Yiddish Pogrom Ballads: Many Towns - Three Songs

• In Event: New Approaches to Yiddish Music & Writing

Abstract

Individual proposal AJS 2018
Yiddish Pogrom Ballads: Many Towns - Three Songs
Itzik Gottesman (University of Texas at Austin)

Yiddish folklore scholars, such as I. L. Cahan and Chana Mlotek have concentrated their ballad research on showing how narrative songs that appear in the traditions of West European countries among them Germany, Scoland and England have found their way into the repertory of the Yiddish folksinger in Eastern Europe. These songs however comprise only a small part of the entire Yiddish ballad repertoire. In this talk I will examine ballads that were performed only by the Yiddish folksingers in Eastern Europe and their descendents: the pogrom ballad. There are no parallel variants of these songs in German, Polish, Ukrainian or Russian. Specifically, the talk will look at three different pogrom ballads and the various versions of them that have been collected and printed in mainly pre-World War Two collections. These ballads have gone through a folklorizing process, so that a song originally written after the Kiev pogrom of 1881 was adapted by singers describing other pogroms that occured twenty years later. I have found three main ballads that had been sung to describe many other pogroms in other towns. I will play recordings of singers performing these songs and look at how the texts have changed over time. Though the folklore process is an oral one, there was influence from printed texts such as a pogrom poem by Abraham Goldfaden.

Author

• Itzik Gottesman, University of Texas at Austin