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A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools
(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.
The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.
The movement to police children’s literature — particularly graphic novels — on the basis of race, sex and gender has encompassed thousands of different titles, and it has grown to become a potent political force with potential reverberations for the 2024 presidential race. The official who has played one of the biggest roles in enabling parents to challenge school library books, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now running for president.
To defenders of the illustrated book — including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups — the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the movement is bigoted and misguided.
Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Florida Rep. Randy Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Calling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine continued, “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
Here is what you need to know about the book, the criticism it’s facing and the context that has made it a flashpoint in a deepening culture war.
What is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’?
Published in 2018, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is a new, abridged version of Frank’s famous diary presented in comic-book format. The project was authorized by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank, which controls the copyright to the diary Otto rescued after he survived the Holocaust. Anne herself perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out for most of the war with her family in an Amsterdam annex.
The Oscar-nominated Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, together with illustrator David Polonsky, put the new book together. It was intended as a companion piece to the 2021 animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” which Folman directed.
While the film tells the fanciful story of Anne’s imaginary friend Kitty coming to life and wandering through modern-day Amsterdam, the book is a straightforward, though heavily truncated, rendition of Anne’s original diary. All of the entries it reproduces are taken from her original text, and dialogue between the characters in the annex is based on Anne’s own recollections of their conversations. Some of its supporters resist the label “graphic novel,” which they say implies the story is fictional.
The new book, the foundation says, is not meant to replace Frank’s original diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Secret Annex” and in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” That book, along with subsequent editions that restored some passages edited out of the first publication, continues to be published and widely read in dozens of languages.
Why and how is the book being challenged?
A handful of parent activists, the largest “parents’ rights” group in the country and at least one Republican state lawmaker — Fine — have specifically gone after “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as part of their larger campaign against what they say is obscene and pornographic content in schools. After a few isolated incidents of parental opposition to the book over the last year, their efforts have gained steam in recent months.
Organized by members of “parents’ rights” groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, parents nationwide have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, the vast majority of which deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality. This movement began as parents organized to oppose COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, as well as recent political controversies involving LGBTQ-focused issues such as medical procedures for trans children.
The groups operate under the presumption that their children’s educators and librarians might be trying to sneak leftist viewpoints (including what they call “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”) into the classroom, or even that they are “grooming” their children.
Increasingly, such parents have trained this focus on books, and have become particularly sensitive to any literary depictions of sex and/or LGBTQ identity — particularly in graphic or comic-book format. Some of the most-banned books in schools across the country are graphic novels and memoirs with LGBTQ themes, including “Gender Queer” and “Fun Home.”
“People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America. “Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.”
Florida has emerged as a frontier for this movement under the leadership of DeSantis, who is a Republican. Under new laws he championed, educators can face felony charges for making obscene material accessible to students; the state also has a new law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, that prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual identity or orientation in elementary and middle school, and limits it in high school.
Why are parents complaining specifically about the graphic adaptation?
Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.
These passages are Anne’s own writing, and were part of her actual diary. Folman and Polonsky reproduce them in the book and show a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition.
This illustration, which is presented as coming from Anne’s imagination, has garnered the most intense blowback from parents. In Facebook groups devoted to book challenges, some members have shared screenshots of the page as evidence of the adaptation’s obscene qualities, questioning why any parent would want their child to read it.
Some people challenging the book have offered other explanations. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty whose Florida district has removed the book, told JTA that she was troubled by the fact that the adaptation only replicates a small percentage of the original diary, while leaving out what she believed to be crucial context: the original epilogue that shifted from Anne’s first-person narration to a larger study of the victims of the Holocaust. (An afterword does appear in the graphic adaptation.)
Inveighing against current child literacy levels she said are woefully low, Justice was also infuriated by the idea that Frank’s diary needed an illustrated version to begin with.
“Anne wrote the diary when she was 13,” she said. “So the diary is written at a level where children of that age can completely understand it.”
