UNC Charlotte students give voice to professor’s research of Holocaust defiance
This semester, 16 members of the University Chorale sang in the program “Partisan Song: Stories and Music of Holocaust Resistance” in performances in Charlotte and New York City.
The program is the brainchild of James A. Grymes, professor of musicology and author of the book Partisan Song: A Holocaust Story of Resilience, Resistance, and Revenge. Published in January by Citadel Press and distributed by Penguin Random House, it tells the story of Moshe Gildenman, a Jewish Ukrainian engineer and amateur musician who became a partisan leader after his wife and daughter were murdered by the Nazis.
Grymes first learned about Moshe Gildenman, known as “Uncle Misha,” more than a decade ago, when he was researching his book “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust—Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour.” “Violins of Hope” was published by Harper Perennial in 2014 and won a National Jewish Book Award.
“His story attracted me from the very beginning,” Grymes said, “even before writing ‘Violins of Hope.”
But Grymes is a musicologist and felt that if he were to write a book about Gildenman, there needed to be a musical connection. One day in 2022, he discovered The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language, an online resource that briefly mentioned a songbook that Gildenman may have owned. Grymes contacted Yad Vashem-The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel and learned that its archive did indeed hold a songbook – the very songbook, in fact, that Gildenman had carried in his coat pocket throughout the war.
“Of all the things,” said Grymes, “this is what he carried.”