The Shmooze: The Yiddish Book Center's podcast
Podcast

The Story Behind the Discovery of the Lost Songs of World War II

Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II is a new recording of music created during the darkest chapter of European Jewish history. During these years, a group of scholars attempted to preserve songs written by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims, and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos. Following the war, the researchers were arrested during Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge and their works were confiscated. In the early 2000s, Yiddish Professor Anna Shternshis traveled to Kiev where she discovered that these songs had survived. Anna shares the history of these deteriorating, fragile documents, which contain some of the most poignant and historically important Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II.

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