A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes

A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes

The first Yiddish Glory album, the Grammy-nominated Lost Songs of WWII, was, give or take, 70 years in the making. The idea of preserving Soviet-Jewish culture by way of an anthology of Yiddish folk originally belonged to Moyshe Beregovsky, a Ukrainian-Jewish ethnomusicologist in the Cabinet for Jewish Culture. But Beregovsky was arrested by Stalin’s government on suspicion of so-called Jewish nationalism in 1947. The sizable archive that he and…