Table of Contents

Introduction

François Guesnet, Benjamin Matis, and Antony Polonsky

PART I. CANTORIAL AND RELIGIOUS MUSIC

A Chestnut, a Grape, and a Pack of Lions: A Shabbos in Płock with a Popular Synagogue Singer in the Early Nineteenth Century

Daniel Katz

Moshe Koussevitzky (1899–1966) in Vilna, Warsaw, and Russia

Akiva Zimmerman

The Art of Cantorial Singing in the Polish Territories

Bożena Muszkalska

PART II. JEWS IN POPULAR MUSICAL CULTURE IN POLAND

Musical Afterthoughts on Shmeruk’s Mayufes

Bret Werb

Servant Romances: Eighteenth-Century Yiddish Lyric and Narrative Folk Songs

Michael Lukin

Broder Singers: Forerunners of the Yiddish Theatre

Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel

Gimpel’s Theatre, Lwów: The Sounds of a Popular Yiddish Theatre Preserved on Gramophone Records, 1904–1913

Michael Aylward

The Polish Tin Pan Alley—A Jewish Street

Robert Rothstein

On the Dance Floor, on the Screen, on the Stage. Popular Music in the Interwar Period: Polish, Jewish, Shared

Tamara Sztyma

The Jews in the Band: Anders Army’s Special Troupes

Beth Holmgren

Szpilman, Bajgelman, and Barsht: The Legacy of an Extended Polish Jewish Klezmer Family

Joel E. Rubin

Władysław Szpilman’s Post-War Career in Poland

Filip Mazurczak

Abraham Ellstein’s Film Scores: Some Less Obvious Sources

Ronald Robboy

PART III. JEWS IN THE POLISH CLASSICAL MUSIC SCENE

The ‘Lust Machine’: Recording and Selling the Jewish Nation in the Late Russian Empire

James Loeffler

Leo Zeitlin and the Flourishing of Jewish Art Music in Early 1920s Vilna

Paula Eisenstein-Baker

‘Jewish musicians are the crowning achievements of foreign nations’: Jewish Identity and Yiddish Nationalism in the Writings of Menachem Kipnis

Julia Riegel

Ostbahnhof Berlin: Jewish Music Students of East European Origin at the Berlin Conservatory, 1918–1933

Adam J. Sacks

Jewish Music Institutions and Organizations in Interwar Galicia

Sylwia Jakubczyk-Ślęczka

Jewish Composers of Polish Music after 1939: A Story in Lists and Numbers

Maja Trochimczyk

Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern’s American Years

Sławomir Dobrzański

PART IV. THE HOLOCAUST REFLECTED IN JEWISH MUSIC

‘My song, you are my strength’: Personal Repertories of Polish and Yiddish Songs from Young Survivors of the Łódź Ghetto

Joseph Toltz

Singing Their Way Home

Eliyana R. Adler

The Nazi-Era Confiscation of Wanda Landowska’s Musical Collection and Its Aftermath

Carla Shapreau

Music as a ‘Paper Bridge’ between Generations before and after the Holocaust

Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota

PART V. KLEZMER IN POLAND TODAY

The Klezmer Revival in Poland as a Contact Zone

Magdalena Waligórska

The Sound of Change: Performing ‘Jewishness’ in Small Polish Towns

Ellie Shapiro

About the Author

François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History, University College London. He is chair of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and secretary of the European Association for Jewish Studies and has held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Oxford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dartmouth College, Potsdam University, Vilnius University, and the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He is the editor, with Jerzy Tomaszewski, of Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (2022). Benjamin Matis is the spiritual leader of Agudath Achim Synagogue in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He qualified as a cantor and a Master of Sacred Music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University, and Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014), and in 2011 was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. His many publications include The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Littman Library, 2010–12), which in 2012 was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum prize of the Polish Senate for the best book on the history of Poland in a non-Polish language written in the previous five years.

Reviews

"The essays in Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands offer rich examinations of a vast and under-studied scholarly terrain. [...] Future scholarship that embraces both the particularity of the Polish-Jewish context and the broad resonance of its themes will best advance the admirable work of this volume’s editors and contributors."J. Mackenzie Pierce, Music and Letters

Reviews"This is an essential contribution to the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, cultural studies, and European studies. The publication indeed explores Jews and music-making in Poland that is engaging and accessible."
Mark Kligman, Yearbook of Traditional Music