poland. A graphic cycle. Afterword Hubert Witt. Vector Hermann Naumann (12 Punzenstiche and cover vignette in the same technology). Reclam, Leipzig 1969

music

• I raised a hey. Edition Künstlertreff, Wuppertal - ISBN 3-9803098-1-9 (record and booklet)
• Majn jowl. Edition Künstlertreff, Wuppertal - ISBN 3-9803098-3-5
• The singer fun nojt. Edition Künstlertreff, Wuppertal - ISBN 3-9803098-2-7
• Farewell Cracow - Blayb fenced me, Kroke. Interpreted by Bente Kahan. Studio Hard, Warsaw (CD)
• Yiddish songs. Wuppertal 1992. - ISBN 3-9803098-0-0

literature

• Christina Pareigis: "trogt zikh a gezang ...": Yiddish love poetry from the years 1939–1945. Dölling & Galitz, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-935549-59-8 .
• Gertrude Schneider (Ed.): Mordechaj Gebirtig: his poetic and musical legacy. Praeger, Westport / Connecticut 2000, ISBN 0-275-96657-7 .
• Manfred Lemm: Mordechaj Gebirtig Yiddish Songs Edition, Künstlertreff, Wuppertal 1992, ISBN 3-9803098-0-0 .
• Bret Werb: S'Brent. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 323–327.
• Christina Pareigis: Yankele. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 467-470.
• Uwe von Seltmann: It's burning. Mordechai Gebirtig, father of the Yiddish song . homunculus Verlag, Erlangen 2018, ISBN 978-3-946120-65-0 .

See also

• List of composers persecuted by the Nazi regime or its allies

Web links

Commons : Mordechaj Gebirtig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Mordechaj Gebirtig in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on exile archive
• Biographical article on www.sztetl.org
• Musical portrait of Mayn Fayfele (My little flute), Van Oort & Verheijen (in English)
• Mordechai Gebirtig , category tog bay tog. yidish calendar of the Jewish Daily Forward from May 4, 2015 (in Yiddish; from approx. 4:20 minute).
• Free sheet music and lyrics in Yiddish
• Time signal : 04/06/1942 - anniversary of Mordechai Gebirtig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mordechai Gebirtig. Retrieved August 8, 2020 . 
2. ^ Edition artist meeting
3. ↑ The chronicler of Kazimierz , Jüdische Allgemeine on September 25, 2016, accessed on September 25, 2016. The translation of blayb gezunt mir, which is presented in the Jüdische Allgemeine , is incorrect; the Yiddish phrase is a farewell greeting and is to be rendered as “farewell”.
4. ↑ BIOGRAPHY .
5. ↑ Uwe von Seltmann, Gabriela von Seltmann: Email to Gebirtig. Creative Documentary in Yiddish, 60 min, film in production, poland 2015. Stowarzyszenie Film Kraków , 2015, accessed on September 28, 2016 (English).