ABOUT ANDRÉ

Instead of a resume

Then My Songs Will Return...

How silent it is everywhere
My songs have been slain,
No longer do I sing or play,
My poor muse is asleep.
(…)

Fields weep, the world sheds tears
Over the men gone and killed.
Black gales blow from the west
Only Satan claps his hands.

I believe the day will come,
When all the guns hush up,
Then my songs will return,
My muse will be woken by God…

These verses, created by Agnieszka Osiecka, were inspired by Mordechai Gebirtig’s poem „Ikh hob shoyn lang“ which the poet wrote in January 1941. In July 1995, I sang them in a comprehensive recital based exclusively on Gebirtig’s poetry, with his own compositions, as well as new music by Ewa Kornecka. In those days, together with Agnieszka Osiecka, we read all Gebirtig’s poems available to us, and together we arranged the recital, to which Ewa Kornecka composed her first songs to Yiddish poetry. I remember the delight with which Agnieszka Osiecka translated his verses into Polish. In Gebirtig, she found her true soulmate, feeling a strong bond to him both as a human being and a poet. She joined us whenever we had a concert and talked about the poet before each performance. She cared so much! At that time nobody thought of a Yiddish song collection; however, then it all began…

Some time later, in Israel, my dear friend Jenny Kirshenberg gave me as a present a wonderful book with collected poems by Itzik Manger. As reading Yiddish texts in the original Hebrew notation exceeded my skills then, my teacher of Yiddish, Prof. Edward Kisler, undertook the titanic task of copying the whole bulky volume by hand, transliterating the poems to the Latin alphabet. And next came the unforgettable time of studying the poetry and selecting the poems for Ewa Kornecka so that she could compose music to subsequent Yiddish songs. The effect of our efforts was the recital „My Blue“ with the Polish Philharmonic Sinfonia Baltica, directed by Bohdan Jarmołowicz, which was premiered in July 2001 at the Music Theater in Gdynia in commemoration of the poet’s 100th birthday.

And I believe it was then that I understood it was my path...

So, I started reading poems by various Yiddish poets in their original versions as well as translations. I collected numerous volumes of Yiddish poetry published all over the world, many of which were presents from people who shared my passion.

I managed to invite many splendid composers to create new Yiddish songs for the collection YIDDISHLAND. Thirteen premieres, including all 120 songs from the collection, were produced in our Agnieszka Osiecka Atelier Theater in Sopot in collaboration with Polish and international artists from Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Belarus, Russia, Chile, Slovakia, the USA and Israel.

I am so grateful for all of this…

I am thankful that somehow I became a medium for the poets included in the collection. I am thankful that the spirit of their poetry touched me and has stayed with me for so long enriching my life all the time.
I am grateful that I was destined to make Gebirtig’s dream come true at least a bit. Not only have his songs returned, but also new ones have been created in Polin, which once seemed a promised land to Jewish sisters and brothers, but was turned by the Germans to their greatest cemetery instead. I am thankful to so many broad- minded people of warm hearts, without whose help and kind support this collection would have never seen the light of day, and first of all, to the ambitious people from „słowo/obraz terytoria“ who decided to publish the songbook.

Yet, the person I am most grateful to is Adam Żuchowski, the coauthor of the collection. His unique talent, imagination and modern vision of art, as well as profound feeling of poetry and readiness to cross frontiers, have led me as an interpreter of these songs to new shores on and on.

Our mutual record company, the Alef Music label, released the audio part of the YIDDISHLAND collection: 12 CD albums in a specially designed box. Certainly, it is not a coincidence that two albums in this collection: the first and the last one, feature poetry of the great Abraham Sutzkever, nor is it a co- incidence that his poem “Prayer” opens and closes the CD collection:

A prayer has been sailing in my veins for years
It will sail until waves harmonize it to a verse:
My good Lord, let us swap our memories,
I – will remember the beginning, You – the end.

(translated by Mira Michałowska)