Mandolinists revive Poland's lost Jewish music

[rug]

GORA KALWARIA (AFP)---The red brick walls of the synagogue in Gora Kalwaria, once a center of Jewish culture in Poland, reverberate anew with music lost in the Holocaust, thanks to one man's search for his Polish roots.

In the 1930s, a group of Jewish mandolin players from this small town just
south of the capital Warsaw gained popularity across the country before many of them perished at the hands of Poland's Nazi German occupiers.

But in 2007, while retracing his family's Jewish roots, San Francisco businessman Avner Yonai found a telling photograph in Gora Kalwaria.

In it, he recognized his grandfather and two uncles among a dozen or so
mandolin-clutching musicians of what was known as the "Ger Mandolin Orchestra".

http://www.ejpress.org/article/52970

Edired for video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBDYiPUaUSo

[Lunabelle]

1. I'd love to hear some of the recordings

If there are any.

[rug]

2. Just edited to add one.

:)

[Lunabelle]

3. Ah, beautiful

Thank you.

[xchrom]

4. Recommend

[bengalherder]

5. I just read Al Jaffee's autobiography.

In case anyone didn't read Mad as a kid, he is a top-notch writer and cartoonist. He is also an American born Jew whose mother took him and three brothers back to Lithuania after her divorce.

He writes quite a bit about the culture and the music-his relative even owned a record store.

He also narrowly escaped the holocaust that killed his mother and any villagers who didn't leave.

"A Mad Life" by Al Jaffee.

He is still painting the Mad fold-ins, the longest running art in any magazine. He is around 90 now.

Thank you for giving me sounds to go with the words.

[bengalherder]

6. PS-this should be posted elsewhere-GD or lounge.

I think more people would see it and it is very cool.