What has happened when parents have challenged the book?
The book first grabbed headlines in August 2022, when administrators at Keller ISD, a public school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, ordered staff to remove it (along with a selection of other books) from their shelves. The book had been challenged by a single parent the previous year, and the school’s new board, backed by right-wing special interest groups, had ordered its review policy for classroom materials to be completely overhauled. Any books that had ever been challenged in the district were to be removed from circulation until the matter had been resolved. Following public outcry, the book was returned to Keller’s shelves a week later.
A second Texas school district, Katy ISD outside Houston, had also placed the book under review during the 2021-22 school year, ultimately determining it was only appropriate for high school students.
The book soon landed on the radar of parent activists in Florida. One Florida school district, Indian River County Schools on the state’s Atlantic coast, ruled in April that the book was “not age-appropriate” at any level of instruction, including high school. A parent there had challenged it, claiming that the book “minimizes the Holocaust.”
After a review, the district agreed with the parent, telling JTA it had determined the book to be “a fictional novel,” “not the real diary of Anne Frank,” and filled with “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent issued a statement backing the ruling, citing Florida’s statewide Holocaust education mandate as a reason why the school should not make the book available to students.
The national leadership of Moms For Liberty issued a statement siding with the district — and emphasizing that Anne Frank’s diary is not itself objectionable.
“There are multiple versions of Anne Frank’s diary of varying age appropriateness available to students,” the statement said. “Only this ONE version was removed.”
Justice, the Moms for Liberty cofounder, is a former board member for Indian River County Schools and still lives in the area. She told JTA she does not like the book either and said its removal was a sign of the system working as it should: School administrators took a parent’s challenge seriously and came to a decision.
“If the superintendent and the school board wanted it there, it would be there,” she said. “If the Holocaust education group in the county had wanted it there — these are Jewish people — had wanted it there, it would be there.”
Another Florida school district, Clay County Public Schools outside Jacksonville, has kept the book restricted from student access for some five months and counting, following a single parental complaint earlier this year. That parent, Bruce Friedman, is Jewish, and has become a leading voice of the broader book challenge movement. He challenged the graphic adaptation along with hundreds of other books in his district that he deemed to be inappropriate for students. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming,” he told JTA about the adaptation.
Facing a backlog of book challenges, Clay County in April altered its challenge policy to make it harder for parents like Friedman to file blanket requests to remove many books at once for broadly defined reasons. But notably, the district retained the pending challenge to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” even after its policy change. A final decision on the book is still pending.
How are the book’s supporters responding to the criticism?
Activists opposed to the book banning movement and experts on the diary’s publication history say critics of the Anne Frank adaptation are wrong even about the most basic facts of their objections.
First, while the visual format of the graphic adaptation (which incorporates some surreal imagery) arguably lies somewhere between fact and artistic interpretation, and its rendition of the diary is severely abridged, the book did not invent the passages these parents find objectionable, as some have alleged. Those came, word for word, from Frank herself. Both passages were fully restored to her English-language diary beginning with versions published in the 1980s, largely without incident.
A crucial part of the argument against the graphic adaptation is the idea that both of these passages were excised from the initial English-language edition of the diary. Both Friedman and Fine have told JTA they have no recollection of having read the passages with sexual content in their own childhood memories of the diary.
They almost certainly did, said Ruth Franklin, a book critic and author who is writing a book about Frank and her diary to be published next year by Yale University Press. According to Franklin’s research, the very first English-language edition of the diary did indeed include one of the two passages the parents are now objecting to: the part where Anne discusses her attraction to another girl.
Franklin said that, contrary to popular belief, Otto Frank was the one who pushed for the passage to be included in the diary’s first English-language edition after it was excised from the Dutch original. Otto is often portrayed as having been responsible for removing the passage so as to sanitize Anne’s language for a general audience.
Contemporary parents who insist they did not read the passage as children, she said, are “misremembering.”
