Photo: Thieves of Dreams, Zloději snů/Conseil des arts du Canada
Lenka Lichtenberg is a Prague-born singer and composer living in Toronto. She has recently won the Juno Award, Canada’s highest music prize, for Thieves of Dreams, an album based on poetry written by her grandmother in Terezín during the Holocaust which she discovered in 2017 after her mother passed away. This past Sunday, Lichtenberg performed the songs to Czech audiences for the first time at a concert at the Maisel Synagogue in Prague. I met with her ahead of the show to discuss the album and I started by asking her if she had any previous knowledge of the poems before discovering them in her mother’s belongings:
“I have a fleeting memory of my mom once mentioning that there were some poems, but I’ve never seen them and she never tried to present them to me or present them to anybody.
“So when I found them, it really was a new thing. It actually didn’t even occur to me that this is what she meant, you because it was decades ago when she mentioned that.
“I have a theory why she never tried to show this to the world, and that is that their relationship wasn’t really that great. And maybe she didn’t think that they were good, or maybe they were good and she didn’t want to acknowledge it.
“Who knows? It could be either of the two or some other reason that I don’t know, and we’ll never find out. So it was all pretty well a massive surprise to me.”
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