Reviving Jewish folk tunes that were nearly lost forever
Musicologist Zisl Slepovitch publishes music recorded in the 1930s in today’s Belarus and Ukraine
Sofia Magid in the sound archive at the Pushkin House, St. Petersburg, circa 1940s Courtesy of the Pushkin House
This article previously appeared in Yiddish.
I recently learned that between 1928 and 1938, a Soviet-Jewish musicologist, ethnographer and folklorist named Sofia Magid gave the Jewish world a precious gift.
Lugging heavy audio equipment, Magid traveled through parts of today’s Belarus and Ukraine (then territories of the Soviet Union) making wax cylinder recordings of Jewish folk music — instrumental tunes, Yiddish songs and Hebrew chants that had been a vibrant part of local Jewish life for generations.
Not long afterwards, this rich and varied musical culture was devastated by the Holocaust.
I found out about Magid’s work thanks to music scholar Zisl Slepovitch — a Minsk-born ethnomusicologist, instrumentalist (he plays clarinet, saxophone, flute, and piano), singer, composer, and Jewish music educator. Late in 2024, he published “Musical Treasures from Sofia Magid’s Jewish Collection,” a scholarly edition of sheet music that he transcribed from Magid’s field recordings.
Contemporary musicians — from individuals to klezmer bands — can now use his transcriptions to play and raise awareness of these tunes, which are mostly unknown even to professional performers.
Slepovitch first became familiar with Magid’s Jewish music collection in 2002. During visits to the Pushkin House Sound Archive in St. Petersburg with his mentor and colleague, Dr. Nina Stepanskaya z”l, he had the chance to work with Magid’s recordings.
“The Pushkin House has a vast collection of historical recordings of folk music and spoken words in many languages,” he explained. “Getting access to them wasn’t easy. But the director, Yuri Marchenko, was a graduate of the Special Music School of the Belarusian State Academy of Music in Minsk, as were Dr. Stepanskaya and I. So he understood what we were trying to do. Fortunately for us as researchers, the archive had transferred Magid’s wax cylinder recordings to open reel tapes in the 1970s, and digitized them in 1999.”
Since this initial encounter over 20 years ago, Slepovitch has been deciphering and transcribing the melodies. This digitized example shows how hard it is to hear the actual music through the hiss and distortion of the old recordings.
“I use some sound filters on my computer, but my main tool is my own ears,” he said. “It really all comes down to patience. I listen to each piece dozens of times until it starts to come to life. The process reminds me of a film, which builds a story out of individual frames. Bit by bit, a whole shape emerges.”
All this hard work has paid off. Slepovitch’s klezmer band, Litvakus, has been performing tunes from Magid’s recordings for years. As the group’s name suggests, they specialize in Litvak instrumental and vocal music from today’s Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Poland, Russia and Ukraine. That’s exactly where Magid made her recordings, so the songs she preserved became a centerpiece of the band’s repertoire.
In 2007, Slepovitch had the opportunity to play music from Magid’s collection in the film “Defiance,” based on Nechama Tec’s book about the Bielski partisans during World War II. He arranged and performed music with a band made up of Lithuanian (mostly Jewish) musicians for a remarkable scene that interweaves a Jewish wedding in the woods with a partisan attack on a group of Nazis.
Slepovitch published 40 instrumental tunes in his first volume of sheet music. He plans at least one more volume, which will include the remaining klezmer pieces, as well as Hasidic niggunim and chants used in synagogue liturgy. Jewish religious practice was more or less outlawed in the Soviet Union, so Magid’s recordings of these religious tunes are especially precious.
Magid was evacuated to Kazakhstan in 1943. After the Holocaust, she tried to find musicians and singers in the same parts of Belarus and Ukraine where she had worked previously, so she could make more recordings. But sadly (and unsurprisingly) she couldn’t find any Jews there.
“Everyone had been killed or displaced. There was no one left,” Slepovitch said.
Now performers can use the published sheet music to revive these tunes that were once such a vital part of local Jewish culture.
“Given the death-defying journey that this music has made,” observed Slepovitch, “it seems symbolic that we got to play it in a film called ‘Defiance’”.
Here is an interview with Zisl Slepovitch about his Sofia Magid project.
Purchase “Musical Treasures from Sofia Magid’s Jewish Collection” here.
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