In a musty basement hall of an unassuming building nestled among modern high-rises in the heart of Tel Aviv, a few hundred spectators 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 playful, lyrical language of Diaspora European Jews.
In its first performance in Israel, a Grammy-nominated concert had arrived to play the lost songs of lost Jews in a nearly lost language. More than 70 years after the purged poems of Holocaust survivors, victims and Jewish Red Army soldiers were first composed and curated, a Canadian historian has brought back to life works thought to be long gone.
“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.” Instead of writing what she called “another boring book,” Shternshis decided to put them to song with the help of Russian-American musician Psoy Korolenko, who was responsible for what he called “melodic solutions” to the newly discovered lyrics.
Shternshis says the songs themselves depict the times in graphic detail — describing, for instance, what Jews wished to do to German soldiers — and for their hatred of Hitler and praise of Stalin, who only years later would turn on his own Jewish population. “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. “My Machine Gun” invokes the pride another otherwise helpless Jew felt at being armed, set against a Klezmer tune.
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