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Arts Features


SINGER-SONGWRITER LEAH ABRAMSON RECONNECTS WITH HER TRAGIC FAMILY ROOTS VIA
SONGS FOR A LOST POD

Music on Main will present the world premiere of her interdisciplinary show this
weekend at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

by Charlie Smith on May 25th, 2022 at 7:29 AM

 * 

1 of 2 2 of 2
 * Drummer Kyle Cashen, narrator Barbara Adler, violinist Meredith Bates, singer
   Emily M. Cheung, and singer Emily Millard are among the performers in Songs
   for a Lost Pod. Lise Oakley

The Holocaust is an incredibly heavy burden for survivors and their descendants.

Knowing that the state was intent on murdering members of their families simply
because of their identity isn’t something that most people like to discuss.



Add in the dynamic of intergenerational trauma and there can be a lot to unpack
by the time the third generation rolls around.




RELATED STORIES

 * Vancouver author Alan Twigg writes a collage of B.C. perspectives on the
   Holocaust
 * Mark Leiren-Young: Trudeau promises to save orcas—and his pipeline—with smoke
   and mirrors
 * Five environmental groups take Trudeau government to court to protect
   endangered southern resident orcas
 * Surviving the Holocaust: a Vancouver family’s story comes vividly to life in
   Joe Gold's Two Pieces of Cloth



Vancouver singer-songwriter Leah Abramson is one of many residents who have had
to live with this burden her entire life. As is the case in other families, her
grandmother never talked about it.

“We had to sort of figure out what had happened and what was going on—and why we
were the way we were,” Abramson tells the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.
“A lot of that was a process of discovery and kind of peeling back the layers.”




Her sister, Claire Sicherman, addressed this directly. She wrote a book,
Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation, which was released in 2017.

“She thought a lot about how it was affecting her son and about that whole
relationship—and about her body,” Abramson says. “And I can relate to those
things as well.”

Abramson, on the other hand, chose a more indirect route to greater
self-understanding, one that took several years. The result will finally come to
fruition in her interdisciplinary stage show, Songs for a Lost Pod, which will
have its world premiere this weekend in a Music on Main presentation.

In her childhood, Abramson was far more preoccupied with other pursuits. She
grew up in Vancouver, where beluga whales were kept in the local aquarium, and
she had a recurring dream of about one of these creatures in a swimming pool.

This phase eventually passed, but in adulthood, she started having repeated
dreams of orcas. That sparked a curiosity that led her to read more about orcas
in science journals and listen to northern resident orcas’ vocalizations on the
Internet’s Orchive archive.

“I learned about how they came into captivity and all these things about whale
families and about their structures and how similar they are to humans in some
ways,” she says. “I started feeling these sort of parallels between orcas and my
family history.”

Abramson mentions that she was blown away that researchers at Orca Lab on B.C.’s
Hanson Island could recognize families of whales by differences in their
dialects.

She visited Hanson’s neighbouring Malcolm Island several times before she was
finally able to watch an orca perform a rubbing ritual on the pebbles near a
beach in 2016. She followed that up in 2017 by releasing the album Songs for a
Lost Pod, which includes whale vocalizations.


Leah Abramson chose a more indirect route than her sister in unpacking the
trauma of what her grandparents' generation endured.

Abramson emphasizes that she doesn’t want to anthropomorphize orcas. But she
also recognizes similarities between human and orca brains, though orcas “are
more developed in terms of limbic lobes”. And that might explain their tight
family ties.

By talking about those similarities, she believes that it offers people a way to
empathize with nonhuman creatures.

“There’s an ‘us and them’ when it comes to animals,” Abramson says. “We think of
humans and animals as so different and so separate. I do not think that is the
case. We forget that we have animal bodies. It’s really not so different.”

She says that she did some processing of her family history on the album, but
not in a head-on way.

“I never liked talking about my family’s Holocaust history,” she states. “I just
found it too painful. But then, I was never able to fully process it when I kept
it hidden.”

Abramson finally decided to tackle it by writing a companion script for the
album. This way, she says, the family history could be “present in the project
in a way that was a lot more truthful than when it was just the music”.

The interdisciplinary project features visuals from Mind of a Snail, narration
by Barbara Adler, a six-member choir, and a five-piece band performing the
nine-song cycle.

“There’s music underneath some of the narration,” Abramson says. “These
musicians can do anything. So I’m very, very happy to be working with them right
now.”

Abramson does not appear in the production, which is directed by Megan Stewart.
According to Abramson, people who attend won’t recognize the orca vocalizations
because they’re embedded into the fabric of the music and a lot of the beats.

While she acknowledges that it’s a “bit of a heavy show” with serious and
painful content, there’s also beautiful music and visuals to help audiences get
through this.

Abramson says that most people already know the horrifying facts about the
Holocaust, so Songs for a Lost Pod doesn’t get into those details.

“I think what’s helpful is trying to figure out how to process the emotions that
come from that,” she says.

More
Music on Main will present the world premiere of Leah Abramson’s
interdisciplinary stage show Songs for a Lost Pod at the SFU Goldcorp Centre for
the Arts on Saturday and Sunday (May 28 and 29). For more information, visit the
Music on Main website.
Click here to report a typo.

CHARLIE SMITH

@charliesmithvcr

Charlie Smith has been editor of the Georgia Straight since 2005. Before that,
he was the paper's news editor.

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