(JTA) — In the midst of the Holocaust, a child sang a song about his mother’s death in the Bershad ghetto, a pocket of current-day Ukraine that was occupied by Romania and Nazi Germany. In the song, the child watches strangers come and pray for his mother, and other strangers carry her away to be buried, but none pay attention to him.

This story was discovered in a trove of 263 songs collected by Moisei Beregovsky, a Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist who recorded Yiddish music from Jews in Ukraine just after they were liberated from the Romanian occupation in 1944.

The music rescued from the Holocaust was nearly lost in Joseph Stalin’s crackdown on Yiddish culture. Beregovsky was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1950, accused of “Jewish nationalism” and sent to a gulag for six years. The music was confiscated, and Beregovsky died in 1961. Only in the 1990s did librarians discover his collection in the basement of Ukraine’s Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv.

Now, the song about a mother’s death is one of 15 in “Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II,” an album released in April by Six Degrees Records. It was compiled by Anna Shternshis, a professor of Yiddish and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, together with 17 musicians.

Shternshis took the album on tour in May to perform concerts across Asia, with stops in Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing. The music project is complemented by a new book she published in June, “Postwar Life, Hopes, and Fears,” the latest in a series about the history of Soviet Jews published by New York University Press.

At first, Shternshis believed the song now titled “Dear Mama” gave an account of daily life in the Bershad ghetto, where more than 8,000 people died of hunger and disease. But the more she patched together testimonies and memoirs, the more she recognized a series of untruths.

Funerals were scarcely allowed in occupied Bershad, and public prayers for the dead were virtually impossible, said Shternshis. She realized that this song was fiction — an imagination of a dignified death.

“One of the biggest traumas that people had in the Bershad ghetto was that no one would notice the death,” Shternshis told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So the song that did talk about the lack of empathy, but also talked about the funeral, was actually a fantasy that all these things would happen — a prayer, a grave.”

This is Shternshis’ second “Yiddish Glory” album aiming to resurrect music from witnesses of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Her first album in 2018, titled “Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II,” was nominated for a Grammy.

That project was the first she reaped from the........

© The Times of Israel