Yiddish Album Top-Rated in Europe

The music album “Silent Tears”, just released earlier this year, has won the highest rating on World Music Charts Europe at the beginning of April 2023. The chart was compiled by major national broadcasters including the BBC, RFI France, ORF Austria and German Public Radio.

The Silent Tears project began when Dr. Paula David launched a poetry program to help Holocaust survivors at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care deal with long term trauma from horrific crimes such as sexual violence, human experimentation and forced sterilization. The album also includes five works based on Holocaust survivor Molly Applebaum’s diary and memoir entitled “Buried Words”. As a child, to hide from the Nazis, she was buried underground in a terribly cold and filthy box full of insects.

The performers are the Payadora Tango Ensemble (Toronto), Olga (Avigail) Mieleszczuk, Lenka Lichtenberg, Aviva Chernick, Marta Kosiorek and other renowned musicians.

Alexander Gorodnitsky in Yiddish

On March 18, 2023, the well-known singer and musician Psoy Korolenko performed in the USA two songs by the Soviet and Russian poet Alexander Gorodnitsky translated into Yiddish. The translations were made exclusively for the author’s 90th birthday by the Yiddish writer Yoel Matveyev. As a special contribution for our website, Korolenko shared a recording of Gorodnitsky’s song “Snow” (“Shney” in Yiddish), which he performed at the Spring MusArt Fest in Sunnyvale (California).

Alexander Gorodnitsky is a world-famous geologist, one of the founders of the Soviet “bardic” song genre (independent singer-songwriters’ style somewhat similar to American folk music revival of the 1960s). The asteroid 5988 Gorodnitskij is named after him. His songs about expeditions to the Arctic are based on personal field experience. Gorodnitsky considers Yiddish, the language of his ancestors, a very important part of his personal cultural heritage.

Website Dedicated to Yiddish Songs

The Workers’ Circle has launched a new website that features lyrics and freely downloadable audio recordings of more than 400 Yiddish songs from Yosl and Chana Mlotek’s anthology. It’s called Yiddishsongs.org. All songs are also accompanied by Roman letters transcription and English translation.

Chana Mlotek was a renowned researcher and collector of Yiddish songs, while her husband Yosl was a prominent Yiddishist activist. For decades the couple ran the popular Forverts column “Pearls of Jewish Poetry”. The new project was carried out by the son and grandson of these authors, Moish and Elisha Mlotek.

Dmitri Shostakovich in Yiddish

Our Internet portal is glad to announce the publication of unique materials dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich’s vocal cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry”. Not being himself a Jew, this great composer considered Jewish folk music unique, had deep feelings towards it and believed that it echoed in the works of many great world composers. In 1948, during the darkest moments of Stalin’s terror against the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, Shostakovich created a series of 11 music pieces based on folk lyrics originally published in Yiddish.

The visitors of our website have now the opportunity to become acquainted with the original collection of Yiddish folk songs by Yekhezkl Dobrushin and Avrom Yuditsky, which formed the basis of Shostakovich’s genious songs; with the book of the Israeli musicologist Joachim Braun, where the Yiddish original texts are reworked according to the melodies (the composer himself used Russian translations, which sound somewhat different from the originals); as well as with full music scores. Most importantly, our site offers a recording of these songs in their original language: Yiddish. It was made in 2000 in Moscow, performed by Eva Ben-Zvi, Elena Goubina and Nikolay Kurpe. Our newly created video of this performance is illustrated by art works of famous Jewish painters.