Delving into “what if” scenarios is, I suppose, a fundamentally pointless exercise. But, when somebody somehow gets through one life-threatening scrape after another to live a long life, one is entitled to consider the alternative denouements.
That Marta Wise (née Weiss) and the vast majority of her close relatives survived the Holocaust, is nothing short of miraculous. But survive she did, thereafter emigrating from her native Bratislava, Slovakia, to Australia, with her family in 1948. She married Harold Wise, an Englishman, had three daughters and, eventually, numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, making aliyah in 1998. Her daughter, Michelle Shir, says there is much to celebrate in Marta’s life to which the next slot in the Into The Light concert series is dedicated.
The event takes place at the Tel Aviv Museum on July 15 (8 p.m.), under the aegis of the Spectacular World of Jewish Music (SWJM) nonprofit established by Yaakov Fisher. The concert proffers an impressive roster of works, including scores by the likes of Jewish Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans, Galicia-born French composer Norbert Glanzberg whose varied oeuvre incorporates songs he wrote for French diva Edith Piaf, who helped protect him from the occupying Nazis forces. And there are charts by Jewish Italian composer and pianist Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Jewish Turkish composer and ethnomusicologist Alberto Hemsi, who specialized in Ladino music, and non-Jewish Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi who actively opposed the Nazis.
Over the years SWIM has staged numerous concerts, predominantly in Jerusalem and also in Tel Aviv, with the expressed aim of unveiling the fruits of Jewish composers murdered during the Holocaust, and other who suffered but survived, and some were forced into exile. Much of this vast rich body of work was lost to the world for decades and, particularly since Fisher stepped into the scene, more and more scores have been unearthed in archives around the world and are being presented to audiences of people of all ages and cultural backgrounds.
The July 15 date, which goes by the apt header of Memories of a Lost World, sees Nir Cohen-Shalit once again take the conductor’s podium, on this occasion to preside over the Israel Camerata Jerusalem. There is also a heavyweight soloist cast lined up, including celebrated pianist Ofra Yitzhaki and mezzo-soprano vocalist Reut Ventorerro, with actor Eli Gornstein serving as MC and enlightening the patrons about the historical and musical backdrop to the event.
Australian-born Shir will also be on hand to share some of her mother’s extraordinary life story with the audience, in English. “My mother was a survivor,” she says. “That encourages me. She was an incredible mother and an incredible person.”
Against all odds
THE ODDS against Marta surviving were well and truly stacked. Among her many close shaves with death there was the choice she made not to join a group of children who were due to sail to Palestine in 1944. She preferred to return home to Bratislava after spending two years in Hungary with distant relatives. That hideaway was curtailed when the Germans invaded Hungary. The boat that left for Palestine sank en route. There were no survivors.
Eventually, Marta and her sister Eva, three years her senior, were betrayed and deported initially to the Séréd transit camp and, a few weeks later, to the Auschwitz-II-Birkenau death camp. There, too, it seemed that Marta’s fate was sealed when she was directed to the group of Jews who were to be gassed on arrival while Eva, older and presumably thought by the Nazis to be of more use, went to the other side. At that very moment, Soviet planes flew overhead and, in the ensuing panic, the two groups closed ranks and Marta was saved from the gas chambers.
As all the works featured in the concert were written in the 20th century, folks who prefer their music on the melodic side might be forgiven for having concerns over the user-friendliness of the repertoire. Cohen-Shalit says there is no little cause for alarm. “There are some works that are a little more musically complex, but there is no avant-garde here and no advanced atonal music.”
But, of course, Monday’s event is not just about the music. There is a life, a long life, to be marked and celebrated. “I don’t know if Marta defined herself as feminist, but she was certainly an inspirational character and she went through a thing or two during her lifetime.”
With that in mind, the conductor, who also wrote arrangements for the two Glanzberg songs in the program, was keen to include women in the venture. “In addition to Reut [Ventorerro] and Ofra [Yitzhaki] there is also material by a female composer,” Cohen-Shalit notes referencing Bosmans’s “Three Lieder on German Texts” arranged by 20th-century Dutch composer Joep Straesser.
German-born Israel Prize laureate composer Paul Ben-Haim also contributed to the Memories of a Lost World performance, with Cohen-Shalit opting for his 1971 work “Rhapsody for piano and strings.” “Ben-Haim falls under the category of the composers and musicians who were persecuted by the Nazis,” he observes. “I think of our repertoire as comprising cycles with, for example, composers like Pavel Haas who was murdered in the Holocaust, and wrote the work we play [“Study for Strings”] in Terezin [concentration camp in Czechoslovakia] that lies at the heart of our repertoire.”
The lineup is also quite variegated, arcing from German-language lieder through to Hemsi’s Ladino-based “Four Songs from Coplas Sefardies,” op. 34, arranged by 74-year-old Menachem Wiesenberg. It is a multilayered program that befits the cultural mosaic that is the state of Israel.
Marta, no doubt, would have enjoyed the salute. “In the videos she made my mum talked about her belief in God, which I think is incredible,” Shir says. “And she expressed her pride in being Jewish.”
Marta also felt a strong bond with Zionism, and her family. “My parents would have come on aliyah much earlier but she was completely devoted to her parents [in Australia]. So she only came here after they passed away. We got our education from somewhere,” Shir chuckles.
No doubt the Tel Aviv Museum audience will learn a thing or two on Monday too.
For tickets and more information: *6119 and www.GoShow.co.il
