THE SONGWRITERS

The men and women who created and performed this music were the kind of people who make edgy entertainment thrive in any age, in any country - some seasoned composers, conductors, and lyricists, but mostly youn, curious, brash theater artists and musicians, filled with new music and new ideologies, loyal, funny, sexy, sociable, angry, unafraid, driven. Many of the composers and lyricists, raised in a world of crumbling institutions, were only in their early to mid twenties when they found themselves deported to chaotic, jumbled pseudo-communities with their terrified, dislocated parents - educations disrupted, without jobs, longing to work, to study, to travel freely, to know what comes next. They created what was to come next: entertainment for people who could not be comforted, diversions for people staring into their own deaths. The cabarets were staged for those who could afford to attend the clubs and theaters that operated throughout the existence of the Ghettos in Warsaw, Vilna, Krakow, Lodz, and Bialystok - cities that had sustained Yiddish theaters in the years before World War II.

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Open concerts in makeshift halls served the larger mass audiences. Hebrew and Yiddish choral societies regrouped after deportations. Orchestras were put together. Instruments scavenged from abandoned apartments were smuggled into Ghettos from the "Aryan" side. Street singers improvised topical songs in the public spaces of the Ghetto, standing on crates, stairs, or overpasses to be seen and heard. Performers in musical reviews carried their scripts and their instruments past those protesting "putting on plays in a cemetary". They rehearased. They tried to maintain professional discipline. A director in Vilna issued fines to those who came late to rehearsal, eventually fining himself when hunger and illness delayed his arrival at the theater. They printed posters publicizing performances. Their audiences came, listened, laughed, grieved, wept, applauded. Leaders of the Jewish councils, appointed by the Germans to administer the Ghettos, regularly sat in the audience, listening for excessive critique, suggesting what pieces might be censored if repeated again in performance.

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Today, in a handful of archives, you can see the typescripts and handwritten pages of song texts that someone thought to pass on to a friend before being "selected" for a final deportation - documentation of something rare, scarcely conceivable: art at the edge of the abyss.