More than one documentary film (like 2005’s Lomax the Songhunter) has referenced the work of essential American ethnomusicologist, historian, impresario and preservationist Alan Lomax, who in the 1940s started to seek and record authentic bluesmen and folk artists in rural backwaters. But Lomax had a Jewish counterpart on the other side of the Iron Curtain: Moyshe Beregovsky, whose remarkable story is revealed here by Russian filmmaker Elena Yakovich.
Born in 1892 outside Kiev , Beregovsky was part of the Ukrainian Jewish community. In the dizzying idealistic period after the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Czar, he worked for the Jewish Culture League, an organization on a mission to preserve the heritage of the temples and the shtetls (albeit in a secular, socialism-approved fashion), following centuries of marginalization and anti-Semitic oppression.
Beregovsky was ardent about audio; it was thanks to his skill recording to wax cylinders that the only preserved spoken words by iconic author Sholem Aleichem (replayed here) were captured during a 1914 Kiev visit. Beregovsky continued to record melodies of rural Ukraine against the calamitous rise of German fascism and the developing Holocaust. It is agonizingly clear that the voices and images of virtually all the people here would be silenced by mass murder.
As WWII escalated, Beregovsky and his team transcribed volumes of material and recorded cylinders of wedding songs, ballads, and laments from the threatened villages. But when Moyshe was seized and thrown into a prison-labor camp in the late 1940s, the dictator behind it was a Soviet “comrade”—Stalin, who suspected Jews of disloyalty with the rise of Israel. Ironically, we’re told, the Nazis were more helpful in carefully preserving the fragile wax-cylinder cache of the Culture League. The Third Reich had intended their own meticulous historical study of the Jews they intended to exterminate utterly.
Occasionally, Yakovich’s narrative yields to horrific and heartbreaking Holocaust anecdotes from the Ukrainian (and Romanian) perspectives – some related onscreen by playwright Aleksander Gelman, a prominent survivor. But Moyshe Beregovsky’s presence is never far from the story’s wanderings. Bergovsky’s music found its way into the Yiddish theater of a bygone New York City, and 21st-century singers, academics, and klezmer bands have produced works based on the archives.
The film harmonizes beautifully with Judaica library shelves, as well as music-oriented film collections with strong ethnographic themes. The timeliness of a film passionate about past tragedies in Ukraine, done by émigré Russian women filmmakers, should also help the title stand out. It is highly recommended, particularly for academic libraries at music conservatories.