The Lead Plates of the Rom Press (1994)
The Lead Plates of the Rom Press was inspired by a poem by the Yiddish poet, Abraham Sutzkever, and by Ben Shahn’s print “Letters of Creation”.
The poet, a partisan fighter in the Vilna Ghetto aludes to a plan of the Resistance to use the lead from printing press plates for ammunition. The poem opens,
“Arrayed at night, like fingers stretched through bars Clutching the light air of freedom.
We seize the lead plates at the Rom printing works.
We were dreamers, but had to be soldiers, And for bullets melt down the spirit in the lead.”
The Rom Press was a prestigious printing press in Vilna that, from the seventeenth century until the formation of the Vilna Ghetto had produced editions of the Talmud as well as Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish literature.
The Lead Plates of the Rom Press was commissioned by the WDR for ‘cellist Sigfried Palm. The work was recorded by Jeffrey Krieger for his CD, Night Chains (available on CRI’s Emergency Music series).