“If they were to actually go to the library and open up the edition that has been in print since 1952, they would be unhappily surprised to find what’s there,” Franklin said. “It seems inconsistent to me to go after the graphic adaptation and not the diary itself.”
At least one parent has objected to the unabridged text-based version of the diary before. In 2013, a Michigan mom challenged an unabridged edition of the diary, citing the same passages that today’s parents are objecting to in the graphic adaptation. She argued that the unabridged diary was “inappropriate for the middle school,” and tried to push her daughter’s district to swap out the “definitive” edition of the diary for the original version that excised one of the objectionable passages. The parent’s objection made national news, was the subject of much condemnation and was ultimately rejected by the district.
Conditions in schools have changed in the last decade, with parents in multiple states newly empowered to challenge books in their children’s schools. The movement has caught up not only the graphic version of Anne Frank’s diary but a growing number of other titles with Jewish and Holocaust themes.
Meehan of PEN America suggested that the parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes, meaning that the text had become an example of “intersectionality,” or representing more than one marginalized group. Some of the book’s opponents, including Justice, have separately attacked the idea of intersectionality.
“When there are multiple themes represented in a book,” Meehan said, “then that book becomes even more a focus of efforts to remove it.”
For the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss group that controls the diary and authorized the adaptation, the situation is clear-cut. From across the Atlantic, the group issued a statement responding to challenges of the diary in all its forms: “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.”
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The post A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education
(JTA) — Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews.
“There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user. “They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”
For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual. But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.
Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony and Jewish values. Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.
It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism. Other contemporary Holocaust learning initiatives have employed video games, artificial intelligence and similarly novel approaches as educators struggle to adapt to a near future without living survivors to share their testimonies.
For Van Zandt, the lessons aren’t just teaching about the Holocaust, but also about highlighting positive Jewish influence in the world of popular culture. He rattled off a list of Jewish artists he admires, including Bob Dylan and the pop songwriting team Lieber and Stoller.
“I have a lot of gratitude for what they have contributed to my life, just in terms of enjoyment,” he said. “Show business doesn’t exist without the Jewish contributions.”
The guitarist founded TeachRock in 2013 alongside other big names from the world of music and the arts, including Springsteen, U2 frontman Bono, Jackson Browne and the director Martin Scorsese. On Thursday, the organization piloted its new Holocaust education lesson plan to 50 high school students at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, timed to the state’s Holocaust Education Week. Florida’s Holocaust education task force is promoting the material to districts across the state.
“We always want to be educating in a way that feels like you’re not being taught. And I think this captures that,” Michael Igel, a contributing author on the TeachRock lesson plan who also chairs the statewide task force, told JTA.
For Igel, a descendant of survivors, the project fits neatly into his own efforts to bring Holocaust education into unconventional spaces. He’s planning future courses that incorporate food and theater.
“It’s still standards-based Holocaust education. But it’s being delivered to students in these different portals,” he said.
It was through Igel’s promotion of such nontraditional methods that he was approached by a member of TeachRock’s leadership council a year ago. TeachRock had recently been looking to offer lessons on Jewish heritage, and saw an opportunity to broach the subject of the Holocaust through Igel.
A huge E Street Band fan, Igel laughed as he recalled how the council member asked him if he had ever heard of Van Zandt.
The first of the curriculum’s four days opens with students listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” the 1975 hit by rock band KISS, before segueing into Jewish life in prewar Europe and the rise of antisemitism.
Igel noted the unique nature of the lesson. “When Gene Simmons with his tongue out is the first thing you see, you’re wondering, ‘What the heck happened to Holocaust education?’” he said.
Gradually the link becomes clear: The lesson explains that KISS frontman Gene Simmons is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Much of the curriculum is built around similar ideas of Jewish survival and resilience, as students are asked to contemplate how Simmons’ family background may have informed his outré stage persona. (Co-founder Paul Stanley is also Jewish.)
