Grammy-Nominated Yiddish Songs Brought to Life at Rutgers

“Last Yiddish Heroes: Lost and Found Songs of Soviet Jews during World War II,” lecture and concert will draw from historic album

During the Holocaust, Jews from across the Soviet Union told their personal stories through Yiddish songs in a collection that was thought to be lost forever, but is now part of a Grammy-nominated recording.

The songs were collected and saved by a group of Soviet Jewish scholars starting in the early 1940s who, at great personal risk, set about protecting them for future publication. The collection was discovered about 50 years later in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library where it had been hidden by the Soviet government. 

“Few people understand the complex patriotism of Soviet Jews who fought in the Red Army against the Nazis, or know of the ways in which Ukrainian Jews resisted their victimization through cultural activism during those terrible years,’’ said  Professor Nancy Sinkoff, the academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, which is sponsoring a March 13 program to bring these songs to the public.

The concert and lecture program, “Last Yiddish Heroes: Lost and Found Songs of Soviet Jews during World War II,” is this year’s Toby and Herbert Stolzer Endowed Program, sponsored by the Bildner Center. It draws on the 2019 Grammy-nominated CD Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II by Yiddish singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko, who is known for his multilingual one-person cabaret-style shows, and Anna Shternshis, the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin.

Sinkoff says the recording “opens up a world to Yiddish songs created by Jewish soldiers, refugees, victims, and survivors. Their voices, brought to life by Shternshis and Korolenko, represent an astounding act of historical reconstruction and musical archaeology."

The program will be held 7:30 p.m. on March 13 at the Douglass Student Center, 100 George Street, New Brunswick. It is free and open to the public. For more information or to RSVP, please visit BildnerCenter.Rutgers.edu.

The Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life connects the university with the community through public lectures, symposia, Jewish communal initiatives, cultural events, and teacher training.