CD version of the album. Comes in a plastic jewel case with liner notes.
Includes unlimited streaming of Beneath White Stars: Holocaust Profiles in Song
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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about
Jewish women in ghettos, camps, and resistance movements secretly wrote and performed poetry about their grim circumstances, as well as happier memories of the past and hopes for a future. Since writing was banned by the Nazis, women resorted to creative ways to share their words, including hiding poems in the hems of their dresses.
lyrics
Women wrote in darkest times
When Nazis censored speech and rhymes
Banished thoughts and youthful dreams
Metered minds and measured schemes
Jewish women left us traces
Fragments of their narrow spaces
Placed their words inside the staves
That contradicted narrow graves
Pen on paper gave life meaning
Snapshots of what souls were gleaning
They measured words, they used their minds
They wrote and read between the lines
They dreamed of living through their fears
Their poems framed the nightmare years
They told the truth of ghetto lives
Of camps where husbands lost their wives
Of Holy Writ and ridicule
Abandonment of Golden Rule
Purges, dirges, sad refrains
Sanctity amidst the stains
Ghetto women told their stories
Echoed simple girlhood glories
They measured words, they used their minds
They wrote and read between the lines
In the camps like pencils broken
Women graphed a life unspoken
Encrypting nouns, inventing verbs
Describing with imperfect words
Shtetl girls in weekday dress
Wore good sides out for Sabbath best
But ghettos fashioned heavy skirts
Worn with worry and alert
In camps two Polish sisters wrote
Their rhyme-and-rhythm’s antidote
Their seamless poems measured stresses
Sewn into the hems of dresses
Memories of sand and sea
In their thoughts they could be free
They measured words, they used their minds
They wrote and read between the lines
Jewish women—teachers, writers
Poets, artists, freedom fighters—
They measured words, they used their minds
They wrote and read between the lines
Shtetl (Yiddish): a small Jewish village in eastern Europe
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