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Rare Recordings of Jewish Folk Music at a Ukrainian Library

July 31 2018

In the 1990s, librarians at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev discovered a cache of unmarked containers. Once opened, they disclosed an archive of Jewish folk music from the early-20th century, including not only song lyrics and sheet music but also recordings that would not be studied systematically for another decade. Jake Marmer tells the archive’s story:

[L]ong before any serious recording technology was invented, without much funding or publicity, groups of ambitious scholars set out on ethnographic expeditions into the heartland of the Ukrainian shtetl world, aiming to capture the community’s folklore, and amassed a treasure trove of material. In recent years, these fragile, virtually unknown recordings were digitized and released in CD format. There are currently nine volumes of music out, with the three latest volumes released just within the past year. These most recent discs included the 1930s recordings of “Jewish Agricultural Colonies of the Southern Ukraine” and . . . a 1913 collection of fieldwork conducted in the Jewish communities of Palestine. . . .

The Jewish archive was started back in 1918, and in those early days . . . many of the early “acquisitions” that came in were the konfiskat—i.e., items confiscated from the wealthy, along with other private property that changed hands in the wake of the 1917 revolution. And then there were also the “library babushkas”: older folks who watched out for abandoned private libraries of those escaping the Soviet regime, or for the closing down of synagogues and study houses. They would quickly drag the items over to the library to prevent looting—at times, endangering themselves in the process.

The archive’s holdings expanded dramatically in the 1930s, when it received a large shipment from Saint Petersburg’s Jewish Museum—a shipment that included materials assembled by the legendary writer-anthropologist S. An-Sky [né Shloyme Zaynvl Rappaport], most famous as the author of The Dybbuk, perhaps the most successful Yiddish play ever produced. . . . An-Sky, like other anthropologists of the early-20th century, used wax cylinders for his recordings. The cylinders work in a manner similar to vinyl discs, with a needle moving in a groove to produce sound. . . .

It was then that the KGB destroyed the filing system that contained the descriptions of the archive’s holdings. . . . When Ukraine became an independent nation in the 1990s, the archive was finally reopened. I innocently asked [the librarian] why the KGB [repressed and nearly destroyed the] archive. She retorted with familiar sarcasm: “Because Jews were bad! Whose fault is it—always and for everything?”

Read more at Tablet

More about: History & Ideas, Jewish archives, Jewish music, S. An-sky, Shtetl, Ukraine, Ukrainian Jews

 

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