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Book Review
Apr. 17th, 2015 10:14 pmMusic in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps
by Shirli Gilbert
I feel weird saying I enjoyed a book about the Holocaust, but with this one, it's pretty much true. Gilbert's writing is clear and readable, without any of the overly dense prose one sometimes encounters in academic writing. I especially liked how she explicitly avoids fitting her examination of music in the ghettos and camps into familiar narratives of redemption or heroism. Instead, Gilbert attempts to see the musical activities of these people as part of the way they coped with what was happening to them in the face of increasing brutality and a lot of uncertainty about where it was all leading.
The material is fascinating. Music in the ghettos and camps was a surprisingly complicated thing, serving multiple purposes and having many different meanings depending on who was performing, who was listening, and why. Music could be an escape, a key to social systems within the camps, comfort, defiance, despair, or just another means through which to suffer. Gilbert takes a very clear-eyed and probing look at all of this and shows the reader how examining this musical activity can give us greater understanding of the experiences of victims and survivors. She organizes her material very well, too. Each chapter covers a specific place: the Warsaw ghetto, the Vilna ghetto, the Sachsenhausen camp, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The progression through increasing horror is a surprisingly effective structure for the points Gilbert makes and for impressing on the reader the depth and complexity of the topic.
by Shirli Gilbert
I feel weird saying I enjoyed a book about the Holocaust, but with this one, it's pretty much true. Gilbert's writing is clear and readable, without any of the overly dense prose one sometimes encounters in academic writing. I especially liked how she explicitly avoids fitting her examination of music in the ghettos and camps into familiar narratives of redemption or heroism. Instead, Gilbert attempts to see the musical activities of these people as part of the way they coped with what was happening to them in the face of increasing brutality and a lot of uncertainty about where it was all leading.
The material is fascinating. Music in the ghettos and camps was a surprisingly complicated thing, serving multiple purposes and having many different meanings depending on who was performing, who was listening, and why. Music could be an escape, a key to social systems within the camps, comfort, defiance, despair, or just another means through which to suffer. Gilbert takes a very clear-eyed and probing look at all of this and shows the reader how examining this musical activity can give us greater understanding of the experiences of victims and survivors. She organizes her material very well, too. Each chapter covers a specific place: the Warsaw ghetto, the Vilna ghetto, the Sachsenhausen camp, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The progression through increasing horror is a surprisingly effective structure for the points Gilbert makes and for impressing on the reader the depth and complexity of the topic.
