A chilling silent film returns with live klezmer score on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
The 1924 silent movie eerily predicted the rise of antisemitism in Eastern Europe
World-renowned musicians will perform a live cine-concert in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, at Rodef Shalom Congregation in Oakland.
Klezmer violinist/composer Alicia Svigals and silent film pianist/composer Donald Sosin will accompany the screening of “The City without Jews,” a 1924 silent movie that eerily predicted the rise of antisemitism in Eastern Europe, with their original score.
The event is being sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Jewish Studies Program and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, with support from other local partners, and an honorarium from the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts.
Admission is free; registration is required.
“It’s a big program,” said Rachel Kranson, Pitt’s director of Jewish studies. “We have wanted to bring Alicia and Donald to Pittsburgh for a long time, and could not afford it. The honorarium made it possible, so this is a big deal.”
Svigals was a founding member of the Grammy-winning The Klezmatics, and is widely considered the foremost klezmer fiddler in the world. She is credited with reviving the klezmer fiddling tradition with her debut solo album Fidl in the 1990s, and has worked with musicians ranging from Itzhak Perlman to the Kronos Quartet to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.
The classically-trained Sosin has performed internationally at venues such as Lincoln Center, MoMA, Telluride, and at major film festivals, and has played for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mary Travers, Howie Mandel, Geula Gill and others.
He and Svigals met at a silent film festival in Italy and have collaborated on several Jewish-themed movie scores.
“City without Jews” was made a century ago by Austrian expressionist filmmaker Hans Karl Breslauer, based on the dystopian novel of the same title by Hugo Bettauer, as a satirical response to antisemitism.
The film was lost for decades until a nitrate print was recovered by a collector at a flea market in Paris in 2015. It was digitally restored through a crowdfunding campaign.
Set in Utopia, a fictitious version of Vienna, it follows the personal and political consequences of a law enacted to expel all Jews. Although the deportation was celebrated at first, Utopia’s citizenry eventually realized the resulting economic and cultural decline, and the National Assembly decided to invite the Jews to return.
The film contains scenes of everyday Jewish life, and ominous sequences, such as assaults on Jews and freight trains transporting them from the city, which foreshadowed the horrific events of a decade later with Hitler’s rise to power.
The Svigals-Sosin score encompasses a range of genres from classical to cabaret to klezmer, with a smattering of traditional prayer melodies, to set scenes, guide the audience’s emotions, and help to distinguish characters, Sosin said.
“Music, in a sense, becomes the dialogue in a silent film. It enhances and complements what we are seeing on the screen.”
There is a great range of how klezmer can sound, said Svigals.
It is ideal for scenes that take place in the world of the shtetl “because it is the soundtrack of lifecycle events,” she said, noting that her accompaniment to “wrenching” scenes of Jews being expelled is “cantorial…a keening and wailing.”
Sosin is one of few silent film pianists in the world.
“We try to be very respectful of the film,” he said. “When I am composing I am thinking, ‘What would I be doing if the director were standing over my shoulder?’”
The goal isn’t to write a great score, but to enhance and complement what is happening on screen, he said. “The best compliment we can receive from an audience member is, ‘I forgot you were even playing.’”
The idea, Svigals said, “is to work on the listener unconsciously and meld completely with the film itself.”
Sosin and Svigals collaborated on “City without Jews” during the pandemic, and began touring shortly after.
The rise in antisemitism, including attacks on college campuses, and hate directed at other minority groups gives the film special relevance with audiences today, Sosin said.
“It was really prescient, and has a lot of depth in terms of emotional and thematic content.”
The film’s depiction of the rise of a demagogue has a chilling, timely resonance, Svigals said. “He whips up nationalist fervor for political gain: ‘Let’s deport them all!’ These things are cyclical realities of history and maybe in a 100-year cycle we’re back to that place.”
She notes that the author of the book on which the film was based was murdered by a Nazi sympathizer and the Nazis banned and destroyed copies of the film.
Sosin said he and Svigals will talk with the audience as part of the program. The concert will be introduced by Randall Halle, the Klaus W. Jonas professor of German film and cultural studies, and director of the European Studies Center at Pitt.
Emily Loeb, Holocaust Center director of programs and education, and a granddaughter of Holocaust victims, expects the cine-concert to be an inspirational experience.
“Our hope is that there will be a take-away — an action step or a change of mind — that will affect how people move through the world and see the world,” she said.
“We are trying to teach about resilience and what it means to stand up to something that isn’t right. We’re hoping this program will teach that.” PJC
Deborah Weisberg is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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