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Between 1942 and 1947, Soviet Jewish folklorists and ethnomusicologists, all workers of the Kiev-based Cabinet for Studying of Jewish Proletarian Culture, including Yeheskil Dobrushin, Moisei Beregovsky, and Elye Spivak, were acutely aware of importance of documenting the contemporary Yiddish culture, which they understood, was going through a profound crisis. During this time,they collected and professionally recorded thousands of Yiddish language folksongs, ballads, plays and stories, from Soviet ghetto survivors, evacuees and refugees. The plan was to publish a number of edited volumes, including one on Jewish heroism in the Soviet army, another one on Jewish music and folklore during the war, and yet another one on Jewish work in the Soviet rear. None of these plans came to fruition, because the Cabinet was shut down in 1947, its workers fired or/and jailed, and the materials left unsorted and buried in nameless boxes of the manuscript department of the Ukrainian Vernadsky Library.
Because of my previous extensive research on Soviet Yiddish popular culture (especially music) in the 1930s, I am aware of both the unprecedented scope and extremely rare nature of these materials. For example, the archive contains a transcript of a Yiddish anti-fascist song recorded in 1944 from a five-year old girl in Ukraine. The song depicts a love story between an enlisted soldier dispatched to fight Hitler, and a young woman, who stayed behind in a Ukrainian village, and ended up in a ghetto. Another example is a song, which argues that Hitler wanted coal from Donbas (an industrial region of Ukraine) and Soviet oil resources from the Caucasus. Recorded in 1945, this song has unexpected contemporary resonance, in addition to its historical significance.
The proposed paper will discuss the genres, the content and the significance of the music found in the archive and propose ways to contextualize the findings in the field of Holocaust music studies as well as studies of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.