"In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children": Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture

Slavic Review 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014)

“In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children”: Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture

James Loeffl er

In February 1948 the young Soviet musicologist Boris Iagolim delivered a glowing profi le of composer Mikhail Gnesin to the editors of Eynikayt, the house organ of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee (JAC). Surveying his work on the occasion of Gnesin’s sixty-fi ft h birthday, Iagolim singled out his Sonata-Fantasia piano quartet, op. 64, as a “creative response to the trials suff ered by his beloved Soviet homeland, and the tragic experiences that the war brought to the great masses of the Jewish people.” The “tragic pathos” of Gnesin’s sonata, which had earned him the 1946 Stalin Prize, Iagolim likens to a “requiem,” in which one can detect “the familiar sounds of Jewish na-tional music.” In outlining the tragedy’s specifi cally Jewish contours, Iagolim writes, Gnesin’s music reveals “the national rising to the heights of art, where it becomes universal.”1

At the time of this writing, Jewish death in the Holocaust was a taboo subject in offi cial Soviet culture. A few weeks earlier, the authorities had se-cretly murdered the JAC’s leader, Yiddish theater director Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels. Iosif Stalin’s cultural commissar, Andrei Zhdanov, had just visited the Union of Soviet Composers to lecture its members about the need for a new, anticosmopolitan direction in Soviet music; an undercurrent of anti-semitism could be detected in his remarks. Gnesin had publicly challenged Zhdanov; he feared now for his life. Yet despite darkening skies, the govern-ment censor initially approved Iagolim’s piece. Only one word required dele-tion—“requiem.” The message was clear: Jewish suff ering could be invoked in Soviet music; Jewish death could not. That such a subtle distinction could be made at all points to the potent ambiguity of the Holocaust in Soviet culture. This, in turn, prompts a larger question: what did the Holocaust sound like in Soviet music?

Recent years have brought a wave of new attention to the reception of the Holocaust in Soviet culture. Moving beyond bald assertions about the blan-

For their comments and criticisms on this article, I am grateful to the editors of and anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review, as well as Judah Cohen, Jeremy Eichler, Joseph Horowitz, Evgeniia Khazdan, Yuval Shaked, Jascha Nemtsov, Neal Stulberg, Assaf Shel-leg, Richard Taruskin, Simon Wynberg, and Samuel Zerin. In addition to his very helpful advice, Michael Beckerman generously arranged, with the assistance of Michael Leavitt and the American Society for Jewish Music, a special seminar and performance devoted to this project at the Jewish Music Forum and the New York University Department of Music in November 2013. For their invaluable research assistance, I thank Nikita Bezrukov, Gila Flam, Jessica Kirzane, Chana Mlotek z”1, and the staff s of the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the University of Virginia Library Interlibrary Loan Services Department.

1. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), fond (f.) R-8144, opis (op.) 1, delo (d.) 53, list (l.) 207 (B. Iagolim, “Mikhail Gnesin [K 60-letiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia], draft article, March 1948).

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ket silencing of the topic, scholars have uncovered a rich vein of artistic ex-pression on this theme across literature, fi lm, and photography.2 “There was indeed a Holocaust in Soviet Russia,” explains Harriet Murav, but it “looks diff erent from what came to be understood as the Holocaust in the West.” Soviet Holocaust culture retained “its own distinct outline,” she argues, “in which the perspectives of Jewish victims, Jewish avengers and Jewish victors overlap.”3 Oft en concealed in plain sight, the Holocaust was encoded into var-ious artistic works through “hidden quotation,” decipherable by the cultur-ally astute Soviet Jewish audience.4 In a similar vein, David Shneer has traced a generation of military photographers who witnessed and documented the trail of Nazi genocide “through Soviet Jewish eyes.”5 Olga Gershenson and Jer-emy Hicks have revealed the existence of a rich genre of previously unknown Holocaust-related Soviet fi lms.6

If we now can see and read the Holocaust in Soviet culture, it remains much harder to hear it. The challenge stems less from the lingering eff ects of Stalinist repression than the sonic politics of European memory. We are in the midst of a major boom in Holocaust musical studies. But this new focus is strikingly selective. Just as Auschwitz has long served as a metonym for the Holocaust, the Bohemian transit camp at Terezín has emerged as its prin-cipal aural icon. The central European Jewish composers imprisoned there, men such as Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein, have received enormous attention in the past two decades. Even the historic performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem at Terezín has been held up as a symbol of “spiri-tual resistance” and a stand-in for European Jewry’s entire Holocaust experi-ence.7 These acts of cultural recovery satisfy a contemporary public desire for historical meaning. But they risk an interpretative fallacy in which any music

2. See, for example, Lukasz Hirszowicz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in Luc-jan Dobroszycki and Jeff rey Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945 (New York, 1993), 29–60; Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Litera-ture in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford, 2011), 150–95; and Mordechai Altshuler, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, 2012).

3. Murav, Music from a Speeding Train, 153.4. Ibid., 4.5. David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

(New Brunswick, 2010); and Shneer, “Picturing Grief: Soviet Holocaust Photography at the Intersection of History and Memory,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 2010): 28–52.

6. Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick, 2013); Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 (Pittsburgh, 2012).

7. On the problem of music and spiritual resistance, see Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford, 2005). For a critique of Terezín’s elevation into metahistorical symbol, see James Loeffl er, “Why the New ‘Ho-locaust Music’ Is an Insult to Music—and to Victims of the Shoah,” Tablet, 11 July 2013, at www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/137486/holocaust-music-victims (last accessed 1 April 2014); and Simon Wynberg, “Shoah Business: The Hijacking of Tere-zin and Verdi’s Requiem,” Commentary 132, no. 3 (October 2011): 51–53.

“In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children” 587

composed (or even performed) by European Jewish victims of the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945 is presumed to convey a generic Jewish Holocaust ex-perience. This approach not only ideologically harnesses art to an essentialist meaning, it also fails to tell us how the Holocaust impacted the aural imagi-nation of the vast number of Jews outside Nazi camps and ghettos, especially those who found wartime refuge in the Soviet Union. This is especially im-portant because, as David Bloch observes, Terezín was absolutely atypical of Jewish composers’ experiences elsewhere in Holocaust-era Europe. Ironically, Jewish composers imprisoned at Terezín had a unique creative freedom, albeit with novel ethical challenges: “Jews there were permitted to compose and to write kinds of music which were absolutely forbidden throughout Europe in the Nazi occupation.”8

Ironically, even the recent phenomenon of musical completism, by which scholars and artists assiduously strive to identify every composer repressed or suppressed by the Nazis and every note of music composed inside the ghettos and camps, has almost entirely eff aced the story of Holocaust-era Soviet art music.9 In many such accounts, the only Russian or east European composer mentioned is Dmitrii Shostakovich.10 It is as if the Holocaust soundscape jumps from wartime Terezín east to the Polish ghettos before leaping forward to Shostakovich’s 1962 Symphony no. 13 in B-fl at Minor (op. 113, Babi Yar). Lost in this schematic narrative is the more complicated story of how vast numbers of Jewish composers in Poland and the Soviet Union encountered and inter-preted the Holocaust in real time.11

Mention of Shostakovich points to a second key obstacle to recapturing the Holocaust in Soviet sound. The towering monument of his Symphony no. 13 has long held canonical status in the history of Soviet culture and in Holocaust studies, thereby obscuring the works of Soviet Jewish composers. Few scholars note, for instance, that even before Shostakovich, the massacre at Babi Yar was treated not once but twice in Soviet music: by the Ukrainian Jewish composer Dmitrii Klebanov, in his controversial 1945 symphony, To the

8. David Bloch, “Jewish Music in Terezin: A Brief Survey,” in Joachim Braun, Vladi-mir Karbusický, and Heidi Tamar Hoff mann, eds., Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts. Dokumentation des Kolloquiums vom 9.–12. Januar 1993 in Dresden (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 105.

9. Perhaps the best example of musical completism is the massive, twenty-four-CD re-cording project of Italian pianist and conductor Francesco Lotoro, KZ Musik: Encyclopedia of Music Composed in Concentration Camps (1933–1945), recorded 2001–11, Musikstrasse.

10. To take but one example, in a recent international academic project with over three hundred scholarly articles and a bibliography of over four hundred fi ft y items, the only Russian or east European composer included is Shostakovich. This project is Music and the Holocaust, an educational website run by an impressive coterie of international scholars sponsored by the Jewish philanthropic organization ORT, at holocaustmusic.ort.org (last accessed 1 April 2014).

11. Another academic chronology of Holocaust-related art music dates the beginnings of the genre to 1947, with the composition of two Israeli works, Odeon Partos’s Yizkor (In Memoriam) and Yitzhak Edel’s Suite in Memoriam, along with Arnold Schoenberg’s A Sur-vivor from Warsaw, op. 46. See Ben Arnold, “Art Music and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 4 (1992): 335–49.

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Memory of the Babi Yar Martyrs, and by the Latvian Jewish composer Mendel Bash, in his 1961 oratorio, Memorial to the Victims of Fascism.12 To these we might add scores of other Jewish composers who engaged with the topic of the Holocaust from the 1940s on to the post-Soviet period.13

Of late, historians have begun to shift their collective gaze eastward, from the confi nes of Auschwitz to the “bloodlands” of Ukraine.14 In the same spirit, I propose that we relocate our historical narrative of music in the Holocaust from Terezín to another point farther east. This story begins deep in wartime Central Asia. The place is Tashkent, the year is 1943, and the musical piece in question is probably the earliest and certainly the most signifi cant Soviet wartime composition about the Holocaust. Yet it is virtually unknown today. This is Mikhail Gnesin’s Piano Trio, op. 63, dedicated “In Memory of Our Per-ished Children.”

