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Shmerke Kaczerginski Update: Another Song and an Apology

When I wrote my post on Shmerke Kaczerginski I mentioned that I had always wanted to hear him sing his “youth-anthem” because of the impression that the song had left on me in my childhood. I didn’t expect to actually ever hear such a recording because I had no way of knowing that such a recording had ever been made and if it had I thought that it was unlikely that it had been digitized and made available to the public. As it turns out at least two such recordings exist. 

Shmerke Kaczerginski Recording רעקאָרדירונג פֿון שמערקע קאַטשאַרגינסקי

As a young child I was fascinated with the music from the Vilna ghetto in general and with the towering figures of Hirsh Glik and Shmerke Kaczerginski in particular.  It began when I was just eight years old when my class in the “Jewish Folkshule” of Philadelphia was taught to sing Shmerke Kaczerginski’s “youth anthem” so that we could perform it in a Yom-Hashoa commemoration....

Montreal Trip

On Monday, December 12, I set off for Montreal with Christa Whitney, the director of the Wexler Oral History Project, and Sara Israel, one of my co-fellows, in order to pick up roughly 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes and 300 cassettes from the Jewish Public Library of Montreal so that they could be digitized as part of the Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library....

Yiddish children's plays from Vilna

Working as a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center it’s very easy to lose a minute or two from time to time amongst the wonders of the book collection just browsing through the titles . . .