« Myrian Alter review by Elliott Simon | Main | Four new reviews »

Velvel strikes again! Songs Never Silenced, now out

As he once wrote me, as though feeling guilty, "I can't stop putting out books"! Now Velvel Pasternak has struck again with yet another essential book of Jewish music: Songs Never Silenced:

... The story behind this book is this: in l948, a survivor named Shmerke Kaczerginsky who lived in Paris wrote down the songs that he remembered or that he could gather from others. The book consisted of the lyrics for two hundred and twenty songs, together with the hand- written, melody transcriptions of a hundred of them. His book nearly disappeared after a while and the few remaining copies of it can only be found on the dusty shelves of second hand bookstores. But Velvel Pasternak somehow discovered it and has given it new life in this new edition which contains those hundred for which there were written melodies, and he has added a few more songs from other sources, and a small section of songs without melodies that were simply too powerful to leave out."

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)