USSR – Historical Research

In my last post I mentioned a phonographic archive located in the Manuscript Institute of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine in Kiev — Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine

The library holds one of the largest collections of phonographic recordings of Jewish musical folklore in the world – including Jewish synagogue singing – on more than 1000 wax cylinders.

Before I worked in an archives I remembered hearing news-stories about things being discovered in different archival repositories and I couldn’t understand – why didn’t they know what was in their collection?

But now that I understand better how many unique items are housed in archives, I see that not everything can be added to a searchable list.

Not to mention the political restrictions that can make archival materials unavailable and even subject to destruction.

In January 1949 the Soviet government confiscated the entire archival collection of the Institute of Jewish Culture and arrested almost all of its employees including Moishe Beregovski who I wrote about last week and about whom I fictionalized a story called Pale Shadow*.

After the break-up of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the early 1990s, the Vernadsky collection of wax cylinder recordings became publicly available and researchers have been going through them ever since – a veritable renaissance.

The collection includes music collected by several generations of cultural researchers who gathered material from as early as 1908 out of Belarus where there was a large Jewish diaspora as well as a plethora of traditional religious centres.

A huge project to re-recording the collection was carried out between 1996 and 1999, from which a CD was produced, “Treasures of Jewish Culture in Ukraine”, in 1997.

*I entered Pale Shadow into a story contest that the magazine Prairie Fire ran so don’t want to jeopardize my entry by posting it here yet.

Vernadsky

Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine in Kiev

I’ve been working on a short story for a contest this week that’s been percolating in my mind for more than 10 years – that’s the way it goes sometimes – but I was happy to have the chance to finally write it.

The story would probably never seen the light of day if it hadn’t been for the break-up of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in 1991 when archival records that had been restricted and virtually inaccessible, were released

The idea for the story I wrote all started at a concert at the Chutzpah festival in Vancouver when the band leader, Alicia Sviegels told the story of an ethnomusicologist, Moishe Beregovski, who travelled through the Ukraine in the 1930s and collected Klezmer folk music in one of the world’s most comprehensive studies.

Beregovski was sent to prison in the 1940’s and his research was confiscated from the Ukrainian Academy of Science. He never knew what had happened to it by the time he died in the 1960s’s, but probably assumed they had been destroyed by the Communist government.

However, after the break-up of the Soviet Union – a whole slew of archival records were released, providing a glimpse into the USSR that academics and geneaologists have been gobbling up ever since.

It was at that time that Beregovski’s early recordings on wax cylinders and his extensive documentation of the music – more than 100 questions for each piece of music – were unearthed and are now available for researchers at at library in Kiev, the Vernadsky National Library of the Ukraine.

I’ll write some more about this in the weeks to come and also will post parts of my story, which is called Pale Shadow.

Category: USSR

Jewish folk music from 1908 on wax cylinders in a unique phono-archive in Kiev

Vernadsky national library of the Ukraine