I’m rather later than usual posting today, and the reason for that is the afternoon spent with a friend of mine. The occasion for our conversation was provided by the fact that several weeks ago she gave a talk at our local church on the song Donna Donna, popularised in the ‘sixties by Joan Baez, but covered many times afterwards by other singers. I was not able to attend her talk, but she did say to me that she believed that there are several layers of meaning within it. Because I could only think of one I said that it would be interesting to get together for a chat, and finally we were able to meet this afternoon.
My involvement with the song goes back to the mid-sixties, and when I began to play the guitar back then the Joan Baez Song Book had almost biblical status for me. It was only rather later that I began to learn Yugoslav folk songs, and the Leonard Cohen material which together made up my repertoire. Looking through her copy of the book this afternoon released a flood of nostalgia.
The interpretation of the song at which I had arrived focussed on the question as to whether we are complicit in our own unfreedom. In case you don’t know it, the song describes a calf being taken to market by a farmer, with the obvious implication that it will be slaughtered. “Who told you a calf to be?” asks the farmer in the song, and “Why can’t you have wings to fly with like the swallow to proud and free?” In other words, is your current state of unfreedom really necessary, and might it be possible that you can do something about that? This is, of course, an important question facing us all, and one which at that stage in my life had a high degree of relevance for me. It never occurred to me to probe further into its possible significances.
The interpretations arrived at by my friend were of a Christian theological bent, and although they are interesting clearly they cannot have been a part of the intentions of the composers of the song. She pointed out that the songwriters were Jewish, and believed that this helped to make sense of it. I am not sufficiently familiar with the Jewish religion to judge how far there might be a theological layer of meaning located within the Judaic tradition. This observation did set me thinking in as new direction, however, which I now find startling. On my return home I did a little research into its background which has really rather shocked me.
Donna Donna was indeed originally a Jewish song, entitled Dana Dana in Hebrew and written by Sholom Semda and Aaron Zeitlin. The date of its composition is significant …. 1940-41. In conversation with my friend I asked whether the fact that the calf in the song is described as “on a wagon” might be relevant to our understanding, suggesting that this form of transport might be disturbingly relevant to our reading of it. She was horrified by the possibility, but we were not able to pursue the idea. Since checking the date, however, I believe that what Joan Baez sang as a rather sentimental ballad might turn out, on closer reading to be chillingly about the Holocaust. It poses the extremely uncomfortable question of whether and to what extent Europe’s Jews, shipped in cattle trucks to their deaths in concentration camps, might be regarded as in some sense complicit in their own fate.
This strikes one at first as simply a cruel taunt, on a par with the farmer’s questions and the laughter of the swallow in the song. Of course the calf could not be a swallow! What choice could it ever have had? Then I remembered a disturbing fact which I encountered recently, reading about the Holocaust in another context. The task of preparing registers of Jews to be rounded up and taken to the camps was typically delegated to the leaders of the Jewish community. Of course, their refusal to comply with this demand would in all probability not have prevented the Holocaust. We have, however, travelled full circle to my original problem. To what extent and in what respects are we (that is, all of us) complicit in our own unfreedom?