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INSIDE:

New Books Reflect
The Holocaust

70

`Parade' Heads
For Ann Arbor

76

Documentary Captures
78
Jewish Porn Star

SCOTT BENARDE
Special to the Jewish News

1

The children

of survivors,

musicians reflect

on the influence

of the Shoah

in their lives

and music.

.1*,••■■••■•

ne of the first things Gene
Simmons reveals in his new autobi-
ography, Kiss and Make-Up, is that
he is the child of a Holocaust sur-
vivor. The co-founder and bassist for KISS,
one of rock's most commercially successful
bands, writes that his mother, Flora Klein, a
Hungarian Jew, was sent to concentration
camps at age 14, "where she saw most of her
family wiped out in the gas chambers."
The ghostly tentacles of the Holocaust have
reached farther and wider than perhaps real-
ized, even casting their shadow on rock music.
Simmons is but one of a number of promi-
nent rock and pop musicians whose families
suffered during the Holocaust. That flesh-
and-blood connection to such cataclysm has
colored their lives and music, with Simmons
faring better than most.
Piano man Billy Joel, Procol Harum lyricist
Keith Reid, WAR harmonica player Lee
Oskar and Ten-Wheel Drive lead singer
Genya Ravan are the children of those who
survived the Holocaust, or fled before the
Final Solution became official Nazi policy.
Longtime Jackson Browne and Linda
Ronstadt bass player Bob Glaub, Justine
Frischmann, leader of the British band elastica,
singer-songwriter Dan Bern and the late Enrico
Rosenbaum, guitarist, singer and songwriter for
the '70s band Gypsy, share similar histories.
Former Blues Project and Seatrain bassist-
flute player Andy Kulberg still remembers his
Austrian-born father Siegfried, who escaped
the Nazis in 1939, telling him long after
coming to the United States to "always keep
about $5,000 in cash in a safety deposit box."
Mickey Raphael, longtime harmonica
player for Willie Nelson, is fortunate that
his father and uncle were wise and lucky
enough to escape Germany by 1936, espe-
cially since uncle Arno had insulted a
group of Hitler's Brown Shirts and been
thrown in jail.
David Draiman, lead vocalist for the Chicago-
based (very) hard rock band Disturbed, is the
grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Draiman
may have rebelled against his strict Orthodox
upbringing, but the band's 2001 concerts
included graphic film clips of concentration
camp victims as part of a montage illustrating
),
"people being murdered for being different.
The performances opened with uniformed
ROCK 'N' ROLL on page 66