Such concepts, he said, help expand the idea of a Holocaust lesson beyond Jews as “victims in a snapshot of time.” In teacher training sessions, educators have responded well to the musical framing and excitedly discussed which songs they would want to pass down to future generations — a positive sign for Igel, who hopes to convince teachers to use the curriculum even outside of the state-mandated Holocaust Education Week lessons.
While Van Zandt, who is not Jewish, doesn’t craft the curriculum himself, he is friends with Simmons and the two have spoken before about wanting to use music to teach Jewish history. Max Weinberg, the E Street Band’s longtime drummer, is also Jewish.
The initiative comes at a moment when the world of popular music, like many other cultural sectors, has become engulfed in controversy over Israel. A recent dustup involved Ed Sheeran and Macklemore, in which Jewish venue owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to drop the rapper from his tour over his onstage pro-Palestinian activism. That prompted many artists to support Macklemore, including Jewish actor Ilana Glazer, who spoke at one of his “Free Palestine” tour stops. Several leading musicians, including Lorde, Paramore and Björk, have also signed pledges to boycott Israel over its conduct in Gaza, while others including Pink and Boy George have taken opposite tracks.
All of this discourages Van Zandt, who famously led an international artist boycott of the South African resort venue Sun City in 1985 to protest Apartheid. The artists now backing the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement targeting Israel have cited the Sun City protests as a direct inspiration. (Sun City itself was founded by Sol Kerzner, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.)
But Van Zandt says the two causes are different.
“Yes, I am known as the boycott king of the world,” he said. “It’s not the same situation. Trying to deny weapons for Israel to defend itself is obscene. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible.”
He has feuded with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, over BDS.
“I wrote him a very nice, detailed letter saying that it was misconceived, it’s a mistake, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Van Zandt recalled. “I was very nice to him. Very diplomatic, very respectful. And then he starts just calling me names in the press.” (Waters has directed expletives at Van Zandt and other contemporaries who disagree with him about Israel in interviews.)
Igel, too, is thinking about how TeachRock’s lessons can address contemporary discourse over Israel, a subject that many Holocaust educators often are reluctant to bring up in the classroom even when students press the topic. His curriculum defines what a genocide is — “for a generation that needs to know what that word means, and what it doesn’t mean,” he said.
Following this week’s pilot program, both Igel and Van Zandt hope states beyond Florida will take an interest in their lessons. The rock star has ambitious goals for the initiative: to try to change the national conversation around Jews and Israel that has filled his social media feeds, which he describes as “lies on top of lies.”
“Eventually there’s got to be a national public conversation about this, which is not taking place,” he said. “So eventually it’s going to have to be. At that point, all bets are off.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education appeared first on The Forward.
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Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing?
Any production of Patrick Hamilton’s popular thriller Rope, like any game of Clue, can be reduced to props, setting and culprits.
The central prop is a large chest, containing a freshly-murdered body. The setting can vary: Mayfair in Hamilton’s 1929 original, Manhattan in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart. The names of the players are sometimes different, but there are always two students in their finely-appointed apartment with the titular murder weapon.
Gordon Greenberg’s new adaptation, now playing off-Broadway at the New Group’s space at St. Clement’s, presents a novel clue as to what prompted the crime: a Christmas tree upstage right. In his take on this “well-made play,” which Greenberg believes has its deficiencies, the central characters, inspired by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, are once again Jewish, but doing their best to conceal that fact.
Hamilton, who wrote his play shortly after Leopold and Loeb’s conviction, was struck by the men’s alleged lack of motive, beyond a desire to pull off the perfect crime based on their nihilistic misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Greenberg doesn’t buy that the killing was dispassionate, and believes a crisis of identity was at play.
“What drew me to it was thinking about what the factors might have been that went into this murder that I personally find hard to believe was just theoretical,” said Greenberg, a director and playwright, who recently revived Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife off-Broadway. “I don’t think anyone does anything for purely theoretical reasons. We can extrapolate them later, but in the moment we are going on gut impulses and human needs and sexuality and jealousy and all of these fiery emotional poles that make us human.”
