Performing grief: the music of three children of Holocaust survivors – Geddy Lee, Yehuda Poliker, and Mike Brant

ABSTRACT

“I always have music in my heart and no one can take that away from me.” These words from the oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, have a particular resonance for this paper, in which I explore the work of three popular musicians – Geddy Lee, Yehuda Poliker, and Mike Brant – who also happen to be children of Holocaust survivors. Using theories from scholars who have studied the psychology of the “second-generation,” I shed light on the diverse ways in which these musicians have confronted their trauma and the trauma of their parents. For Lee and Poliker, this has taken the form of developing personal identities on and off stage as Jewish musicians with a cause, either for social justice or for preserving Holocaust memory; for Mike Brant, who committed suicide in 1975, his career and body of work involved a toxic mix of superstardom and depression, which many in his family, even his mother who survived the Holocaust, linked to his inability to address childhood anxieties about his parents’ suffering. The study is a revealing window into two worlds that rarely intersect – that of pop (and especially rock) music and Holocaust trauma. Far from trivializing the study of the latter, this essay enriches our understanding on a number of fronts, especially with regard to how ordinary people who suffered in extraordinary ways sought healing through the power of song.

Notes on contributor

Jonathan C. Friedman is currently Professor of History and Director of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 in modern German and modern Jewish history from the University of Maryland, College Park and has worked as an historian at both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Lion and the Star: Gentile-Jewish Relations in Three Hessian Communities, 1919–1945 (University Press of Kentucky, 1998), Rainbow Jews: Gay and Jewish Identity in the Performing Arts (Lexington Books, 2007), The Routledge History of the Holocaust (Routledge, 2011), and The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music (Routledge, 2013).