#itzik fefer

[sovietjewry]

Soviet Yiddish writer Itsik Fefer, singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson, and the legendary Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels at the Soviet Consulate, 1943. (via Milken Archive)

The American concert singer and actor Paul Robeson met Feffer on July 8, 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 Itzhak 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 rumors 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 three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated for 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 June 14 - 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. Recordings of the concert survived but Robeson's spoken words are lost.

(via Wikipedia)

[sovietjewry]

Visit Original Link

"Ich bin a Jid" (I Am a Jew)

poem by Itsik Fefer music by Emil Gorovets arrangement by Zalmen Mlotek sung by Mark Aizikovitch

[sovietjewry]

The hundreds of Yiddish songs collected in Yidishe folkslider 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 Folkslider 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. This anthology, published in the Ukraine 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. (via Yiddish Book Center)

You can read the full text (if you read and understand Yiddish, which I don't) at the link.