CONTENTS
AVAILABLE EDITIONS
1. Dream
5
Piano/Choral Score
2. I’ll Fly
10
3. The Peaks of Tibet
15
4. I Will Flutter
20
5. Fly, Cruise, Soar!
28
Full Score 8604A (Performing Forces: Flute, 2 Bb Clarinets, Bb Trumpet, Percussion [Finger Cymbal, Triangle, Glockenspiel, Temple Blocks, Tambourine], SATB Chorus, Piano, Strings (4-4-3-3-2)
Duration: 10:07
8604
Instrumental Parts
8604B
Version for Treble Chorus and Piano
8109
Abraham (“Abramek”) Koplowicz (1930–1944) and poetry that Abramek had created which Abramek had stashed there.
P O E P R Y U IN S G AL IS C IL OP LE Y G A L
Abraham (“Abramek”) Koplowicz was born February 18, 1930, in Lodz, Poland. He was the son of Jewish parents Mendel Koplowicz and Yochet Gittel. In 1939 (when Abramek was 9), World War II entered the lives of and all of the other Jewish inhabitants of Lodz. The 165,000 Jewish residents of the town were forced to live in a squalid ghetto foursquare-kilometers in size. By 1940 (when Abramek was 10), 90% of the Jews were working as slave laborers in 119 factories belonging to the army of the Nazi German occupiers simply to earn meager food rations. In 1943 (when Abramek was 13), he began to write poems and sketch satirical images in a school notebook that documented the everyday life of the Lodz Ghetto and his family’s survival. (The text for the present work is based on words from the Polish poem Marzenia [The Dream] which Abramek wrote that year, as translated and adapted by composer Diane Abdi Robertson.) In 1944, the Koplowicz family was deported to the infamous Nazi German concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Abramek and his mother were both murdered in the gas chambers there, but Abramek’s father survived.
C
Meanwhile, another Jewish family was struggling for survival in the Lodz Ghetto. Like the Koplowicz family, the Grynfeld family consisted of a mother, a father and an only son named Eliezer (“Lolek”). Lolek’s mother, Haya, was familiar with Abramek because she was a co-worker of Mendel’s. Abramek used to work in a shoe factory, but occasionally he would make an appearance at his father’s workshop. There he would entertain the slave laborers by reading poetry and performing satire. Everyone who witnessed Abramek’s skills considered him a prodigy. Lolek’s father was murdered in the war, but Haya and Lolek survived. After the war, Mendel returned to his former home in Lodz to look for any memorabilia that he could collect about the family whose lives the Nazis had stolen from him. In the attic, he recovered artwork
Eventually Mendel was reunited with his former co-worker, Haya. They wed in 1946. In 1956, the Mendel, Haya and Lolek moved to Israel along with the two children that Mendel and Haya had together, daughter Hava and son Adam. For the remainder of his life, Mendel’s mood was withdrawn. He never really got over the tragic losses he experienced during the Holocaust. Mendel seldom spoke of Abramek. He did, however, keep Abramek’s rendering of a rabbi as a framed artwork on a wall in his bedroom for many years. It was only after Mendel’s death in 1983 at the age of 83 that Lolek found Abramek’s school notebook among Mendel’s belongings. Lolek was astonished at what he saw there; bright, hopeful poetry and drawings created by his late 13-year-old stepbrother under incredibly oppressive conditions. Furthermore, the work contained therein belies the age of its creator. Abramek only received formal schooling from ages 7–9. Still, he managed to learn so much on his own about the finer points of Polish, writing quality poetry in that language, creating visual artwork, and about the world in general (geography, for example) that it is mind-boggling. To quote Lolek Grynfeld, “It’s hard to explain to non-Polish speakers how marvelous these poems are. The rhyme and the rhythm, the imagery, the play on sound is amazing, and not only considering the fact that the poet was a child. It’s excellent poetry regardless of the writer’s age. Experts on Polish literature who saw the verses were very impressed indeed.” The Nazis succeeded in extinguishing Abramek Koplowicz’s life, but they did not crush his spirit, nor did they erase his legacy. His notebook now resides at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel. Source: The Jerusalem Post Magazine, Friday, July 7, 1989 Edition, pp. 4–5, article by Sarah Honig.
Cover art: from Abramek Koplowicz’s notebook. The title reads “UTWORY-WŁASNE” (Private Creations). The artwork, also by Koplowicz, depicts the tallest building in the Lodz Ghetto (a church), a footbridge, and the year of authorship (1943).