Ḳieṿ : Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhayṭn in U. S. S. R. 1938. Original edition.
Hardcover. Embossed yellow leather-like covers, gilt Yiddish title on front and spine, blind Cyrilic tile on rear board, small quarto (10 x 7.1 inches), 531 pages, musical scores. Index.

Very scarce copy of the original edition of this collection of Yiddish folk songs, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the October revolution of 1917. It opens with the Yiddish words to the International and includes a separate section of Soviet Yiddish songs (e.g., For our dear comrade Stalin).

The texts of the songs are in Yiddish with Hebrew letters and using soviet orthography). The words under the musical scores are transliterated into the Roman alphabet.

The songs are arranged in sections including work and struggle, love songs, weddings and joyful occasions, family songs, cradle songs, children’s songs, songs without words, dances, etc.

This anthology, published in the Ukraine S.S.R. in 1938, is a rich collection of folk songs with notes, lyrics and transcriptions. The songs, sorted into categories such as “Arbet un kamf,” “Libe-lider,” and “Af khasenes un simkhes,” provide us not only with beautiful melodies and texts, but also with snapshots of the lives of Eastern European Jews in the Soviet Union, dominated by poverty and political struggle, but full of idealism, passion and humor.

The hundreds of Yiddish songs collected in Yidishe folks-lider were compiled by the Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski (1892–1961) during his numerous research trips around Eastern Europe. From 1929 to 1947, Beregovski traveled around the Ukraine, visiting collective farms, factories and homes, to collect secular Jewish music – both documenting the songs and melodies on paper, and recording them on phonograph cylinders. With around 2000 field recordings, Beregovski’s ambitious project resulted in the largest and most detailed collection of its kind in prewar Europe.

Yidishe Folks lider was assembled in collaboration with the Yiddish poet Itzik Fefer (1900-1952). A member of the Communist Party, and frequently published in Soviet-Yiddish magazines, Fefer was an apologist for Soviet ideology, and has been described as one of the "most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets." Soviet editors of folk music collections often modified old songs or added new ones that would support Soviet ideology and idealize Soviet life, and this is evident in this volume, which opens with “The International.” In spite of Fefer’s allegiance to Communist ideology, he was persecuted by the security police and Stalin’s courts, and executed along with 13 other Yiddish intellectuals in 1952.


Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovsky (Russian: Моисей Яковлевич Береговский; משה אהרן בערעגאָווסקי ; 1892–1961) was a Soviet Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist from Ukraine, who published mainly in Russian and Yiddish. He has been called the "foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry". His research and life's work included the collection, transcription and analysis of the melodies, texts and culture of Yiddish folk song, wordless melodies (nigunim), East European Jewish instrumental music for both dancing and listening (klezmer music), Purim plays (Yiddish: פורים-שפיל / purim-shpil), and exploration of the relationship between East European Jewish and Ukrainian traditional music.

Biography
Early life
Beregovsky was born into the family of a Jewish parochial primary school (kheyder) teacher in the village of Termakhovka, then in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. As a child he participated as a boy-chorister in a local synagogue. He studied in the conservatories of Kiev (composition and cello in 1915–1920) and Petrograd (1922–1924). He also worked as a vocal coach in Jewish orphanages in Petrograd and Moscow under Joel Engel.

Career in music research
From 1928–1936 he was the head of Musical Folklore section of the Institute for Jewish Proletarian Arts of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1936–1949 he was a researcher in the Institute for Language and Literature, head of the Office of Folklore of the Jewish Arts Section of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and head of the Office for Musical Ethnography. He was a teacher in the Kiev Conservatory from 1947, in the sections of music theory and folklore).

From roughly 1929 to 1947, Beregovsky made ethnographic trips collecting secular Jewish music in various parts of Soviet Ukraine. His works make up the largest and most carefully notated collection of its kind in pre-WWII and early postwar Europe. He was especially interested in Klezmer music, which had been far less collected and studied than Yiddish folksong. By 1941 he said he had managed to collect 700 examples of the genre, which included presumably his own field recordings, musical manuscripts, and collections he inherited from an older scholar, Susman Kiselgof. Mark Slobin, who arranged and republished much of Beregovsky's collection in the United States, has said in an interview that Beregovsky "was the only person to do this for Yiddish music, and he was an excellent ethnomusicologist." He made roughly 2,000 field recordings on 700 phonograph cylinders.

