Setting a Holocaust survivor’s poetry to song
COMPOSER Judy Campbell first met award-winning author and Holocaust survivor Jacob Rosenberg more than a decade ago when a mutual friend introduced the pair during a book launch at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
COMPOSER Judy Campbell first met award-winning author and Holocaust survivor Jacob Rosenberg more than a decade ago when a mutual friend introduced the pair during a book launch at the Sydney Jewish Museum.
It proved to be a fateful encounter. In the following years, she and Rosenberg forged a deep bond as they worked together on a project, setting his poems to music.
While Rosenberg has since passed, Campbell is carrying on their work.
She recently wrote an arrangement to his poem, The Waltz of Survival, a piece about reconciling the past, with the US-based capella group The Western Wind. The group, in town for the inaugural Australian Jewish Choral Festival, is poised to premiere the work during a concert at the Sydney Jewish Museum on Monday, March 19.
“The song is very poignant,” Campbell told The AJN. “It’s based on a fragment of melody that Jacob recalled his grandmother singing to him.
“I think Jacob is smiling out there somewhere,” she continued. “I know that it gave him a lot of pleasure setting his poetry to music, and seeing his work move and morph into this new form.”
Born in Lodz, Poland, Rosenberg was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. After migrating to Australia in 1948, he spent many years writing about his experiences in Yiddish. Later, he switched to writing in English and from 1994 to his death in 2008 at age 86, he wrote three books of poetry and four books of prose, including his two-part memoir East of Time and Sunrise West, both of which received major Australian literary awards.
Shortly after Rosenberg and Campbell’s initial meeting in 2000, they began work on their collaboration.
Working with the late American composer Gordon Brisker, Campbell – who has worked as music director at the North Shore Temple Emanuel for the past 12 years – set 16 sonnets from Rosenberg’s Behind the Moon for piano and voice.
“It gave a new kind of voice to Jacob’s poetry in a very literal sense, and it brought perhaps a new channel for reaching people,” said Campbell, reflecting on the project. “[Employing] words is one channel, but when you add music to that, it creates another very powerful channel for the meaning of the text to reach the listener.”
Ultimately, she added, “I’d like them to be singing [the new arrangement] when they wake up in the morning. I’d like it to stick in their minds.”
Quite touchingly, the premiere will be launched in the same place where it all began – the Sydney Jewish Museum. “There is kind of a pleasing element of circularity. It feels very satisfying,” said Campbell. “I do feel that Jacob would more than approve.”
Enquiries: Sydney Jewish Museum, (02) 9360 7999; reception@sjm.com.au.
CHANTAL ABITBOL
Judy Campbell and Jacob Rosenberg
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