A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here.
On June 13, at New York’s Baruch College Perfoming Arts Center, musician, composer, arranger and bandleader Dmitri “Zisl” Slepovitch premiered a program titled “Traveling the Yiddishland,” the result of some 10 years researching Yiddish songs in Belarus and other parts of the Former Soviet Union with the late Jewish music scholar Nina (Nechama) Stepanskaya.
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye.
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: