Tea lady by day, guerilla heroine by night, Anna Marly, Singer, 1917-2006
From the Sydney Morning Herald
Anna Marly, who has died aged 88, was a Russian-born French singer and guitarist who inspired the wartime French Resistance with her broadcasts from the BBC - notably with the stirring Le Chant des Partisans ( Song of the Partisans), which became arguably France’s most famous tune after La Marseillaise.
She wrote the song in London during the Blitz, while serving as a volunteer tea lady for Resistance leaders. She wrote the words in Russian, having read a newspaper report about Russian partisans fighting the Nazis at Smolensk.
Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, the two French writers to whom she played it, realised its potential as an anthem for the Resistance after La Marseillaise was banned by the Nazis, and they gave her tune the lyrics now known to French speakers worldwide: Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines? (My friend, do you hear the black flight of ravens over our plains?)
Anna Marly whistled the tune as a station signal at the start of the BBC’s Free French broadcasts, entitled Honneur et Patrie - her crisp, clear whistle cracking through Nazi jamming to lift the hearts of Resistance fighters and ordinary citizens alike. BBC announcers usually referred to it as The Guerilla Song.
In her memoirs Anna Marly recalled being approached by a former Resistance fighter after the war. “He told me he and four other men captured by the Germans had been ordered to dig their own graves. To keep their spirits up, they whistled my song.” While his friends were gunned down, the man had managed to flee.
Among her customers when she was working in the canteen of the Free French Forces’ London headquarters, off the Mall, was General Charles de Gaulle.
After the war he described her as “the troubadour of the Resistance” and thanked her for “using her talent as a weapon for France”. Forty years after the liberation of Paris, she was awarded the Legion of Honour by President Mitterrand.
French listeners tuning into the BBC also heard Anna Marly’s whistling introduce another song for which she had written the music; her haunting La Complainte du Partisan ( The Lament of the Partisan) was made famous by Leonard Cohen on his album Songs from a Room in 1969.
Anna Marly was born Anna Betoulinsky in St Petersburg on October 30, 1917, at the height of Lenin’s October Revolution. Her father was executed when she was a baby and her mother fled with her, first to Finland and eventually to Paris to join the many other Russian emigres.
As a teenager, Anna took music lessons from Serge Prokofiev, and began writing songs, first in Russian, later in French.
Told that her surname was too long and hard to pronounce, she picked out Marly by opening a telephone directory at random. Her singing debut was at a Paris nightclub.
After the Nazi invasion of France, she and her husband, a Dutch diplomat she had married in 1938, fled to Spain and Portugal, eventually arriving in London in February 1941.
He worked with the Dutch government-in-exile while she volunteered to serve tea and soup to French Resistance members at their London headquarters.
Her talent was soon recognised and she was asked to tour Britain to entertain troops in French, English, Russian and Polish. Having divorced her first husband, she married George Smiernow, a devout Russian Orthodox native of St Petersburg, in 1946. They returned to Paris, only to find that she was relatively unknown - Kessel and Druon had been widely credited with writing Le Chant des Partisans.
Only years later did Russians realise the song had originally been written in their language, and after the success of the Cohen version of her other partisan ballad, she finally gained the recognition she deserved.
She toured the world performing her songs and eventually settled at Jordanville, New York, becoming a US citizen in 1965.
After the death of her husband in 2000, Anna Marly moved to the small town of Lazy Mountain, near Anchorage, Alaska, saying she wanted to be closer to nature.
Since Alaska used to belong to Russia, she said, she also felt that she was returning home. She died there on February 15.
Technorati Tags: Anna Marly, singer, guitarist, French Resistance
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:57 am
I was the only daughter of Anna Smiernow. Not by natural birth but by devine intervention as she often referenced me. I met her when I was 17 and we both knew I would become the daughter she never had the chance to have. I last spoke to her in September of 2003. She was traveling to Alaska to meet up with a long lost cousin from the Soviet Union noe living in Palmer Alaska. She was to spend a month with these people she had never met and return to my daughter and me in Florida to celebrate Christmas. We never received contact with her again. I have searched for her for two years but could not find her. Yesterday I found an article on line saying she had passed away in Feburary of this year. If anyone who reads this knows anything about the woman we I call our Mother, please post it here as I am need to find answers and a close to our lives together and apart.