From its very title, Gnesin’s trio provokes a question: are these children Jewish or Soviet? The piece hints loudly at the enormity of wartime Jewish suff ering. At the same time, its internal Jewish references are carefully hid-den. Rather than an illicit expression of private Jewish memory or an offi cial Soviet propaganda statement, Gnesin’s trio refl ects a careful articulation of individual Jewish pain inside a larger depiction of Soviet collective loss. In its deliberate elision of Jewish and Russian, past and present, personal and pub-lic, the piece refl ects a larger quest for a Soviet Jewish cultural identity that fuses equal parts Soviet patriotism, Jewish nationality, and universalist hu-manism.15 Conscious that the enormity of the Holocaust cannot be completely disentangled from Jews’ Soviet wartime experiences, Gnesin’s undeclared requiem simultaneously affi rms the offi cial Soviet image of a Russian “holy war” against fascism while evoking a discernible theme of Jewish loss.

Recapturing this forgotten cultural genealogy provides a very diff erent kind of European historical soundtrack for the Holocaust. Instead of the cat-egories of survivor and bystander, wartime witness and postwar remembrance, we fi nd a more ambiguous form of early Holocaust memory. Rather than a mark of Jewish diff erence, Soviet music of the Holocaust emerges as an aspira-

12. For more on these works, see Bret Werb, “Music,” in Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, eds., Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford, 2011), 483–84.

13. In the 1940s alone, the pages of Eynikayt were fi lled with numerous mentions of composers who produced memorial works on Jewish martyrdom, oft en using the texts of Soviet Yiddish writers. Prominent examples include Leningrad composer Aleksandr Manevich’s 1947 Yiddish cantata, To the Memory of the Victims of German Fascism; Kiev composer S. Sendrei’s 1947 setting of Shmuel Halkin’s iconic poem, “Tife griber, royte leym—kh’hob amol gehat a heym” (Deep Pits, Red Clay—Once I Had a Home), and other works; as well as the song settings of Halkin’s poetry by Mieczysław Weinberg and Lev Pul΄ver. See also Inessa Dvuzhil΄naia, “Otrazhenie temy kholokosta v muzykal΄nom iskusstve Belarusi,” Materialy vosemnadtsatoi mezhdunarodnoi ezhegodnoi konferentsii po iudaike, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2011), 1:514–24; and Antonina Klokova, “‘Mein moralische Pfl icht,’ Mieczysław Weinberg und der Holocaust,” Osteuropa 60, no. 7 (July 2010): 173–82. On the broader Cold War cultural politics involved in the reception of Soviet composers, see Neil Edmunds, introduction to Neil Edmunds, ed., Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Baton and the Sickle (London, 2004), 2.

14. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010).15. Murav, Music from a Speeding Train, 119.


tional form of imperial belonging. Finally, the story of how the Holocaust fi rst entered Soviet music challenges our contemporary assumptions about the co-herence and legitimacy of Holocaust music as a category in cultural history.16

16. For recent work on Soviet cultural responses to World War II, see Anna Krylova, “‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944–1946,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (June 2001): 307–31; Jeff rey Brooks, Thank You, Com-

Figure 1. Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin (1883–1957). Courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.

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“I Would Forfeit All of the Holy Land for Your Love”

Mikhail Gnesin might have been “Jewish by birth,” declared Soviet musician Tikhon Khrennikov, “but as a composer, he was Russian.”17 Just as a binary division of Russian and Jewish oft en runs through discussions of Soviet Jew-ish history, Gnesin himself is remembered today either as a Russian artist or a Jewish one—but rarely as both. In the past decade, his role in Silver Age symbolism and the early Soviet avant-garde has been recovered, including his “Wagnerian” collaborations with poet Aleksandr Blok and theater direc-tor Vsevolod Meyerhold.18 Yet this scholarship hardly mentions his Jewish-themed musical oeuvre.19 By contrast, another strain identifi es Gnesin as a forgotten founder of modern Jewish art music, emphasizing the “Jewish men-tality” and cultural Zionism at the root of his work.20 These dueling national narratives refl ect a more general tendency among scholars and listeners alike to bisect Russian Jewish composers and their compositions into Russian or Jewish categories. Yet, just like the much-abused terms assimilated and na-

rade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000); and Rich-ard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995).

17. Quoted in Vladimir Dyn΄kin, “Evreiskaia muzyka zhdala svoego Glinku . . . ,” Lekhaim 105, no. 1 (January 2001), at www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/105/hrennikov.htm (last accessed 1 April 2014).

18. Simon Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley, 2002), 26.19. Mariia Karachevskaia, “M. F. Gnesin: Osobennosti stiliia na primere vokal΄nogo

tvorchestva” (PhD diss., Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, 2011); Margarita Arkhi-pova, “Stsenicheskie kompozitsii M. F. Gnesina: Ot ‘muzyky slova’—k muzykanl΄noi into-natsii” (PhD diss., Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, 2006); and Alexander F. Goedicke, Julian Krein, Michail F. Gnesin, and Georg Kirkor, Russian Futurism, vol. 2, with Vladi-mir Gontcharov (trumpet), Gleb Karpushkin (horn), Kyrill Robin (cello), Andrei Pisarev (piano), and the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Konstantin Krimets, re-corded 16 June 1998, Arte Nova Records, 2 compact discs. For an insightful discussion of Gnesin’s status as a “second-tier” composer in the Russian canon, see Natal΄ia Meshche-riakova and Ol ga Malinovskaia, “‘Ia chelovek zabroshennyi . . .’: Paradoks Mikhaila Gne-sina,” in A. M. Tsuker, ed., Kompozitory ‘vtorogo riada’ v istoriko-kul turnom protsesse: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 2010), 229–41. For a brief exception, see O. I. Lukonina, “‘Svet,’ vostoka v Russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul ture pervoi treti XX veka (Na primere muzyki M. Shteinberga, V. Deshevova, M. Ippolitova-Ivanova, M. Gnesina),” in V. K. Kriuchek, ed., Nauka, iskusstvo, obrazovanie v III tysiacheletii: Materialy II mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, g. Volgograd, 4–7 aprelia 2006 g. (Volgograd, 2006), 128–36. For a diff erent take on Gnesin’s “Jewish music” for Meyerhold’s production of Nikolai Gogol΄’s Revizor, see Z. Zeitlin, “Mashehu ‘al ha-profesor David Shor,” Ha-mashkif, 11 June 1942, 4.

20. Sergo Bengelsdorf, “Der bakanter un umbekanter Mikhel Gnesin,” Forverts, 2 April 2010, at yiddish2.forward.com/node/2862 (last accessed 1 April 2014); Rita Flomenboim, “Ha-eskolah ha-le’umit shel ha-musikah ha-yehudit-omanutit: Yo’el Engel (1868–1927) ve-Mikha’il Gnesin (1883–1957)” (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University 1996); Dmitrii Slepovich, “Evreiskaia kompozitorskaia shkola v Rossii pervoi poloviny XX veka: Tvorchestvo M. F. Gnesina,” at klezmer.narod.ru/Jews_rus.htm (last accessed 30 June 2014); Frans C. Le-maire, Muzyka XX veka v Rossii i v respublikakh byvshego Sovetskogo Soiuza (St. Peters-burg, 2003), 321–24; and Izalii Zemtsovskii, “M. F. Gnesin o sisteme ladov evreiskoi muzyki (po materialam arkhiva kompozitora),” Nauchnyi vestnik Moskovskoi konservatorii (2012): 6–24. See also the recent survey of literature on Gnesin by E. V. Borisova, “Kratkii ob-zor literatury, posviashchennoi M. F. Gnesinu),” in Vladimir V. Tropp, ed., Gnesinskii is-toricheskii sbornik: Zapiski memorial΄nogo muzei-kvartiry El. F. Gnesinoi. K 60-letiiu RAM im. Gnesinykh (Moscow, 2004), 94–103.


tionalist, Russian and Jewish do little justice to the many shades of cultural and political identity among members of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia who came of age in the late imperial fi n de siècle. Nor do they convey the nature of those who refused to choose.21 For artists such as Gnesin, it was precisely the entanglement of Russianness and Jewishness that animated his cultural identity and political commitments alike.22

Born into a large middle-class Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don in 1883, Gnesin grew up the son of a musically trained mother and a Maskilic father who served as a government-appointed rabbi. Several of his sisters preceded him into music, establishing the Gnesin Musical Institute in Moscow in 1895. The school, where Gnesin himself later taught composition, eventually be-came one of the most famous cultural institutions in the Soviet Union. Re-buff ed in his own application to study at the Moscow conservatory due to a Jewish quota, Gnesin entered Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov’s composition class at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory in 1901. There he quickly emerged as a star disciple of the elderly Russian master, vying with classmates Maksi milian Shteinberg and Igor Stravinsky for the title of heir apparent. Gnesin’s name remained linked to Rimskii-Korsakov’s for the duration of the younger man’s career, even though his own musical style belonged more to the early Russian modernism infl uenced by the French impressionists and the harmonic experi-ments of Aleksandr Scriabin.

Gnesin embarked on his musical studies at the St. Petersburg conserva-tory with little thought of his Jewish heritage. But by the time he graduated, in 1908, he had become intimately involved with the nascent Russian Jewish cultural renaissance. He was among the early leaders of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded that same year by composers and folklorists dedicated to developing a modern Jewish national school of art music. Drawing in part on ancient Jewish liturgy and Yiddish folk traditions, he produced a series of seminal works. They included his string quartet Variations on a Jewish Folk Theme (1917); the Symphonic Fantasia (in Jewish Style), op. 30, subtitled Song of the Ancient Homeland (1918–19); and his unfi nished Hebrew-language op-era, Abram’s Youth (1921–23). The inspiration for many of these compositions came from two sojourns in Palestine, in 1913–14 and again in 1921–22. Yet none of this Zionist experimentation prevented Gnesin from delving deeper into the Russian cultural scene. In the 1910s he forged an intense collaboration with Russian avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He worked on a number of Moscow Art Theater productions. His song settings of Russian symbolist poets drew considerable praise. So too did his theoretical writings on music, drama, and language.

