This talk presents the book Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust, which focuses on acculturated Polish Jews in the creation of concert music in Poland during the mid-twentieth century. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. The book not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within modern Polish musical culture; it also shows why its aftermath has been difficult to hear.
Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Beinecke Foundation.