The Oscar-nominated Short Documentary from The New Yorker featuring Holocaust survivor Joseph Feingold, his violin, and the life that it changed upon donation.
While exploring Otto Klemper: His Life and Times you are quickly drawn into issues of self and family identity. From Page 7:
“In Breslau, where as in most of the cities of Eastern Europe, the Jewish community was still largely intact, the Klemperers' family life was later described by their younger daughter, Marianne, as ‘old-fashioned Jewish’: the Sabbath, feast days and dietary laws were all observed. In Hamburg, however, Nathan found employment in a Christian firm, which involved working on the Sabbath. From this time much religious observance was allowed to lapse. Though Nathan remained a member of a synagogue and observed fasts tot he end of his life, Ida, who had grown up in the less hermetic Jewish world of Hamburg, was deeply imbued with the ideal of assimilation. Yom Kippur was observed by the male members of the family, but dietary restrictions were gradually abandoned and Ida took her young children to a reformed synagogue, where the services were partly in German. On his thirteenth birthday, Otto was formally received into the Jewish faith at the ceremony of the bar mitzvah, but among the books he received as presents on that occasion were the complete works of Shakespeare. There was great emphasis on prayer, but the prayers were German. Grace was said at table in German. Traditional Hebrew songs gave way to German music. There was no mention of Zionism. Nor did Ida send her children to exclusively Jewish schools. Unlike his father, who had been raised in a closed Jewish society in Prague, Otto Klemperer was brought up as a German citizen of Jewish faith, a half-way house that was to fail to withstand the storms of the twentieth century.”
“Otto Klemperer was about nine years old when he first saw the man who was to be the central inspiration of his entire life as a musician.
‘I remember as though it were yesterday, seeing Mahler on the street when I was quite small. I was on my way to school. Without anyone pointing him out to me, I knew it was him. At that time he had a habit of pulling strange faces, which made a tremendous impression on me. I ran along shyly after him for about ten minutes and started at him as though he were a deep-sea monster.’
“The schoolboy also noticed that his hero held his hat in his hand and walked with a jerky gait as though he had a club foot. After that initial encounter he frequently saw Mahler, who since 1891 had been First Conductor at the Hamburg Stadttheater and had lived in the west of the city close to the Grindelallee. Two years before his arrival the boy's parents had settled nearby.
“Otto Klemperer's father, Nathan, was a newcomer to Hamburg. Like all his recorded ancestors he had been born in the Prague ghetto. The family name had originally been Klopper, which was derived from Schulklopfer, the synagogue official whose task was to wake members of the Jewish community for early service and its children for school. In 1787, however, as part of the reforming Emperor Joseph II's attempts to integrate the Jews into Christian society, the head of each family was obliged to assume a family name and every member of it also to take a first name. Hence Otto's great-great-grandfather, who had been born Gumpel the Klopper in 1758, died in 1803 as Markus Klemperer.”
—From Peter Heyworth's Otto Klemperer: Volume 1, 1885-1933: His Life and Times
“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.
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