She can carry a tune — from World War II to the present.
A singer born just months after her parents were freed from a Nazi concentration camp will perform love songs made famous during World War II at Fort Hamilton on Aug. 29. “While You’re Away: Love Songs of World War II” commemorates the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, and is the performer’s way of thanking the soldiers who saved her parents, she said.
“I have great joy in doing this program, because how do you thank the people who give you your life back?” said Diane Cypkin, a Brighton Beach resident. “To me, every last soldier came to save my family.”
The singer and college professor says that Western history’s most tumultuous and strife-filled half-decade was a good time for popular music — if nothing else.
“Creativity doesn’t necessarily grow in happiness — it really blooms in misery,” said Cypkin.
The singer has music in her blood. Her father wrote his own love songs — penning original lyrics for well-known tunes — while Nazis kept him prisoner in a ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, she said.
Cypkin’s family is one of few who survived the Kovno camp, hiding in an underground bunker as the Nazis razed the city and retreated from advancing Allies in 1944. There were about 35,000 Jews in Kovno in 1939 — Cypkin’s family were among the 500 who survived, she said.
Cypkin was born in an US-run displaced persons camp in post-war Germany in 1945, and her family came to Brooklyn in 1949. At first, their adoptive home was a mystery, Cypkin said.
“We came in by boat through Gravesend — the bay — so they came in early morning and they saw all these lights on the Belt Parkway,” she said. “My brother asked what they were and my mother said they were bicycles.”
The family lived with an aunt near Shore Road in Bay Ridge before moving to Bensonhurst and later Brighton Beach, she said. Cypkin — a native Yiddish speaker — learned English in Brooklyn’s public schools, and she began performing in the Yiddish theater scene as a teenager. She appeared on Broadway in the show “Light, Lively, and Yiddish,” and earned a master’s degree from Brooklyn College and a doctorate from New York University. Now she teaches theater and communication at Pace University, and has maintained a career in the performing arts.
On Saturday, Cypkin will sing 10 songs by World War II-era musicians, including “La Vie en Rose” by French cabaret singer Edith Piaf, and “The White Cliffs of Dover” from British troop entertainer Dame Vera Lynn, along with tunes from Brooklyn-born composer Harry Warren. Her Siberian-born accompanist will also play a few instrumental tunes.
Diane Cypkin performs “While You’re Away: Love Songs of World War II” at the Ft. Hamilton Army Base Theater (403 General Lee Ave. between MacArthur Road and Pershing Loop in Bay Ridge). Aug. 29 at 7 pm. Free.
