Like a symphony in green

The German-speaking Jew Selma Merbaum was born on February 5, 1924 in Czernowitz in what was then the Kingdom of Romania (now Cernivci in south-western Ukraine).The poet bequeathed 57 poems to posterity, which are now part of world literature. Selma Merbaum joins a group of outstanding German-language Jewish poets from the region of the former Duchy of Bukovina, including Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer. In Bukovina, about four times the size of the Saarland and today Ukrainian and Romanian territory, there were
According to Austrian statistics, around 170,000 German speakers lived in Bukovina in 1910, 60 percent of whom were Jews.
Selma Merbaum's intellectual German-Jewish homeland was completely wiped out in the 1940s, and the poet herself died in an SS labor camp in Romania in 1942 at the age of 18. But her poems live on.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth in 2024, a new project to set her poems to music has been launched. The project is being led by the German-Israeli singer Aviv Weinberg (cantor in the Jewish community of Celle) and the pianist and composer Albrecht Gündel-vom Hofe (Berlin). The two artists have been working closely together for many years and have, among other things
released the CD "Jazz Goes Synagogue" in 2018.