Tweet

Share
 

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, German troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants.

Jewish fighters revolted, launching hand grenades from alleyways and windows. They were able to hold out for nearly a month before the Germans crushed their resistance, murdering thousands and sending others to labor and death camps.

Sixty-six years later, a Berkeley arts studio will mark the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising with song and dance.

Even though the uprising ended tragically, said musician Yale Strom, it is ultimately a tale of survival and triumph.

“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a paradigm for the small guy fighting Goliath and eventually overcoming,” said Strom, a violinist with the San Diego–based klezmer band Hot Pastrami and an artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University.

“And I hope it’s a paradigm for many people struggling today against great adversity,” he added. “This is not just a concert about Jews, for Jews. It’s about all of humanity looking at the bigger picture.”

Strom will perform with his wife, vocalist Elizabeth Schwartz, April 19 at Berkeley’s Moving Arts Western Sky Studio.

“It’s important to remember that even in the midst of this living nightmare, Jews never lost the capacity to laugh and to love, and there was great power and beauty in this validation of life,” Schwartz said. “Marking the uprising is a remembrance of life, not only of death.”

The klezmer duo will be joined by Berkeley-based choreographer Ruth Botchan, whose dance troupe will perform an excerpt from “Mothersongs,” a piece inspired by her own family’s heritage in Poland, as Holocaust victims and survivors and as immigrants in America.

“Mothersongs” will be accompanied by songs “actually composed by people during the Holocaust,” Botchan said. Yiddish singer Betty Albert-Schreck will perform live while five dancers interpret them through modern dance.

The last time Botchan performed “Mothersongs” was in 2008 in Poland at an international dance festival.

“ ‘Mothersongs’ became a whole new experience for me and my dancers after performing it at a synagogue [in Poland],” Botchan said. “Not all of the dancers are Jewish, so it was a voyageurs’ discovery.”

Botchan’s Polish roots run deep — her grandparents were from a small village outside of Bialystok in northeastern Poland. Other sections of “Mothersongs” are accompanied by Yiddish folksongs, lullabies and show tunes Botchan’s mother used to sing to her daughter years ago.

“The songs are a way for me to connect with my grandparents’ world,” she said. “I felt like their world was receding further and further in the distance … Music and dancing has become a way to preserve their culture for others and future generations.”

Botchan choreographed “Mothersongs” in the ’90s; for nearly a decade, it went unperformed. Then in 2006, she dusted it off and staged it with a Persian dance company, an evening they called “Bridges.”

Being in Poland was transformative for Botchan, and she is thrilled to perform the piece again after seeing intimately the historic and geographic source of her inspiration.

For instance, one segment, known as “Birds are Dreaming,” is based on a poem written by a young girl, Leah Rudnitsky. She wrote that “birds are dreaming on branches,” which Botchan always thought was simply a nonsense childhood lullaby.

But in Poland, she heard birds singing from trees above mass graves in the forest; later, she learned that Polish Jewish gravestones are often engraved with birds because they symbolize the soul.

“And that was an incredible epiphany for us, that the poet was picturing all of the souls of all the people on the branches, watching over this child,” Botchan said. “It was a profound realization.”

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Botchan gained early exposure to the arts thanks to her actor father and musician mother.

While a young dancer in New York, she performed with Rod Rodgers, Beverly Brown and Susan Cherniak before teaching at the Erick Hawkins School. She moved to the East Bay in 1980, launching her own company shortly thereafter. Today, her ensemble is the resident modern dance company at Berkeley Moving Arts.

Both Botchan and Strom hope their one-day-only partnership inspires their audience.

“I hope it inspires them, whether it takes them back to home or inspires them to learn Yiddish or read books,” Strom said. “After a concert I always hope we inspire people to go forth and seek their own path into Yiddish culture.”

“Dances and Songs Of Remembrance, Resistance and Hope” will be performed 5 p.m. April 19 at Western Sky Studio, 2525 Eighth St., Berkeley. $15-25 (sliding scale). Information: (510) 848-4878 or http://www.berkeleymovingarts.com.

most popular rss feeds