Contact
Martin ShichtmanEastern Michigan University Foundation
734-487-0250
emu_foundationevents@emich.edu
Yiddish Glory: The Lost and Found Songs of World War II
Singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko (Moscow - New York) and historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) bring to life long lost Yiddish songs of the World War II in this all-new concert and lecture program.
Collected by Moisei Beregovskyand other scientists of the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture, these previouslyunknown Yiddish songs were confiscated and hidden by the Soviet government in1949, and have only recently come to light. They tell stories of how Soviet Jews livedand died under the German occupation, used music to document Nazi atrocities,fought in the Red Army, worked in the home front, and made sense of it all throughYiddish music. None of these songs were known until they were accidentallydiscovered in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library in the 1990s. Thelecture/concert features the performance of these previously unknown materials,thus giving voices to Soviet Jewish women, children and men who never got to telltheir stories, but left us their incredible songs.
Biography of Pavel Lion, a.k.a. Psy Korolenko
One of Russia’s most popular – and clever –songwriters, as well as a pre-eminent Yiddish singer, songwriter and scholar. Self-referred to as a ''wandering scholar'' and an ''avant-bard'', he is known for hismultilingual one-person cabaret-esque shows, which balance folk and klezmermusic, free-style poetry and intellectual comedy. Psoy writes and sings in English,Russian, Yiddish, and French. On stage since 2000, he has published one book ofselected essays and song lyrics, ''The Hit Of The Century'', and 14 CDs – some ofthem in collaboration with active Jewish and Klezmer musicians ("Opa!", Daniel
Kahn, Igor Krutogolov, "Oy Division"). Psoy is a member of the organizingcommittee for a Russian American music festival JetLAG, a guest of many klezmermusic festivals, and an ex-artist in residence at the Trinity College (Hartford), TheUniversity of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). An author ofinsightful and sophisticated Russian sung poetry, Psoy is also known for his keenand explorative vision of the art of translation, “tradaptation” and what he callsSpell-Art (i.e. playing with foreign text, emphasizing linguistic distances,multilingual songs etc).
Biography of Anna Shternshis
Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddishstudies and the Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at theUniversity of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil) in ModernLanguages and Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the authorof Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 -1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: Oralhistory of Jewish Life in Under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).Shternshis is a co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs.