Two Ruminations on May Day & Yom ha-Shoah
Check these pieces out, because it’s Yom ha-Shoah, and it’s May Day, and maybe your thoughts, hands, and memories are starting to get all a-jumbled.
Lawrence Bush staggers through every emotion I’ve ever felt about Yom ha-Shoah. 10 paragraphs of hope, despair, resolve, empathy, and what-ifs. The series of realizations, like descending stairs, when you see those horrendous pictures of what happened, and think about it happening to you, until you remember that something very like it is happening to other people right this second. It’s a quick read, but parse it slowly. http://jewishcurrents.blogspot.com/2008/05/never-say-never-again.html
Right in the middle he mentioned Zog Nit Kein Mol, the Partisans’ anthem, sending me across the internet from broken link to wikipedia stub, sifting for lyrics, background, a recording in any format. Eventually I found a clip of Paul Robeson singing it, and Ross Altman’s “Paul Robeson and the Jews” column in FolkWorks magazine. (http://www.folkworks.org/content/view/35453/3176/) There’s a little too much tooting of our own shofar in Altman’s essay for me, but there’s also a great mad tour towards its end leaping from the Partisans to the HUAC blacklist to ol’ Joe Hill, “labor’s martyred troubadour”.