DvarTorah bkmark: Grammy-Nominated Lost WW2 Yiddish Songs includ'g Remembrance of the Roma Porajmos

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Thursday July 11, 2019 · 4:56 PM PDT

2019/07/11 · 16:56

When concerts of this music are performed, the spectators —who number a handful or a few hundred at most— “are kindly requested to turn off their cellphones.” What makes the typical scene surreal is that they are asked to do so in Yiddish — the lyrical, and practical, and wry language of European Diaspora Jews.”

[Sophie] Milman “brings smooth, sultry vocals to ‘Kazakhstan,’ a cabaret-style ode of gratitude to the land where a quarter-million Jewish refugees survived.

It’s the song on the album for which Sergei Erdenko — the album arranger, acclaimed as Russia’s greatest living Roma violinist— composed a new tune, combining Roma, Yiddish and Rumanian themes.

The song is deeply personal, both for Milman, whose grandmother survived as a Soviet Jewish refugee in Kazakhstan, and for Erdenko, as a tribute to the Roma who were also victims of the Holocaust.

The album’s liner notes, including lyrics in English and Russian translation, offer extensive, fascinating background material and archival images on 18 of these rediscovered songs “ring[ing] with defiance, revenge, love, hope and Jewish humor. It became an unexpected hit upon its release,” earning prominent coverage in well-known publications and becoming the subject of an NPR radio documentary.

And then was Grammy-nominated in the 2018 world music category and shortlisted among the five finalists announced Feb. 10, 2019 live from the Los Angeles Staples Center. (Just a tiny handful of Yiddish-language recordings have been likewise honored: the Klezmorim nominated for best ethnic album in 1982, the soundtrack to the film Partisans of Vilna in 1990, and the Klezmatics winning for best contemporary/world music album in 2007.)

YouTube Video

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Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish musicians created a vibrant cultural life in camps and ghettos, with the arts providing a refuge, a sense of meaning and even a form of resistance.

"The last thing a lot of Yiddish speaking people did was to write a song," said Anna Shternshis, the University of Toronto professor behind the project. "Before Yiddish was killed, it was sung."

“Kazakhstan”

was among the hundreds of poems and songs detailing the Holocaust and Jewish resistance to fascism collected amid raging war by Moisei Beregovsky (1892-1961) and a desperate group of likeminded Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist and Yiddish scholars and volunteers from the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture, a department of the Ukrainian Academy of Science. They hoped to to preserve for the future these artifacts of Jewish culture of the 1940s before it would be erased.

Beregovsky and his colleague Ruvim Lerner (1912-1972), planned to publish an anthology of the [material], a continuation of Beregovsky’s earlier groundbreaking work preserving Jewish folk songs and Yiddish and klezmer music.

But the project was shut down in 1949 at the height of Stalin's anti-Jewish purge. in 1950, Beregovsky was arrested, convicted of Jewish nationalism and jailed for five years. Soviet authorities confiscated the monumental collection of music, and he and Lerner died believing their work had been destroyed.

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, librarian Lyudmila Sholokhovaa stumbled upon 15 unmarked boxes in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and catalogued the documents, the original catalogue destroyed half a century earlier.

But it was another decade before a lucky coincidence brought to Kiev Anna Shternshis, a leading scholar of Soviet and Yiddish culture, and present Director of the University of Toronto’s Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. In conducting research there for her dissertation on prewar Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, Shternhis discovered the trove surviving the decades against all odds.

Some typed but most hand-written on paper, the terribly fragile, deteriorating revealed themselves as some of the most poignant and historically important Yiddish material of World War II. None of the songs had been performed since 1947.

In all, they comprised a bombshell challenging the established wisdom of the role of Soviet Jews in World War II and how they made what sense of it they could — describing, for instance, in graphic detail what Jews wished to do to German soldiers, their hatred of Hitler and praise of Stalin ... who only years later would turn on his own Jewish population.

Many songs represented the first grassroot testimonies of the German atrocities, such as "Babi Yar," based on a likely eyewitness account of the 1941 massacre of over 33,000 Jewish men, women and children in a ravine outside Kiev that became a symbol of Nazi evil.

...What hardships we've endured! What kind of great evil decree is this? Oh, from this misfortune, so many have fled. The ones left are lying in Babi Yar...

Their authors used music and poetry to describe violence and destruction that could not be easily comprehended or described in prose.

"These are not private diaries,” Shternhis’s colleague Psoy Korolenko told the Tel Aviv concert audience. “These are songs. Songs are supposed to be sung before people," but "These people were not expecting anyone to hear them ever because they were preparing to die."

Some were written by Red Army soldiers —women as well as men— fighting in the trenches (the experience of approximately 440,000 Jews), others by those anxiously awaiting these soldiers’ return (about 1.4 million Soviet Jews survived the war in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia). Yet others by Jews in occupied Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union (over 2.5 million Jews were killed in the European part of the Soviet Union).

