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The Lost Yiddish Songs of the Soviet Holocaust, Revived

As a matter of policy, the USSR suppressed efforts to commemorate the Holocaust as an event distinct from the suffering of the Soviet nation as a whole. Thus a remarkable trove of songs and poems written by Jews caught up in the Final Solution was long kept in obscurity—until last month, when a professor and a musician teamed up to perform them in Tel Aviv. Aron Heller writes:

As the war raged, a group of Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologists led by Moisei Beregovsky recorded hundreds of Yiddish songs detailing the Holocaust and Jewish resistance to fascism. . . . Beregovsky planned to publish an anthology after the war, but the project was shut down in 1949 at the height of Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge, and Beregovsky was arrested on suspicion of promoting Jewish nationalism. His documents were seized and he died thinking his work had been destroyed.

Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did a librarian stumble upon fifteen unmarked boxes containing the collection. She catalogued them, but it was another decade before [the historian Anna] Shternshis came upon the trove of handwritten poems in the Ukrainian National Library [and] decided to put them to music with the help of Russian-American musician Psoy Korolenko, who was responsible for what he called “melodic solutions” to the newly discovered lyrics.

[One song], “Yoshke From Odessa,” tells the story of a Jewish soldier in the Red Army—one of a half- million—who slices his enemies into pieces like a butcher. “My Machine Gun” invokes the pride another otherwise helpless Jew felt at being armed.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Holocaust, Jewish music, Soviet Jewry, Soviet Union

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic