Full Description
To Sing Away the Darkest Days is the culmination of a five-year project which saw Norbert Hirschhorn source more than one thousand Yiddish songs from several archives and from collections on the Internet, as well as from CDs. For Norbert they helped him to rediscover and trace his own Jewish cultural history. However, some of the songs 'spoke' to him as a poet and begged for a new translation, or 're-imagining' as he calls it, into English poems. The resulting collection of poems tells the story of the emigrant, the Jew in the Diaspora. Norbert adds his unique view: he personalises the Diaspora, and at the same time brings a vanished culture back to life. The collection is funny and poignant and captures the Jewish experience, but the struggle and questioning of the poet add an extra dimension. To Sing Away the Darkest Days is not only a wonderful collection of poems but also a unique historical document.
Contents
Basherte Cave Song Ten Brothers Make a Living Three Sisters The Little Stove Jump Rope Songs From My Mouth From Podwoloczyska to Ellis Island My Cousin the Greenhorn Mayn Rue-Plats Abecedarian for the Workers of the World A Punter's Lament A Czarist Conscript Bids Farewell The Happy Conscript Scapegoats A Yiddishe Mama Laments A Marxist Lullaby Sleep My Child A Yiddish Divorce The Last Branch Pleads for Release The Neighbouring Village Ecclesiastes Redux For Sure The Wandering Jew The Quantum Rebbe When Our Rebbe - Tristesse To Life! Confessions
