JewishSong.org
Spring in the Ghetto, a tango written in mourning
The song known in Yiddish as Friling, which means spring, was written in the Vilna ghetto in April 1943. The words are by Shmerke Kaczerginski, the melody is a tango by Avrom Brudno, a fellow prisoner in the same ghetto. The World ORT archive Music and the Holocaust records that Kaczerginski wrote it after the death of his wife Barbara in the ghetto.
It is a love song, which is a rare thing to find written in such a place. The spring keeps arriving on time, the sky is blue, the flowers come up, and none of it means anything anymore, because the person the singer loved is gone. The whole force of the song is in that contrast. Nature carries on being beautiful and the loss is not smaller for it.
Avrom Brudno wrote several of the best known melodies of the Vilna ghetto, including the setting of Avrom Sutzkever's Unter dayne vayse shtern. He perished in the Klooga camp in Estonia. Shmerke Kaczerginski survived, joined the partisans, and after the war gathered the songs of the ghettos and the camps into the collection that preserved most of what we can still sing today.
Friling travelled far beyond the ghetto that made it. It is performed at memorial concerts, it has been recorded by singers including Chava Alberstein, and it appears in the educational programs of Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The Russian version on this page is a poetic adaptation by the poet Olga Anikina, made in 2017 and sung by Elechka. It keeps the tango, and it keeps the one image the song is built on: they led you away in a spring just like this one.
Why bring it into English
A love song is the easiest kind of song for a listener to enter, and the hardest to translate badly without losing everything. Bringing Friling into Russian, and then line by line into English, means a listener who knows neither Yiddish nor Russian can still follow a man walking through a ghetto in spring, looking for his wife. That is the shortest route into this history that we know of.
The words, line by line
Russian adaptation by Olga Anikina, 2017. The English beside it is a literal, line by line rendering for understanding only. It is not a singing version, so please do not perform it. The refrain repeats; it is printed here once.
For parents and educators
The song concerns bereavement in the Vilna ghetto and grief that does not resolve. Its spring imagery can support a conversation about the contrast between the seasons and a person’s loss.
Explain that Kaczerginski wrote the Yiddish song after his wife Barbara died in the ghetto in April 1943. The Russian adaptation has its own imagery of a woman being led away; that image should not be substituted for the documented circumstances behind the Yiddish song.
After you listen, ask about the spring itself. Why does the song spend so much time on flowers, blue sky and warm weather when it is a song about losing someone? Children usually arrive at the answer on their own: it hurts more when the world looks beautiful and carries on without you. That is a real conversation about grief, and it belongs to every family, not only to this history.
What to avoid: do not turn the song into a lesson about camps, do not add what happened to the composer, and do not press for a bright ending. If a child asks whether the man found his wife, the honest answer is no, and the honest next sentence is that he spent the rest of his life making sure the songs of those years were written down.
Sources
- Music and the Holocaust (World ORT): Friling
- Music and the Holocaust (World ORT): Avrom Brudno
- Yad Vashem: Heartstrings, music of the Holocaust, the Vilna ghetto
- Shmerke Kaczerginski, Lider fun di getos un lagern, New York, 1948
- The chapter page on this site: Songs of the Holocaust