The key to this balancing act was Gnesin’s self-conception as an exponent of a dual Russian and Jewish cultural identity. Like many of his fellow Soviet

21. Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 3–8.

22. On the challenges of labeling Gnesin’s identity, see James Loeffl er, The Most Musi-cal Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven, 2010), 94–133, 202–8, and Evgeniia Vladimirovna Khazdan, “Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin: Evreiskii kompozi-tor ili kompozitor ‘evreiskogo prosveshcheniia’?,” in Materialy vosemnadtsatoi mezhduna-rodnoi ezhegodnoi konferentsii, 1:495–513.

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Jewish composers, he viewed himself as defi ned by a double patrimony: the Jewish “nation to which I belong by birth” and the larger “Russian musical culture.”23 Infl uenced by Silver Age notions of spiritual renaissance, Gnesin saw Russians and Jews as uniquely positioned to redeem modern art by bridg-ing east and west. This was refl ected in many of his most iconic works of the post-1917 period, including his song settings of Russian poets who wrote on Jewish themes, the subject of his 1918 Tri evreiskie pesni na slovy russkikh po-etov (Three Jewish Songs to the Words of Russian Poets), op. 32, and his 1926 Po vest΄ o ryzhim motele (Tale of the Red-Headed Motel), a song cycle based on the Soviet Jewish poet Iosif Utkin’s popular story of the same name.24 Dedicated to Lev Trotskii, Utkin’s Russian-language text incorporates a large amount of Yiddish, off ering a symbolic marriage of the two languages in the new Soviet reality.

The greatest challenge to this Russian-Jewish cultural vision came from the recurrent force of antisemitism. In fact, it was a search for relief from the “stain of antisemitism” in Russian culture that impelled Gnesin to undertake his fi rst trip to Palestine, in 1913.25 While there, a chance encounter with Men-del Beilis, the wrongly accused defendant in Russia’s most notorious blood libel trial, further shook his confi dence in Jews’ future in Russia. Gnesin con-templated settling in Palestine for good; he even fantasized about relocating Meyerhold’s entire theater studio there.26 Local musicians off ered him the di-rectorship of Tel Aviv’s fl edgling music conservatory.27 But both before and aft er 1917 a gnawing sense of duty coupled with the intoxicating possibilities of socialist revolution drew him home to Russia. There was simply too much important work—musical and political—remaining to be done.

Romantic intrigue beckoned as well. Gnesin developed an intense fi xa-tion on Vera Nikolaevna Klepinina, a riveting actress in Meyerhold’s studio.28 She symbolized to him his larger love aff air with Russia, a sacred bond that jostled against his palpable attachment to the ancient Jewish homeland. En route home from Palestine in 1914, he later recalled, one line from Aleksandr Blok’s modern mystery play, Roza i krest΄ (The Rose and the Cross), ran inces-santly through his head: “I would forfeit all of the Holy Land for your love.”29

23. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2954, op. 1, d. 193, 1. 95 (Draft Manuscript of the Memoirs of M. F. Gnesin).

24. On this latter work, see Iulian Krein, “M. F. Gnesin,” in Raisa Vladimirovna Glezer, ed., M. F. Gnesin: Stat΄i, vospominannia, materialy (Moscow, 1961), 33.

25. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 181 (M. F. Gnesin, “Iz vospominannii o V. E. Meierkhol΄de,” 24 August 1941). See also I. V. Krivosheevoi, ed., Vs. Meierkhol΄d i Mikh. Gnesin: Sobranie dokumentov (Moscow, 2008), 14.

26. Flomenboim, “Ha-eskolah ha-le’umit,” 176–78; Jascha Nemtsov, Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik (Wiesbaden, 2004), 104–10; and Nemtsov, Enzyklopaedisches Find-buch zum Archiv der “Neuen Jüdischen Schule” (Wiesbaden, 2004), 222–23.

27. On Gnesin’s Palestine travels, see the recent analysis by Evgeniia Khazdan, “Dve palestinskie poezdki M. F. Gnesina,” Opera Musicologica 11, no. 1 (2012): 26–46.

28. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 242 (Letter from Mikhail Gnesin to Nadia Gnesina, 30 Oc-tober 1913).

29. Aleksandr Blok, Roza i krest , act 1, scene 3, in A. Blok, Teatr (Berlin, 1922), 163. For the details of Gnesin’s failed attempt to compose music for Blok’s play, see Morrison,


The sentence epitomized the tension between Gnesin’s dual loves: Russia and Zion. Despite his infatuation with Klepinina, he found to his disappointment that the Russian actress was “incompatible” with both Palestine and his ar-tistic aspirations.30

Back in Moscow for good, Gnesin threw himself headfi rst into the promis-ing new world of 1920s Soviet Jewish culture: the Habima Hebrew-language theater, the Society for Jewish Music, and an anthology of Soviet Yiddish songs.31 Meanwhile, in the broader Soviet musical realm his career was marked by impressive achievements as a pedagogue coupled with professional frus-trations as a composer. A generation of colleagues and students at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories and Gnesin Musical Institute revered him.32 But his reputation as a composer wavered, especially aft er a vicious ideological attack on him by the Bolshevik populists of the Russian Association of Prole-tarian Musicians (RAPM) in the late 1920s.33

The charges against Gnesin—reactionary formalism and “bourgeois na-tionalism in Jewish music”—contained more than a hint of antisemitic innu-endo.34 Though he escaped the episode relatively unscathed, it proved to be only the fi rst in a series of devastating personal blows. His fi rst wife, Nadezhda Tovievna, died in 1934. Then the late 1930s terror touched some of those clos-est to him. His brother Grigorii was arrested in 1937 for anti- Bolshevik politi-

Russian Opera, 26–42. On the larger history of the production, see Timothy C. Westphalen, Lyric Incarnate: The Dramas of Aleksandr Blok (Amsterdam, 1998), 120–63.

30. Gnesin, “Iz vospominannii,” 11–14. Gnesin went on to refer to his Symphonic Fan-tasia, op. 19, offi cially titled Song of the Ancient Homeland (Pesnia o drevnei rodine), as Song of the Holy Land (Pesn΄ o sviatoi zemle) in a 1920 letter to Maksmilian Shteinberg. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 269, ll. 21–22 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to M. S. Shteinberg, 15 June 1920), quoted in G. V. Grigor eva, ed., “Pis΄ma M. F. Gnesina k M. O. Shteinbergu,” in G. V. Grigor eva, ed., Iz lichnykh arkhivov professorov Moskovskoi konservatorii, 3 vols. (Mos-cow, 2002–08), 3:73.

31. Nemtsov, Neue Jüdische Schule, 159–83; M. F. Gnesin and I. I. Bakst, Naye lider: Muzikalishe zamlbukh (Moscow, 1927); and letter from M. F. Gnesin to M. M. Mil΄ner, 7 May 1926, published in “Pis΄ma deiatelei evreiskoi kul tury k M. A. Mil΄neru,” in G. V. Kopytova and A. S. Frenkel , eds., Iz istorii evreiskoi muzyki v Rossii, vol 2, Materialy mezhduna-rodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii “Evreiskaia professional΄naia muzyka v Rossii: Stanovlenie i razvitie,” Sankt-Peterburg, 1–2 dekabria 2003 (St. Petersburg, 2008), 178–79.

32. For a recent artistic assessment of Gnesin’s oeuvre, see Mariia Karachevskaia, “‘Ia chelovek zabroshennyi . . .’: K 125-letiiu so dniia rozhdeniia Mikhaila Gnesina,” Muzykal΄naia zhizn , no. 2 (February 2008): 20.

33. Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (Woodbridge, 2012), 314–21; Elena S. Vlasova, 1948 god v Sovetskoi muzyke: Dokumentiro-vannoe issledovanie (Moscow, 2010), 116–41; Vladimir Tropp, “Biografi ia,” in V. V. Tropp, ed., Elena Gnesina: Ia privykla zhit΄ dolga . . . : Vospominaniia, stat΄i, pis΄ma, vystupleniia (Moscow, 2008), 37–38; and Simo Mikkonen, Music and Power in the Soviet 1930s: A His-tory of the Composers’ Bureaucracy (Lewiston, N.Y., 2009), 37–38.

34. M. F. Gnesin, “Iz strakha ne rozhdaetsia tvorchestvo (Publikatsiia i kommenta-riii E. Vlasovoi),” in M. E. Tarakanov, Otechestvennaia muzykal΄naia kul tura XX veka: K itogam perspektivam. Nauchno-publitsisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1993), 89; Marina Lobanova, “Michail Gnessin und die ‘proletarischen Musiker’ (aus der Geschichte einer Konfrontation),” in Ernst Kuhn et al., eds., “Samuel” Goldenberg und “Schmuyle”: Jüdis-ches und Antisemitisches in der russischen Musikkultur (Berlin, 2003), 105–18.

