In 1941, during the war, Abeliovich was drafted and served in an aero-geodetic detachment. He was recalled in 1944 on the recommendation of the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, and in 1946, after studying symphonic composition for two years with Myaskovsky at the Moscow State Conservatory, he successfully applied to join the Union of Soviet Composers. During this period, Abeliovich's friendship with Weinberg also brought him into contact with Dmitri Shostakovich, and he was further inspired by this circle of musicians, including the violinist David Oistrakh. With the denunciation of Weinberg and Shostakovich in 1948 on charges of 'formalism' during Andrei Zhdanov's cosmopolitan cultural purges of late Stalinism (Zhdanovshchina), Abeliovich returned to Minsk in 1951, where he worked in a variety of genres and remained in contact with Weinberg throughout the thaw. Abeliovich died in Minsk in 1985, and has been hailed as a Belarusian composer for his use of Belarusian and Polish themes in his music. However, his reception outside Belarus has been limited, possibly because of his own patronymic and his associations with Jewish and denounced composers.

Abeliovich's entire family was killed in the Holocaust, probably in the Vilna ghetto or at Ponary. Yad Vashem's database of names shows a "Moshe Abeliovich" murdered at Ponary, with the correct date of birth for his father, and like many sole survivors from families scattered throughout the bloodlands of the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine, the exact fate of his family is unknown. Abeliovich's service in the war was a source of compositional inspiration in his later works, where he had a slight fixation with a militarised or mechanised compositional language.³  However, his work also has a "vivid-tragic orientation" in a Belarusian context, where he integrates Belarusian folk idioms and references in a dramatic and decisive way, creating a sense of withdrawal from everyday life, sentimentality and wistful memory.⁴  His works have this duality of the brilliant glory of the military, the cheerful determination of collective farming, tinged with the sadness of the Jewish catastrophe or the tragic or nostalgic memory of a lost Belarus, a destroyed land.

The Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust in the USSR are inextricably linked. After Nazi Germany broke the non-aggression pact on 22 June 1941, its war against the USSR was racialised and became one of total annihilation and destruction. The Bolshevism of the USSR wasn't just a socio-economic philosophy opposed to that of the Third Reich, but was seen as controlled by and imbued with Jewish influence, from Karl Marx to "Stalin and the Jews behind him".⁵  Categories of combatants and civilians on the Eastern Front were blurred, leading to catastrophic Holocaust deaths in the "bloodlands" of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states, and to new victim groups worthy of consideration as Holocaust victims alongside Jews and Roma, including partisans, Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet citizens.

Belarus is a specific case study of the Holocaust, with almost total destruction of the civilian population and infrastructure by the Wehrmacht, and a dynamic culture of resistance and public remembrance, emblematised in post-war films such as Come and See. New testimonies, such as that of Yahad in Unum, vividly describe the Holocaust in Belarus and the utter destruction in the wake of the German advance. Allen S., who escaped into the forest as a partisan, described: "what they did in those [first] six weeks, is beyond description. Village after village, the only thing that you’ve seen were chimneys, the houses burned down, the people taken away to concentration camps."⁶  Abeliovich captures this destruction musically, just as the catastrophe of the Holocaust in Belarus was a Jewish and Slavic tragedy, with the total decimation of communities across the country. The dualism in his music is both a private elegy for the "unwelcome memory" of Jewish mass death, the specific anti-Semitism of the Holocaust, and a generalised nostalgia for a destroyed Belarus.⁷ This duality continues in Abeliovich's legacy, where he is remembered as a Jewish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Soviet composer. Like his contemporaries Weinberg or even Beregovskii, Abeliovich is a multi-national composer whose compositions weave together layers of traumatic and nostalgic memory, reflecting the complex climate of memory and anti-Semitism in the USSR.

Abeliovich's work is better known in Belarus than in the West for its incorporation of folk music and the infusion of folk themes and sentimentality throughout the works. As analysed in several pieces in a short book by Kalesnikava from the 1970s, this integration of folk idiom into Abeliovich's works was an idealised use of socialist realism - local knowledge, melodies and aesthetics used to convey larger socialist messages, such as the joy of collective farming or the glory of the Red Army.⁸  Belarusian musicologist Inesa Dvulzhinaya has written extensively about Abeliovich and his counterparts in Belarus, including Henryk Wagner, Edi Tyrmand and Grigory Frid, who have introduced this music to new generations of scholars and performers, especially those outside the former USSR. However, due to Soviet repression, minimal foreign scholarship and the lack of publication of these compositions in the West, these composers, including Lev Abeliovich, remain relatively unknown and certainly disconnected from larger conversations about Holocaust music. Abeliovich's experience, his integration of the violin into his compositions, and his wistful recollection of the lost intellectual and Jewish world of the 1930s is his way of remembering and addressing the Holocaust in music. Abeliovich's complex depictions of destruction, war and folk sentimentality reflect the complex memories and experiences of many Soviet survivors of a century of terror, including the Holocaust.

By Alexandra Birch