On Sunday at JW3, an ambitious new music theatre performance produced by Dash Arts, Songs for Babyn Yar, will recall the massacre of almost 34,000 Jews in a ravine near Kiev, in September 1941, through a multilingual combination of music, poetry, and prose designed to move, challenge, and inspire.
For Svetlana Kundish, an acclaimed Ukrainian Yiddish singer based in Germany, working on the project for two years with her fellow performers, Yuriy Gurzhy and Mariana Sadovska, has been the hardest thing she has done.
When we talk via WhatsApp, Kundish is on a train back to Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony, where she serves as the Jewish community’s first female cantor.
“I’m coming out of rehearsals right now with a load of emotional stuff. This is the country where I’m from [Ukraine], where I was born [in Chernobyl, 1982], and where I spent the first 13 years of my life. And this is something I not only read about in books, but it’s part of what I’ve been doing professionally. As a Yiddish singer, there is no way for me to avoid tracing this chapter of history.”
Indeed, music played a vital role during the Holocaust by giving Jews a way to express their humanity in inhumane conditions. Songs were heard in, and written about, the ghettos and concentration camps, while escaped partisans often composed pieces to be sung in groups.
Although this is not the first time Kundish has dealt with the Holocaust, Songs for Babyn Yar feels particularly personal to her because of the involvement of a survivor she met among her congregants and the close friendship they formed.
Rachil Blankman was sent away from Kiev with a sick aunt by her parents, who stayed behind to wait for her missing brother to come home. “She got letters from her father to the family asking them to save her,” says Kundish, “and it took her a month to get to Siberia. The trains were bombed. There was nothing to eat. Millions of people were being evacuated. It was total chaos.”
The Germans occupied Kiev, and the family Blankman had left behind were murdered at Babyn Yar.
The orphaned teenager eventually returned, says Kundish, “and had to struggle for many years. There were years of hunger and of poverty, but she’s very strong, and she got a university degree and became an engineer.” She also developed wanderlust and travelled around the USSR. After the Soviet Union crumbled, she adopted Germany as a base from which to tour Europe.
“Her whole life story is a statement that despite everything, she found a way not only to survive, but also to live a happy life.”
The Ukrainian emigre is now the “main voice” of Songs for Babyn Yar, says Kundish. “We have excerpts from the story of her life incorporated into the body of the show, so her voice comes in and out at certain moments, and the music is in a dialogue with her memories.”
She gives an example: when Blankman returns to Kiev and refers to Babyn Yar as a pit, “a very old Hasidic nigun” reflects her thoughts and emotions, and conveys the show’s mixture of sadness and hope, with the lyric, “What’s the reason the soul descends or falls down from the highest mountain to the deepest pit?/The reason for descending is to rise up again.”
Although very private, Blankman immediately agreed to tell her story for inclusion in the show. In part this may have been to honour the strong bond she had with Kundish, but mostly it seems to have been a recognition that, at 93, she is coming to the end and “wants to be prepared”.
“In our synagogue we have this Tree of Life where you can purchase leaves on which the names of relatives or former community members are written. She paid for her family, and also for neighbours who she was close with before the war, because it’s important for her that the memory stays. And this is probably the key word: memory. So this is the reason she shared her story with us: she’s trying to leave some trace.”
This is all the more important for someone coming from a country where the Nazis and the Soviets attempted to erase Jews and their culture, and where taboos surrounding what happened during the Nazi occupation persist.
When the renowned Lithuanian soprano Nechama Lifshitz, under whom Kundish studied Yiddish music in Israel, sang Lullaby to Babyn Yar in Kiev, in 1965, she was arrested by the KGB and banned from performing in the USSR. Topics such as complicity in actions like Babyn Yar are still controversial in the post-Soviet era and rarely discussed. They must be, however, in order for there to be a chance of healing the wounds that continue to cause tensions within society.
“When we think about the Holocaust, people have this image of Jews and Roma people being taken on trains to concentration camps, but in eastern Europe they were killed on the spot. And very often the neighbours were the people, be it Ukrainians or Poles or Lithuanians, who collaborated with the Nazis,” says Kundish. “I think that Germany is probably the only country in Europe that faced up to their war crimes in the Holocaust, and this is something which allows me to work and live here as a Jewish person.”
She says Mariana Sadovska, who is also Ukrainian, confronts the issue of collaboration very forcefully in the show, which makes me ask if she is expecting the performance they’re due to give in Kiev to be a very different experience from London. “Well yeah,” she says, laughing. “I think that’s a rhetorical question.”
Kundish only began to learn about the Holocaust in detail herself after the Soviet Union fell apart and she started performing in concerts with her mother, who was also a professional Yiddish singer. She always knew her background, though.
“I knew that we were Jewish because my parents told me, but I didn’t really know what it meant. It didn’t go hand in hand with anything traditional. I just knew that it made me different from the other kids,” she says.
“For my parents, being Jewish had mostly to do with discrimination. To be Jewish meant that you’re the Other and that you have to protect yourself or be ready to be attacked.”
She describes herself as “a known hooligan” at school, who could hold her own against the boys. Often, when she’d “beaten them into a puddle”, all they had left to attack was her identity. “And so I got to hear things like, ‘It’s a pity Hitler didn’t kill all of you’ or ‘Dirty Jew’ . That was part of my childhood years.”
When she was 13, the family moved to Israel. They would have left earlier but her father wanted them to join relatives in Germany, while her mother was a Zionist, so they couldn’t agree on where to go. When the latter fell ill, they took the visa that was quickest to obtain.
Later, Kundish studied classical singing in Vienna, but after realising opera wasn’t her path, she enrolled in the cantorial programme at Berlin’s Abraham Geiger College. “I wanted to rediscover everything which my family had to hide and to suppress during the Soviet years,” she says. “My great grandparents were all very religious and Orthodox. So Yiddish songs and prayers in synagogue, I see this as my heritage.”
Knowing nothing about Judaism meant “learning everything from scratch”, which gave her an opportunity to decide “which part of it is going to become a part of my life and which is not. Which parts correspond with my personal beliefs and thoughts, and what is b******t.”
She is only one of a handful of female cantors in Germany, and admits that she is “facing a lot of issues as a woman in this profession. But that’s fine,” she laughs. “I’m used to discrimination.” Where does it come from mostly? “Religious b******t which says that women are impure, and they are not allowed to touch the Torah scroll or lead services, and their voice is subject to a sexual arousal, so a Jewish woman is not supposed to sing in front of a man. You know, oppressing women is a very big part of any religion. I’m not talking about every religion, because there are many streams within every religion today and also new religions which I’m probably not even aware of. I’m talking about the patriarchal ones, our three main Western religions.”
Her train is reaching its destination. Before she logs off, she tells me that she hopes Songs for Babyn Yar will be part of an ongoing conversation, and that people won’t just watch it, feel sad, and then move on.
“I want them to tell their children or grandchildren about it. I want them to keep the memory alive because this is a hard chapter of history and it should not be forgotten. And people who live in Ukraine, especially the young generation, they should know about it.”
Her dream is that the show and what they are trying to say will one day reach a wider audience. “I want it to be broadcast on Ukrainian television. I want people to accidentally push the button and end up on this channel and just listen. That’s what I want.”