Greenberg, who is gay and Jewish, had long been fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case, wondering what led two well-bred, cerebral Jews to commit a supposedly “motiveless” murder. (In the real crime, notably fictionalized in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy, Robert Franks; in Rope, they kill a wealthy classmate.)
Hamilton’s play, which Greenberg found to be “antiseptic,” de-Judaized and stripped of queerness, is not concerned with the “why” of the killing.
His murderers, Brandon, described as “tall, finely and athletically built, and blonde” and Granillo, “a Spaniard” with the “shrug of the shoulders characteristic of his race,” are in it for the thrill. They convene a dinner party and serve the meal on the chest containing their victim, certain they won’t be caught.
In Greenberg’s version, set in 1957 Manhattan, Brandon is Garret Stern (Cameron Monahan), a working-class striver who declaims, in a break of the fourth wall, that he “wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews with bent vowels and calloused hands from whom he actually descends.” (As part of the ruse, he’s abandoned his given name of Gary.)
Granillo is now Nate Singer (Corey Fogelmanis), the Yekke scion of a garment district macher who, to his upwardly-mobile mother’s delight, “can almost pass for gentile.” Both are students at Princeton and plan to drop the body back in Jersey after their macabre dinner party.
Like the real Leopold and Loeb, they are also involved sexually and sadomasochistically. Greenberg says he was partially inspired by Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon, which revisited the killers through a queer lens.
Nate’s instilled self-hatred likely feeds into his desire to be dominated by Garret, whose rough upbringing as a Jew in postwar Skokie taught him the utility of violence. (His school principal praised him for breaking a boy’s nose, saying “your people aren’t exactly known for defending themselves.”)
Greenberg, who said that, as an actor he played “every Herb Gardner and Neil Simon play around,” chose to move the action up to the era Lavender Scare and a resurgence of casual, clubby antisemitism following the “chemotherapy of World War II” that briefly put it into remission.
Nate and Garret’s guests, for their post-Christmas shindig, whose centerpiece is a chest containing a corpse, include a polished, pedigreed classmate; a droll Sarah Lawrence student; their closeted professor, who will catch them in the lie; and a Mayflower-descendant judge who happens to be the father of Ronald Kentley, the deceased.
Driving the boys’ motive and cue for passion is Nate’s tormented attraction to Ronald, who he fears might out him and land him on McCarthy’s list. Garret is jealous, but sees an opportunity: In bumping Ronald off, he hopes to take his place as the judge’s surrogate son, gaining entry to the patrician world to which he aspires.
But their guests’ routine macroaggressions show the futility of trying to overcome their backgrounds. The Christmas tree is fooling no one. Greenberg is similarly unconvinced that Leopold and Loeb’s murder was merely a Nietzschean performance, undertaken to prove that morality need not apply to superior intellects.
“No one really knows what was going through their mind, and no one ever will,” Greenberg said of Leopold and Loeb’s crime. “But taking one of these fascinating true crime stories and positing what the humanity is behind it, what’s all the flesh on the bone, is to me the fascination and the fun exercise.”
The post Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing? appeared first on The Forward.
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Documentary reveals composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s empathy for the Jews
אין רוסלאַנד איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ דאָקומענטאַר רעזשיסירט פֿון גריגאָרי אילוגדין, מיטן נאָמען „DSCH: סימפֿאָניע נומער 13‟, וועגן דעם וועלט־באַרימטן קאָמפּאָזיטאָר דמיטרי שאָסטאַקאָוויטש און די ייִדן. כאָטש ער איז נישט געווען קיין ייִד, האָט ער געשאַפֿן מוזיק פֿאַר ייִדישע לידער און געווידמעט זײַן 13טער סימפֿאָניע דעם חורבן פֿון די ייִדן.
