Yom Hashoah by Michael Zev Gordon

Composer and Chavurah member Michael Zev Gordon explains the background behind his most recent work, ‘Britten Sinfonia: 1945 – A Kind of Haunting, which premiered in March at the Barbican.

“This work is not so much about the Holocaust as its after-effects. It is about the traces of trauma that have come in its wake – what has been passed down to the ‘next generations’. It is about how survivors’ memories could be absorbed so intensely by children and grandchildren that they experience them like their own. It is also about how those memories could be suppressed. For in my case, my Polish-Jewish father never spoke about his, or his family’s past. It was shrouded in silence. A Kind of Haunting tells the story of what it was to grow up with that silence, and what emerged, years later, from it. For as one of the lines in the piece puts it, ‘Things that are pushed away, push back’. And my desire to know more about what happened only grew over time, culminating in the journey I made in 2022, with two of my sons, to the forest in Poland where my grandfather was killed in 1941. 

A key aspect has been to evoke “…how things that are not direct memories can end up feeling like actual memories that are passed on; my work explores and expresses what memory does to us, how powerful and poignant it is, not just the things you remember, but equally all the things that keep slipping away or that we push back, which may all of a sudden come up again”

The piece intercuts between two very different endings. One acknowledges the terrible return of full-on trauma (on all sides) in today’s Middle East, which ripped into the piece as we were writing it. The other is a clarion call to let the past go: to separate ourselves from those who died in the Holocaust by saying, ‘We were not there’.  

I wanted the piece to be about what it is like to inherit all these different layers of memory."