Powerful ‘Lonely Child’ documentary ‘comes home’ to Santa Cruz

A Yiddish word for destiny or fate, beshert, carries a positive, even blessed connotation. It’s a term that comes up repeatedly in the new documentary “The Lonely Child,” a sprawling tale that follows the trail of a lullaby written in the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust about a daughter separated from her mother.

The song’s grim origins might sound like a bad fit for beshert encounters, but this is no ordinary tune. “The Lonely Child” reveals the tangled skein of relationships that transported the lament around the globe, generation by generation, turning it into an unlikely anthem.

The fact that it’s screening Oct. 15 at Landmark’s Del Mar Theatre as part of the Santa Cruz Film Festival, which runs at theaters around the city Oct. 14-18, is just the latest full-circle moment in the life of a remarkable story of family devotion and the insistent power of song.

“Coming home to Santa Cruz with the film is so amazing,” said San Francisco filmmaker Marc Smolowitz, who directed, co-wrote and co-produced the documentary with Oakland freelance journalist Alix Wall. They’ll be on hand for a post-screening Q&A session with former Santa Cruz County Supervisor John L. Leopold.

Smolowitz and Wall first met as undergrads at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1980s, when she had only the vaguest sense of how the song “The Lonely Child” captured a fraught moment in the life of her grandmother and mother.

The film made its world premiere with a sold-out Castro Theatre screening in July as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, “and this is the perfect second stop, because without Santa Cruz the film couldn’t have happened,” said Wall, whose contributions to The New York Times’ popular Vows column explore beshert matrimonial tales.

Filmed over a decade, “The Lonely Child” draws on an extraordinarily rich trove of archival interviews and footage, from the Wall family’s home movies to Smolowitz’s senior project as a UC Santa Cruz film major, which focused on his mother’s story as an infant hidden with a gentile family during the Holocaust.

He and Wall initially bonded over this unusual shared history. Decades later he was the obvious choice as a collaborator when she started to investigate how Yiddish poet, musician, and cultural activist Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954) came to write “The Lonely Child” (or in Yiddish, “Dos Elnte Kind”) for her mother and grandmother, Rachela Melezin, who hid her infant daughter with her gentile Lithuanian nanny to save her from the Nazis.

Melezin and Kaczerginski survived the war by cataloging Jewish texts seized by the Germans for a museum intended for the extinct Jewish people. While sorting through a polyglot inflow of books, pamphlets and manuscripts, they were key players in what came to be called the Paper Brigade, an underground project smuggling Jewish artifacts away from the Nazis to stash in the Vilna Ghetto.

Filmmaker Marc Smolowitz and journalist Alix Wall teamed up on the Holocausr-themed documentary "The Lonely Child. (13th Gen) Shortly after World War II, while in a displaced persons camp, Kaczerginski recorded the lullaby he’d written for Melezin, set to a mournful melody by composer and theater artist Yankl Krimski. In much the same way that the Paper Brigade’s hidden troves preserved the culture of a shattered world (and are now housed at the YIVO Institute For Jewish Research in New York City), Kaczerginski’s song took on a life of its own.

He was a revered figure in Yiddish cultural circles, and “Dos Elnte Kind” was recorded numerous times by folk singers like Theodore Bikel and included in anthologies of songs written during the Holocaust. But growing up, Wall’s mother “had mostly forgotten about the song,” Wall said, as her grandmother never spoke about it, and avoided discussing the war.

Memories of “Dos Elnte Kind” came rushing back in the mid-‘90s when her mother visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on a trip to Washington, D.C. “While looking at a computer display she happens to find Kaczerginski’s recording and bursts into tears,” Wall recalled.

The film essentially re-creates Wall’s search for the song’s story, revealing a romantic path not taken by her grandmother, who ultimately decided not to marry Kaczerginski, instead choosing a man devoted to the daughter she was able to reclaim after the war.

“It took many years to make the film, and that gives you time to find the story and let it breathe,” Smolowitz said. “Alix’s recognition of the affair deepened over the arc of the movie and at some point she started to talk about ‘the family secret.’”

Part of the film’s power comes from the repeated, ever-changing interpretations of the lullaby. The late, powerhouse vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg and blues guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood offer deep emotional insight into the piece, while bass Yiddish vocalist Anthony Russell treats it with the drama of an art song.

At the film’s end, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars turn “Lonely Child” into a processional that puts an entirely new spin on the melody. Each version fulfills the song’s concluding imperative, “you must not forget the past.”

“In sharing the film,” Wall said, “that process is still unfolding.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.

‘THE LONELY CHILD’

When & where: 6 p.m. Oct. 15 at Landmark’s Del Mar Theatre, Santa Cruz

Tickets: $10-$50; scff26.eventive.org