In 1944, Beregovsky received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Conservatory, writing his dissertation on the topic of Jewish instrumental folk music. He worked to meticulously expand the work of previous Eastern European Jewish musicologists and ethnographers such as A.Z. Idelsohn, Yoel Engel, S. An-Sky, and Y.L. Cahan.

Beregovsky was the head of the Cabinet for Jewish Musical Folklore in the ethnographic section of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev. He continued his research during the period of Stalinist repression of the 1930s-50s, under what must have been great ideological pressure, as state-funded musical research in the Soviet Union necessarily followed Marxist-Leninist lines.

The institute itself was later closed down and many of its members exiled and disgraced. In 1949, Beregovsky's department was closed and he was arrested in 1950 at the height of Joseph Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign and sent to Tayshet, in the Irkutsk region, where he remained from 1951 to 1955. He was released and 'rehabilitated' in 1956. He returned to Kiev, where he lived the rest of his life.

Beregovsky's archive of wax cylinders, many from the pre-WWI Jewish Ethnographic Expeditions directed by Sh. Ansky, was thought by many to have been destroyed during World War II, but was found to be in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv/Kiev in the 1990s. Some of Beregovsky's most significant work and collections have been published in English by American ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, beginning in 1982 with Old Jewish Folk Music (University of Pennsylvania Press), followed by a more expansive volume in 2001 devoted to Beregovsky's study of the klezmer instrumental tradition, Jewish Instrumental Folk Music (Syracuse Univ Press), translated by Michael Alpert and Slobin, annotated by Alpert, and edited by Slobin, Robert Rothstein and Alpert. The latter has been reissued in a 2015 second edition, extensively revised by Kurt Bjorling with annotations by Bjorling and Alpert, including the restoration of an entire chapter of text missing in the 2001 edition. Beregovsky's collections of melodies have made their way into the repertoire of many current-day klezmer musicians, including recordings by Joel Rubin, Joshua Horowitz, Alicia Svigals, Pete Rushefsky, Brave Old World, and Veretski Pass. Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto and Russian-American scholar/avant-bard Psoy Korolenko worked with Beregovsky's archive of song texts, with Shternshis spearheading the production of the 2018 album Yiddish Glory (61st Grammy-nominated).
(Wikipedia)


Itzik Feffer (10 September 1900 – 12 August 1952), also Fefer (Yiddish איציק פֿעפֿער, Russian Ицик Фефер, Исаàк Соломòнович Фèфер) was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's purges.

Early life Itzik Feffer was born in Shpola, a town in the Zvenigorod uyezd (district) of Kiev Governorate, in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is now part of today's Cherkasy Oblast in Ukraine. His father was a teacher of Hebrew, as well as a poet, and served as his son's teacher. He was killed by the Nazis during the occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War.

Feffer started working at a young age as a printer. In 1917 he joined the Bund and volunteered for the Red Army and fought in Ukraine. Captured by Anton Denikin's counterintelligence, he ended up in a Kyiv prison, from where he was released by armed workers.

Soviet career
In 1919 he joined the Communist Party and was a member of it until his death. He edited literary and art magazines in Yiddish and took an active part in the life of writers' organizations in Ukraine and Moscow. He was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and a member of the board of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Feffer had also allegedly been one of the "most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets", who had helped to enforce strict ideological control over other Yiddish writers, and had a history of denouncing colleagues for their "nationalistic hysteria".

Literary work
Feffer was a prolific poet who wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish. He made his debut in 1919 in the Kyiv newspaper "Komunistishe fon" ("Communist Banner"). He became one of the leaders of the Kiev literary group "Vidervuks" ("Growth"). His published works in Yiddish take up almost eighty volumes.

He was the most politicized among Jewish poets, devoting most of his poems to the construction of socialism. In his early poems Feffer praised the revolution and the party. His poems were quickly published and he earned himself a senior position among Jewish Soviet writers. He wrote propaganda songs as well as lyrical folk songs, songs of nature, and songs of praise for the Jewish community in Birobidzhan. He was also engaged in the study of literature, criticism and linguistic innovation, and was also a prolific children's poet. His play The Sun Doesn't Set was staged by the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in 1947.

