Unacc. melodies with chord symbols.

The poet, partisan fighter and eminent collector of the Yiddish Shoah song, Shmerke Kaczerginski was born in 1908 in Vilna, Russian Lithuania.

Following the unsuccessful partisan uprising of September 1943, during which the FPO commander was captured and killed (an incident chronicled in the ballad ‘Itsik Vitnberg’), Kaczerginski withdrew from the ghetto together with other members of his battalion. He spent the remaining months of the war in the forested borderlands between Lithuania and Byelorussia, serving first with the FPO, later with a Soviet partisan brigade. It was in his capacity as brigade historian that he began noting down the stories and songs of his comrades-in-arms. In August 1944, he participated in the Soviet liberation of Vilna, and soon set to work locating and salvaging Jewish books, artworks and other cultural artifacts.



In l948, a Holocaust survivor named Shmerke Kaczerginsky wrote down the songs that he remembered from the camps or that he could gather from others. The book consisted of the lyrics for 220 songs, together with the handwritten, melody transcriptions of 100 of them. Velvel Pasternak somehow discovered this forgotten book and has given it new life in this edition, which contains those songs for which there were written melodies, plus a few more from other sources, and a small section of songs without melodies that were simply too powerful to leave out. The book begins with a translation of Kaczerginsky's introduction, written in Paris, just after the war. Whoever reads these folksongs or listens to them sung on the accompanying CD by some of the great artists of our time, will have a glimpse into the holy of holies that existed midst the destruction of the Holocaust. Hardcover.