14th August 2020 – Shabbat is almost here
And I am so happy for talking about the work of my long-admired producer Daniel Rosenberg and the thrilling project Yiddish Glory!
Hello, how are you? I hope well! In this edition I come back to the todays, with artists that are alive but with a project based on Yiddish songs from the World War II. After many decades considered lost, those songs were found at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. Read more below.
Daniel Rosenberg receives this weekly newsletter and I hope he will have a nice suprise! I didn’t advice him in advance. 🙂
The producer, journalist and publicist Daniel Rosenberg
It seems a lie but there was a time when we were able to travel to other continents easily, without masks and without quarantines. This picture was took in Toronto in 2019, where I attended the Canadian Music Week thanks to Music Export Poland. This picture was done the first time we meet, after a big breakfast in a nice cafe and he is Daniel Rosenberg.
Daniel is graduated in molecular biology and in political science. This might have no relationship with the theme of our email, but I want to highlight what an amazing person Dan is. Apart from that, he has been working for more than 20 years in the dissemination of the musics from all over the world, in radio and in compilations.
He has made the selection of many of the albums of the collection Rough Guides, by World Music Network. He has produced and written liner notes for more than 60 CDs, including this Yiddish Glory. He is the producer of this work. He selected the musicians and organiced all the work to make this idea and this documents become a touchable and listenable album.
Before the beginning of the pandemic, he was working in several projects. One of them was the first album by Taraf Syriana, about the music of the Romani people in Syria from before the war, as well as in another amazing project, related also to Jewish culture and history, about which I hope to talk with him in a near future.
You can learn more about Daniel in his official website.
The lost Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II
According to the press release by Rob Jacobs from Six Degrees Records, the label that released this album:
“Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II is the new recording of music created during the darkest chapter of European Jewish history. In the midst of World War II, a group of scholars led by ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky (1892 – 1961) discovered songs written by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos. One song was written by a 10-year-old orphan who lost his family in the ghetto in Tulchin, another by a teenage prisoner of the Pechora concentration camp, and yet another about a Red Army soldier who learns, upon his return to Kiev, that his family had been murdered in Babi Yar. […]
Following the war, the researchers were arrested during Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge. The scholars’ works were confiscated, and they died thinking the collection was lost to history. The songs were discovered in unmarked boxes stored in the archives of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in the 1990s.
In the early 2000s, a lucky coincidence brought Yiddish Professor Anna Shternshis to Kiev where she learned that these songs had survived all of these decades following the researchers’ arrests. Quickly deteriorating, fragile documents, some typed, but most hand-written, contained some of the most poignant and historically important Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II.”
The booklet includes much more information about the work in general and about each specific piece. You can order it here.
The song about the massacre of Babi Yar
Babi Yar means the grandmother’s ravine. It is a ravine in the outskirts of Kiev where in September of 1941 there were killed more than 33 thousand Jews in two days. It is considered the biggest slaughtering in the less time. Until the 6th of November of 1943 the number of Jewish from Kiev and surroundings killed would increase to around 200 thousand. I won’t explain more details, as this events are widely documented and you can find information easily at the Internet.
The lyrics of the song are by Golda Rovinskaya, 73 years old, Kiev, 22 June, 1947, recorded by Hina Shargorodsky. It talks from the poing of view of someone returning to Kiev from the front line, happy for being still alive, but finding that all his family and beloved ones have been killed. The music is based on “In droysn geyt a regn,” a folk song, with instrumental parts and arrangement by Sergei Erdenko.
Clic the picture to listen to Babi Yar from Yiddish Glory, in a live recording from Zoomer Hall Classical FM 96.3:
I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
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Shabbat Shalom.
Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música
MICHAL: It’s a traditional nigun (song without the words, or with some kind of citation). In this case nign “Niezhuryca khlopcy” has in three sections (A, B, C), three typical kinds of texture:
ARACELI: About you: year and place of birth, place where you are settled. Did you receive lessons for liturgic singing or anything like that? I think you can conduct religious services and I know it requires a lot of time for studying. What made you interested in that?
The event mentioned in this song dates back to 1497 and tells the story of the murder of Juan de Borja y Cattanei, II Duke of Gandía (he is the man in the portrait). He was stabbed and his body was thrown to the river in Rome, when he was only 19 years old. The last time he was seen alive was in a place called the square of the Jews.
This question came to my mind when I knew that Jürgen, from Hudaki Village Band, was an Austrian. Through that question I got to understand that the story of Hudaki Village Band is the story of the synergy, complicity and the love between Jürgen and the music and the people from this Ukranian agricultural land.
Jürgen is now Yuri and Hudaki is a powerful band of local musicians with an international approach and a careful staging, masters of the alchemy of musical-vibrating happiness.
My task here, even after almost 20 years, remains to strengthen the self-confidence of the band members, to insist again and again on the strength of the traditional music, without compromising on kitsch and commerce. The most important, we still have fun making music together, just like in the beginning. The fact that we have been playing with practically the same line-up since 2001 is probably the clearest indication of this.”