Zuzana Rusickova: Music is Life

“She’s a musical pioneer, a grande dame of her country’s music scene, the first person in the world to record the complete harpsichord music of Bach. As a teenager, she survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted the bubonic plague. As an adult, she lived through the height of the cold war in a communist country, under suspicion as a party nonmember and a Jew. Zuzana Rusickova, the Czech harpsichord player, is 90 years old. Her story sounds like a movie. Now, it is one.” —Anne Midgette, Washington Post (read the full feature, “A Survivor's Life in Music”)

3 min trailer for feature documentary about Zuzana Ruzickova, who became a world class musician while living behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, after surviving four concentration camps during her teenage years. She became the first and only person in the world to record all the keyboard works of Bach. Told by Zuzana herself, as she nears 90.

A 20th Century Passion

Giving a spotlight to composer Peter Gary's oratorio, “A Twentieth Century Passion” which was given a world premiere in 2016. 

Interweaving the haunting refrains from the world premiere of A Twentieth Century Passion, his oratorio in memory of the 6 million Jews massacred in the Second World War, the documentary tells the life journey of holocaust survivor and composer, A. Peter Gary.

Using a combination of in-depth interviews with Peter and archival footage from the 1940s, the story of his fate at the hands of the Nazis becomes the personal story that epitomizes the experience of millions. One terrible Christmas Eve Peter and his mother – along with 300 others – were taken in trucks to woods near the border with Poland; lined up, naked, on the edge of a ravine and mown down with machine–guns. Peter’s mother pushed him from behind, down the ravine. She was killed, but Peter and three others survived and made their way to Poland. Peter was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto. After four months there he was transported first to Majdanek then Dachau and ultimately Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated by the British Army on his 21st birthday. He weighed 76 pounds.

The horror of the concentration camps contrasts poignantly with current footage of Peter speaking to schoolchildren on Vancouver Island. Peter believes he owes it to the Jewish children who died and to future generations to speak out against hate and teach tolerance and understanding. “We must stamp out hate for our children. We must believe that we can and will do better.”…

See more at www.a20thcenturypassion.org

Adding to the Film Bibliography

The bibliography for the Mischlinge Éxpose goes beyond just books, to include films as well - so make sure you're checking in often as new resources are added. The latest additions include two new films, “We Were So Beloved” by Manfred Kirchheimer and “The Memory Thief” by Gil Kofman. “We Were So Beloved” was especially resonating as it was interesting to hear the understandably confusing mix of experiences and feelings from German Jews about their home country: nostalgia, disgust, loyalty, pride in what was… “The Memory Thief” was an incredibly unsettling look at an extreme expression of survivor guilt.

Johannes Reuchlin and the Frank L. Herz Collection

Reuchlin, Johann. Augenspiegel (1511).

The Leo Baech Institute houses “The Rare Book Collection of Frank L. Herz” which focuses on the famous Renaissance controversy between the Christian Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, who introduced the study of Hebrew to Germany, and the anti-Jewish agitator Johannes Pfefferkorn, who was trying to lobby for the destruction of all Jewish books. You can view the collection of rare books on the LBI.org website.

Christian scholar, Johannes Reuchlin wrote “Reccomendation whether to confiscate,  destroy and burn all Jewish books” in Augenspiegel in 1511 - a courageous defense of the importance of Jewish ideas in the Christian world. Reuchlin was among the first to place Jews alongside Christians as part of the discourse on legal and human rights. Reuchlin found his chief opposition in a convert from Judaism, Johannes Pfefferkorn, who published several anti-Jewish treatises between 1507 and 1510. Pfefferkorn appealed to Emperor Maximilian I to confiscate all Jewish books as a part of his hope to eliminate Jews from German lands. The Emperor asked for theologians opinions and it was Reuchlin who was the sole defender of the preservation of Jewish literature. 

Chopin and Mendelssohn

“The day after I accompanied the Hensels to Delitsch Chopin came; he intended only to remain one day, so we spent this entire together in music. …his playing has enchanted me afresh, and I am persuaded that if you, and my Father also, had heard some of his better pieces, as he played them to me, you would say the same. There is something thoroughly original in his pianoforte playing, and at the same times so masterly, that he may be called a most perfect virtuoso; and as every style of perfection is welcome and acceptable, that day was most agreeable to me, although so entire different from the previous ones with you, —the Hensels.

It was so pleasant for me to be once more with a thorough musician, and not with those half virtuosos and half classics, who would gladly combine les honeurs de la vertu et les plaisirs du vice, but with one who has his perfect and defined phase; and however far asunder we may be in our different spheres, still I can get on famously with such a person… Sunday evening was really very remarkable when Chopin made me play over my oratorio to him, while curious Leipzigers stole into the room to see him, and when between the first and second part he dashed into his new Études and a new concerto, to the amazement of the Leipzigers, and then I resumed my “St. Paul;” … So we gon on most pleasantly together; and he promised faithfully to return in the course of the winter, when I intend to compose a new symphony and to perform it in honour of him.” 

Excerpted from Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, from 1833-1847