Storied Charlotte

James (Jay) Grymes and I became friends while he was serving as the chair of UNC Charlotte’s Music Department and I was serving as the chair of the English Department. We often ran into each other at meetings, and we discovered that we are both former bassoonists. We also discovered that we share an interest in the Jewish resistance movement during World War Two. One day we had a long talk in the parking deck as we were leaving campus, and we exchanged stories about this shared interest. I told him about my Jewish ancestors who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and he told me about his research project on a Jewish guerilla fighter who helped lead the fight against the Nazis who occupied Ukraine during the war. Well, I am pleased to report that Jay’s research project has resulted in a new book titled Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge.  I contacted Jay and asked him for more information about how he came to write this book. Here is what he sent to me:  

In 2012, UNC Charlotte led a broad community coalition to present the North American premiere of Violins of Hope, a collection of string instruments that are exhibited and performed for Holocaust education. Since then, the collection has toured all over the country and world, including Cleveland, Houston, Jacksonville, Nashville, and Washington, D.C., as well as Berlin, London, and Rome. One offshoot of Violins of Hope–Charlotte was my book Violins of Hope: Instru­ments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Violins of Hope has inspired a number of musical works, including Jake Heggie’s Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope, a composition for mezzo-soprano, solo violinist, and strings that draws its text from my book. UNC Charlotte joined Temple Beth El, Temple Israel, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust and Social Justice Education Center, and other community partners to present the east coast premiere of Intonations at the 2022 Yom HaShoah Commemoration in Charlotte.

Violins of Hope includes the story of a young Jewish partisan named Motele Schlein, who infiltrated a German officers club as a violinist. He snuck several pounds of explosives into the officers club in his violin case and blew up the building. While researching Motele, I became fascinated by the story of the commander of his partisan brigade, Moshe Gildenman. Prior to the Holocaust, Gildenman had lived a simple life as an engineer and cultural leader in his hometown of Korets, Ukraine. But when the Nazis murdered 2,200 Jews in his peaceful community, including his wife and daughter, he vowed revenge and escaped to the forest with his son. Fighting under the nom de guerre “Uncle Misha,” he engineered a number of intricate missions for the small but fearless brigade that later became known as “Uncle Misha’s Jewish Group.” Operating in northern Ukraine, his band of brothers and sisters raided storage depots, blew up trains, and attacked German garrisons. Even after the liberation of Ukraine, Gildenman insisted on staying in the fight until the last Nazi was defeated. He joined the Red Army as a combat engineer and became one of the first conquering heroes to walk the streets of Berlin. His mission was completed, so he laid down his weapons and went back to a life of peace.

After finishing Violins of Hope, I spent the next decade collecting Gildenman’s writings and testimonies, in addition to the writings and testimonies of Jewish partisans who fought alongside him. I would later locate partisan combat logs in an archive in Kyiv. Those records corroborated Gildenman’s stories and filled in essential details such as dates and locations. But one thing kept bothering me: Gildenman often wrote about making music around the campfire with his fellow partisans, but he left few clues as to what they were actually singing. I knew that Gildenman was an avid musician and songwriter, and that it would be impossible to truly understand him and his partisan brigade without also understanding the music they made together. Finally, in May 2022, I stumbled onto a cryptic reference to a “Songbook of Misha” on an old website. After some digging, I found a copy of a Yiddish songbook that Gildenman had safeguarded in his pocket throughout the war. The same trail led me to a portfolio of war songs that Gildenman’s son had collected. Here at last was the music that Gildenman and his son not only made, but carried with them during the war as treasured mementos of their lives before and during the Holocaust. And that was when I knew I was finally ready to write the book that became Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge.

I have since reconstructed some of the songs that Gildenman wrote in the ghetto and in the forest. Students in the University Chorale of UNC Charlotte will be performing them at Temple Beth El in Charlotte on February 26 and at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on March 9. Both presentations will intertwine readings from Partisan Song with a selection of Holocaust-era songs, including music from Gildenman’s Yiddish songbook. The program will pay tribute to Gildenman’s heroic efforts to avenge the murders of his family members and liberate his homeland, while also preserving Jewish culture.

Here is a video of our choral students singing in Yiddish while I talk about Partisan Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO8kkr2qnBM

I congratulate Jay on the publication of Partisan Song.  It is an important contribution to the history of the Jewish resistance fighters who stood up to Fascism during World War Two, but it is also a book that relates to contemporary events here in Storied Charlotte and beyond.