Wednesday, March 13, 2019 | 7:30 p.m. | Douglass Student Center

The Toby and Herbert Stolzer Endowed Program
Concert and Lecture Program

Last Yiddish Heroes: Lost and Found Songs of Soviet Jews during World War II

Psoy Korolenko, Singer-songwriter
Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish Studies, University of Toronto

In the early 1940s, a group of Soviet Jewish scholars began a remarkable project: gathering and safeguarding songs written by Jews who were facing annihilation during the Holocaust. Answering the call in Yiddish newspapers, handwritten song submissions came pouring in from Jews across Russia, Ukraine, and beyond—a testament to Jewish life in the Soviet Union. In the 1990s the collection was discovered in the basement of the Ukrainian National Library where it had been hidden by the Soviet government. Psoy Korolenko and Anna Shternshis bring these long lost songs to life in this all-new concert and lecture program drawn from their 2019 Grammy-nominated CD, Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II.

Psoy Korolenko is a preeminent Yiddish singer, songwriter, and scholar. He is known for his multilingual one-person cabaret style shows, which balance folk and klezmer music, free-style poetry, and intellectual comedy. He has released more than twenty CDs and one book, The Hit of the Century.

Professor Anna Shternshis, director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin.

Free and open to the public. Free parking available. RSVP to rsvpBildner@sas.rutgers.edu or on the event web page at BildnerCenter.Rutgers.edu. Check website for more details, including new online parking registration information.