Press bulletin Mayn fayfele
“In 1983, the Austrian State Broadcasting Service produced a two-hour program on Gebirtig, as part of a series on great Jewish personalities, such as Freud, Einstein, Marx, Mahler, Buber, etc. Had anyone suggested to Gebirtig during his lifetime that a time would come that he, the humblest of the humble, would be considered one of the greatest in his field of folk-music, he would have considered it a joke in poor taste.”
In
this way Sinai Leichter typifies Mordekhay Gebirtig in his “Anthology of Yiddish
folksong”, Volume 6, and it is a striking characterization.
November 16, 2003 is the release date of ‘Mayn fayfele’ (My little flute), the third CD with Yiddish songs made by Mariejan van Oort (voice) and Jacques Verheijen (piano, accordeon, guitar).
This
CD is completely devoted to the Polish-Jewish folk poet and composer Mordekhay
Gebirtig (1877-1942). Gebirtig was a particular man: he earned his living
in Cracow repairing old furniture. Beside he wrote poems and songs, with which
he created an unique chronicle of 40 years Yiddish daily life in Cracow.
An
unique CD too. For there is a known Gebirtig, whose songs were already sung
during his lifetime all over the world. And there is an unknown Gebirtig:
just ten years ago a hitherto unknown collection of 68 poems was found at
the Moreshet Archives in Givat Haviva, Israel, and published in 1997 under
the title “Mayn fayfele”, but only in Yiddish-Hebrew writing. It is this unknown
Gebirtig, who has been made accessible for a broader audience now by Mariejan
and Jacques: they transcribed seven poems from this collection in Latin writing,
and Jacques wrote music for them.
The
60-pages Cdbooklet has been made with great carefulness: it contains the songtexts
in Yiddish and in English translation, connected by
biographical notes about Gebirtig’s life and work, and embellished
with historical photos of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Cracow, and of
Gebirtig, and drawings by Alexander Bogen.
From his socialist-pacifist
worldview, and from a deeply felt personal humanism he reacts upon the small
and big events which enter his life. He is a very modest man but with
a strong feeling for human dignity and social justice. He writes with compassion,
sensitiveness, humor and respect the stories of the people around him,
ordinary people, like himself. He writes and sings about their feelings
of hope and happiness, about their sorrows, their weaknesses and their strength.
He writes and sings about youth, poverty, old age and decay and about harsh
labor conditions. He writes and sings a lot about love, the love between a
mother and a child, the love of young people and the love in Jewish family
life. Children have a special place, his own daughters, growing up and getting
married, but also the children from just around the corner in Kazimierz.
When, in the thirties
of the previous century, the social and political conditions of life are deteriorating
for the Jews in Europe and in Poland, this is reflected in Gebirtig’s songs,
his lyrics and his melodies. They show the pain, the humiliation, the fear,
the helplessness, the anger, the resistance, the contradiction of the inevitability
of death and the hope and conviction that some day a better world will
originate from all this.
The last 16 songs/poems
Gebirtig wrote during World War II and the Holocaust also bear witness
too, in an intrusive and convincing way, of his own personal
struggle for preserving his human standard, even under such inhuman conditions.
The
song is for Gebirtig the ideal form to picture the microcosm of daily
life in a way that is at the same time personal, political and historical.
This is so on both the textual and the musical level. And it is that combination
that makes his work time-bound and timeless at the same time and extraordinarily
moving. It is a testimony of being human. However simple his poems sometimes
may seem, they always possess more than one layer and an unpretentious wisdom
learned from life itself. For the humanist Gebirtig there was only the validity of the human standard
as the sole standard possible and the knowledge that people can be great in
the little things they do. This knowledge is fed by the deeper insight that that which is great manifests itself in
what is small, and vice versa.
Today
Gebirtig’s songs are as actual as they were when they were written.
Mayn fayfele, songs
of Gebirtig
A
musical portrait by Mariejan van Oort and Jacques Verheijen.
Label:
I-C-U-B4-T, article nr CUP 8027