Gary Tischler, Lithuanian Embassy
With
all the great music and musicians, the social schmoozing opportunities, and the
convivial receptions, the Embassy Series exists primarily as an effective tool
to conduct cultural diplomacy. Sometimes, an
event can transcend mission and goals, and even the pure enjoyment of
great music. At the Lithuanian Embassy last week, the power of music to
transform its listeners, attach itself to memory, resurrect the past and make
the moment a personal experience was on full display when Embassy Series
founder Jerome Barry presented the program "Songs from the Vilnius
Ghetto."
Barry, a noted baritone, accompanied by Michael Adcock on piano, resurrected
the ghosts of a long ago tragedy that struck the Jewish residents of Vilnius in
Lithuania with the coming of the Germany army. Two ghettos, one a
veritable killing ground, were created in which Jews lived in the same horrible
conditions that existed in Jewish ghettos throughout occupied Europe, characterized by roundups, selections, random
murders and shootings, starvation, daily systematic terror and the destruction
of families. Nearly 200,000 Lithuanian Jews
died in the Holocaust.
On the day that is memorialized in Lithuania as Holocaust Remembrance Day and
during the holy days of Yom Kippur, Barry sang songs and music written not by
Mozart or Beethoven, but often nameless and anonymous residents of the Vilnius
Ghetto, sometimes in Yiddish, sometimes in
Hebrew. Many of the songs were almost unbearably sad, still others were
remarkably buoyant and even celebratory, looking to a future that for
most of them didn't exist. All of the songs, always tinged with a
feeling of loss and a trickle of hope, were sung with tremendous power . The
music and songs resurrected the daily life of the ghettos, where the sight
of birds, the sound of wind at night, the darkness descending, the memories of
children and parents gone into the night, the voices of partisans and street
peddlers, all achieved a vivid reality to the point that a kind of resurrection
was achieved.
For a time, you forgot where you were--in a hall in a small embassy,
sitting in the company of the ambassador, his wife, retired diplomat, listening
to music not heard anywhere else in this city, not in Adams
Morgan, once sung by people the majority of whom did not survive the
life they led in the ghetto.
For those in attendance, it appeared to be an extraordinarily powerful,
moving evening impossible to duplicate or to forget.
Gary Tischler
