Description
MAYN FAYFELE (My Little Flute) is entirely devoted to the Polish-Jewish folk poet and composer Mordekhay Gebirtig (1877-1942). Gebirtig earned his living in Cracow, Poland, repairing old furniture. He also wrote poems and songs, creating a unique chronicle of yiddish daily life in the city. Many of his songs had been widely performed for years but just 10 years ago a hitherto unknown collection of 68 poems was found at the Moreshet Archives in Israel. They were subsequently published but only in Yiddish-Hebrew. Now 18 of them have been made accessible to a larger audience by Mariejan and Jacques. There is also a 60-page booklet containing the songtexts in Yiddish and English, biographical notes about Gebirtig's life and work, and historical photos and drawings of Gebirtig and Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Cracow. Gebirtig's songs reflect the social and political conditions for Europeran Jews during the 1930s and early years of World War II: they show the pain, the humiliation, the fear, the helplessness, the anger, the resistance, the contradition of the inevitability of death and the hope and conviction that some day a better world will originate from all this.