When Anna Shternshis stumbled on to a collection of Yiddish songs in the late 1990s, at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kiev, she had no measure of their value.
Upon revisiting the collection nearly a decade later, Shternshis said, she “felt shock” to discover that they were written by Soviet Jews in the 1940s describing the horror, violence and destruction of the war in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Of the 6 million Jews massacred in the Holocaust, 2.5 million are said to have perished in the Soviet Union.
“These songs have such a raw, emotional power that hit me on the head,” said Shternhis, director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. “They go into specifics about how people were tortured, how they died. The songs were written by men, women, even children.”
On Tuesday, Feb. 20, Shternshis along with Russian-Jewish songwriter Pavel Lion, who goes by the pseudonym Psoy Korolenko, will present 18 of these lost songs at UC Irvine’s Winifred Smith Hall.
Shternshis also will present a lecture about the significance of these songs that tell the stories of Soviet Jews, a perspective that is rarely heard.
These songs, she says, were documented in the 1940s by Soviet ethnomusicologists from the Kiev Cabinet for Jewish Culture, led by Moisei Beregovsky. They tell the stories of Jewish soldiers who fought for the Red Army; of survival and death in Nazi-occupied Europe; and of Jews in Central Asia, the Ural Mountains and Siberia.
Beregovsky and his colleague, Ruvim Lerner, had hoped to publish an anthology of the songs, but the project never saw the light of day after Beregovsky was arrested at the height of Josef Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge. The songs were sealed and the scholars died thinking their work had been lost and destroyed.
But in the 1990s, the songs turned up in unmarked boxes at the library in Kiev where they were catalogued and stored. And that’s where Shternshis found them — on fragile paper, most of them hand-written, some typed.
Shternshis says those who originally sang these songs were not professional poets, songwriters or musicians.
“These were just people experiencing the war, some were refugees,” she said.
One of the songs was written by a 10-year-old child who talked about leaving his mother’s grave. He says he doesn’t know what will happen to him, but his mother is never coming back.
“The voice of a child, the sentiment of orphaned children, is very relevant to the Jewish experience,” Shternshis said. “The war created a generation of orphaned adults and this is their story.”
Strangely, there is also a generous sprinkling of dark humor in many of the songs, she said. It’s slapstick comedy “poking fun at Germans” who are described as coveting Ukraine for its natural resources, but were kicked out and were running away with their pants down, tripping and falling.
“I wondered why they had this type of humor in these songs,” Shternshis said. “And it occurred to me, maybe because it appeals to young people. They were trying to laugh through this horrible war.”
Some of the songs also mock Hitler, portraying him as a woman wearing a skirt and a scarf. In one song Hitler marries a machine gun and the gun shoots and kills him.
Korolenko said that to put the words to music, to breathe life into them, he had to use his creativity and imagination.
“These songs are so touching because they give voice to people who wouldn’t have been heard otherwise,” he said. “This is music that overcomes boundaries and fights the ideology that separates people and promotes hatred. These are anti-hate songs.”
If you go
What: “Lost Yiddish Heroes: Lost and Found Songs of the Soviet Jews during World War II”
When: 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20
Where: Winifred Smith Hall, at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, off Mesa Road
Admission: Free; open to the public.
