Blumenlese (2025)

This work takes its title from an album of 57 poems called Blumenlese ("Harvest of Blossoms", a word often used to describe an anthology) that Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger assembled in the autumn of 1941, shortly before she and all the Jewish residents of Czernowitz were forced into a ghetto in October that year. The album, handwritten in pencil, was a gift for Leiser Fichman, a close friend and probably a lover who did not fully reciprocate Selma’s intense feelings for him. In the summer of 1942 Selma and her family were deported from the ghetto to slave in a stone quarry and then were sent to a labour camp in Mikhailowka. Selma died there in December 1942, aged eighteen.

Many of the poems are written by a young woman in love, but many address indirectly the increasingly devastating times she lived in. Several of the poems express a youthful exuberance, often through nature imagery. In other poems her own lovelorn sadness and sense of loss, insecurity and fear may be seen as metaphors for the savage and collapsing world that surrounded her. Poem, the third song, states her anger and bafflement at the ubiquitous death and destruction that was intertwined with her own fears for herself and her lover. (In this setting, the first two stanzas of Poem have been omitted).

The poems in the album were written in German between 1939 and December 1941; the last poem she wrote, Tragik (Tragedy), and the urgent message scrawled beneath it in red pencil, presumably addressed to Leiser, was written in the ghetto and is dated 23rd December 1941.

In my choice of the poems and the order in which I have placed the songs I have attempted to convey something of Selma’s journey, but I have not tried to create a narrative, even though I have been greatly moved by her story. Some of the musical material of the songs serves to link them together, some more closely than others, and the last two songs recollect more clearly the first two.

I am indebted to Richard Stokes who helped me enormously with the texts.

BRIAN ELIAS
August 2025