Ber Horovits
Hot nights
have drunk
our stammering
Naked we
rolled around on roses
Millions of songs
died then
The Song Remains
דאָס ליד איז געבליבן
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Hot nights
have drunk
our stammering
Naked we
rolled around on roses
Millions of songs
died then
Ber Horovits (1895-1942) was born in the rural village of Majdan, in the Carpathian Mountains of eastern Galicia. He received a traditional Jewish education at home, and also studied at a Ukrainian primary school, and graduated from the Polish gymnasium in Stanisławów.
He fought for the imperial Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, and later studied medicine in Vienna. He was associated with a group of Yiddish authors in Vienna including Avrom Moyshe Fuks, Melech Ravitch, and Moyshe Zilburg.
He later moved to Kraków, where he translated and adapted plays for the Krakover Yidish Teater, and ultimately back to Stanisławów.
According to Melech Ravitch, “Ber Horowitz is one of the powerful Jewish poets. He sings loudly. His poetry is noisy, even the quiet tenor of his lyrics is noisy … He uses a language that is semi-gentile, Judeo-Slavic pidgin Yiddish. He is a splendid representative and this alone has a bit of a stir for him: What am I?”
He was also a gifted artist.
He was murdered by the Nazis at the age of forty-seven. According to the oral testimony of three Jewish survivors, he died on Hoshana Rabbah, 1942, with 9,000 Jews in Stanislawów. According to another source, he was murdered by local peasants in his birthplace of Majdan.
(more…)Close your doors, lock all up
mad dogs are howling in this dark city
Mad dogs are howling in this dark city
waking little children – making them cry
Those who long have been saddened
will even sadder be
Misha Troyanov, also known as Misza Trojanow (1906-1942) was a pen name used by Moyshe Troyanovski. He was born in Dąbrowa Górnicza near Będzin, and later lived in Łódź and Warsaw. He and had a religious education, and later worked as a tutor, business agent, and storehouse employee. His literary work first appeared in a number of Yiddish newspapers and journals based in Łódź and Warsaw. He was killed by the Nazis in Otwock on 19 August 1942.
(more…)It’s a mighty symphony
just one word – not more:
Over human soul
Be an Engineer.
When from my little village I was parted
My grandfather took me to the lake
the spring sun warmed the blue sky
He handed me a note when we said goodbye
I owned a bunch of negative critiques
in songs of battle courage and spite
a nobody with hardly a worthy thought
but today a wealth of treasured “capital”
I recall in prison when I took the book into my hands
and silently embraced the wealth of ideas
a holy shiver trembled in me
when opening Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”
Sholem Zhirman (1909-1941) was born in Vilnius, and worked as a carpenter in his father’s workshop. He published his first poems in Warsaw’s Literarishe Tribune, and later published in a number of Yiddish newspapers and journals. He was jailed on several occasions for his activities in the revolutionary movement, and was later confined in the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp between 1933 and 1939, where he contracted tuberculosis and became deaf. He was murdered by the Gestapo with his wife in Paneriai (now in Lithuania) in late 1941.
Source: Congress for Jewish Culture