מיט דער אַברעוויאַטור DSCH, וואָס פֿיגורירט אינעם טיטל פֿונעם דאָקומענטאַר, פֿלעגט שאָסטאַקאָוויטש אונטערשרײַבן זײַנע נאָטן. מיינען מיינט עס D. Schostakowitsch. דאָס ווייסן, מסתּמא, אַלע מוזיקער, וועלכע שפּילן זײַנע ווערק. ווייניקער איז אָבער באַקאַנט דעם קאָמפּאָזיטאָרס שײַכות נישט בלויז צו ייִדישע טעמעס אין אַלגעמיין, נאָר דווקא צו ייִדיש. געוויינטלעך זינגט מען אויס זײַנע ייִדישע לידער בלויז אין דער רוסישער איבערזעצונג; אויף דער וועבזײַט „ייִדיש־קולטור‟ קענט איר זיי אויסהערן אויף ייִדיש.
אין פּעטערבורג איז די פּרעמיערע פֿונעם פֿילם פֿאָרגעקומען אינעם קינאָ־טעאַטער „אַווראָראַ‟, וווּ שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט אין די 1920ער יאָרן אָנגעהויבן זײַן מוזיקאַלישע קאַריערע ווי אַ יונגער פּיאַניסט, וועלכער האָט אַקאָמפּאָנירט שטומע פֿילמען. דער אַלטער קינאָ־טעאַטער, געעפֿנט אין 1913, האָט דעמאָלט געהייסן „פּיקאַדילי‟.
אין 1961 האָט דער רוסישער דיכטער יעווגעני יעווטושענקאָ אָנגעשריבן זײַן קורצע פּאָעמע „באַבי־יאַר‟ וועגן דעם טרויעריק־באַקאַנטן אָרט אין קיִעוו, וווּ די נאַציס האָבן אומגעבראַכט איבער 100 טויזנט מענטשן, אַרײַנגערעכנט צום ווייניקסטן 33,771 ייִדן. די פּאָעמע הייבט זיך אָן מיט די ווערטער „אויף באַבי־יאָר זײַנען קיין דענקמעלער נישטאָ‟. דאָ ציטיר איך יוסף רובינשטיינס ייִדישע איבערזעצונג, וועלכע איז דערשינען דעם 8טן אָקטאָבער, 1961, אינעם פֿאָרווערטס.
שאָסטאַקאָוויטש, דעמאָלט שוין וועלט־באַרימט, האָט באַשלאָסן צו שאַפֿן אַ סימפֿאָניע מיט אַ באַס־זינגער, אַ באַסן־כאָר און אַן אָרקעסטער, וווּ עס ווערט אויסגעזונגען די דאָזיקע פּאָעמע, און האָט עס פֿאַרענדיקט אין 1962. יעווטושענקאָ האָט ספּעציעל פֿאַר דער סימפֿאָניע אָנגעשריבן נאָך אַ ליד מיטן נאָמען „פּחדים‟. אין דעצעמבער 1962 האָט מען צום ערשטן מאָל אויסגעשפּילט שאָסטאַקאָוויטשעס 13טע סימפֿאָניע אין מאָסקווע, און אין מאַרץ 1963 אין מינסק.
דער פֿילם דערציילט, פֿאַר וואָס שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט זיך בײַם אָנהייב אָנגעטראָפֿן אויף גרויסע שוועריקייטן מיט אָט דעם ווערק. לויט דער סאָוועטישער שיטה איז געווען פּאָליטיש אומקאָרעקט צו דערמאָנען די טראַגעדיע פֿון באַבי־יאַר אין שײַכות באַזונדערס צו ייִדן, ווײַל דאָרטן זענען דערמאָרדעט געוואָרן – און, קוואַנטיטאַוו גערעכנט, מער ווי ייִדן – אויך סאָוועטישע געפֿאַנגענע און אַנדערע מענטשן. דערצו, האָט מען פֿאַרשוויגן די ראָלע פֿון די אוקראַיִנישע קאָלאַבאָראַנטן אין דער מאַסן־שחיטה.