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cal crimes and subsequently executed. In 1939 two more old friends, Meyer-hold and Zisman Kiselgof, a Jewish musical compatriot, were arrested and executed.35

Despite recurrent moods of despair and periodic fl irtations with the idea of returning to Palestine, Gnesin retained his faith in the Soviet project of modernity.36 The outbreak of war with Germany only renewed his sense of mission. Emboldened by the mobilization of Soviet society, he turned again to a large-scale musical project that boldly asserted Jewish national identity: a Yiddish-language opera about the Bar Kokhba revolt. The story of a Jewish war against Roman forces in second-century Palestine had already proven popular in a 1938 production at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. In the hands of Yiddish poet Shmuel Halkin, the prerevolutionary Yiddish theater classic had been refashioned into an appropriately Soviet parable of Jewish heroism, rebirth, and anti-imperialism.37 In 1940 Gnesin and Halkin began work on an opera adaption. However, this project halted with the Nazi inva-sion of the Soviet Union the following year.38

Dreaming of Jerusalem in Tashkent

In late September 1941, as Nazi forces approached the outskirts of Leningrad, Gnesin and his family evacuated to Ioshkar-Ola, a city on the Volga River; there they spent the winter.39 The following summer, a massive German of-fensive threatened the Volga region. This time Gnesin made plans to join the evacuated Leningrad conservatory faculty in Tashkent. He sent his son, Fabi, then thirty-fi ve, on ahead, while he remained to sell off personal belongings. At the same time, Gnesin began work on a new piano trio. The fl ight from Leningrad had already taken their physical and mental toll on Fabi. Physi-cally weakened from prior illness, he struggled as well with undisclosed psy-chological problems. In Tashkent Fabi was seen wandering the streets. By the time his father arrived, in late November, he had died in a local hospital.40

Consumed by grief, Gnesin attempted to channel his pain into a number

35. O. V. Akhmatova, “Grigorii Fabianovich Gnesin (Po sokhranivshimsia arkhivnym material),” in Tropp, ed., Gnesinskii istoricheskii sbornik, 192–202.

36. Flomenboim, “Ha-eskolah ha-le’umit,” 178–80. On Gnesin’s visions for the future of Soviet music and his place in it, see Mariia Karachevskaia, “Simfonicheskoe tvorchestvo M. F. Gnesina: Ot ‘Difi ramba’ k ‘Monumentu,’” in E. S. Vlasova and E. G. Sorokina, eds., Nasledie. Russkaia muzyka—mirovaia kul tura: Sbornik statei, materialov, pisem i vospo-minanii (Moscow, 2009), 248–60; and M. A. Karachevskaia, “Iz arkhiva M. F. Gnesina,” in Grigor eva, ed., Iz lichnykh arkhivov professorov Moskovskoi konservatorii, 2:121–64.

37. Jeff rey Veidlinger, The Moscow Yiddish State Theater: Jewish Culture on the So-viet Stage (Bloomington, 2000), 168–73; Mikhail Krutikov, “Halkin, Shmuel,” at www. yivoencyclopedia.com/article.aspx/Halkin_Shmuel (last accessed 1 April 2014).

38. Fragments in Gnesin’s archive suggest he returned to work on the Bar Kokhba project in the years 1944–47 once back in Moscow. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 86, 1. 37.

39. On the period in Ioshkar-Ola, see RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 283, ll. 15–18 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to L. Shtreykher, 31 May 1942).

40. On the diffi cult circumstances involving Fabi’s arrival in Tashkent and un-timely death, see the letters from Maksmilian Shteinberg to Elena Gnesina, reprinted in E. F. Gnesina, “Ia chuvstvuiu sebia obiazannoi . . . ,” Muzykal΄naia akademiia, nos. 3–4 (1998): 134.


of compositions, including both the sonata-fantasia and the piano trio.41 Yet mounting depression and a heart condition proved crippling. Unable to se-cure an apartment, Gnesin and his wife were reduced to living for months in the lobby of the Tashkent conservatory.42 He confi ded to his sister Elena that he felt his career was over. His thoughts turned to old dreams of Zion. “Something in this land reminds me of Palestine more than anywhere else I’ve been,” he wrote her in November 1943. “If it’s still possible to dream of the distant future, I would like to imagine someday going to the distant lands once again (perhaps in this earthly life). I imagine how I might spend my last days there. However, at present it’s simply impossible. I feel a moral duty to fi nish several works dedicated to Fabi’s memory. . . . To accomplish this, [I must remain] in our country.”43 Gnesin’s sense of “moral duty”—both typical

41. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 233, 1. 27 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to E. F. Gnesina, 26 No-vember 1943); RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 425, 1. 17 (Letter from E. F. Gnesina to M. F. Gnesin, 14 December 1942). The fi rst draft of the trio in Gnesin’s archive is dated 29 August 1943. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 31.

42. Tropp, ed., Elena Gnesina, 183.43. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 233, 1. 44 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to E. F. Gnesina, 26 No-

vember 1943).

Figure 2. Title page of the fi rst draft of Gnesin’s Trio, op. 63, “Pamiati nashikh pogibshikh detei” (In Memory of Our Perished Children), dated Tashkent, 1943. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.

Figure 3. First page of Gnesin’s Trio, op. 63, published in 1947 by the Gosudar-stvennoe muzykal΄noe izdatel stvo, Moscow-Leningrad.


of Soviet composers’ sentiments during World War II and refl ective of his own personality—propelled his musical writing.44 He labored on the trio on and off for over a year, fi nally completing it shortly before the end of 1943.45 When it came time to dedicate the work, however, he chose not to single out his son. Instead, from the fi rst full draft onward, he inscribed it “In Memory of Our Perished Children” (Pamiati nashikh pogibshikh detei).46

From our perspective today, it is natural to read this dedication and think of Jewish children perishing in the Holocaust. And if they are Jewish victims of the Nazis, then this is very likely the fi rst piece of music ever written about the Holocaust. Gnesin composed it at the very moment when news of the Nazi mass murder of Soviet Jews in Ukraine was beginning to penetrate further into Soviet society.47 It suggests a bold statement of Jewish mourning and suf-fering at the hands of the Nazis. But when we look more closely at the work, any simple Jewish ascription dissolves.

In the music itself, Gnesin adopts a neutral late romantic style, uninfl ected by any stereotypically Jewish folkloric elements. There are no augmented seconds or throbbing violin vibratos to suggest the intonations of Ashkenazi Jewish folk music idiom. Opening with a delicate violin pizzicato, plucking out a simple falling melodic line, it shift s into an oblique ruminative mood, marked “Andante sostenuto quasi una ballata” in triple meter (3/4). The bal-lata qualifi cation nods to an archaic Italian song-dance form, suggesting the moderately slow-tempo piece echoed a song whose lyrics had been forgotten. It may have also served as a reference to the commedia dell’arte tradition and the “dances of death” genre that Gnesin explored in his early theater work with Meyerhold.48

Aft er several measures of the violin’s unaccompanied line, centered on the interval between the tonic and the fi ft h of the B-fl at natural minor scale, the cello and piano join in, picking up the melody and spreading out a rich harmonic tapestry before introducing the second theme in an andantino tempo. This theme, in G major and marked “simple” (semplice), centers on a four-note motive. A triplet fi gure moves from the sixth (E) down a fourth to the third (B) and back up, stepping up one more note in the scale (to F sharp), before settling back on the sixth. Aft er several measures of development, the third theme, a lyrical, lush line, marked “Andante cantabile,” enters. Also in G major, it moves back and forth between 4/4 and 2/4 meters. This melody employs a swooning fi gure that dips down and back in an interval of a third.

44. Harlow Robinson, “Composing for Victory: Classical Music,” in Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment, 62.

45. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 233, 1. 38, 44 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to E. F. Gnesina, 26 November 1943).

46. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 31. The Russian word pogibshikh (perished) might also be translated as “dead,” “lost,” or “murdered.”

47. On the dissemination of news of the Holocaust in Soviet culture, see Karel C. Berk-hoff , “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–105.

48. See the suggestive discussion in Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Gro-tesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Burlington, Vt., 2000), 301–9.

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The sweet, graceful gestures and cresting rubato chords evoke a transitional, rhapsodic section. Following an extended middle portion of further develop-ment of the second theme, the piece folds back up in reverse order. It con-cludes with a fi nal restatement of the melody on top of rolling piano chords. This gently devolves into a sustained tonic note in the violin part under which the chords glide toward a subdued major-key fi nale on a B-fl at chord.49

Overall, Gnesin’s trio is a roughly ten-minute, single-movement work of lyrical elegance and restrained emotion. The only personal element in the published score is a short note that indicates that the second motive is based on a melody composed by Fabi at age eight. All of this implies that the dead children are part of the larger population of Soviet victims of fascist aggression rather than Jewish victims of Nazi antisemitism. Even Gnesin’s fi nale, which highlights the shift from minor key to major key to indicate a positive conclu-sion to a traumatic event, fi ts the dictates of socialist realism.50 It is as if Gne-sin has transmuted his personal grief into a collectivist mode of grieving.

In his public presentation of the piece, Gnesin appeared to confi rm this narrative. In a composer’s note distributed in concert performances of the work and eventually published in Eynikayt, he stresses the collective ethos behind the work:

The author strove not only to express our shared pain about our children, students, and young friends who perished in battles for our fatherland or were tortured by the enemy in occupied cities; he sought to stir up in the memory of listeners the image of these living young people, of their youth—from childhood dreams and play, from youthful unrequited love and aspi-rations, to the very fi rst real adult achievements and sudden deaths. The sections of the trio linked to the poetry of children’s suff erings are built on the theme . . . composed at age eight by the son of the composer, Fabi, now deceased.51

Little in this description speaks to the Holocaust per se. In fact, the classic in-vocation of children as the symbol of the promise of the Soviet future echoed a principal wartime theme of Soviet culture as a whole.52 No mention is made of Jewish remembrance. Yet against this generic expression of collective Soviet pain, Gnesin inserted a potent musical clue: in the opening theme, he quotes directly from a well-known Yiddish folk song, “Amol iz geven a yidele” (There Once Was a little Jew). The words of that song speak of an explicitly Jewish, nakedly religious sentiment:

Amol iz geven a yidele, a yidele, a yidele.Hot er gehat a vaybele, a vaybele, a vaybele.

