Richard Miller

🎷🎷We continue our weekly post of Yiddish songs from the Holocaust and WWII.🎷🎷 _________________________________ Mames Gruv (My Mother’s Grave) 🎷In 1945, in Bratslav, Ukraine, a 10-year-old Jewish orphan named Valya Roytlender sang a short song to Soviet ethnomusicologists. His mother had been murdered. 🎷The song is almost unbearably simple. The boy walks away from her grave and speaks to her: “Mama, I won’t return to you again. Oh mama, who will wake me up? Oh mama, who will tuck me in at night?” 🎷He imagines the morning stars and the rainbow taking her place, because she is gone forever. Then he says he wanders like a sheep in the field and can never reach any shore. 🎷This is not poetry written later for effect. This is a real child’s voice, recorded right after the war, still trying to understand what had been taken from him. 🎷The song was collected by Moisei Beregovsky’s team, then buried for decades under Stalin. Like so many of these songs, its survival is almost miraculous. 🎷It belongs next to “Tulchin”, another child’s testimony from the same destroyed world. Never forget.