From Silence, Songs About the Holocaust
The music on “Silver and Ash,” a new album from the songwriter Clare Burson, started with silence. There was the silence that descended in 1941, when letters from her maternal great-grandparents, German Jews who had fled to Latvia, abruptly stopped arriving in Memphis, where Ms. Burson’s grandmother settled in 1938. Then there was the second silence: the silence in Ms. Burson’s family about the first silence.
Ms. Burson, now a 34-year-old songwriter who lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, started asking about her family’s history in Europe when she was 8, and learned about the Holocaust at religious school. Her mother’s response: “Don’t ask Grandma about it.”
Some children would respond to that command by dropping it; Ms. Burson was the kind who never really stopped asking, eventually moving to Germany for two years, learning German and Yiddish, and traveling to Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine, the home of other ancestors, in search of answers. In “Silver and Ash,” 28 years of questioning, studying and mourning have been channeled into song, yielding an unusual cultural hybrid: an American album of popular music devoted to the theme of the Holocaust....
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Ms. Burson, now a 34-year-old songwriter who lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, started asking about her family’s history in Europe when she was 8, and learned about the Holocaust at religious school. Her mother’s response: “Don’t ask Grandma about it.”
Some children would respond to that command by dropping it; Ms. Burson was the kind who never really stopped asking, eventually moving to Germany for two years, learning German and Yiddish, and traveling to Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine, the home of other ancestors, in search of answers. In “Silver and Ash,” 28 years of questioning, studying and mourning have been channeled into song, yielding an unusual cultural hybrid: an American album of popular music devoted to the theme of the Holocaust....