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About Jewish Cabaret In Exile
Product Description 25 Jewish and Yiddish cabaret songs by Edmund Nick, Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Holländer, Moses Milner, Abraham Ellstein, Viktor Ullmann, Georg Kreisler & Misha Spoliansky "A fascinating ... valuable addition to the lore of cabaret ... Settle in with this album for a lively--and occasionally provocative--evening." -- Fanfare [CED 65] This follow-up to the New Budapest Orpheum Society's highly successful debut album Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano covers a wide variety of Jewish songs. The disc is being released in time for Passover. Review The booklet accompanying this release is so thick that it requires a double jewel case to accommodate it and the single CD it documents. So extensive are the essay, annotations, and bibliography to this production--assumed to have been authored by the New Budapest Orpheum's director, Philip V. Bohlman, though nowhere is he credited as the author--that I will not even try to summarize their contents, which cover the history, politics, and poetics of Yiddish song in stage, screen, vaudeville, and cabaret. The program of Jewish cabaret songs contained herein complements some of the volumes that appeared in the massive Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, though the composers represented on the current CD were not necessarily transplants to American soil. Of those who enriched the Jewish cabaret literature, some did make it to U.S. shores, notably Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg. But others, such as Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, perished in the Holocaust. The disc is divided into seven sections: (1) "The Great Ennui on the Eve of Exile," featuring songs by Edmund Nick and Erich Kästner; (2) "The Exiled Language--Yiddish Songs for Stage and Screen," featuring unattributed songs, but at least one by Abraham Ellstein; (3) "Transformation of Tradition," presenting songs by the aforementioned Eisler; (4) "The Poetics of Exile," offering songs by Kurt Tucholsky, as well as additional songs by Eisler; (5) "Traumas of Inner Exile," featuring songs by Ullmann; (6) "Nostalgia and Exile," presenting additional unattributed songs; and (7) "Exile in Reprise," offering songs by Friedrich Holländer. The songs were chosen to reflect the various phases of exile--physical, emotional, and psychological--that European Jewry experienced in the period leading up to and during WW II and its immediate aftermath, roughly 1935 to 1945, a period that accounts for the second great exodus of Jews from Europe. Primarily then, these are songs from the smoke-filled nightclubs and entertainment halls of Berlin and other European cities before the rise of Hitler, from the barracks of the concentration camps during the Holocaust, and from the months and years following the liberation. The before, during, and after the Shoah aspects of the recorded material frame and reflect the corresponding attitudes, mindsets, and living conditions of the times--from a song like Elegy in the Forest of Things , expressing a kind of resigned world weariness; to Ellstein's Deep as Night that tries to deaden the senses to the pain of the outside world with the surrogate internal pain of a longed for love; to the bitter sarcasm of Eisler's Sweetbread and Whips and Georg Kreisler's Poisoning Pigeons , a song about spreading arsenic on graham crackers and feeding them to the birds in the park; and finally to I'm an Irrepressible Optimist , a song from the aftermath which cannot erase memories and finds optimism only in the release of death. The New Budapest Orpheum Society is an ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago. A mixed group of vocalists (Julia Bentley, mezzo-soprano and Stewart Figa, baritone) and instrumentalists (Iordanka Kisslova, violin; Stewart Miller, string bass; Hank Tausend, percussion; and Ilya Levinson, piano), the NBOS performs regularly at Chicago's universities, synagogues, and cultural institutions, and has also appeared at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum and the
