Our Inspiration
It's in the name, Famanistot.
Fama, our beloved late matriarch, a feminist torch bearer and Holocaust scholar and educator, taught us, through familial artistic legacy and daily demonstrations of transcendence, that we are threaded together in humanity’s tapestry. The middle “-nist,” and the ending “-tot,” pay homage to those influences, as a feminist, a world traveler, and a lover of languages, especially her ancestral Yiddish and Hebrew languages.
Our Inspiration, Our Legacy
Musical Theater in Nazi-era Ghettos
In the overcrowded ghetto, an area of walled off seven blocks housing over 40,000 displaced Jewish residents of Vilnius, a stopover before Nazi death camps or mass grave pits, a group of writers and performers launched variety shows of poignant and satirical songs and skits.
Posters decrying that "In a graveyard you do not do theatre" were plastered around the Vilna (Vilnius) Ghetto in the Fall of 1941 as World War II raged in Eastern Europe. Even so, concerts, performances, and lectures became important social occurrences in a starving ghetto where many were mourning their dead kin and kith. In hundreds of standing-room performances, 38,000 inmates could rise above their horrific circumstances and depraved conditions, and immerse in hope, however fleeting. Most of the Ghetto denizens would be liquidated by late 1943.
Survivors spoke of the theatre as a “miracle.” Nothing could keep audiences away, not even the presence of hostile soldiers in the audience, or the grim reality of omnipresent random murders, imminent death, grief, and starvation. Creativity and spirit were sustained and nourished, and some of the songs written then are still sung and recorded today.
Photo: Scenes from a Vilna Ghetto theater production Source: Yad Vashem
Among the most iconic rallying songs is “We Live Forever” (from the original Yiddish, Mir lebn eybik). The rousing anthem was written and first performed in 1943 as part of a cabaret show at the Vilna Ghetto by relatives of Famanistot’s founders.
We live forever, the world burns
We live forever, even penniless broke
Despite our haters, enemies
who want us on our knees
We live forever! We are here
We live forever, and hourly
We live now and live on
until bad times are gone
We live forever! We are here!
Sang as the Ghetto inmates were shipped out to their death it was nonetheless a joyous reminder that “we” have outlived those - people and circumstances - which seek our undoing. A message of resilience, resistance, and compassion that rings as true today as then.
We are inspired by our ancestors, most of whom perished during the Holocaust, whose wonderous resourcefulness, creativity, art- and music-making defied war - a preventable manmade catastrophy - and eternalized a common humanity.
We are inspired to promote and support similar endeavors of art transcending war from past and present, and around the world.