Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust

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Univ of California Press, Apr 22, 2025 - Music - 356 pages
Sounds of Survival tells a story of unexpected musical continuity across some of the twentieth century's most cataclysmic events. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, J. Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
 
 

Contents

Imagining Cultural Continuity in
1
Illustrations figures
10
Musical Belonging and Its Limits
25
MAPS
26
Cartoon by Jerzy Srokowski 1939
28
Adolf Chybiński Maria Szczepańska Bronisława Wójcik Keuprulian and Hieronim Feicht ca 1925
39
The musicians of the Warsaw Philharmonic 1931
43
Mateusz Gliński welcomes Édouard Ganche to Warsaw 1927
45
Unearthing the Oyneg Shabes archive 1946
110
We Must Restructure the Musicians into Soviet Thinking
137
Józef Koffler late 1930s
148
Zofia Lissa late 1942
157
Synthesizing Socialism
167
Ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto ca 1945
170
Nowy Świat street in Warsaw ca 1947
171
Roman Palester 1960s
184

A Civil Society for Music
50
Nadia Boulanger visits the Union of Polish Composers 1967
59
The Nation Is Now a Matter of Life and Death
79
The Philharmonic of the General Government performs 1944
89
Still from the film Forbidden Songs 1947
96
Program of the Dom Sztuki café September 1941
104
We Cannot Imagine Life without Music
108
The Aesthetics of Loss
194
A Generation in the Shadow of the Cold War
231
Cast of Characters
241
Bibliography
293
Index
323
Copyright

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About the author (2025)

J. Mackenzie Pierce is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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