49. For another musicological discussion of the style, see Khazdan, “Mikhail Fabia-novich Gnesin.”

50. Izaly Zemtsovsky, “Underground Styles as a Feature of a Totalitarian Culture: The Case of Russian Music,” in Braun, Karbusický, and Hoff mann, eds., Verfemte Musik, 196.

51. Ia. Frenkel, “Sovetisher kompozitor Mikhl Gnesin,” Eynikayt, 1 December 1944, 23. See also V. V. Tropp, E. G. Artmova, and I. B. Barannikov, eds., Gnesinskii dom: Letopis΄ voennykh let. 65-letiiu Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 gg posviashchaet-sia (Moscow, 2010), 123.

52. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!, 192.


Zey hobn gehat a kadishl, a kadishl, a kadishl.Der kadishl iz geshtorbn, geshtorbn, geshtorbn.

(There once was a little Jew, a little Jew, a little Jew. / He had a little wife, a little wife, a little wife. / They had a little son [kadishl], a little son, a little son. / The little son died, died, died.)

In Yiddish, a kadishl designates an only son, called as such because it is the son’s sacred responsibility to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer for his

Figure 4. “Amol iz geven a yidele” (There Once Was a Little Jew). In Menachem Kipnis, Hundert folks-lider (Buenos Aires, 1949), 113. Photo by the author.

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father upon the patriarch’s death. In traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture, from medieval times forward, this memorial prayer grew into a powerful re-ligious custom imbued with all sorts of theurgic meanings. The son’s pious act of prayer was said to have the power to redeem the dead father’s soul. The Yiddish folksong plays on the grim irony of a Jewish father who has lost his kaddish sayer and instead fi nds himself cast in the role of saying kad-dish for his own son. The song also derives a measure of ironic power from the fact that there are a number of other light-hearted Yiddish folksongs with similar lyrics. Among them is the well-known song “Amol iz geven,” whose lyrics describe a kleyne yidele (little Jew) who has a kleyne vaybele (little wife) and a kleyne fi dele (little fi ddle). This song was a staple of the repertoire of the two most famous concert performers of Yiddish folk songs in interwar eastern Europe, Menakhem Kipnis (1878–1942) and his wife, Zimra Seligfeld (ca. 1900–ca. 1942).53 Against the iconic image of the happy, dancing Jew with his fi ddle—a stock fi gure in Russian culture—Gnesin’s chosen song juxtaposes an image of another proverbial little Jew, his wife, and their dead child.

Gnesin’s writings leave no doubt that he used the folk song in question deliberately. He admitted as much in a 1943 letter to his sister in which he shared his story of the piece, the version “that I can’t show to the world.” The fi rst theme came from “a Jewish folk song I learned from an ethnographer in Moscow.”54 In all likelihood, this ethnographer was the writer and critic Ye-hezkel Dobrushin (1883–1953), who also provided Shostakovich with the texts for his work From the Yiddish Folk Poetry.55 Citing the lyrics, Gnesin wrote, “The dynamics of the piece develop out of it. It is a sort of sign of fate. It is presented in an epic tone (in the beginning), in a dramatic mood with some lighter moments, something similar to an existential victory as a result of a hard struggle to survive, the moment of death, and, in the end, the sound of remembrance.”56

Gnesin goes on in the same letter to describe the second theme, in a minor key, as about “childhood,” derived from a song about a “grassman” composed by his son when he was eight years old, whose words read, “I was born in the grass together with my brother” and there “I had a [pet] grasshopper.”57 The choice of a theme by his son was more than a tribute. It was also a bor-

53. Menakhem Kipnis, 140 folks-lider, vol. 2, 80 Folks lider fun Zimra Zeligfelds un M. Kipnis kontsert-repertuar (Warsaw, 1930), 31; Shimen Krongold, “Di zinger fun folk: Kipnes der zamler un seligfeld-kipnes di oysfi rer fun idishen lid (tsu zeyer 100-ten kont-sert),” Haynt, 13 December 1928, 9. “Amol iz geven a yidele,” also known by the title “Der kadishl,” was fi rst published in Warsaw by Menakhem Kipnis in a 1918 collection and again in 1930. Kipnis’s book was reissued in 1949 in Buenos Aires. The song resurfaced in the 1994 Russian collection by Maks Gol΄din, ed., Evreiskaia narodnaia pesnia: Antologiia (St. Petersburg, 1994), 95. Parallel to Gnesin’s setting, the song was also arranged for voice and piano by Mikhail V. Iordanskii in his Dve evreiskie melodii (vokalizy) (Moscow, 1935). Khazdan, “Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin.”

54. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 233, 1. 44 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to E. F. Gnesina, 26 No-vember 1943).

55. Aron Vergelis, Strazh u vorot: Romany, zapiski pisateliia (Moscow, 1988), 249–50.56. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 233, 1. 44 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to E. F. Gnesina, 26 No-

vember 1943).57. Ibid.


rowing from his unfi nished Hebrew opera. Twenty years earlier, Gnesin had used the same melody in his Abram’s Youth.58 In the trio reprise, he wrote, “Fabi’s theme undergoes development and receives a new interpretation as if in mourning for itself.” The third and fi nal main theme, also in minor key, he conceived as “unrequited love.”59

More than a programmatic statement about mass death—Jewish or Soviet—these comments suggest a musical narrative centered on personal mourning. Gnesin’s constant reference to the fact that his son’s melody was written at age eight—the printed score actually contains a single footnote attesting to this fact—even when his son was thirty-fi ve years old when he died, also hints at a psychological fi xation on time and aging. This insistence, together with the mention of his abandoned Hebrew opera, speaks to lost dreams and lost innocence. Given all of this, it is not hard to read Gnesin’s lamentation as an expression of the pain of his own regrets about his life and career.

Of course, Gnesin’s deliberate ambiguity might be interpreted as a cun-ning strategy to fool the Soviet censors.60 But his intimate narrative, mixing past and present, personal and collective, neatly captures the complexity of Soviet Jewish cultural identity in the wartime moment. Determined to voice a Jewish national identity that fi ts neatly inside a larger Russian cultural frame-work, Gnesin encoded his Jewish suff ering inside the Soviet war experience. The trio refl ects an oblique approach to the particularity of Jewish victim-hood. And yet, the Jewish aspect peeks through, disguised but perceptible. The particular Jewish experience takes the form of intimate, private suff ering enveloped within the public ordeal of the general Soviet population. At the same time, Gnesin opts not to include an overt Soviet musical marker, such as a Russian-language folk song or popular anthem that might denote the overarching societal cause.

Gnesin’s symbolic linkage of his son and himself to the fallen soldiers and civilian victims creates a multilayered tapestry of sounds. This blurring of roles is suggested in diff erent ways throughout the piece. Thus, the fi rst theme itself oft en fl its between major and minor modes. Gnesin achieves this by constantly alternating between a natural sixth (G note) and a fl at sixth (G fl at note) in the descending line. The original Yiddish song uses only the fl at sixth, in keeping with the conventional natural minor scale. Gnesin’s switch back and forth ratchets up the harmonic tension and suggests a fl ickering borderline between two worlds. Similarly, when the fi rst theme returns later in the piece, it is intertwined with Fabi’s theme. The merging of the two evokes another meeting point of the personal and the collective. So, too, does the re-semblance between the sound of Fabi’s playful childhood melody and the lon-gueur of the “unrequited love” theme dissolve the boundary between adult emotions and child-like innocence. Indeed, Gnesin noted in his letter to his

58. Rita Flomenboim, “The Work of Michail Gnesin during the 1920s: An Opera—a Play Score—a Vocal Song Cycle,” in Jascha Nemtsov, ed., Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahr-hundert: Quellenlage, Entstehungsgeschichte, Stilanalysen (Wiesbaden, 2006), 150–55.


60. Arlen Blium, “Otnoshenie sovetskoi tsenzury (1940–1946) k probleme kholo-kosta,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 2, no. 9 (1995): 156–67.

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sister that this third theme “was composed by me, however it contains some elements of Fabi’s improvisations.”61

These types of aesthetic moves also create an important equivalence be-tween Jewish civilian victims, Jewish survivors, and the offi cial Soviet martyrs. This was important, because, as historian Amir Weiner explains in his classic study, Making Sense of War, the question of Jewish contributions to the war ef-fort became central to the Soviet narrative of WWII. The “twin institutions of hierarchical heroism and universal suff ering,” writes Weiner, formed “the cor-nerstones of the Soviet ethnonational ethos of the war. Whereas the various nations of the Soviet Union were ranked in a pyramid-like order based on their alleged contributions to the war eff ort, their suff ering was undiff erentiated.”62 This dynamic put those privileged Jews who were evacuated to the Soviet hinter lands in a delicate position, as evidenced by the derogatory term Tash-kent partisan.63 In that sense, Gnesin’s piece could be understood as an affi r-mative plea for Jews to be counted in the still-emerging Soviet cultural story of the war’s meaning. In this context, the trope of “unrequited love” might be read as a one-sided love aff air between Jews and Russian culture. Or it might even hearken back to Gnesin’s own youthful dreams of union—physical and spiritual—with the Russian people. Whatever Gnesin’s intention, the rapidly shift ing politics of the Stalinist regime guaranteed that such a musical state-ment would be subject to special scrutiny in the immediate postwar period.

“In Memory of Our Murdered Jewish Children”

Gnesin’s work had its premiere in Tashkent at the end of November 1943 by a trio consisting of A. Shtrimer, B. Portugalov, and A. Khal΄fi n. It was repeated in a farewell concert of his works held there in early February 1944.64 Shortly thereaft er, he returned to Moscow, where the trio was performed for a private hearing at the composers’ union on March 1.65 The piece, together with the sonata-fantasia, soon attracted notice. A 1946 article by Gnesin’s pupil Reza Glezer in Sovetskaia muzyka discussed both works. Glezer quotes Gnesin’s own comments about the trio’s programmatic depiction of youthful lives lost. Of the sonata, which she linked closely to the trio, she wrote of its “hidden program,” representing “the infi nite number of lives lost—in particular, the tragic fate of the Jewish people.” Stylistically, both pieces share the “romantic single-movement form with the sonata principle of development.” They also exhibit his penchant for a language “linked by blood to the type of emotional character of Jewish national melodies.”66


62. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bol-shevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 208.

