Customer Reviews

Ghetto Tango: Wartime Yiddish Theater

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ghetto Tango is a remarkable CD. Beautifully performed by master musicians Cooper and Mlotek and accessable to all audiences I believe that this album is one of the best of the year. The songs are at once funny, disturbing, beauiful, moving and grotesque. What a great change from the usual sugary-sweet, pseudosentimental holocaust memorial recordings! Here we have an honest and true testiment to the complexities of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. But this isn't just an album to use simply as a memorial, it's a great listen and surprisingly delightful. It is certainly a must for any world music collector and certainly for any Jewish music lover!

Ghetto Tango is a compilation of beautiful and deeply moving interpretations of the music created and performed in the Jewish ghettos during the war, presented by two exceptionally gifted musicians. Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek are both in top form, delivering the haunting melodies and heartbreaking lyrics with rich emotional texture. Some of the songs are in English and most are in Yiddish, but excellent liner notes as well as the seamless translations interspersed with some of the songs make it a thrilling listening experience even for those who don't know Yiddish at all.

You don't have to know Celtic to enjoy Enya and you don't have to know Yiddish to be completely entranced by the haunting melodies and text presented by Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek. The lyrics are presented in such way that I was transported to the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna. The spirit and courage of the oppressed Jews whose voices were silenced are given voice in this remarkable CD. Kudos!

This presentation of mostly unknown songs engendered in the face of annihilation is a breathtaking ensemble put together and performed by Ms. Cooper and Mr. Mlotek. Listening to the CD becomes a voyage through time to a time at the edge of existence. The beauty they find there is heartbreaking and, ultimately, triumphal in the witness it bears and the message it carries. Accolades to them both for finding a way to share these lost treasures from what most consider a dying language, and breathing new life and hope into them. Encore! Encore!

I should have read the liner thoughts more carefully, I thought this was authentic wartime Yiddish cabaret music, such as you might have heard in one of the underground clubs or cabarets in the ghetto... perhaps some rare recordings of the real thing....what you have here is something...dreadful. Songs in English in this overblown vocal style that gives you no feeling whatsoever for the subject matter or times or themes or anything. What a disappointment!