די טעמע פֿונעם ייִדן־חורבן האָט מען בכלל אויסגעמיטן, ווײַל מצד דעם אָפֿיציעלן קוקווינקל זענען ייִדן געווען אַ רעלאַטיוו קליינער טייל צווישן די 26 מיליאָן אומגעקומענע סאָוועטישע בירגער. קיין דענקמעלער זענען אין באַבי־יאַר טאַקע נישט געווען ביז 1976, ווען מע האָט אויפֿגעשטעלט אַ מאָנומענט לזכּרון די דערמאָרדעטע „בירגער פֿון דער שטאָט קיִעוו און קריגס־געפֿאַנגענע‟. ערשט אין 1991 האָט זיך דאָרט באַוויזן אַ באַזונדערער ייִדישער דענקמאָל, און נאָך שפּעטער, אין 2016, אַ ציגײַנערישער.
אינעם דאָקומענטאַר ווערט דערמאָנט שאָסטאַקאָוויטשעס שײַכות צו דער ייִדישער שפּראַך. אין 1948, ווען אין סטאַלינס צײַטן האָבן אַ סך ייִדן געליטן פֿון רדיפֿות כּלומרשט צוליב זייער נאַציאָנאַליזם, האָט שאָסטאַקאָוויטש געשאַפֿן זײַן לידער־ציקל (אָפּוס נומער 79) „פֿון דער ייִדישער פֿאָלקס־פּאָעזיע‟, באַגרינדעט אויף יחזקאל דאָברושינס און אַבֿרהם יודיצקיס זאַמלונג „ייִדישע פֿאָלקס־לידער‟ (פֿאַרעפֿנטלעכט אינעם יאָר 1940 אין מאָסקווע).
איר קאָנט זיך באַקענען פּרטימדיק מיטן דאָזיקן ציקל פֿון שאָסטאַקאָוויטשן אויף ייִדיש און ענגליש אויף דער וועבזײַט „ייִדיש־קולטור‟, וועלכע האָט, ווי פֿריִער געזאָגט, אַ געוויסע שײַכות צום נײַעם דאָקומענטאַר. דער גרינדער פֿון דער דאָזיקער וועבזײַט, ד״ר מאַרק זילבערקוויט, איז אויך דער פּראָדוסער פֿונעם פֿילם. אילוגדין, דער רעזשיסאָר, האָט מיך פּערזענלעך פֿאַרבעטן אויף דער פּעטערבורגער פּרעמיערע פֿונעם נײַעם דאָקומענטאַר ווי אַ ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקן זשורנאַליסט. ער האָט מיר איבערגעגעבן, אַז ייִדיש שפּילט פֿאַר אים אויך אַ גרויסע ראָלע און ער האָפֿט ווײַטער צו פּאָפּולאַריזירן ר די שפּראַך.
וואָס שייך דער קאָמפּליצירטער באַציִונג פֿונעם ראַטן־פֿאַרבאַנד צו ייִדישע טעמעס איז כּדאַי צוצוגעבן, אַז אין 1961, דאָס זעלבע יאָר וואָס יעווטושענקאָ האָט אָנגעשריבן „באַבי־יאַר‟, האָט זיך אין מאָסקווע געעפֿנט דער ייִדישער ליטעראַרישער זשורנאַל „סאָוועטיש היימלאַנד‟. דאָרט און אין דער סאָוועטיש־ייִדישער ליטעראַטור בכלל האָט מען יאָ באַהאַנדלט דעם ייִדן־חורבן.
איין וויכטיקע זאַך ווערט נישט דערמאָנט אינעם פֿילם: ווען שאָסטאַקאָוויטש האָט געשריבן זײַן 13טע סימפֿאָניע, מיט וועלכע ייִדישע שרײַבער און דיכטער האָט ער זיך געחבֿרט? דער ענטפֿער וואָלט טאַקע געווען גוט צו וויסן.
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