Russian-born writer Margarita Meklina writes for RTÉ Culture about Pulse Of The Past: Reviving Memories of the Jewish Diaspora, a unique music and literature event taking place this weekend for National Heritage Week, which runs 19-27 August.
Where is the little street? Where is the little house? Where is the girl that I loved?
We are rehearsing in the sunny suburbs of Dublin's Southside. Rathfarnham Castle with its pristinely white walls is nearby. So is the synagogue on Rathfarnham Road, both behind large fences. The relaxed respectability of the area sharply contrasts with a song heard from the windows, where musician Maja Elliott is learning a Yiddish song about a barefooted orphan, who is braving cold and rain, selling cigarettes to soldiers and sailors.
Suddenly Maja breaks into another song, Oyfn Pripetchik, about a Rabbi who teaches children Torah. Her voice is soothing and soft; the beautiful music masks grief. In our music-to-words event, this song follows a poem entitled The Missing, written by Dublin poet Gerry Mc Donnell. It is a heart-wrenching tale about children who 'went to school that morning / kissed by their mothers. / By lunch time they were gone / in the thundering trucks'. Gerry’s sombre voice revives Jewish schoolchildren taken away during the World War. We know that their mothers never saw them again, but the power of memories, the power of music brings them back.
The Yiddish tango descends on the Southside streets. The preparation for the show is in full force. Gerry recites his poems about 19th century East European Jews who came to Ireland with their dreadlocks and dreams and settled in Portobello.
Gerry remembers, "I grew up near an old Jewish cemetery in Ballybough. As children we used to dare one another to scale the wall and walk among the headstones until the caretaker chased us out. I was fascinated by the foreign names on headstones: Rosenthal, Isaacs, Benmohel. The numbers, 5618 cut in stone over the caretaker’s door, puzzled us. It became etched in my mind. There are usually a few things which are memorable from childhood. This date – 5618 is 1857 in the Hebrew calendar – was one of them for me."
The tango is reminiscent of Argentina. Music and memories travel the world. And after Gerry finishes sharing his childhood memories, another story of the human quest for happiness starts, a story about Naftali, a Jewish boy who befriended an ostrich when he emigrated with his family to Argentina from Russia and had no other place to live there other than derelict train carriages in the middle of the Pampas, on a forgotten railroad, on a train line that now went nowhere. I read from my novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote.
"Vi is dos gesele? Where is this little town?" – Maja’s voice is nostalgic. This song was sung by my grandmother in the former USSR. She was a convinced Communist and a geography teacher, and with her knowledge she could easily locate on a map her family house and loved ones, if they still existed on earth. But they were buried alive by the Nazis in Byelorussia.
Now the song has reached Ireland. "All that remains is merely a dream. No more is the little street and the little house, no more is the little girl that I love."
Pulse of the Past: Reviving Memories of the Jewish Diaspora takes place at The Irish Jewish Museum, Dublin, on 20 August, 2017 at 3:30 pm, as part of National Heritage Week, which runs from 19-27 August - details here.
