Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust at Puffin: 10/1 8PM

How could an era of history so void of humanity as the Holocaust produce some of the most remarkable songs that haunt us to this day? What was there to sing about? Who composed the songs? Who sang? Who listened? On Saturday night, October 1st, at 8:00 PM at the Puffin Cultural Forum, folk singer Jerry Silverman will present a program of songs and readings from his book "The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust," in a search for the answers to these questions. The Forum is located at 20 East Oakdene Avenue (off of Teaneck Road) in Teaneck. There is a suggested donation of $5.00 at the door.

Jerry Silverman is one of America's outstanding folksingers, guitar teachers and most prolific authors of music books. He has published over 200 books, which have sold in the millions, including folk song collections, anthologies and method books for guitar, banjo and fiddle. He has taught hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, the joys of making music on the guitar. He has performed in folksong concerts at schools, universities and concert halls in the U.S. and abroad.

During his performance the audience will be led on the terrible journey from the first Lager-Lied (concentration camp song) -- composed in the Börgermoor concentration camp in Germany in 1933 -- step by step through the inexorable and tragic events leading up to the Shoah, through the wartime years and up to the present. It is an eight-decade odyssey.

The songs sing of despair, hope, rage, resistance, and even humor, in the face of the unspeakable. Rare recordings of voices long still, salvaged from the abyss complement the live performance. After the presentation the members of the audience are invited to ask questions and offer comments. It has happened that survivors or children of survivors in the audience have first-hand recollections of the events recounted in some of the songs.

Silverman has utilized his extensive musicological and linguistic expertise in compiling and editing "The Undying Flame: Ballads & Songs of the Holocaust," a major work in the field of Holocaust scholarship, which contains 110 songs in 16 languages - Yiddish, German, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Ladino, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian and English. The songs include the works of concentration camp prisoners and inhabitants of the ghettos of Eastern Europe as well anti-Fascist anthems inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Red Army songs and songs of Resistance fighters. Jerry Silverman's concert / lecture program based on the material in "The Undying Flame" presents many of these rare and moving songs for the first time ever. A CD of 14 songs is included with the book.

Among his best-selling books are "The Folk Song Encyclopedia" (a two-volume compilation of over 1,000 folk songs; words, music and guitar chords), "Ballads and Songs of the Civil War" (piano-vocal w/guitar chords), "The Guitar Player's Guide and Almanac" (a combined method book and survey of musical, technical and anecdotal information), "Of Thee I Sing" (patriotic American songs from the Revolutionary War to the present) and "The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust."

The Puffin Cultural Forum is a project of the Puffin Foundation, Ltd. and is located at 20 East Oakdene Avenue in Teaneck (off of Teaneck Road). For directions or other information about Puffin Cultural Forum events, please consult the Puffin Cultural Forum section of the foundation's website at http://www.PuffinFoundation.org or call us at 201-836-8923.

Alan Sohn NEW: Now available in convenient blog format at http://TEANECK.blogspot.com See http://www.TeaneckInfo.com for the complete Teaneck Community Calendar. Send your event to mailto:Events@TeaneckInfo.com for inclusion on the site. "Scientia Est Potentia"