Max Helfman: Di Naye Hagode
Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, Naxos, (2006), $6.98
by Stephanie Persin
Max Helfman was a composer and music educator born
in Radzyn, Poland in 1901.
He came to America at age eight and sang regularly
in New York Orthodox synagogue choirs. Not much is
known about his childhood or teenage years, except
that he had somewhat of a traditional Jewish education,
and eventually went on to study at the Mannes College
of Music. In 1928, he became organist and choir master
at Temple Israel in Manhattan, and began to experiment
with choral compositions.
In 1945, the Histadrut Ivrit of America
and the American Zionist Youth Commission established
a Jewish Arts Committee in New York. This committee
was set up to promote Hebrew culture and Zionist ideals
in the United States. This brought Helfman into contact
with Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis, who had
recently established a camp to inspire Jewish youth
to be interested in Judaism and Israel. Helfman was
named music director of the Brandeis Camp, a job he
held for seventeen years. In 1958, he was invited to
serve as the dean of the department of fine arts at
the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, a department
which he was asked to create. Helfman died in 1963
at the age of 62.
Helfman’s Di
Naye Hagode (The
New Haggada), composed in 1948, is a choral interpretation
of an epic poem by Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer about the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, Di
shotns fun varshever geto (The Shadows of the Warsaw
Ghetto). The Haggada is the
biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt which Jews
are required to retell every year. So too, did Fefer
want Jews to retell the tragic tale of the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising to honor the victims of Nazi
persecution.
The poem was published in the United States by the
IKUF, the Yiddish Cultural Organization, and was brought
to Helfman’s attention later that year. Di
Naye Hagode focuses not on divine miracles that
saved the Jews from Pharoah and slavery, but on the
physical act of Jewish armed heroism against evil.
This work celebrates the fact that, under certain death,
the Jewish ghetto fighters took their fates into their
own hands.
Di Naye Hagode is interwoven
with narrated text of Fefer’s poem translated
into English, which recounts the horrors of the ghetto.
The text is narrated by Theodore Bikel, the famed Jewish
actor and folksinger, most known for his work in The
Sound of Music and Fiddler
on the Roof. The narration begins with an image
of the night the Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto.
Bikel asks the question that echos from the Passover
seder: why is this night different from all other nights
of the year? As the piece continues, the text becomes
increasingly desperate. God is asked when He will send
His prophet Elijah to save and console the Jewish prisoners
in the ghetto. The narration describes The
Boy (Dos Yingl), who used to ride on wooden horses
and fight with wooden swords, who has now lost his
childhood and has become a ghetto fighter. Finally,
in the last narration, Bikel says, “Why
is this night different from all other nights? Because
on this seder night, we remember them all, those nameless
shadows who died so that we may live...In us and our
children, their blessed memories shall live on and
on.”
The beautiful and powerful choral
arrangements, sung by the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale
and the Choral Society of Southern California, as well
as the music by the YMF Debut Orchestra, only intensify
the somber text of Bikel’s narration, and succeed
in bringing Helfman’s work to life.
The liner notes state that on several
occassions, Helfman expressed regret that he had never
written a complete opus, but “Di Naye Hagode,
with its overall musicial-structural arch, its sense
of inspired artistic unity, and its judicious balance,
probably comes closest to that wish.”
This album also contains two other
works by Helfman which have not yet been reviewed: Hag
Habikkurim,
a collection of Hebrew songs sung in Palestine by Zionist
pioneers before Israel’s
independence, and The
Holy Ark, a liturgical work based on the melodies
of the Torah service on Shabbat. The
Milken Archive is producing an astounding collection
of American Jewish music – sacred
and secular – with the collaboration of distinguished
artists, ensembles and recording producers. We will
be reviewing more of the collection in coming weeks.
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