Subject: J, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, formerly the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California - How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee (print view)
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Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 20:54:51 -0400

J, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, formerly the Jewish
Bulletin of Northern California

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/22829/format/html/displaystory.html

How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee

by scott r. benarde
correspondent

The Canadian rock trio Rush will draw from an impressive song catalog
spanning four decades on its current 30th anniversary tour, including classics
such as “New World Man,” “Tom Sawyer” and “Freewill.” The band also is
performing tracks from its newest album, “Feedback,” a collection of favorite
songs by other acts, including rock standards such as “Summertime Blues,” and
“Heart Full of Soul.”

But it is another song in the Rush repertoire that concertgoers should pay
close attention to when the band performs in the Bay Area July 9 and 10.

The 20-year-old song “Red Sector A,” from the 1984 album “Grace Under
Pressure,” comes from a deeply emotional and personal place in the heart of lead
singer and bassist Geddy Lee.

The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when
British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s
mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father,
Morris Weinrib, was liberated from Dachau a few weeks later.) The whole album
“Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, “is about being
on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.”

Though “Red Sector A,” like much of the album from which it comes, is set in
a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes
directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.

“I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says
during a phone conversation. “She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She
didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow
this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”

In fact, when Manya Rubenstein looked out the window of a camp building she
was working in on April 15, 1945, and saw guards with both arms raised, she
thought they were doing a double salute just to be arrogant. She did not realize
British forces had overrun the camp. She and her fellow prisoners, says Lee,
“were so malnourished, their brains were not functioning, and they couldn’t
conceive they’d be liberated.”

It is easy to see why Manya Rubenstein had given up on civilization. She and
future husband Morris were still in their teens — and strangers to one another —
when they were interned in a labor camp in their hometown of Staracohwice (also
known as Starchvitzcha), Poland, in 1941. Prisoners there were forced to work in
a lumber mill, stone quarry, and uniform and ammunition manufacturing plants.

From Staracohwice, about an hour south of Warsaw, Manya and Morris, along
with many members of both their families, were sent to Auschwitz. Eventually
Morris was shipped to Dachau in southern Germany, and Manya to Bergen-Belsen in
northern Germany. Thirty-five thousand people died in Bergen-Belsen from
starvation, disease, brutality and overwork, according to information from the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Another 10,000 people, too ill and weak to save,
died during the first month after liberation.

Lee told his mother’s story to band drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, and
“Neil took that sentiment and wrote [the lyrics to] ‘Red Sector A,’” says Lee,
who wrote the music. For a song that’s supposed to be set in some unstated,
undated future, lyrics such as, “Ragged lines of ragged grey/Skeletons, they
shuffle away/Shooting guards and smoking guns/Will cut down the unlucky ones,”
sound realistic and reportorial. Perhaps it is the music with its pounding
drums, chilling guitar and ominous synthesizer that transport the listener to a
yet-to-come time and place. But maybe it is simply easier for Lee to deal with
this song as metaphor instead of family history.

Lee was born in Toronto on July 29, 1953. His parents had immigrated there in
1947 and opened a discount variety store. (They had reunited after the war and
lived in the officers’ quarters of Bergen-Belsen after it was turned into a
displaced-persons camp. They were also among 2,000 couples who married in the
camp during the first few months after liberation.)

Unlike many Holocaust survivors, Lee’s parents did not bottle up or hide
their experiences. Lee began hearing the horror stories as early as age 8.
Though his mother insists she never spoke to her children about the Holocaust
when they were young, Lee remembers the stress and nightmares the stories
triggered. “These were the things that happened to them during the most
formative time in their lives. Some people go to horseback riding camp; my
parents went to concentration camp,” Lee says.

The couple gave their children a Jewish education, and Lee had a bar mitzvah
at 13. Unfortunately, his father died the year before from chronic health
problems that took root in the camps. Today, Lee considers himself a cultural
Jew.

His mother, like many Holocaust survivors, was overly protective of her three
children. During Lee’s teens, which he describes as “a selfish time,” he
distanced himself from his parents’ history, and also discovered rock ’n’ roll.
Singing in a rock band, Lee says, “was me yelling back” at authority. It was
well after Morris Weinrib died that an aunt told Lee his father had played the
balalaika at bar mitzvahs and weddings, but he had purposely kept that fact from
his children. “He didn’t want us going into music as a career,” Lee says,
adding, “It was a great feeling to know he was musical.”

Lee was 16 when he formed the first incarnation of Rush with guitarist Alex
Lifeson and drummer John Rutsey in 1969, and released their debut album in 1973.
Current drummer and band lyricist Neil Peart joined in ’74, thus the 30-year
celebration now.

“Red Sector A” is not the only song Lee has written based on his mother’s
life. Lee’s solo album, “My Favorite Headache,” released in 2000, includes the
song “Grace to Grace,” which he co-wrote with fellow Canadian Ben Mink, a
multi-instrumentalist and another child of Holocaust survivors. The song, Lee
explains, is partially about his mother’s courage, survival instincts and “her
ability to keep her head up” though all of the horror she lived through.

Lee’s mother, along with the rest of Canada’s Jews, has been reminded of
Hitler’s Germany by a wave of anti-Semitism that included the April fire bombing
of a Jewish day school in Montreal. The rise in anti-Semitism in Canada, Lee
says, “is upsetting to all of us. … There is no such thing in the homes of
Holocaust survivors as ‘It can’t happen here.’ They always feel it can happen
again. My mother [has] never felt secure again.”

Except for possibly one time.

In 1995, Lee, his older sister and younger brother accompanied their mother
back to Germany to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of
Bergen-Belsen. They met many other survivors as well as British army veterans
who had liberated the camp. Their mother also took them back to her hometown in
Poland and the house in which she grew up.

“The Holocaust doesn’t go away,” Lee says. “My mother still has a tattoo on
her arm, but that was a great trip for her, a completion of something. It made
her feel fantastic to stand on those grounds with her children. For the first
time she felt like a victor, like, ‘I’m here and you’re not!’”

Rush performs 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 9, at Shoreline Amphitheatre,
Mountain View, or 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 10, Chronicle Pavilion, Concord.
Tickets: http://www.ticketmaster.com/, or http://www.tickco.com/.

Scott R. Benarde is the author of “Stars of David: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s
Jewish Stories” (Brandeis University Press)

CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California