C 4. Yiddish Songs in the Soviet Union In the years following the October revolution, Yiddish culture was officially supported as a part of the state policy which encouraged cultural expressions of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. The Society for Jewish Folk Music, the first Jewish musical institution in Russia, had been founded in St. Petersburg in 1908. It initially concentrated on the collection, processing, publication and presentation of Jewish folklore, and members of the society such as Yoel Engel participated in a number of ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement, most notably that of Shlomo An-skys expedition in 1912 – 14. Following the political and economic collapse of the country after the Revolution, the center of Jewish music relocated to Moscow in the 1920s, and the last event of the society took place in 1929. Russian Jewish folk music continued to be sung, played and recorded throughout the Soviet regime until the anti-Jewish purges which took place from 1948 until Stalins death in 1953. The most prominent ethnomusicologist of the era was Moshe Beregovsky who, beginning in 1928, led a series of ethnographic expeditions to collective farms, factories, and homes around the country. His 1934 collection, Jewish Musical Folklore, was the first to include many of the worker and strike songs that had become popular in the early revolutionary era. Later collections of folk music were undertaken in collaboration with Yiddish writers who were apologists of Soviet ideology, such as Itsik Feffer, and contained modifications of old songs or new ones idealizing Soviet life. Life in tsarist society was poked fun of, Hasidism was ridiculed, and any reference to religion was omitted from texts and from the repertoire. Soviet emblems were extolled, as can be seen in the popular song Hey Dzhankoye [When You Go To Sevastopol], and praises were sung to settlement in Birobidzhan, officially named the Jewish Autonomous Region in 1934. It is unclear to what extent the Soviet-inspired songs were actually sung, although the fact that some of them were taken to Canada and America by Russian-Jewish immigrants shows that there must have been a certain amount of circulation. Most of the songs in the collections were love songs, lullabies and work songs. (For examples and texts of the songs, see Veidlinger). While Jews were being encouraged to laud the Soviet Union, Stalin unleashed the Great Terror (1937-38). Anti-semitic policies were already being carried out, although an overtly anti-Jewish campaign did not start until 1948, with the murder of actor-director Solomon Michoels and closure of the Yiddish State Theatre in Moscow. This was followed by mass arrests of Yiddish writers, among them the poets Peretz Markish, Leib Kwitko, David Hoffstein and and Itzik Fefer, and novelists David Bergelson and Der Nister. Some 30 Yiddish writers were executed on Aug. 12, 1952, but the secret was kept long after Stalin had died. Some of the poems have since been set to music, notably by Russian-Jewish singer Emil Gorovets, who eventually settled in the US and who published a disk together with Zalmen Mlotek: Ikh Bin a Yid: Songs of the Martyred Yiddish Poets of the Soviet Union. Another disk of Soviet Russian music was recorded by the famous Yiddish folk-singer Sidor Belarsky: Songs by Soviet Yiddish poets and composers. (Here is a video narrated in Yiddish of a commemoration held recently in New York of the night of the murdered poets). In the post-Stalinist period, performances of Yiddish music were allowed in a controlled fashion by the Soviet government, which sought to show the world that Stalinist terror was over and that Jewish life could thrive once again. However, anti-semitism was gradually being replaced with anti-Zionism, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967. By then, both singers and audience had grown up in the Soviet Union, and had much less background than their parents in Jewish language and culture. One singer, in particular, who made an enormous impact on Soviet Jewry and the whole world, was Nehama Lifshitz, who gave concerts in Yiddish throughout the Soviet republics, from 1956 until she left for Israel ten years later. Nehama became a universally-acclaimed symbol of the struggle against suppression. One of her outstanding achievements was to introduce songs in Hebrew, a language which had, in effect, been prohibited. She also awakened Jewish consciousness and alerted the world to what had happened to Russian Jewry in the Holocaust when she sang Eli, Eli, lomo azavtoni [O God, why have you forsaken me], a song ending with the affirmation of Jewish faith Shma Israel, and also when she sang the heart-rending lullaby Babi-Yar, by Shike Driz and Rivke Boyarsky, in the city of Kiev, adjacent to the site of the Babi Yar massacre of 1941. N.B. There are quite a few clips of Nehama Lifshitz on You Tube. I particularly like this one, where she sings Avraham and Sara, by Itsik Manger, together with Shraga Friedman. Its not a big part, but you get a feel for her acting as well as singing abilities. References: Shternshis, A. Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union: 1923-1939. Indiana University Press, 2006 Roi, Y. (1991). Nehama Lifshitz: symbol of the Jewish national awakening. In Roi, Y. & Beker, A., Eds. Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union. C.8: pp.168-190. Veidlinger, J. Violin, Voice and Jews. My Intimate Music (Blogspot) Rubin, J. & Ottens, R. jewishfolksongs/en/heritage
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 18:22:16 +0000
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