Beregovski Online Forum #2
Origins of the English Language edition of Moshe Beregovski’s Jewish Instrumental Folk Music.
BOF #2
Fiddler Craig Judelman hosts the scholars who brought Beregovski’s work to the United States, and helped to publish the first English-language edition of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music.
Speakers: Lyudmilla Sholokhova, Izaly Zemtsovsky, Mark Slobin, Michael Alpert, Robert Rothstein.
Sasha Lurje and Christina Crowder provided technical support for the Zoom Recording Session. Video editing by Craig Judelman.
About the Beregovski Online Forum
The Beregovski Online Forum is a series of discussions with musicians and scholars about the life and work of Klezmer’s preeminent ethnomusicologist, Moshe Beregovski. The series is conceived and convened by klezmer violinist Craig Judelman. You can support this work by making a donation to Craig’s Tip Jar on the video link, or from right here.
Craig’s Website is here.
Craig Judelman, Host
Michael Alpert
Short Bio
Singer, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, and scholar Michael Alpert has been a key figure in the renaissance of East European Jewish music and culture worldwide since the 1970s. A native Yiddish speaker, he is one of the only Yiddish singers of his generation adept in the style of pre-WWII generations. Alpert is a celebrated innovator in Yiddish song, whose original compositions have expanded the canon. A leading teacher and scholar, his work has helped spark an international revitalization of the Yiddish cultural arts, from Yiddish folksong and dance to klezmer violin. Alpert’s vision has fostered Yiddish/Jewish cultural creativity as both an ethnic heritage and a contemporary identity.
Selected Discography
Robert Rothstein
Short Bio
Robert A. Rothstein was trained in linguistics by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Roman Jakobson, but also has a long-standing interest in folklore and popular culture. In addition to publications in the field of Slavic linguistics, his bibliography includes such titles as “The Poetics of Proverbs,” “Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness,” “The Popular Song in Wartime Russia,” “The Girl He Left Behind: Women in East European Songs of Emigration,” “Klezmer-loshn: The Language of Jewish Folk Musicians,” “How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture,” “From the Folk Ballad to the Cruel Romance,” and “Songs of Women Warriors and Women Who Waited.” Rothstein has contributed numerous articles about Yiddish song to the Forverts between 1987 to 2005. He was co-translator and co-editor of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski.
Articles and Book Chapters
“The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and Its Critics,” Slavic Review 39 (1980), 373-388.
“On the Melody of David Edelstadt’s ‘Vakht oyf!’”, Musica Judaica 4 (5742/1981-82), 1:69-79.
“The Mother-Daughter Dialogue in the Yiddish Folk Song: Wandering Motifs in Time and Space,” New York Folklore 15 (1989), 1-2:51-65.
“Popular Song in the NEP Era,” in Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, Sheila Fitzpatrick et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 268-294.
“Geyt a yid in shenkl arayn: Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness,” in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed. David Goldberg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1993), pp. 243-262.
“The Challenge of Popular Culture: Mayakovsky and the ‘Urban Romance,’” in A Commemoration of the Life, Work, and Times of Vladimir Mayakovsky (Proceedings of the Mayakovsky Centennial Symposium), ed. Anne D. Perryman and Patricia J. Thompson (New York: Lehman College, 1993) 994. 1-10 [separate pagination], [with Halina Rothstein]. 2nd edition, 1994.
“Death of the Folk Song?”, in Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 108-120.
“Homeland, Home Town, and Battlefield: The Popular Song,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 77-94.
“Klezmer-loshn” (Klezmer Slang), Judaism 47 (1998), 1:23-29.
“The Girl He Left Behind: Women in East European Songs of Emigration,” SEEFA Journal 5 (2000), 1:25-38. [Corrected endnotes: 5 (2000), 2:63-65.]
“How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture,” Slavic Review 60 (2001): 781-801.
“Klezmer-loshn: The Language of Jewish Folk Musicians,” in American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots, ed. Mark Slobin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 24-34 [revised reprint of 1998 article].
“Mishshprakhike lider: a slovakish-yidishe dugme in zayn slavishn un yidishn kontekst” (Mixed-language Songs: A Slovak-Yiddish Example in Its Slavic and Yiddish Context), YIVO-bleter, n.s. 4 (2003): 157-168 [revised translation of 1994 article].
“The Sad Lot of Women in Ukrainian and Yiddish Folksongs,” in Textures and Meanings: Thirty Years of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ed. Leonard H. Ehrlich, Shmuel Bolozky, Robert A. Rothstein, Murray Schwartz, Jay R. Berkovitz, James E. Young, 1. 213-227 [http://www.umass.edu/judaic/anniversaryvolume].
