Forward.com

Defined by QualityConcerts and CDs featuring composers who died during the Holocaust have become commonplace, with such once forgotten names as Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), Pavel Haas (1899–1944) and Gideon Klein (1919–1945) receiving posthumous tributes. Yet these honors, sincere and well deserved as they undoubtedly are, tend to type composers and their music in the somber region of historical tragedy. They define a musician by the way he died, which was certainly not any individual’s artistic choice. No one would think of calling Johann Sebastian Bach a “stroke” composer or Robert Schumann a “syphilis” composer, yet involuntary death in a Nazi prison camp continues to define a generation of composers who deserve more individuated identifications. Weighty works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bloch were played at a November 9 concert in Berlin to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the violently antisemitic “Night of Broken Glass,” yet not every composer is suitable for such a highly charged occasion.
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Symphonies Lost and FoundYou would have thought that musicians who escaped fascist Germany would feel liberated to compose in freedom. Not so. Restarting a career in a new country at any time is full of pitfalls, and even outside Germany, conservative musical tendencies in the 1930s were equated, rightly or wrongly, with the Nazi rejection of “degenerate” art.
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Being a Profound Critical Analysis of Contemporary Jewish Comedic LiteratureWhen the arts and culture editor of the Forward assigned me the task of reviewing a new book on Jewish comedy, I was thrilled. This would be my first go as a “literary critic,” and I have to tell you, it really impressed my new girlfriend.
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