Tag: Jewish History

Poems From the Holocaust Revisited: Performance and Panel October 20 7:00pm

by Lara Canner, Allan Blank Curator of Music Special Collections

Composer Allan Blank wrote the moving work entitled “Poems From the Holocaust” based upon children’s poetry found at the concentration camp of Terezin after itshttps://flic.kr/p/2mAdcdz liberation in 1945. The composition for mezzo-soprano, double bass, and piano features five pieces that were written to evoke an emotional response from the audience.

During World War II, the Third Reich turned the Terezin fortress located in the modern Czech Republic, into a concentration camp for Jewish writers, artists, and scholars. More comparable to a prison than an extermination camp, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Nazis falsely presented the camp to the rest of the world as a “spa town” when pressed for details by the Red Cross. The reality was that Terezin acted as a collection point for transferring people to ghettos or death camps. Art classes were forbidden, but artist and educator Friedl Dicker-Brandeis brought the children together in secret, where they could create, learn, express their emotions, and hopefully regain a bit of their lost childhood. After the war, many of the writings, artwork and poems were collected by Hana Volavková, who was an art historian and Holocaust survivor.

Allan Blank included the first lines of one of the poems in his composition At Terezin, which reads: “When a new child comes everything seems strange to him. What on this ground I have to lie? Eat black potatoes? No! Not I! I’ve got to stay?” The last lines of At Terezin read: “Here in Terezin, life is hell. And when I’ll go home again I can’t yet tell.” Sadly it is possible that the young writer of this poem most likely never made it back home, of the 15,000 children imprisoned at Terezin, only 150 survived.

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Poem from the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 by Hana Volavková From ODU Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives Rare Book Collection

On October 20th at 7pm Old Dominion Libraries will host a performance of Allan Blank’s work “Poems From the Holocaust” followed by a panel discussion. The event support’s ODU’s Fall 2021 Themester’s Art and Social Justice theme by prompting listeners to never forget the tragedy of the Holocaust’s youngest victims through music. 

The performance and panel discussion will be available to watch live via Zoom. Registration is open now: https://oduonline.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R9fiZvIUTJC3-LAF1VTXrQ

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The Story Behind One of Our Most Popular Artifacts: John Duffy’s Emmy

by Maddie Dietrich, Music Special Collections & Research Specialist

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One of two Emmy’s awarded to composer John Duffy

One of the more widely-seen items in our holdings is an Emmy award belonging to the late composer John Duffy (June 23, 1926, New York City—December 22, 2015, Norfolk, Virginia). Oftentimes when a class visits Special Collections the Emmy is brought out along with a dozen or so other objects, oddities and memorabilia intended to demonstrate to students that Special Collections isn’t just about old papers and manuscripts but in fact consists of all kinds of artifacts, including old papers and manuscripts, which tell the stories firsthand of the persons to whom they once belonged. These introductory class sessions are intended to teach students how to use the collections and include brief hands-on exercises on how to examine items—papers, photographs, maps, calendars, and so on—and offers suggestions on the kinds of information a person might glean from viewing these items firsthand, free from the editorial framework imposed by some intermediary scholar for their own agenda.

So what about this Emmy award? What makes it so popular, so impressive? Well, it’s big and heavy, and it’s shiny and gold. And it’s easily recognized though relatively few people have ever seen one in person. And of course it represents a pinnacle of human achievement in television broadcasting–somebody, somewhere, sometime, did something so outstanding in their field that their peers deemed the accomplishment worthy of their highest award, to be remembered for all time. To see this Emmy, then, is to experience a brush with greatness. And so who was John Duffy and what did he do to win an Emmy, and how did it end up in Special Collections?

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Retired Reading Room Supervisor Mona Farrow with the Duffy Emmy

Born and raised in the Bronx, John Duffy was a veteran of U.S. Navy and fought in the Battle of Okinawa during WWII. After the war he studied composition with such musical giants as Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland and went on to become music director at the Guthrie Theater and the American Shakespeare Festival. He wrote scores for the Broadway productions of J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and Barbara Garson’s MacBird! In 1974 he founded the organization Meet The Composer in association with the New York State Council on the Arts and the American Music Center. He was in fact a two-time Emmy winner, receiving his first for writing the score of the NBC documentary A Talent for Life: Jews of the Italian Renaissance (1979) and his second for the score of the PBS production Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (1984). In 2005 he worked with the Virginia Arts Festival to found The John Duffy Composers Institute, a workshop for young composers which for ten years was held in the Diehn Composers Room on the campus of Old Dominion University (the workshop later became the John Duffy Institute for New Opera). In 2011 Duffy donated his collection of scores, manuscripts and memorabilia to ODU Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (The John Duffy Papers, 1944-2012). Though he composed more than 300 works for symphony orchestra, theater, television and film, Duffy felt strongly that “classical” music was no more worthy an art form than any other type of music, popular or otherwise, and fought to expose the ingrained privilege and prejudice that often hides behind such hierarchies.

That’s who John Duffy was, and that’s why we have his Emmy. When the pandemic is over, make a plan to visit our collections and ask to see it!