After the Swan Song
swan song noun
1: a song of great sweetness said to be sung by a dying swan2: a farewell appearance or final act or pronouncementMerriam-Webster DictionaryVayidom Aharon… And Aaron remained silent. (Vayikra 10:3)
This week we marked Yom HaShoah (remembering the Holocaust) on Thursday, and this week we also read the Torah portion Shmini in which two of Aaron’s sons do something wrong in their sacrificial offering and are themselves burnt to death. A week haunted by the memory of tragedy. Aaron, grieving father, is silent. As Theodor Adorno once put it, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What can one say?
Several years ago I began a quest to connect to classical music by listening to every great string quartet from the works of Joseph Haydn (18th century) through to the present day. At one point I finally reached the Czech masters, tracing from Smetana to Dvořák to Janáček, leading to the early 20th century quartets of Pavel Haas. (Don’t worry about all the names if classical music isn’t your thing. But if you’re new to string quartets and curious, try Dvořák’sAmerican Quartet - it's gorgeous!)
In addition to his Czech lineage, however, Pavel Haas was also Jewish, and things were increasingly terrifying for Czech Jews in the 1930s as Nazi’s reshaped the world. Aware of the dangers, Haas divorced his wife, who was not Jewish, in order to protect her and their daughter from anti-Jewish actions. He attempted to arrange passage out of the country, but was arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1941.
In 1944, the Nazi’s prepared for a propaganda film and a visit from the Red Cross by requiring the prisoners to create musical and artistic performances that would make their situation seem congenial rather than deadly. Pavel Haas composed several pieces that he must have known would be his swan songs - because as soon as the Red Cross left, and as soon as the propaganda film was made, the composers and musicians and artists were sent to Auschwitz. Nearly immediately upon arrival, at age 45, Pavel Haas was murdered.
I remember learning this right after dropping my son off at preschool on a pretty spring day. I stared at my phone through tear-filled eyes. The music fell silent. How could I keep listening after Auschwitz? The string quartet, born in the age of faith in human reason and creativity, cut off by the warping of creativity into cruelty and of reason into hate. It felt barbaric to simply enjoy music in the shadow of such memory.
And then I remembered Different Trains. Another string quartet, another Jewish composer. During the years Pavel Haas lived and died in concentration camps, Steve Reich was a young boy in America. He writes:
The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.
The piece itself is highly unusual, incorporating voice recordings of his governess, a train porter, and Holocaust survivors. (If you’d like a deep dive into the music, try this recent podcast.)
But what struck me most about it was that here was someone who brought the full force of his creative genius into a project that confronts the shadow of the Holocaust. He reckons with the loss - the millions of swan songs heard and unheard - and acknowledges the fraught role of luck in survival. In its structure, Different Trains moves us listeners through and beyond the war years. Steve Reich’s piece is as much about the day after Pavel Haas’s swan song, opening a path towards renewed if still complicated life, even a demonstration of Jewish and musical flourishing.
The day after Yom HaShoah is perhaps just as important as Yom HaShoah itself.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