Anna Shternshis, Professor of Yiddish studies, director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, creator of 61st Grammy Awards world music nominee YIDDISH GLORY together with Psoy Korolenko. — Anna Shternshis

Shternshis returned six years later to conduct research on Beregovski’s archive. On doing so, she discovered songs with unexpected lyrics. Among them were Yiddish songs praising the bravery of Chuvash women…

"Chuvash er Tekhter” (Daughters of Chavashia) tells the story of the draft and service of women in the Red Army during World War II. Approximately 900,000 Soviet women engaged in combat during the war, serving in medical and provision units, pilots, spies and even infantry members. The lyrics were written by Sonya Roznberg in 1942 and reveal the firm determination of women soldiers to fight against Hitler and his ideology.

[and] battle songs to calm the nerves of soldiers on the front; and one particularly aggressive number instructs Hitler to “kiss our asses.” (Yes, that one is on the album.)

Thus was launched a multi-year rescue project led by Dr Shternhis and Pavel Eduardovich Lion, a Russian Jewish Slavics and Yiddish scholar, ethnomusicologist, and songwriter —known onstage as Psoy Korolenko,

who was responsible for what he called "melodic solutions" to the newly discovered lyrics.

Only about 10 percent of the songs included musical notation. Some referenced or gave hints of popular tunes of the times.

Korolenko immersed himself in the material, a process he described as “musical archaeology.” Then, tapping into his expert knowledge of folk and popular music of the era and locales, he recreated what the annotated poems indicated, summoning up adaptations for others, and applying other melodies as needed.

He believes the original authors would be proud to see their works come to life.

And at last, Shternhis, Erdenko, Korolenko, producer Dan Rosenberg , and Six Degrees Records brought together an ensemble including Juno Award-winning Russian-Jewish-Canadian jazz vocalist Sophie Milman, virtuoso Russian-Canadian accordionist Alexander Sevastian, and the group Loyko, co-created by Erdenko.

____________________________________________

Shternshis was stunned by the Grammy nomination.

“Given the whole history, where it all started, … it’s unbelievable,” she told JTA in a phone interview. “It is an extraordinary tribute to Beregovsky and his colleagues, who risked their lives and suffered consequences for their dedication to Jewish culture and memory...”

...“I was shocked on so many levels,” said Shternshis, recalling when she [first delved into the thousands of fragile pages]. Steeped in the history of Russian Holocaust literature and music of the region, she was incredulous that she didn’t recognize a single song [ — they] were notably distinct from music from Vilna, Warsaw and Lodz, with references to Stalin and the Soviet Union.

“The music had no parallels,” Shternshis said.

“On the High Mountain,” the first song, leads with the soulful call of David Buchbinder’s trumpet. The lyrics are a nod to an old Yiddish counting riddle; Korolenko’s lively melody recalls that famous folk tune.

Several songs offer ground-level, vivid descriptions of the massacres in Babi Yar, Tulchin ...

which was under the Romanian administration during the Holocaust. The song was written by a 10-year-old who lost his family in the Tulchin ghetto — most Jews from Tulchyn were deported to the nearby Pechora concentration camp where they perished. The area was liberated by the Red Army in March 1944.

and Pechora in Ukraine.

“Mames Gruv” (My Mother’s Grave) is a child mourning the death of his mother sung by Isaac Rosenberg, Shternshis’ son, who was 11 at the time of the recording. He is beyond thrilled that he’ll be attending the Grammys, said Shternshis, who has to miss the ceremony.

"Yoshke From Odessa" tells the story of a Jewish soldier in the Red Army — one of half a million — who slices his enemies into pieces like a butcher.

Misha tserayst Hitlers Daytchland — Misha tears apart Hitler’s Germany.

“Mayn Pulemyot” (My Machine Gun), is set to Klezmer melody for the pride another otherwise helpless Jew felt at being armed to kill German soldiers.

“Shelakhmones Hitlern” (Purim Gifts for Hitler) strikes a lighter note in comparing Hitler with Haman, the villain of the Jewish holiday of Purim.

“Shpatsir in Vald”— A Walk in the Forest.

Taybl’s Briv — Taybl’s letter to her husband at the Front.

and more...

Such songs were later used as evidence against Beregovsky, who was punished for focusing on the Jewish victims of the Nazis, instead of the communist narrative that all Soviet citizens were equal victims. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 2.4 million were killed on Soviet soil. An additional 300,000 either died in combat or during evacuation, Shternshis said.

…Rosenberg [reflected on the poets and composers] who took pen to paper, many of whom were killed during the Holocaust. “They felt it was important to try to share their personal stories, their warnings against fascism, and their dreams for a better future in the faint hope that these stories would someday be heard...”

Shternhis said, "I think about these people who so rarely get to tell their stories in their own words. It's always translated and purified and explained. But here I don't touch them. This is what they say. I just let them speak..."

^{Main Sources:}

^{⧫ JTA - January 25, 2019

⧫ SixDegreesRecords.com/yiddishglory

⧫ Der Ferverts/The Forward - Dec. 12, 2018

⧫ utube

⧫ Ha'aretz - July 9, 2019

⧫ wikipedia

⧫ Yiddish Glory @ wikipedia}

Shabbat shalom.

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DvarTorah bkmark: Grammy-Nominated Lost WW2 Yiddish Songs includ'g Remembrance of the Roma Porajmos

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