63. Weiner, Making Sense of War, 192.64. Glezer, M. F. Gnesin, 312; letter from M. O. Shteinberg to E. F. Gnesina, 8 February

1944, quoted in Tropp, Artmova, and Barannikov, eds., Gnesinskii dom, 150–51.65. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 269, ll. 49–50 (Letter from M. F. Gnesin to M. O. Shteinberg,

2 March 1944). See also Grigor eva, “Pis΄ma M. F. Gnesina,” 90.66. Reza Glezer, “Sonata-Fantasia M. F. Gnesina,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 7 (1946):

43–44, 53–54.


In 1947 the trio appeared in print from the Soviet State Music Publish-ing House. The editor responsible for publishing it was Gnesin’s old friend, Levon Tadevosovich Atovmian, who had courageously defended Gnesin in the RAPM attacks of 1931.67 Multiple articles in Eynikayt over the course of the late 1940s make reference to the work. While none of these specifi cally cite it as a work of Jewish remembrance, they oft en note the “subconscious current of national physiognomy” pulsing through it.68 Gnesin himself encouraged this interpretation of his work, as refl ected in a letter he wrote to an American musicologist in 1945:

Do I still compose at all “in modo Judaico”? Many of my works are linked to a conscious search for a Jewish style in music. . . . Alongside those works, Jewish musical elements have also infi ltrated my musical taste and imagina-tion, such that even when I don’t consciously try to write in a Jewish style, they begin to appear in my compositions. I think that they are very visible for instance . . . in my recent Trio, op. 63 (“In Memory of Our Perished Children”), and in my just completed piano quartet, op. 64 (“Sonata-Fantasia”). Immer-sion in Jewish folk music helped me to understand the language of folk art more generally. As a result, I became “more democratic” as an artist.69

Notwithstanding the obligatory Soviet ideological qualifi cation of the last sentence, Gnesin’s statement is striking for its evocation of a Jewish national ethos permeating the entirety of his work. This accorded with his image in the postwar period as an exponent of “Jewish Soviet music.”70 He is both a “great Soviet composer and, along with that, one of the leading modern Jewish com-posers,” wrote Ia. Frankel in one Eynikayt profi le; both a “fervent patriot of his socialist fatherland” and a composer whose “creative output is closely linked to his people.”71 These journalistic codes operated much like Gnesin’s piece: manifestly Jewish without any specifi c allusion to the particulars of Jewish mass death.

Gnesin’s own fi nal oblique gloss on the work came in a 1949 autobio-graphical essay. Describing the genesis of the trio and the piano quartet in the war years, he again mentioned his son’s death and the use of his melody in the trio. (He did not disclose the Yiddish folksong melody.) Then, turning to the sonata-fantasia, he noted that, alongside its general depiction of “the people’s suff erings in recent years,” the one theme with “a certain optimism was inspired by a terrifi c humanitarian and charitable fi gure, my tragically murdered friend Dr. Rafail Fabianovich.” Rafail Fabianovich Tiktin was an eighty-two-year-old Jewish doctor from Rostov-on-Don, Gnesin’s hometown,

67. Nelli Kravets, ed., Riadom s velikimi: Atovm΄ian i ego vremia (Moscow, 2012), 411n31.

68. Frenkel, “Sovetisher kompozitor,” 23.69. Letter from M. F. Gnesin to R. B. Fisher, 6 April 1945, quoted in Krivosheevoi, ed.,

Vs. Meierkhol΄d i Mikhail Gnesin, 143. Gnesin also once remarked to his student Abram Iusfi n, “My Jewishness is the subsoil [podpochva] from which the very ways in which I think, feel, see, understand, and misunderstand the world, people, and myself grew.” Abram Iusfi n, “Kto ia est΄?,” Al΄manakh “moriia,” no. 6 (2006): n.p.

70. S. Polonsky, “Shafn muzikalishe verk farn folk,” Eynikayt 49, 22 April 1948, 3; Moyshe Beregovskii “Vegn der hayntsaytiker yidisher lid,” Eynikayt 108, 4 September 1947, 3.

71. Ia. Frenkel, “Muzikalishe sezon in Moskve,” Eynikayt, February 1946.

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who was murdered by the Germans in one of the largest atrocities of the war on Russian soil in August 1942.72

All of these Jewish readings of the trio relied on subtle cues and musical clues inside the larger Gnesin oeuvre to hint at the Holocaust. They point to the persistent ambiguities that confronted Soviet Jewish listeners as well as the ideological pressures that shaped the way music could be heard.73 Mean-while, outside the Soviet Union, Holocaust readings of Gnesin’s work began to appear in the immediate postwar years. Writing in Palestine in November 1947, the critic Moshe Gorali singled out Gnesin’s latest chamber works as be-ing written “in memory of the children of Israel who died in the war.”74 But ironically, the strongest Holocaust reading came neither in British Palestine nor in the Soviet Union but next door, in postwar Poland.

Many Jewish communist writers spent the war in the Soviet Union, forg-ing close ties with the JAC. They returned home to Poland at war’s end. Even as Stalin’s secret police focused on eliminating the last remnants of Polish nationalist opposition to communist rule, these Polish Jewish communists, together with their Zionist and Bundist rivals, found themselves briefl y em-powered to articulate a fragile but real public memory of the Holocaust. It was in this context, surprisingly enough, that Gnesin’s music surfaced, in 1948, on the fi ft h anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Just as it did in Soviet Russia, the politics of Holocaust memory proved equally controversial in postwar Poland. Soviet authorities would not counte-nance the idea of an elaborate public commemoration of the Jewish military uprising against the Nazis.75 “It simply cannot be,” Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslov Molotov reportedly declared, “that the fi rst postwar memorial in Poland, where so many Poles have died, should be for Jews.’” Such a monu-ment would only serve the cause of Jewish nationalism rather than commu-nist internationalism.76 Jewish death could not displace Polish death.

Despite this Soviet interference, on 19 April 1948 a massive crowd gath-ered to dedicate the new memorial with speeches and prayers, including “El mole rakhamim,” the Jewish prayer for the dead. The same day, Gnesin’s piece

72. Mikhail Gnesin, “Avtobiografi ia,” in R. Glezer, Mikhail Gnesin, 173.73. For a similar discussion of Jewish themes in Shostakovich’s work, see Judith

Kuhn, Shostakovich in Dialogue: Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1–7 (Burlington, Vt., 2010), 64–66.

74. Moshe Gorali, “Ha-‘eskolah ha-musikalit ha-yehudit,” Davar, 13 November 1947, 22.

75. Shimon Redlich, K. M. Anderson, and I. Al tman, eds., War, Holocaust and Stalin-ism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg, 1995), 84–85.

76. Hersh Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye, mit der letster hofenung (Tel Aviv, 1982), 103–7, 115–16. For more on the context of the memorial’s opening, see Michal Mirski and Hersch Smolar, “Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Reminiscences,” So-viet Jewish Aff airs 3, no. 1 (1973): 98–103; and Nathan Cohen, “Motives for the Emigration of Yiddish Writers from Poland (1945–1948),” in Elvira Grözinger and Magdalena Ruta, eds., Under the Red Banner: Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era (Wiesbaden, 2008), 157–64. See also August Grabski, Zydowski ruch kombatancki w Polsce w latach, 1944–1949 (Warsaw, 2002); and Bozena Szaynok, “Memoire de l’insurrection du ghetto de Varsovie (1944–1989),” in Jean-Charles Szurek and Annette Wieviorka, eds., Juifs et polonaise, 1939–2008 (Paris, 2009), 413–18.


was broadcast on Polish national radio. We know this because of a letter writ-ten to Gnesin by Hersh Smolar (1905–93), a Bolshevik activist, wartime parti-san, Yiddish writer, and head of the Cultural Section of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce). Smolar had led the Jewish resistance movement in the Minsk ghetto and fought alongside Belorussian partisans. Aft erward, he resettled in Warsaw and assumed a leading role in the reconstruction of Jewish cultural life. In the context of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial, he wrote to Gnesin, in Yiddish, “Your piano trio, dedi-cated to the memory of the murdered Jewish children [umgekumene yidishe kinder], was broadcast on Polish radio.”77 Smolar included with his letter a

77. RGALI, f. 2954, op. 1, d. 875, 1. 66 (Letter from G. Smolar to M. F. Gnesin, 24 June 1948). The radio show on which it was aired regularly ran four evenings a week. On the specifi c broadcast, see “‘Dos, vos es sharkt unz, iz der bavust zayn, az mir zaynen nisht eynzam’: Fun der aroystretung durkh radio fun Van Fraana,” Naye lebn 26, no. 195 (21 May 1948; 12 Iyyar 5708): 4. On Yiddish-language broadcasting on Polish radio in these years, see Jonas Turkow, Nokh der bafrayung: Zikhroynes (Buenos Aires, 1959), 33–51.

Figure 5. Letter from Hersh Smolar to Mikhail Gnesin, 24 June 1948. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.

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copy of Leon Vayner’s memorial cantata, “To the Polish Jews,” and another Yiddish song collection, Undzer zamlung.