With the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the mass extermination of the Jews, Feffer completely changed the essence of his poetry. He wrote national Jewish songs and lamented the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. His epic poem Di Shotns fun Varshever Geto ("The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto") is a tribute to the 750 Jews who rebelled against the Nazi liquidation of the ghetto and gave their lives fighting tyranny during World War II.

His poems were widely translated into Russian and Ukrainian. He is considered one of the greatest Soviet poets in the Yiddish language and his poems were widely admired inside and outside Russia. Some of his poems were translated into Hebrew and published in the literary press and in anthologies by translators such as Avraham Shlunsky, Samson Meltzer, Moshe Basuk, Uriel Ofek and others. No volume of his own has been translated into Hebrew in its entirety.

Activities during World War II[edit] After the Second World War broke out, he was evacuated to Ufa. Feffer enlisted in the Red Army for the second time, serving as a military reporter with the rank of colonel. He was also vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and, with Solomon Mikhoels, toured the United States, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom in 1943 to win popular support and raise money for the Soviet Union, broadcasting the message that anti-Semitism no longer existed in the Soviet Union.

In April 1942, he became deputy editor of the newspaper Eynikayt («Эйникайт» or "Unity") published by the JAC. In February 1944, together with Mikhoels and Shakne Epshtein, he signed a letter to Joseph Stalin with a request to organize an autonomous Jewish region in the Crimea.

Feffer closely collaborated with the NKVD and held secret meetings with Lavrentiy Beria to report on the activities and attitudes of the JAC's members; during the war, he was supervised by the deputy head of the counterintelligence department of the NKVD, Leonid Raikhman. Mikhoels and other members of the JAC guessed (or knew) about Feffer's connections with the NKVD, but did not hide anything from him, believing that they did not face any jeopardy, since all the activities of the committee were for the benefit of the state. Arrest and death
In 1948, after the assassination of Mikhoels, Feffer, along with other JAC members, was arrested and accused of treason. Since Feffer had been an informer for the NKVD he reportedly hoped he would be treated differently and cooperated with the investigation, not only providing false information that would lead to the arrest and indictment of over a hundred people, but implicating himself.

Efforts were made abroad to save him. The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson had met Feffer on 8 July 1943, in New York during a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee event chaired by Albert Einstein, one of the largest pro-Soviet rallies ever held in the United States. After the rally, Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda Robeson befriended Feffer and Mikhoels.

Six years later, in June 1949, during the 150th-anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union to sing in concert. According to David Horowitz

In America, the question "What happened to Itzik Feffer?" entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumours that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually, he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for a half year, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin's police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. They're going to kill us, he said. When you return to America you must speak out and save us.

During his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall on 14 June - which was broadcast across the entire country - Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Vilna Partisan song "Zog Nit Keynmol" in both Russian and Yiddish. The song was met with a standing ovation from the hall.

Returning to the US, Robeson organized a letter in defense of Feffer, which was signed by writer Howard Fast and the then-chairman of the World Peace Council, French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, among others. According to observers, Robson's letter delayed Feffer's death by three years.

In 1952, however, Feffer, along with other defendants, was tried at a closed trial of JAC members, ostensibly due to their support of the American-backed proposal to establish an autonomous region for Jews in the Crimea. Feffer realized during this trial, when the defendants pleaded not guilty and spoke about the methods by which the investigation was conducted, that he would not be spared, and retracted his testimony:

Investigator Likhachev told me: "If we arrest you, then we will find the crime ... We will knock out everything we need from you." So it turned out. I am not a criminal, but being very intimidated, I gave fictitious testimony against myself and others.

Feffer also expressed pride in his Jewish identity.

The tribunal convicted him of giving "slanderous information about the situation of Jews in the USSR" to an American contact, as noted in a letter from Minister of State Security Semyon Ignatyev to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Georgy Malenkov dated February 7, 1953. Feffer was executed on 12 August 1952 at the Lubyanka Building.

Feffer was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, after Stalin's death; a cenotaph for him was installed at the Moscow Nikolo-Arkhangelsk cemetery. His poems have been reprinted, both in Yiddish and in Russian translation.
(Wikipedia)

CONDITION: Near Fine. (Boards have short fabric splits at top and bottom spine joints. The first text page has the stamp of the “W.C. Home Library”. The book is otherwise Fine.)