Forward - 07.06.2001

 

Forward

LETTER FROM RIGA

Mourning, Yes, But Music Too At a Reunion of Latvian Jews

By Libby Garland

My German musician friend Joscha Zmarzlik called me from Dresden this April to tell me he'd been invited to give a klezmer concert in Riga, Latvia, as part of the week-long Reunion of World Latvian Jewry taking place in June. Did I want to meet him there?

This is how I found myself sitting in the theater on the top floor of Riga's refurbished Jewish Community Center on the night of the reunion's official opening, listening to Joscha and his friend, Christian Reck, singing Yiddish songs. "We were nine brothers," they sang. "One died, then we were eight... seven... one."

The stage was decked in blue and white, and above the performers hung a large Star of David. Before the war, Jewish theater troupes came from far and wide to perform here; during the Soviet era it served as a place for Party functionaries to give speeches to each other. Now, thanks to funds from the Joint Distribution Committee and others, the lovely large building near the city's old center is again a space for Riga's Jews.

That night it was packed with the 170 or so reunion attendees, most from the United States and Israel, some from places like Germany, Sweden and Colombia, and a small contingent of Jews who live in Latvia itself. Though the reunion's official name didn't allude to it, the event was deeply bound to the Holocaust. Many of the attendees were Holocaust survivors, and their presence in Riga was twinned with a massive absence that still reverberates: The Holocaust was at its most thorough in Latvia, where all but about one thousand of the pre-war population of 90,000 were killed.

The number of those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand here is dwindling. Steven Springfield, a survivor of the Riga ghetto and the Kaiserwald and Stutthof concentration camps, heads the Jewish Survivors of Latvia in the United States, and this is the third such reunion he has helped organize since Latvian independence in 1991. The event was originally scheduled for 2003, he told me, but, for the sake of aging survivors, was pushed forward two years.

Even so, there were fewer survivors attending than there had been the first two times. Many of those at the reunion were the children and grandchildren of Latvian survivors, people for whom pre-war Jewish Riga and the history of the Holocaust here are things encountered only through other people's stories. This made for a particular urgency that permeated the event. Being in Riga, at the epicenter of memory, intensified the sense that this was a pivotal moment of generational transition, transmission and translation. Though most of the people at the reunion did not live anywhere near Riga, it was a hand-off of the city itself in a way, of all the meanings and stories Riga carries for Holocaust survivors.

But oddly, even while this generational changing of the guard takes place, another transition has catapulted Latvian Jewish survivors to political center stage. Since the end of the Soviet era and the beginning of Latvian independence, this community has been among the best organized and most successful in the internationally publicized push for reparations from the German government and Swiss banks. In large part, this is due to the forceful efforts of Riga attorney Alexander Bergmann, 76-year-old president of the Latvian Association of Ghetto and Concentration Camp Survivors, and one of the reunion's hosts.

Such claims have forced post-unification Germany to grapple with the links between its new identity and a difficult past. The fledgling Latvian state is struggling with similar issues. Working to reinvent itself as a sleek new destination for investors and tourists, it is haunted by the specter of its wartime collaboration. In 1998, it established an international historical commission — Mr. Springfield is a member — to investigate the Holocaust in Latvia. The reunion, then, was an important occasion for demonstrating the "new" Latvia's good will. On the evening of the opening, press and beefy security men crowded around President Vaira Vike-Freiberga as she spoke of history and forgiveness at the dedication of the Jewish Community Center's library and the presentation of the first Latvian translation of Elie Wiesel's Night. After we all climbed the grand stairs up to the third floor theater, she spoke again, as did Latvia's Prime Minister and other international dignitaries.

After the speeches came the concert. Joscha was performing here for the second time. He is not Jewish, and most of the time not a klezmer musician — he is a classical vocalist, training at Dresden's conservatory. His relationship to Yiddish music, and to Latvia, is emblematic of the sometimes improbable, personal forms the international engagement with the past and present of Riga's Jews can take.

When I met Joscha 10 years ago — I was studying at the University of Freiburg, where he was a student — he'd just started performing Yiddish music in Germany. The concerts were benefits, part of an intensive fundraising effort his mother, Margot Zmarzlik, instituted on behalf of Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe; for many years she has worked to convince Germans to support a Jewish hospital in Budapest, dental care in Vilnius, medical care in Riga. Last year, Joscha and Christian performed in Vilnius and Riga, and were warmly welcomed by people in the survivor communities with whom Joscha's mother had developed strong friendships.

It was Alexander Bergmann who invited the two back to Riga to perform, and he was the one to stand up on stage and introduce them. The concert began. Although Latvian Jews often were steeped in German culture and language more than in Yiddish, the audience seemed pleased; some people clapped and sang along. But some were restless. It had been a long day. The morning started at the ruins of the Big Choral Synagogue, right across the street from Alexander Bergmann's apartment, near the old ghetto. The synagogue was burned down by the Germans on July 4, 1941, with 300 Jews locked inside. We stood in the morning chill; there were emotional speeches in Russian, Yiddish and English. A prayer was said for the young Israelis who were killed by a suicide bomber in the Tel Aviv disco two nights earlier. The Israelis had flags with them. People clicked cameras.

After that we went by bus to Rumbala and Bikernieki forests, lovely woods several kilometers outside of town, where tens of thousands of Jews were marched in 1941 to be murdered en masse. More prayers; an old man said Kaddish; weeping, a younger man recorded this with a video camera. In Bikernieki, Winfried Nachtwei, a Green Party representative in the German Parliament, addressed the group as we gathered around the new memorial there, in whose construction he was instrumental: a formation of somber columns looming over stone markers. Mr. Springfield translated from German into English. When he came there in 1989, Mr. Nachtwei said, he was shocked: Nothing marked the place, and locals picnicked on top of the mass graves. "I hope this memorial is a bridge from Latvia to Germany, and from one generation to another," he said, describing the international youth corps of volunteers who will work at tending this and other sites.

The music that night was scheduled to last for an hour, but after 30 minutes or so the musicians were told they would have to cut things short: President Vike-Freiberga had to leave. Afterwards, a small group of us went to the Flying Frog, a trendy café that serves burgers and pasta to the tourist crowd. In a private room, I sat with the musicians, Margot Zmarzlik, Winfried Nachtwei, Alexander Bergmann and a few of his friends from Riga's Jewish community. "Finish the concert!" someone suggested, and so, there around the table, they did.