It is tempting to conclude that to Smolar’s Jewish ears, Gnesin’s music represented an explicit monument to Jewish suff ering. Yet Smolar himself dis-played a decidedly complicated attitude toward Jewish victimhood and the theme of the Holocaust in communist eastern Europe. In 1948 he was already engaged in a vicious battle with his political opponents within the Polish Jew-ish community. As Stalinist forces began to ascend in the Polish communist leadership, Jewish communists loyal to Moscow such as Smolar found them-selves caught between Zionists, Polish nationalists, and Stalinist authori-ties. Holocaust memory became a prime confl ict zone. Less than a year later, Smolar denounced his fellow Jews precisely for singling out Jewish deaths in WWII. Acceding to the emerging Stalinist narrative, he went so far as to ar-gue, in 1949, for the physical elimination of traitorous Jewish “cowards” and weaklings in Polish communist society.78 It is unlikely that the Smolar of 1949 still referred to Gnesin’s trio as a memorial to the “murdered Jewish children.” That he could have plausibly reverted back to the original Russian title again points to the studied ambiguity of the piece.

Back in Moscow, the political winds also shift ed for Gnesin over the course of 1948 and 1949. His sixty-fi ft h birthday produced a string of lauda-tory profi les in Eynikayt. But a year later the paper had been shut down, as had the JAC. Its leadership was rounded up and accused of espionage, treason, and anti-Soviet Jewish bourgeois nationalism. In the musical sphere, the new campaign of anticosmopolitanism and antiformalism also took shape over the course of 1948. Friends and colleagues of Gnesin’s were arrested and sent to the gulag, including Dobrushin, ethnomusicologist Moyshe Beregovskii, and composer Aleksandr Veprik.

Gnesin was particularly vulnerable, due to his participation in a series of conversations in 1944 among JAC leaders about the prospect of launching a Jewish autonomous republic, with a Jewish national conservatory, in the Crimea aft er the war. Courting danger, he spoke up to directly challenge the launch of the anticosmopolitan campaign in Soviet music at the beginning of 1948.79 Beyond his comments protesting the new attack on formalism and de-fending modernist composers, including Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofi ev, he also associated himself personally with the Soviet composer Vano Mura-

78. Marci Shore, “Język, pamięć i rewolucyjna awangarda: Kształtowanie historii pow-stania w getcie warszawskim, 1944–1950,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Institytu Historycznego w Polsce 188, no. 3 (December 1998): 51. Snyder comments, “In the politically acceptable history of the Second World War, the resistance in the ghetto had little to do with the mass murder of Jews, and much to do with the courage of Communists. This fundamental shift of emphasis obscured the Jewish experience of the war, as the Holocaust became nothing more than an instance of fascism.” Snyder, Bloodlands, 355.

79. Soveshchanie deiatelei sovetskoi muzyki v TSK VKP(b) (Moscow, 1948), 148–52; “Vystupleniia na sobranii kompozitorov i muzykovedov g. Moskvy,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 1 (January–February 1948): 80–82; Marian Koval , Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s΄ezd kompo-zitorov: Stenografi scheskii otchet (Moscow, 1948), 194–99; Gnesina, “Ia chuvstvuiu sebia obiazannoi . . . ,” 135–38; and Patrick Zuk, “Nikolay Myaskovsky and the Events of 1948,” Music and Letters 93, no. 1 (2012): 61–85. For a general overview of this episode, see Kiril Tomoff , Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, 2006), 122–51.


deli (1908–70), whose opera The Great Friendship was at the center of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign’s launch. Gnesin also off ered an impassioned de-fense of Aleksandr Lokshin (1920–87), a young Moscow composer accused of reactionary formalism. In defending Lokshin and Muradeli, Gnesin chose to publicly confront Zhdanov in the sessions of the composers’ union.80 In another incident, he openly challenged an offi cial from the Ministry of For-eign Aff airs in the presence of a visiting dignitary about the repression of fellow composers. His musical works also represented a direct challenge to the aesthetic dictates of zhdanovshchina, which looked askance at abstract instrumental works without words or explicit programmatic themes attached to certify their political meanings.81 In the recollection of composer Albert Le-man, Gnesin stood out for these atypical displays of courage.82 According to Gnesin’s student, Iosif Ryzhkin, these improprieties also convinced Gnesin for a time during 1948 and 1949 that his arrest and execution were imminent.83

The feared arrest never happened. Instead, as part of a larger eff ort to purge the Soviet musical profession of its unseemly preponderance of Jews, the Soviet authorities attempted to close down the composition department of the Gnesin Musical Institute.84 Gnesin had served as dean of the depart-ment since his return to Moscow in 1944. To save it, he accepted forced retire-ment in 1951, handing his position over to one of his leading students, Aram Khachaturian.85 Still, Gnesin’s absence did little to quiet voices concerned about his ongoing infl uence there. A formal denunciation came in March 1953 from a group of Gnesin institute faculty who complained of a Jewish national-ist conspiracy in hiring at the school. “We believe that the mastermind of this vicious, essentially bourgeois-nationalist tendency is Professor M. F. Gnesin, who . . . [still] exerts a very great infl uence on it through his sister . . . [pro-moting] his Zionist, Jewish-nationalist [ideology].”86 To prove their case, these accusers pointed to Gnesin’s Jewish cultural activism, his travels to Palestine, and the fact that most of his musical works “are linked to Jewish themes and Jewish melodies.” They further noted that he had encouraged a student of his

80. Maria Lobanova, “Lokschins Schicksal im politisch-kulturellen Kontext der Sow-jetzeit,” in Rudolf Barshai, M. Lobanova, and E. Kuhn, eds., Ein unbekanntes Genie: Der Symphoniker Alexander Lokschin. Monografi en, Zeugnisse, Dokumente, Wuerdiungen (Ber-lin, 2000), 28; Aleksandr Lokshin, “Die Jahre 1948 und 1949 im Leben meines Vaters,” in Barshai, Lobanova, and Kuhn, eds., Ein unbekanntes Genie, 156–57. On Gnesin’s partici-pation in this event, see Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 1 (January 1950): 49–50. Gnesin further registered his distaste for the politically driven theories of Soviet music in a 1948 article, “O Russkom simfonizme,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 6 (August 1948): 41–50, and no. 2 (Feb-ruary 1949): 50–54.

81. Anna Ferenc, “Music in the Socialist State,” in Edmunds, ed., Soviet Music and Society, 16.

82. Dyn΄kin, “Evreiskaia muzyka.”83. Iosif Ia. Ryzhkin, “Moi vstrechi s Mikhailom Fabianovichem Gnesinym,” in Tropp,

ed., Gnesinskii istoricheskii sbornik, 56–57.84. On the context of the antisemitic purges in the Soviet musical profession at this

time, see Tomoff , Creative Union, 164–88.85. Tropp, “Biografi ia,” 45–46.86. A. V. Bogdanova, Muzyka i vlast : Poststalinskii period (Moscow, 1995), 194. On the

Gnesin Musical Institute’s negotiation of Soviet cultural politics in the 1950s and 1960s, see Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, 2008), 40–73.

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to write a symphonic work to the melody of “Hatikvah.”87 Whether because of Stalin’s timely death the same month or the intercession of his student Tikhon Khrennikov, now head of the composer’s union, Gnesin once again escaped direct repression.

Aft er his death, in 1957, Gnesin’s reputation lived on, but his trio did not. Unrecorded, and absent from concert repertoire, the piece faded fairly quickly from view. There were a few attempts to promote its virtues. Writing in vol-ume 3 of the offi cial Istoriia russkoi sovetskoi muzyki (History of Russian Soviet Music), published in 1959, musicologist Igor Boelza singled out the trio at both the beginning and end of his chapter surveying wartime instrumental works. It was one of the most “original” works, Boelza writes, notable for its suc-cessful “programmatic” depiction of the “struggles and suff erings of man, the highest humanitarian ideals of Soviet people.” Inspired by the “events of the Great Patriotic war,” Gnesin’s “deeply aff ecting, soulful” piece calls to mind the “tradition of Russian elegiac trios by [Petr] Tchaikovskii, [Anton] Aren-sky, [and Sergei] Rachmaninoff .”88 A similar move of ascribing Russianness to the piece came from composer Iulian Krein, in his 1961 contribution to Gne-sin’s memorial volume. Even as Krein describes audible strains of traditional Jewish cantorial improvisations at the heart of the trio’s melodies, he recasts the work in the grand “tradition of Russian Orientalism” by which Russian composers from Mikhail Glinka onward wrote Russian music using Jewish themes.89 Yet neither stripping the trio of its Holocaust connotations nor em-phasizing its “Russian” paternity ensured its longevity. The 1963 Sovetskaia kamerno-instrumental΄naia muzyka (Soviet Chamber-Instrumental Music), by Jewish musicologist Lev Raaben, himself a former target of the anticosmopoli-tan campaign, discussed Gnesin’s sonata-fantasia in depth but omitted any reference to the trio.90 Over time, the trio became little more than a title men-tioned in passing in periodic anniversary tributes from former disciples and friends.91 In the postwar United States, it even vanished from the programs of the small cultural circle committed to preserving the musical legacy of Rus-sian Jewish composers.92

87. G. Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachala do kul΄minatsii: 1938–1953 (Moscow, 2005), 346–48; G. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast΄ i anti semitizm (Moscow, 2001), 553. For another instance of the accusation of secretly using “Hatikvah” in Soviet music, see Tomoff , Creative Union, 166.

88. Igor Boelza, “Instrumental΄naia muzyka,” in V. A. Vasina-Grossman, ed., Istoriia russkoi sovetskoi muzyki, vol. 3, 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1959), 338, 422.

89. R. Glezer, “Muzykant-Grazhdanin,” Sovetskaia muzyka, no. 6 (1957): 1–8, and no. 5 (1957): 76–81; Krein, “M. F. Gnesin,” 52, 55.

