Songs Never Silenced

Songs Never Silenced ** arranged by Velvel Pasternak. Tara Books. Jewish. Book with CD. 194 pages. Tara Publications #1928918263. Published by Tara Publications.

In l948, a Holocaust survivor named Shmerke Kaczerginsky wrote down the songs that he remembered from the camps or that he could gather from others. The book consisted of the lyrics for 220 songs, together with the handwritten, melody transcriptions of 100 of them. Velvel Pasternak somehow discovered this forgotten book and has given it new life in this edition, which contains those songs for which there were written melodies, plus a few more from other sources, and a small section of songs without melodies that were simply too powerful to leave out. The book begins with a translation of Kaczerginskys introduction, written in Paris, just after the war. Whoever reads these folksongs or listens to them sung on the accompanying CD by some of the great artists of our time, will have a glimpse into the holy of holies that existed midst the destruction of the Holocaust. Hardcover.