Review: Klezmer-ish Stumbling Stones at Philharmonic Hall Music Room ****

Stumbling stones – or Stolpersteine in German – are small brass squares embedded into pavements outside the former homes of Jewish people who were victims of the Holocaust, giving their names, dates of birth and information about their fate.

There are tens of thousands of these poignant reminders, first conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in Cologne three decades ago and now found all over Europe.

Two of them sit outside Villa Russo in the town of Wernigerode where Julia Nelki’s great aunt and uncle Clara and Benno Russo ran a successful Harz cheese dairy, until Hitler swept to power in the 1930s and they were systematically stripped of their home, business and ultimately their lives.

Nelki recalls them in her book Villa Russo: A Jewish Story which outlines her own family’s fascinating history through many generations, both before and after the events of the 30s and 40s.

But while personal, these warm, sometimes funny and frequently moving memories also have a wider resonance – and more than 80 years on from those dark times they remain as pertinent as ever.

Stumbling Stones was first presented as a work-in-progress at the Unity last spring.

Returning here as part of two (sold-out) evenings to mark this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations and anchored by Liverpool’s musical quartet Klezmer-ish, while it’s billed as a play it actually feels more an intimate piece of oral and aural storytelling, with two actors, a poet, singer and ultimately Nelki herself joining the band on stage.

Above: Stumbling Stones cast at the Music Room. Above: Klezmer-ish.

Joanna Bending is a compelling narrator of the life of the Nelkis – a family whose diaspora embraced upstanding members of the pre-war medical community, 19th Century ne'er-do-wells and exotic travelling circus performers.

Their central story is augmented by young Palestinian actor Qais Attallah, and punctuated by poet Loraine Masiya Mponela’s contemplative verse which gives voice to the current day dispossessed and displaced and a soundtrack which embraces Yiddish 20s cabaret numbers, Sephardic songs and – aptly – concludes with the well-known Shir Lashalom (Song for Peace), all sung in beguiling fashion by Darren Abrahams.

Abrahams, a former professional opera singer and now a coach and trainer (and trauma specialist with Musicians Without Borders), has a wonderfully sweet, expressive, melancholic and resonant vocal delivery.

Paired with a short opening set from Klezmer-ish - a sinuous journey through half-a-dozen irresistible tunes offering Levantine shimmer, ebullient rhythms and an evocative rattle along Odesa’s railway tracks alongside a carriage full of factory workers, Stumbling Stones is a quiet testament both to man’s inhumanity, but also, importantly, to the strength of the human spirit and the importance of hope, compassion and reconciliation.