“Ashkenazim,” in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife, ed. William M. Clements (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006), 3:330-341.
“The Polish Tin Pan Alley – A Jewish Street,” POLIN – Studies in Polish Jewry 52 (Jews and Music-making In the Polish Lands), ed. François Guesnet, Benjamin Matis and Antony Polonsky (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020), pp. 147-163.
Reviews & Translations
Max Goldin, On Musical Connections between Jews and the Neighboring Peoples of Eastern and Western Europe (= Program in Soviet and East European Studies Occasional Papers Series No. 18), (Amherst, MA: International Area Studies Programs, University of Massachusetts, 1989), 65 pp. [translated from the unpublished Russian original and extensively annotated].
Hidden History: Songs of the Kovno Ghetto (Washington, D.C., 1997), in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13 (1999), 488-490.
Aleksander Kulisiewicz, Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 1940-1945 (Washington, D.C. 2008), Slavic and East European Journal 53 (2009), 518-519.
Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (New York, 2016), Slavic Review 77 (2018): 845-846.
OTHER YIDDISH-RELATED PUBLICATIONS
“Hucpa and the Klezmer, or What Yiddish Gave to Polish,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 25/26 (1982), 405-412 (= Slavic Linguistics and Poetics: Studies for Edward Stankiewicz on His 60th Birthday, ed. Kenneth E. Naylor et al.).
“Yiddish Aspectology” [review article], in Studies in Yiddish Linguistics, ed. Paul Wexler (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), pp. 143-153.
“Language Play in the Yiddish Proverb,” in Harvard Studies in Slavic Linguistics, ed. Olga T. Yokoyama, 3:143-147 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Slavic Department, 1995).
“Food in Yiddish and Slavic Folk Culture: a Comparative/Contrastive View,” in Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1998), pp. 305-328 (with Halina Rothstein).
“The Metalinguistic Function as an Organizing Principle of the Yiddish Folklore Text,” in American Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists, ed. Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1998), pp. 479-487.
Entries on Argots (pp. 1834-5), Ignatz Bernstein (p. 67), Proverbs (pp. 1479-80), Riddles (pp. 1559-61),
Songs and Songwriters (pp. 1784-7), in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Lyudmila Sholokhova
Short Bio
Dr. Lyudmila Sholokhova is curator of the Dorot Jewish Collections at the New York Public Library and a lecturer of Yiddish language at Columbia University. She was the Director of the YIVO Library and Associate Director for External Relations in Eastern Europe and Russia from 2019 till January 2020. She was Head Librarian at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 2011-2016, Acting Chief Archivist from 2013-2016, and Director of the YIVO Archives and Library from 2016 – 2019. From 1994 to 2001, she was a Research Associate at the Judaica Division of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. Dr. Sholokhova is the author of numerous publications on the history of Jewish music and Jewish bibliography. She is fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish.
Selected Bibliography
Sholokhova, Lyudmila, “The Formation and Development of Jewish Musical Folklore Studies in the Russian Empire at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” (Russian). Kiev University Dissertation, 2000.
—— Phonoarchive of Jewish Musical Heritage: The Collection of Jewish Folklore Phonograph Recordings from the Institute of Manuscripts; Annotated Catalogue of Phonocylinders, Musical and Textual Decodings. (Kiev: Vernadsky Library, 2001).
—— “Zinoviy Kiselhof as a Founder of Jewish Music Folklore Studies in Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th Century” in K. Grözinger (ed.), Klesmer, Klassik, Jiddishces Lied: Jüdische Musikkultur in Osteuropa. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz, 2004), 63-72.
Mark Slobin
Short Bio
Mark Slobin is the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University and the author or editor of books on Afghanistan and Central Asia, eastern European Jewish music, film music, and ethnomusicology theory, two of which have received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award: Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World; and Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants. His most recent book (2018) is Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. He has been President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Asian Music and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Selected Bibliography
Slobin, Mark. “A Fresh Look at Beregovski’s Folk Music Research.” in Ethnomusicology 30, no. 2 (1986): 253.
—— “Moshe Beregovski: The Insider as Outsider,” unpublished conference paper, 1998.
—— Old Jewish Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski, Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
—— “Thoughts on Zemtsovsky’s and Kunanbaeva’s ‘Communism and Folklore,’” In Folklore and Traditional Music in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Proceedings of a One-Day Conference, May 16, 1994, edited by Porter, James, 28-31. (Los Angeles: Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, 1997).
