A special show today as I am joined by guest Professor Anna Shternshis, who is Professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She was instrumental in recovering lost songs from Soviet ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky, who wrote down hundreds of new Yiddish songs in the Soviet Union during WWII. These songs were written mostly by amateurs, Jewish soldiers in the Red Army, Jewish wives and mothers working on the home front, as well as refugees and survivors of Nazi terror in Poland and Ukraine. Beregovsky hoped to publish these songs after the war, but he was swept up in Stalin s 1952 anti-Jewish purges and sent to the Gulag, where he died thinking the songs were lost forever. In the late 90 s, some unmarked boxes were found in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kiev. These contained mostly handwritten copies of the songs. Professor Shternshis and Russian musician and Slav expert Psoy Korolenko coll
'Song Searcher,' a new film about Moyshe Beregovsky, the Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist who traveled his native Ukraine in the 1930-40s, is all too relevant today