Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs Of World War II

As World War II raged through Europe, a group of Soviet Yiddish scholars embarked on an ambitious goal to preserve Jewish culture of the 1940s. These linguists, folklorists, and historians believed that it was their immediate duty to record stories, anecdotes, poems and songs by Jews who lived through the most painful part of their history. Soviet ethnomusicologists from the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Proletarian Culture, led by Moisei Beregovsky (1892 – 1961), recorded hundreds of new Yiddish songs: tunes that detailed Soviet Jewish wartime service in the Red Army, survival and death in Nazi-occupied Europe and stories from those working in the Soviet home front in Central Asia and Siberia. Beregovsky and his colleague Ruvim Lerner hoped to publish an anthology of these songs, but the project was never completed as Beregovsky was arrested in the height of Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge. The documents were sealed. The scholars died thinking that their work had been lost and destroyed.

In the early 2000s, a lucky co-incidence brought University of Toronto professor Anna Shternshis to Kiev where she found out that these songs had survived all of these decades following Beregovsky’s arrest, and were kept in the manuscript department of the Vernadsky’s Ukrainian National Library. Quickly deteriorating, fragile documents, some typed, but most hand-written on poor-quality paper presented a challenge. But upon quick examination of the material, it turned out that these contained some of the most poignant and historically important Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II. None of them have been performed since 1947.

Видео Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs Of World War II канала Six Degrees Records