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Resurrecting Yiddish Music One Song At A Time

JL;DR SUMMARY In a captivating project, the album "Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II" resurrects the poignant yet powerful voices of Soviet Jews through Yiddish songs composed during the Holocaust. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustWorld War IiYiddish MusicCultural PreservationSoviet JewsJewish ResilienceYiddish GloryPsoy KorolenkoAnna ShternshisMoisei Beregovsky

Places mentioned

Minsk, Belarus
"Sometime in late 1944, Taybl Birman, a 28-year-old Soviet Jew working in a tailor shop in war-torn Minsk, composed a song for her husband, Misha, a Red Army soldier who was fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front."
Berlin, Germany
"My Misha dearest, she sang in Yiddish, you will arrive [in Berlin] and split open all of their heads."
Brandenburg, Germany
"Misha wrote back with verses of his own: Taybele, my wife, please know. I am now in East Prussia."
Tulchin, Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine
"Tulchin, written in 1942 by a 16 year-old Ukrainian boy named Yosef Braverman, decries the murders of Jews in the titular Ukrainian town, which lost its entire pre-war Jewish population during World War II, and visualizes the terrible fate that will befall those sent to Pechora, the nearby ghetto and death camp."
Berdychiv, Kyivshchyna, Ukraine
"Four Sons, written by Nokhem Royznvaser of Berdichev, speaks of the sleepless, sorrowful nights endured by a father whose four sons have joined the Red Army, one of whom has already had his [life] snipped like a young sapling with blossoms."
Kiev, Kyivshchyna, Ukraine
"Babi Yar, written in 1947 by 72 year-old Kiev resident Golda Rovinskaya, gorily recounts the massacre at Babi Yar ravine, where 33,771 Jews were shot to death by German troops and Ukrainian collaborators over the course of two days in September, 1941, and warns that anti-Semitism will continue to flourish even in the wake of Germanys defeat."
Odessa, Odeshchyna, Ukraine
"On the High Mountain, a song composed in 1944 by Veli Shargorodski of Odessa, comically mocks German soldiers for their failed attempts to seize the natural resources of Ukraine, and promises that Hitler is kaput!"
Astana, Kazakhstan
"Purim Gifts for Hitler, an anonymously-penned song from Khazakstan, exults in the continued survival of the Jewish people despite over two thousand years of persecution."
Kyiv, Ukraine
"It wasnt until the 1990s, when librarians at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine unearthed several un-labeled boxes filled with typed and hand-written documents, that the songs collected by Beregovsky and his colleagues resurfaced."

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