🕵️old klezmers🎻Sep 21, 2024

not what I was looking for in my search, but I came across this magazine profile of Nehama Lifshitz, the great Soviet #Yiddish singer, in an English-language propaganda magazine from 1963. The timing is significant, an era when the #USSR was once again trying to promote a pluralistic image abroad but when artists faced various constraints and local roadblocks. This was six years before she emigrated to Israel.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.30000108553805?urlappend=%3Bseq=574%3Bownerid=119196010-578

#SovietHistory #JewishMusic

USSR 1963.

HathiTrust
Show thread🕵️old klezmers🎻Sep 21, 2024
I wrote her #Wikipedia biography in dialogue with her daughter a few years ago. Her promising career was constrained by circumstances. While she seems to have been a party member, in the #USSR her performances were subject to occasional cancellation and regular censorship during her decade of fame 1958-69. In Israel, where her emigration was considered a political coup, there was essentially no interest in her #Yiddish art music and she became a librarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nechama_Lifshitz
Nechama Lifshitz - Wikipedia

Show thread🕵️old klezmers🎻Sep 21, 2024

I was thinking about her recently because my choir director said he wanted to make Gorovets' setting of Itsik Fefer's "Ikh bin a Yid" the focus of our final concert next year. It made me think of trying to set this piece for choir, a setting of a Peretz Markish poem by Shmul Senderei for Lifshitz: "Gist-zhe on." Rather mundanely translated as "Pour Out" here.
https://soundcloud.com/yiddishkayt/pour-out

#Yiddish #ArtMusic #USSR

Pour Out • גיסט-זשע אָן • Nehama Lifschitz

גיסט-זשע אָן - פּרץ מאַרקיש העכער פֿונעם פֿויגלס פֿליגל האָבן מיר אַף בערג געשטיגן און דערשטיגן. און דערלאַנגט,- גיס-זשע אָן מיט ברייטער האַנט אַז מקוים זאָלן װערן אַלע אונדזערע באַגערן. אָפּגעבליט

SoundCloud
Show thread🕵️old klezmers🎻Sep 21, 2024

I couldn't find a full translation that I liked, but "Gist-zhe On" was Peretz Markish's last poem. Here's how Yiddishkayt translated part of it in 2012:

"Higher than the wings of birds
We climbed the mountains
And ascended, and reached the top,—
Now pour it out with a generous hand,
—May all our wishes
Now be fulfilled..."

#Yiddish #USSR #PoetryInTranslation

Show thread🕵️old klezmers🎻Sep 21, 2024

For #Yiddish readers here's the text of the poem from the Yiddish Book Center collection.

https://archive.org/details/nybc213639/page/n12/mode/1up

Yerushe lider un poemen : Markish, Peretz, 1895-1952 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

T.p. partially vocalized

Internet Archive
Show thread🕵️old klezmers🎻

Here's Emil Gorovets' setting of the same poem which is much more of a cheerful triumphant anthem😅🎶 Really shows how the same text can be interpreted very differently. it's not that I dislike it, it's charming, but it doesn't have quite the same feeling of a repressed person screaming to be heard.
https://soundcloud.com/user-39180681/gist-zhe-on-peretz-markish-e-gorovets-8

#Yiddish #JewishMusic #USSR #SovietMusic

GIST ZHE ON (Peretz Markish, E. Gorovets) -- 8

Songs of the martyred Yiddish poets od Soviet Union

SoundCloud
Sep 21, 2024 at 2:52pmWeb