Izaly Zemtsovsky
Short Bio
Izaly Zemtsovsky is a Russian-born American ethnomusicologist and a visiting professor at Stanford University. Zemtsovsky has been a lifelong advocate of Russian Soviet musicologist Boris Asafyev’s “intonation theory” (intonatsiia) and contributed to its use at European and American universities. He has lived in the US since 1994, teaching at UCLA, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University. Zemtsovsky graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory with degrees in ethnomusicology and composition, and from Lenigrad University as a folklorist and linguist. In St. Petersburg, Zemtsovsky helped establish the Department of Folklore at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in 1969, chairing it immediately after perestroika allowed non-Communist Party Jews to hold such positions. He also chaired the Folklore Department of the Union of Russian Composers and, in 1989, founded the Department of Traditional Culture of Siberian and Far East Peoples at the Russian Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. Since 2006 Zemtsovsky has been the founder and director of Silk Road House, a non-profit organization focused on the culture of the Silk Road in Berkeley, CA. He was awarded the Fumio Koizumi Prize for Ethnomusicology in 2011.
Selected Bibliography
Goldin, Max, Jewish Folk Songs: Anthology. Commentary: M. Goldin and I. Zemtsovsky. Ed. I. Zemtsovsky. (St. Petersburg: The “Kompositor” Publishers, 1994). (in Yiddish, Russian and English).
Zemtsovsky, Izaly, “An Attempt at a Synthetic Paradigm,” in Ethnomusicology, Vol. 41, No. 2, Special Issue: Issues in Ethnomusicology (Spring – Summer, 1997), (Champaign: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology, 1997) pp. 185-205.
—— “The Encyclopedist of Jewish Folklore,” in Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writing of Moshe Beregovski. (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2001). p. IX—XV.
—— “Hearing in the Sociocultural margins: Identifying HomoMusicans Polyethnoaudiens,” In Garment and Core: Jews and their Musical Experiences, Edited By Eitan Avitsur Marina Ritzarev Edwin Seroussi, (Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University Press, 2012). P. 13-30.
—— “Jewish Music: Values From Within Versus Evaluation From Without,” in Studies in Jewish Civilization. Vol. 8. Representations of Jews Through the Ages. Eds. Leonard Jay Greenspoon, Bryan F. Le Beau. (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 1996) p. 131—151.
Zemtsovsky, Izaly and Kunanbaeva, Alma. “Communism and Folklore.” In Folklore and Traditional Music in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Proceedings of a One-Day Conference, May 16, 1994, edited by Porter, James, 3–23. (Los Angeles: Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, 1997).
“In February 1966, I collected Beregovski’s archives at his Kyiv home, where his older daughter Irina lived, and transferred it to St. Petersburg, to my Institute (which is now the Institute of the History of the Arts). That archive included all five volumes of Beregovski fundamental masterpiece “Jewish musical folklore” as well as various manuscripts (in Russian and Yiddish) and a box of sound recordings on wax cylinders.
One of those articles, written by Beregovski in 1946, I was miraculously able to publish in 1973. Later on, in 1982, it was translated and published by Mark Slobin (“The altered Dorian scale in Jewish folk music: On the question of the semantic characteristics of scales”). Later on, in 1989 and at the beginning of the 1990s, I was able to copy the main volumes of Beregovski and to bring them to New York.
Mark Slobin and Robert A. Rothstein worked with them, and … their collaborative work Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski was successfully published with my foreword in 2001 and is well-known today. In October 1992, in St. Petersburg, I organized the First International Conference dedicated to the centenary of Beregovski. The modest summary book of its papers was published in Russian.”
Some brief accounts of how Beregovski’s work came to be known in the United States.
I began visiting and researching at YIVO in 1973 and became friendly with the great Chana Mlotek, who pointed me to many sources on East European Jewish music, including Beregovski’s works. It was a time when a couple of YIVO working papers appeared around the ideology of Soviet folkloristics, so I got some sense of the current discourse. I decided to make sources accessible to the people of the klezmer revitalization and in wider European folk music studies who did not read Russian or Yiddish and in 1982 compiled Old Jewish Folk Music, which relied completely on materials already in print in the USSR that could be used without copyright infringement.
Izaly Zemtsovsky graciously provided me with photocopies of the Beregovski manuscript holdings at the Institute for the Study of the Arts in St. Petersburg. The klezmer movement needed the full material Beregovski had worked on, so I invited colleagues—Michael Alpert, Robert Rothstein–to produce an edition introduced by a previously published essay by Zemtsovsky and supplemented by a discographic description by Kurt Bjorling.
In 1986, my article surveying Beregovski’s contribution appeared in Ethnomusicology and in 1998 I gave a talk at a conference that I think was held in Moscow at the Russian State University of the Humanities for Project Judaica. That is the sum of my work on this extraordinary heritage of collecting and research by a man whose name ought to be much more generally known in scholarly and musical circles. He was truly one of the great figures in ethnomusicology/folklore studies in the twentieth century.
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