Article

Name: The city Jewish folklore (jn the material of the songs collected in Novosibirsk)

Authors: E. A. Liebert

In the section Современное состояние фольклора

Abstract: Folk songs of Russian Jews, an important part of among cultural tradition, cannot very often be heard in modern cities in Western Siberia, mainly due to rather late Jewish migration to this region. None the less the paper presents a collection of about 40 samples performed by two native-speakers of Yiddish – Michael B. Bulsteyn and Pauline A. Janushevskaya who came to Novosibirsk during the II World War from Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa respectively. Both claim to follow the original way of performance as they know it from their youth. Distinctly pronounced in the remote past, none of the songs are determined either by an especial situation by ritual reason nowadays and are performed at various occasions in a rather free manner even with a certain elements of stage-playing. Some of the songs exist in Yiddish only; in some others Yiddish and Russian couplets alternate with each other; besides their songs written entirely in Russian-Yiddish mixture known as ‘surshik’ as well as songs translated from Russian (some of them are even believed to be originally Jewish). In the paper a classification of old and new songs of the basis of subject and linguistic analysis is proposed. On the whole, an oblivious fusion of genre can be noted. Nevertheless the following verities can be distinguished: complains love-songs, wedding-songs, comic-songs, recruit-songs, lamentations and some others. As the language, one may separate: songs in pure Yiddish, songs with Russian-Yiddish alternation, songs written in a Russian-Yiddish mixture, translated songs.

Keywords: Jewish songs, Yiddish, genre classification

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