Yiddish Glory:  The Silenced Songs of World War II, with Anna Shternshis       

ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:  What was Beregovsky accused of by Stalin’s government?  And what was their rationale for doing so?

During the 1940s, ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky (1892 – 1961) led a group of scholars in the discovery of a collection of songs that had been written by a wide range of people who had witnessed the horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe and Russia. It included pieces by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos, including a 10 year old orphan, a teenager prisoner of a concentration camp, and many more.

The sizable archive that he and his colleagues had amassed during and immediately after the Shoah — 263 original songs in all, constituting a record of a culture on the brink of oblivion — languished in the basement of a Kyiv library until it was discovered by chance in 1990.

Two or so decades later, a group of archivists, academics and musicians — led by Anna Shternshis, professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto — took up Beregovsky’s task, and out of the jumbled archive they pieced together an album of Yiddish songs. The majority of the archive consisted of just lyrics (that is, without sheet music) so Shternshis teamed up with Russian songwriter Psoy Korolenko to compose new melodies, taking care to match the music to the lyrics’ subject, period and geographic origin. The resulting album Yiddish Glory: the Lost Songs of World War II was released in February, 2018. It was hailed as a spectacular insight into the experiences of Holocaust-era Soviet Jewry and was nominated and shortlisted for the 61st Annual Grammy Award in the world music category.

Now, seven years later, Shternshis and her collaborators have released a second album: Yiddish Glory:  The Silenced Songs of WWII.  The songs on this album represent rare Jewish testimonies of atrocities that took place in parts of Ukraine and Poland. Each song on the album was selected because it challenges the established knowledge of history of the Holocaust, often written by the sole survivor from an entire community which was massacred. Silenced Songs is more than just anguish, though; there’s uplift, too, the same injections of hope, levity and defiance that you can hear on the first album.

Anna Shternshis is the Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is a distinguished scholar with an international reputation for her expertise in Jewish culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, oral history as well as Yiddish music. We spoke with her about the first volume of Yiddish Glory when it was released in 2018, and you can listen to that program here. This week she is speaking with us about the new album, Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II.

 I AM A TYPHUS LOUSE–BIN IKH MIR A TIFUS LOYZ

A PRIEST WAS MURDERED IN KALISZ