This 12-year-old is enchanting people with her Yiddish singing. Her klezmer musician dad explains why.
Many of Dinah Slepovitch’s performances, accompanied by her father Zisl Slepovitch, can be found on YouTube
Dmitri Slepovitch
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The Schmooze ‘Agentn’ of Yesterday and Today
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. To perform Yiddish theater today, you need a lot of money, or a lot of ambition. The New Yiddish Rep theater company, led by David Mandelbaum, has the latter. Mandelbaum is an actor and director who also plays most of the other roles a theater company…
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The Schmooze Traveling the Length and Breadth of ‘Yiddishland’
Photo by Spencer Ritenour In his 2006 study “Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture,” Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Shandler noted the strange phenomenon in which musicians have become some of the most well-known authorities on Yiddish culture. “Marginal figures in East European Jewish society before World War II, klezmorim are now prominent cultural spokespeople,…
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The Schmooze Being a Jewish Musician in Belarus
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye. There is a story in my family about my paternal great-grandfather Yosl (Yeysef), who served as a clarinetist in the Russian Army military band. During World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was held in Germany until a year after the war…
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The Schmooze Singing Yiddish Songs in Belarus
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Dmitri Slepovitch writes about “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”), a song he recorded in his native Belarus: I recorded “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”) in Mogilev, Belarus, from Sterna Gorodetskaya, born in 1946 into the only Jewish family that got reunited…
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