At celebrations, outdoor concerts, and dance events we play music from around the world including Klezmer, Israeli, Ladino, Yiddish Theater, Folk, Tango, Swing, and Jazz. We bring energy, emotion, and humor to our performances. You can try to sit still, but it will be difficult! You will leave refreshed, reinvigorated, and full of life. L'Chayim!
As classically trained musicians, our goal is to bring the music to life - to connect the past to the present. The music should pluck at your heartstrings but give you hope.
Our two hour multimedia concert, Homeland to Heartland, covers the immigration of Jews to America from Lithuania at the end of the 1800s to the late 1940s and includes:
The stories were written by Millie's ancestors (Tenenbaums, Tatlebaums, Bleherts, etc.), who kept very detailed and literate diaries and photos of their experiences both in the Old Country and the New World. Some of the stories were recently published by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest (JHSUM) entitled, "In America People Were Free" which comes from the writings of Millie's grandfather's first cousin Morris Tenenbaum. Included among the photos in the slide show are pictures that were drawn by Morris, such as pictures of the village Vsoko-Litovsk, Lithuania, their house, the ship (interior and exterior) and many others.
The music speaks of love, work, prayer, family, strength, and tradition.
Translations are provided to audience and accessible to all.
Millie and the Mentshn present a program of the music and history of the Jewish people with a comparison of selections from before, during, and after the Holocaust. Yiddish songs reflect the life and customs of the Jewish people so that we can witness their history as passed down from generation to generation.
Songs prior to WWII speak of family, romance, children, work, and tradition, as well as tragedy, war, tyrants and social movements, or basically life in Eastern Europe from mid 1800s.
Most of the songs created during WWII in the ghettos and concentration camps were tragically destroyed along with the composers. In 1948 Shmerke Kaczerginsky, a Holocaust survivor from the Vilna ghetto, wrote down all the songs that he remembered or gathered from others. Altogether he hand-wrote the lyrics for 221 songs and the melody transcriptions for 100 of them. These songs depict the poignancy, the pain, the heroism, and even the humor of those who underwent unimaginable torture.
Post WWII, the music reflects a synthesis of the old country traditions of the survivors with the sounds of jazz that surrounded them in America, the new world.
The music illustrates the story, the history, and reveals the will to survive in the soul of the people.
Translations are provided to audience and accessible to all.
* with permission from Velvel Pasternak