FolkWorld #80: Payadora Tango Ensemble

The team behind the Yiddish Glory project, which we reviewed a few years ago,^[67] has a new album: Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango by Payadora Tango, based on testimonies of women who survived the Holocaust.

Silent Tears, The Last Yiddish Tango deals with the long-term trauma Holocaust survivors face. The songs are based on poetry, testimonies and writing of women who were victims of unimaginable horrors, including sexual violence, human experimentation, torture and forced sterilization – sharing their stories with the world to warn future generations about the consequences of racism and xenophobia.

The music of “Silent Tears” is based on poems, testimonies and writings of women who were victims of sexual violence and torture during the Holocaust. Some songs are from a project led by Dr. Paula David, a social worker at a Toronto Jewish care home who helped survivors process their trauma by writing collective poetry. Others are from Molly Applebaum, a Toronto-based author, who, during her adolescent years, was buried underground in a small wooden box in a barn in Poland during the war. Set to music by an award-winning team of musicians, the songs on the album tell the story of unimaginable violence as experienced by women and children during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Three of the songs on this album are based on a group poetry project that began in the 1990s by Holocaust survivors at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, one of the largest Jewish care homes in Canada. During weekly meetings, members shared intimate stories, some of which they hadn’t even told their own families.

“As a social worker in charge of the group, my job was to help its members to process their traumas. 15 women met together for several years, and created poems that reflected their collective experiences. They weren’t familiar with normal aging, let alone issues from agerelated illnesses. The majority of them were orphaned because of the Holocaust, so they never had the opportunity to know or care for their own aging parents. Some suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s, which caused their recent memory to fade, and long-term memory to become more vivid. Imagine the pain of being unable to recall the names of their beautiful grandchildren, but left with only the memories of their brutally traumatic Holocaust experiences. In 1995, The Collective Poems were published, and the survivors became authors. Their poems have now evolved into music and the Silent Tears project continues to keep their memories and hopes alive.”
-Dr. Paula David

Five of the works on this album are adapted from Molly Applebaum’s survival story. Applebaum was born on October 27, 1930 in Kraków, Poland. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Molly was prohibited from attending school. By 1941, Jews were being rounded up and sent to death camps including Belzec. Molly’s mother, Sara Weissenberg, arranged a place for Molly and her older cousin Helen to hide with a local farmer named Victor in Dombrowa, Poland. Fearing discovery by neighbours that he was housing Jews (an offense punishable by death), the farmer refused to hide Molly’s younger brother Zygmunt (who couldn’t remain quiet) or her mother Sara. Both were later murdered by the Nazis.

The farmer buried Molly and her cousin in a small wooden box in barn, so cramped that they couldn’t sit up, with just a small hole to breathe through. Molly kept a diary of her ordeal underground, describing the filth, hunger, thirst, cold, lice and other insects, boredom and sexual abuse. Applebaum came to Canada after the war as a refugee, not knowing a word of English or anyone in the country. She is now 92, has 3 children, 6 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren. Her diary and memoir, Buried Words were published in 2017 by the Azrieli Holocaust Memoir series, won the Wolfe Chair Holocaust Studies Student Impact Prize at the University of Toronto, and is used in Holocaust education courses at top universities around the world.

“During the interwar period (1918-1939), Warsaw became the European capital of tango, and the world capital of Yiddish tango,” explains Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk, a graduate of the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, who has been described by the Times of Israel as the “Queen of Yiddish Tango.” “More than 3000 tangos were written during the interwar period in Poland. Many became hits, and most were written and composed by Polish Jews.”

“Polish tango flows with Slavic-Jewish blood,” observes Mieleszczuk. “It is an Eastern European genre mixed with Jewish and Romani music. In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II, the golden age of Jewish tango ended.” Songwriter Andrzej Włast and composer Artur Gold were killed in Treblinka.

We created this album in the style of Polish tangos from the 1930s, because the women whose stories we are retelling all grew up in Poland during this period. Sadly, they never got to dance to the popular music that era in clubs, school gymnasiums or concert halls as their childhoods were spent on the run, in hiding, and in concentration camps.

Dan Rosenberg is a journalist and Grammy-nominated music producer based in Toronto. He has travelled to over 40 countries reporting on arts and culture, hosts the radio program Cafe International and is a producer for Afropop Worldwide.

SILENT TEARS (Winner of the “Best New Yiddish Song, 2022” at the Yiddish Music Awards presented by Kleztival in São Paulo, Brazil).

Music: Rebekah Wolkstein; Arranged by Drew Jurecka; Vocals: Aviva Chernick; Words: The Terrace Holocaust Survivors Group at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, edited by the project’s leader, Dr. Paula David and adapted by Dan Rosenberg from the poem “What We Went Through”; Yiddish translation by Vicky Ash-Shifriss.

“Silent Tears” is based on the experience of a young mother and her daughters who are on the run from the Nazis in a forest in Poland. Her children are starving, so she goes to try and steal some food from a nearby farm, and they become separated. She has to search for her children in silence, for fear of being discovered.

SABINA’S LETTER: SOME OF US MUST SURVIVE (Winner of the “Best Jewish Music Video, Jury Prize, 2022” at the Yiddish Music Awards hosted by Kleztival in São Paulo, Brazil).

Words: Molly Applebaum and Dan Rosenberg; Yiddish Translation: Aleksander Fisz; Vocals: Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk; Music: Artur Gold (1897-1943, murdered in the Treblinka Death Camp); Arranged by Drew Jurecka.

This song is based on a letter written by a teenage girl named Sabina Goldman in Dombrowa, Poland to Molly Applebaum on September 11, 1942. Before the Nazis liquidated the Jewish ghetto in Dombrowa, Molly and Sabina hung out each day together in an empty shoe store (the Nazis ordered all shops to remain open, even if they didn’t have any goods to sell). Molly, who was just 11 and ½ at the time, had a crush on Sabina. Molly had hoped that Sabina would join her on the run and hide with her on a farm. However, Sabina wrote that she needed to stay with her parents who were in poor health, but urged Molly to do whatever was humanly possible to survive. Sabina was murdered the next week. “This letter was as if Sabina was speaking from beyond the grave to Molly and giving her a reason to fight to survive,” explains Holocaust historian, Dr. Doris Bergen (University of Toronto). “It was like a hand reaching across the line between death and life, and trying to extend the possibility of life to Molly.”

On April 17th, 2023, to mark Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), The New Classical FM presented Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango, a concert featuring the Payadora Tango Ensemble with haunting vocals by Juno Award-winning Lenka Lichtenberg and Aviva Chernick.