How ‘lost’ Yiddish songs from a wartime ghetto in Ukraine revive links to Shanghai’s past

Lost anti-fascist Yiddish language songs from World War II will be making their Asian debut this month.The project is the brainchild of University of Toronto academic Anna Shternshis, who said Shanghai’s own history gave the choice of venue an extra significance, and songwriter and musician Psoy Korolenko.Their performances, which combine live music with lectures, will be only the third Yiddish-language concerts in mainland China over the past 60 years, according to producer Daniel Rosenberg.Shternshis and Korolenko have produced two albums of Yiddish music – 2016’s Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II and The Silenced Songs of WWII from this year – that were first collected by Soviet ethnologist Moisei Beregovsky in the 1930s and 40s.“He was arrested by Stalin’s government for doing this work, ended up in the Gulag, and was released only in 1956. He never got to see those songs performed on stage,” Shternshis said.