In August 1945, as World War II was drawing to a close, a 10-year-old Jewish orphan named Valya Roytlender sang a song called “My Mother’s Grave” to a Soviet ethnomusicologist in Bratslav, Ukraine. “Oh mama, who will wake me up?” the boy sang, in Yiddish, to the tune of a traditional Jewish folk song. “Oh mama, who will tuck me in at night?”
Around the same time, in Kazakhstan, a Soviet republic in central Asia to which many Polish and Ukrainian Jews fled during the war, another ethnomusicologist from the same team transcribed the lyrics to another, this time from an unknown singer. The sarcastically titled “Purim Gifts for Hitler,” named after a holiday celebrating the Jews’ survival of Haman’s attempt to massacre them in biblical times, struck a more defiant tone. “You’re not my first enemy; before you I’ve had many others,” the lyrics went. “Your bleary end will be on Haman’s tree, while the Jewish people live on and on.”
These songs, along with hundreds of others, were collected for an archive of lyrics by amateur Jewish authors in the Soviet Union during World War II and documented by a team of researchers from the Cabinet of Jewish Culture from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which operated under the auspices of the Soviet government. They describe the Jewish wartime experience, telling tales not just of Holocaust survivors but of Jewish soldiers in the Red Army, women working in factories on the home front and Polish refugees building new lives in far-flung corners of the Soviet empire.
…That these songs weren’t entirely lost is something of a minor miracle. After World War II, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s policies grew increasingly anti-Semitic, and Jewish political leaders, authors and academics were imprisoned and, in many cases, tortured and executed. Most members of the Cabinet of Jewish Culture — including their leader, Ukrainian Jewish ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky — were arrested and sent to Siberian gulags.
For decades, it was presumed that Soviet authorities had destroyed the documentary work of Beregovsky’s team. But in 1993, a few years after Ukraine gained its independence from the fracturing Soviet Union, they were discovered in unmarked boxes at the Vernadsky National Library.
…The ordeals of Ukrainian Jews are not well-documented, partly because of Soviet censorship and partly because of the astonishing death tolls. Of the 1.5 million Jews living in Ukraine at the start of the war, over 900,000 perished — and many of the remaining 600,000 either fled the republic or served in the Red Army. In some German-occupied areas, according to Shternshis, the survival rate among those who stayed behind was less than 1 percent.
…Another of these voices belonged to Golda Rovinskaya, a 73-year-old who was “probably one of 150,000 Jews from Kiev who survived World War II in the Soviet rear — central Asia, maybe Siberia,” according to Shternshis. Beregovsky’s team documented her in 1947 singing a song about the massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev in which more than 33,000 Jews were executed over two days in 1941. “Oh, blood gushed out from all sides,” her lyrics read. “The earth was stained red from blood.”
…The album isn’t the only recent project to unearth Jewish music from World War II and the Holocaust that had been lost for decades. In Jerusalem in April, a group of musicians, led by Italian composer and pianist Francesco Lotoro, will play pieces written by Jewish composers in labor and concentration camps, which Lotoro has spent the past 30 years collecting. Many of the music’s authors died in the camps, but their compositions were smuggled out in the form of manuscripts or committed to memory by survivors, some of whom Lotoro tracked down and interviewed for his project. Most of the works at the performance, titled “Notes of Hope,” are being heard publicly for the first time.
For the people bringing this lost music back to life, the current political climate has brought an added sense of urgency to their efforts. A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League says that anti-Semitic activities in the U.S. increased by 57 percent last year, including sharp increases in the number of bomb threats, acts of vandalism and other incidents of intimidation and harassment. “We’ve got people running for office right now, here in this country, who deny the Holocaust ever happened,” says Bob Duskis, co-owner of the San Fransisco-based label Six Degrees, which is releasing Yiddish Glory. “So this kind of [music] continues to be very relevant and very important.”
…“This is the Jewish experience, the Soviet experience, the human experience,” Korolenko says. “It’s part of our lives in the current context and the context of history. This is great, to give voice to these people.”
Read Andy Hermann’s full piece (and listen to this album on Spotify) at NPR.
‘You’re Not My First Enemy’: In Long-Lost Jewish Songs Of WWII, Pain And Defiance
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