Collecting Jewish Cultural Treasures in a Post-WWII New York Lobby

During the summer of 1948, only three years after the end of World War II, Ben Stonehill, a man devoted to Jewish culture, recorded recently-arrived Jewish survivors of the war who were temporarily housed in a hotel in upper Manhattan. The singers included men, women, and children. Stonehill collected over a thousand songs of many kinds: joyful as well as sad, mainly in Yiddish but also in Hebrew, Polish, and Russian. These songs are musical testimonies to the resilience of the survivors, a direct link to pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and a cultural treasure. The music and chatting that went on in between the songs tell not only of the singers' terrible traumas but also of their hopes, and reflect the sheer pleasure of reconnecting with others through song. In this talk, Isaacs describes the role of the Library of Congress in preserving this unique musical treasure. She plays some of these almost forgotten recordings and talks about the collector, the singers, and their times.

Speaker Biography: Miriam Isaacs is retired affiliate visiting associate professor of Yiddish Language and Culture, University of Maryland College Park. She received her Ph.D., M.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University. She is a native speaker of Yiddish and has language skills in English, French, German, Modern Hebrew and Russian. While in residence in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Isaacs worked on her project entitled, "Oral Culture in Transition: The Legacy of the Benjamin Stonehill Collection."