90. Lev Nikolaevich Raaben, Sovetskaia kamerno-instrumental΄naia muzyka (Lenin-grad, 1963), 92–93. Gnesin’s work, referred to as a “Memorial Trio,” still earned a pass-ing mention in M. E. Tarakanov, ed., Istoriia sovremennoi otechestvennoi muzyki, vol. 2, 1941–1958 (Moscow, 1999), 233.

91. A. G. Yusfi n, “Michael Fabianovitch Gnesin,” program note to August 2002 con-cert, at www.joodsemuziekprojecten.nl/uk/pdf/gnepro_yusfi n_sum_uk.pdf (last ac-cessed 17 April 2014).

92. To take one example, the 1968 brochure of the National Jewish Music Council failed to include Gnesin’s trio in a list of his chamber works available for musicians and concert programmers interested in Russian Jewish repertoire. National Jewish Music Council, Articles on Jewish Music (New York, 1968), 8–16.


Since the 1990s, Gnesin’s trio has received a new wave of interest from musicians in post-Soviet Russia, central Europe, and the United States. The ongoing reshaping of Soviet Jewish memory is refl ected in the contemporary interpretations of the trio’s meaning. These recordings and performances typ-ically cast the piece as lost Russian Jewish art music or Soviet futurism rather than a specifi c piece of Holocaust representation.93 Writing in 2004, Gnesin’s former student Iosif Ryzhkin spoke of the trio as one of his mentor’s great-est works, intertwining personal loss with the generic loss of Soviet children: “One might say that the trio embodies tragic experiences on two interlocking levels; a response both to the premature death of Mikhail Fabianovich’s son and to the loss of so many children from the very beginning of the Second World War. . . . This trio should be performed annually on the days for the defense of children.”94 Ryzhkin elsewhere mentions the trio as an example of Gnesin’s “fusion” (splav) of Russian and Jewish national elements.95 Even a recent discussion by another Gnesin disciple, composer Abram Iusfi n, men-tions the Yiddish folk song’s presence yet makes no reference to the piece as a work depicting the Holocaust. The trio, writes Iusfi n, is perfect evidence of “Jewish music without special reference to its national origins.”96

In the fi nal analysis, is Gnesin’s trio then a work of Holocaust music? To judge by its absence from contemporary Holocaust commemorative contexts, the answer is no. But this merely points to the strangeness of the entire cat-egory of Holocaust music as presently imagined. As Gnesin’s biography sug-gests, he was threatened by two diff erent totalitarian regimes over the course of his life. And he was twice a victim of ideological persecution fueled in part by antisemitism. He was, in fact, the only Soviet Jewish composer ever spe-cifi cally banned by the Nazis.97 Yet he never had any direct contact with the Nazi regime. And throughout his long career in Soviet society Gnesin also re-mained a highly valued, even honored member of the state-sponsored artistic elite. Even if, as Iusfi n claims, Gnesin’s compositions were in later decades held back from performance because of their Jewish associations, it would still strain reality to label him a “repressed” composer—either in terms of Na-zism or Stalinism.98

93. For an exception, see Slepovich, “Evreiskaia kompozitorskaia shkola.”94. Ryzhkin, “Moi vstrechi,” 54.95. I. Ia. Ryzhkin, “Sootnoshenie natsional΄nykh istokov v muzykal΄nom tvorchestve

Mikhaila Gnesina i Al΄freda Shnitke—k postanovke voprosa (tezisy),” in B. B. Granovskii, ed., Evreiskaia muzyka: Izuchenie i prepodovanie. Materialy konferentsa (Moscow, 1996) (Moscow, 1998), 49.

96. Yusfi n, “Michael Fabianovitch Gnesin,” and Abram Iusfi n, “Jewish Music in its Offi cial Epoch of Non-Existence,” in Braun, Karbusický, and Hoff mann, eds., Verfemte Musik, 184. See also Flomenboim, “Ha-eskolah ha-le’umit,” 190–208.

97. Friedrich Geiger, Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Kassel, 2004), 100.

98. Yusfi n, “Michael Fabianovitch Gnesin.” On the politics of musical programming and blacklisting, see Elena Vlasova, “Repertuarnaia politika v muzykal΄nom iskusstve Stalinskoi epokhi,” in Iu. Pozanova, I. A. Skvortsova, and E. G. Sorokina, eds., Iz istorii russkoi muzykal΄noi kul tury: Pamiati Alekseia Ivanovicha Kandinskogo (Moscow, 2002), 153–167; A. V. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total΄nogo terror, 1929–1953 (St. Peters-burg, 2000), 243–51; and Robert Enz, “Sowjetische Repertoirepolitik in der Stalinzeit am Beispiel Moskauer und Leningrader Opern- und Balletttheater wie Philharmonien” (PhD diss., Ruprcht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, 2006), 366–416.

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Gnesin’s wartime representation of death and loss is similarly ambigu-ous. Instead of an act of explicit engagement with Jewish suff ering, his music deliberately blurs the lines between private pain and public commemoration, between personal memory and political statement, and between Soviet Jews and the rest of the Soviet population. As a result, Gnesin’s trio is neither sim-ply Holocaust music nor Soviet war music. It’s both—and yet neither. By de-sign, the work’s meaning depends on the aural screen we apply to it. As a work of contemporaneous witness to the Holocaust, Gnesin’s piece is an important achievement. With its specifi c allusion to Jewish suff ering, it is in one sense a founding contribution to the musical literature from the Holocaust. It is also undeniably an affi rmation of Jewish identifi cation with the broader, collective Soviet war experience.

This “doubleness” is a theme now familiar to us from studies of Shostako-vich’s music.99 It has even been suggested that Gnesin’s music, including his trio, served as a model for Shostakovich’s own style.100 Regardless of possible infl uence, the key conclusion is that this dualism was not a mere strategy for survival. Nor is it simply a “hidden language of resistance,” a philosophical refrain about human existence of the kind oft en ascribed to Shostakovich.101 Shostakovich’s music has been described as an aesthetic of the grotesque, due to its deliberate combination of seemingly incongruous musical elements—Jewish and Russian. Gnesin’s trio, by contrast, rests instead on an aesthetic of harmony or “fusion.”102 The Jewish elements have been smoothed over to the point that they are potentially inaudible.

In broader cultural terms, Gnesin’s trio refl ects a unique Russian Jewish expression of the experience of war and genocide. By refusing to disentangle the particularism of Jewish experience in Russia from the larger trajectory of Russian history, the trio paradoxically affi rms the Holocaust as a category of musical art and frustrates the very meaning of the category. We can hear both the Soviet and the Jewish inside the music because both are there by design, waiting to be heard. In deliberately commingling themes of Nazi antisemi-tism, the east European Jewish past, Soviet wartime solidarity, and personal loss, Gnesin attempts to avoid having to choose one single meaning for him-self or his listeners.

Besides blurring the line between Soviet war suff ering and Jewish Ho-locaust experience, there is another way in which Gnesin’s work challenges contemporary notions of Holocaust art. We tend to classify much wartime mu-

99. Joachim Braun, “The Double Meaning of Jewish Elements in Dimitri Shostako-vich’s Music,” Musical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1985): 68–80; Esti Sheinberg, “Jewish Existen-tial Irony as Ethos in the Music of Shostakovich,” in Pauline Fairclough and David Fan-ning, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge, Eng., 2008), 350–67; Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley, 2009), 302–5; and Kuhn, Shostakovich in Dialogue, 44–56.

100. Ryzhkin, “Moi vstrechi,” 58; Iu. Krein, “M. F. Gnesin,” 37. See also Flomenboim, “The Work of Michael Gnesin,” 155–59.

101. Joachim Braun, “Jewish Art Music and Jewish Musicians in the Soviet Union, 1917–1950’s,” in Braun, Karbusický, and Hoff mann, eds., Verfemte Musik, 131–32; Shein-berg, Irony, Satire, Parody, 301–19.

102. Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, 302–9.


sical expression about the Holocaust, particularly songs sung or composed in camps and ghettoes as reactions to lived experiences. The choice to sing a cer-tain song in its original version or to author new lyrics signifi es an individual response. By contrast, we speak of pieces composed aft er 1945 as a post-event interpretation or an act of commemoration. Gnesin’s work suggests this is a false distinction. By marking all Jewish musical expression during the war as Holocaust art, we risk placing a monstrous burden of historical weight on it, squeezing the untidy diversity of horrors and suff erings contained in the Jewish experience of the Holocaust into a tight cordon of generic suff ering. And by assigning post-1945 music to the category of memorial art, we strip it of its immediacy: music becomes a form of post-event remembering rather than a direct emotional response. Because Gnesin’s piece was written over the course of 1942 and 1943, during the war, but really only entered the public realm aft er 1945, the trio sits right on the temporal border between a docu-ment of lived experience and an ex post facto memory act. Its very liminality frustrates any attempt to defi ne Holocaust music—Soviet or otherwise—as a category strictly based on chronological periodization.

If we take Gnesin’s trio seriously, we must consider the possibility that there is no such thing as Holocaust music. Every attempt to construct such a genre requires lumping together works of disparate origins, both famous and obscure, through an arbitrary set of highly problematic ascribed charac-teristics. If we choose the radical option of limiting this imaginary canon to ethnically Jewish composers, we are left grappling awkwardly with the defi ni-tions of Jewishness promulgated through ideologies of racial persecution. If we rely instead on the now rampant clichés about art music that thematically “bears witness” or testifi es to “spiritual resistance,” we severely restrict the rich meanings in and around the work. Naming a genre provides the false comfort of coherence. But it does not move us closer to apprehending the ways in which Jews and others in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and beyond imagined the sounds of war and genocide. If we really wish to hear the Holo-caust in Soviet music, we must fi rst start by asking what we gain, and what we lose, in applying our cultural labels to their historical music. It is our own listening that is at stake, even before we can imagine theirs.

"In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children": Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture

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