Whisper of the Stars
I recently produced a number of tracks for David Tamulevich of Mustard’s Retreat, a wonderful folk duo (now trio) from my hometown…Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This song, Whisper of the Stars reached out and grabbed me in particular. David’s family was caught up in Lithuania during this brutal pogrom.
He explains:
After WWII Stalin had all the teachers in Lithuania gather in a big auditorium. They were then told what they were going to teach…and what not…and what the proper history of glorious Russia was….total revisionist history. The teachers stood up en masse and sang the Lithuanian national anthem. The next day they were all loaded on cattle cars and shopped to work camps in Siberia…almost none of them survived.
They took farms from Lithuanians..including my family…gave them to Russians…and shipped the families to Siberian work camps. Mostly husbands were separated form their wives and children..and shipped to different camps/prisons/factories. There is one story I just read about a mom and her kids, on the cattle car. The Russians would come in the middle of the night…give the family 1/2 hour? to pack….then often the people were robbed by the guards at the train depot as they were being shipped out…
There is nowhere to hide in this scenario. Just the stark historical truth that David captured in his song. The trick was to keep it simple, but mournfully so. I played the acoustic, while David Mosher sky painted with his lonesome electric. I think we did it justice…and let those voices be heard.
