I've had a number of requests to post here the Norman Lebrecht article on
Shostakovich from _The Jewish Chronicle_ (UK) that I recently put up on
the DSCH List; bear in mind that it was written for a general audience.

I am following it with an explanatory comment from Nora Avins Klein,
which I found fascinating.  The idea of the "lamed-vavnik" -- news to this
gentile -- is deeply appealing, and suggests that it could well furnish the
basis of an opera.  Does anyone know it is has done so?

   ************************

   At the risk of trespassing on my day job, there is a great weight
   that I need to get off my chest about Shostakovich and the Jews.
   Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) was the supreme Russian symphonist of
   the twentieth century, not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins, yet
   more Jewish in heart and mind than any minyan of Israeli cabinet
   ministers, past or present.

   It was Shostakovich who, in 1944 when the whole world was silent and
   Churchill refused to bomb the Auschwitz railroad, wrote a piano trio
   that ached with the agonies of massacred Jews.  Stalin had it silenced
   after a single performance.  In 1948, as Stalin cranked up his campaign
   against 'rootless cosmopolitans', Shostakovich wrote a Jewish-inflected
   violin concerto for David Oistrakh and an explicit song-cycle, From
   Jewish Folk Poetry, aware as he did so that he risked life and liberty.
   He was protesting, he said later, not so much against official
   anti-semitism as against the popular versions of Jew-baiting that he
   encountered in daily conversation.  It was years before either piece
   could be played in public.

   In 1961, sensing a resurgence in anti-semitism, he composed a 13th
   symphony around Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar, an indictment
   of the willing complicity of Russians and Ukrainians in Nazi atrocities,
   and of the Soviet state's refusal to honour the Jewish dead.  Castigated
   by commissars, Yevtushenko withdrew his poem and toned it down.  At
   the premiere of Shostakovich's symphony, the soloists received threats
   from the KGB, police ringed the hall to restrict general attendance
   and no texts were published in the programme.  Shostakovich, undaunted,
   wrote an orchestral setting for the Folk Poetry to give it a wider
   chance of performance.  Much of it deals with the death of children,
   a Mahlerian preoccupation.

   That Shostakovich was a brave man is acknowledged by all except a
   perverse clique of American musicologists who insist, against all
   reason, that he wrote Jewish themes because he thought Stalin liked
   them.  The same scholars maintain, for what purpose I cannot fathom,
   that Shostakovich was an unwavering Soviet lackey.  Those who knew
   him best -- the cellist Rostropovich, his own son, Maxim -- interpret
   his 15 symphonies as a covert history of Soviet Russia and his 15
   string quartets as a coded account of his personal torments.  His
   life was often threatened and certainly foreshortened by stress.
   He died a broken man, a decade before the dawn.

   None of this need concern us here were it not for the composer's
   insistence on sticking his Russian neck out for, of all people, the
   Jews.  In his conversations with Solomon Volkov, a Jewish musician
   who took down his memoirs and published them in the West, Shostakovich
   explained that his parents had raised him to regard anti-semitism as
   'a shameful superstition', unworthy of a civilised person.  As a
   young man, he broke with close friends if he heard them make anti-Jewish
   remarks.

   His supreme act of philosemitic altruism occurred when his
   fellow-composer Moisei Vainberg was arrested in February 1953.  At
   a time when wary citizens avoided all contact with families of the
   disappeared, Shostakovich approached Vainberg's wife, daughter of
   the murdered actor Solomon Mikhoels, and offered to look after her
   child and possessions once she, too, was taken.  'Don't worry,' said
   Shostakovich, 'they won't touch me.' This was bravado, and he knew
   it.  If Stalin could kill generals, poets and KGB chiefs in his
   paranoia, a mere composer stood no chance.  Happily, Stalin died a
   fortnight later and his self-sacrifice was not required.

   Shostakovich, by physical appearance, was a nervy little chain smoker.
   Morally, he was a giant and, in his attitude towards Jews, a prospective
   lamed-vavnik.  Neither personal affection nor aesthetic values explain
   his extraordinary heroism.  To Volkov he said:  'Jews became a symbol
   for me.  All of man's defencelessness was concentrated in them...
   It was a bad time for Jews then.  In fact, it is always a bad time
   for them.'

   To Dmitri Shostakovich, unlike any Russian artist past or present,
   the Jews represented a metaphor for suffering humanity.  To a man
   without religion, they were the martyrs and latter-day saints,
   imperishable icons in the wickedest of worlds.

   This is not how we see ourselves, and I confess to some discomfort
   on listening to the Folk Poetry or to passages in the piano trio when
   the music makes us out to be more holy than humans have a right to
   be.  Such expectations of nobility are unrealistic.  Better not to
   be a victim than to have to suffer sympathy.

   On the other hand, the works stand as a glorious corrective to
   the rest of Russian culture which, explicitly or otherwise, scorns
   and excludes the Jewish elements in Russian society.  Pushkin or
   Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky or Mussorgsky, the public work and private
   letters either ignore Jews or abuse them.  Shostakovich is the shining
   exception.  He deserves to be honoured with, at the very least, a
   street in an Israeli development town crammed with the repatriated
   Russian Jews whom he so loved and admired.

   Yet, amid the celebration, a tiny qualm.  If Shostakovich were alive
   today, or had ever visited the State of Israel, he would have been
   forced to revise his image of the Jew as victim and replace it with
   something less flattering.  It is reassuring for us, who live in
   freedom and material comfort, to have shed the status of victims.
   We have no reason to look back and can raise our children to walk
   tall.  But the music of Shostakovich reminds us that, with the end
   of anguish, we have lost a certain saintliness, an inner quality that
   the great composer glimpsed as a light unto the nations.

   [LEBRECHT ENDS; NORA AVINS KLEIN BEGINS]

   Martin -the elegant essay you posted reminds me a great deal of a
   poem written after WWI by Louis Untermeyer, entitled "Jerusalem
   Delivered," published in War Poems from the Yale Review, 1919.

   A "Lamed Vovnik" (Lamed Vav or Vov denotes the number 36) refers not
   to the "righteous gentile" but is one of the thirty-six righetous
   men appointed by God.  They carry the responsibility of the whole
   world on their shoulders.  None of these Lamed Vovniks is aware that
   he is one of the Righteous.  When one dies, God immediately appoints
   a replacement.

   See also Schwartz-Bart's novel, "The Last of the Just," perhaps the
   finest fiction to come out of the Shoa; the title refers to one of
   the thirty-six.

Martin Anderson
Toccata Press
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http://www.classical.net/music/books/toccata/index.html