Evgeny Kissin (born in 1971) is an outstanding pianist, one of the greatest contemporary music performers who became famous as an internationally renowned star at the age of 12, when he performed two of Chopin’s piano concertos in one evening.

When the young musician was a child in Moscow, his parents gave him a calendar card with the Hebrew alphabet, which they bought in a second-hand bookstore. Kissin quickly learned the letters, but at first did not find any use for them.

In 1977, the composer and theater director Yuri Sherling (born in 1944) created the Chamber Jewish Musical Theater, which performed in Yiddish and Russian. This was an unexpected event in the country, where the very word “Jew” was often a taboo subject. The first performance of this theater, the musical The Black Bridle of the White Mare, was staged by Sherling in two languages and was written by two well known poets: Chaim Beider (the Yiddish version) and Ilya Reznik (the Russian one). When the cover of this work’s vinyl record, which contained both versions of the libretto, reached Kissin who always had a phenomenal memory, he used it as a textbook of sorts for learning Yiddish.

In 1989, the Kissin family emigrated to the West. The young pianist started his intensive international concert activities. At some point, he began to appear on stage not only as a musician, but also as a reciter of Yiddish poetry. The regular participants of prestigious music festivals did not expect the world-famous star to recite poetry in a language that was only understood by very few people. It did not fit into the stereotypical view that this musician only focuses on piano performances.

An important event in Kissin’s life was his acquaintance with Boris Sandler, one of the few living speakers of Yiddish of the older generation whose long professional career as a writer and journalist is linked to this language.

Evgeny Kissin’s participation in the development of contemporary Yiddish culture has three aspects. First, he still appears on the stage with programs that are directly related to this language. As a recent example, he performed at the Carnegie Hall together with the artist Veniamin Smekhov at an event dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the execution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). Second, he has already published two of his own Yiddish books, where he appears as a writer, poet and translator. Third, his musical and literary activities were combined in his own chamber and theatrical music compositions. In 2019, Birobidzhan hosted the premiere of the children’s musical fairy tale play The Bird Alef From the Old Gramophone, written in Yiddish by Boris Sandler. The music was written by Evgeny Kissin. The 2022 play called Gramophone, made by the same creative duet and staged in Prague, is dedicated to the Holocaust memory.