Yiddish Sounds of Canada
Director, script Olga Antimony
Producer Gregory Antimony
Ukrainian Jewish ethnomusicologist and Yiddish scholar Moisei Beregovsky collected hundreds of Jewish songs in the 1930s and 1940s with the intention of publishing an anthology. After the liberation of Ukraine in 1944, he continued to collect Yiddish musical folklore created by Jews in ghettos, concentration camps, partisan units, and in evacuation. However, during the post-war period of Soviet anti-Semitism, Beregovsky was arrested for “Jewish nationalism” and sent to the Gulag. His archive was thought to be lost. In the early 1990s, University of Toronto professor Anna Shternshis discovered the archive by chance while working at the Vernadsky Library in Kyiv. A group of musicians from different countries gathered in Canada to recreate these songs, using popular Soviet melodies from that era.