A Call to Collect Jewish Folk Songs

There is no need to provide evidence concerning the great value of folk songs when one wishes to study the history of a people—any people—and all it has undergone. Alongside the history books of each people, based on official and unofficial documents, there is another history book whose author is the people itself, as it records in its songs the events of days past. The need to use these folk creations so that we might learn our past has already been discussed many times in Jewish scholarly writing (E. Orshansky, Lerner, and others). Unfortunately, however, no one has thus far set about the task of properly collecting this material, which at first seems insignificant but which actually has considerable value—since it can illuminate several important periods in the life of Russian Jewry—especially as time continues to surge forward. Old songs whose content tells the events and history of our people (such as wedding songs, lullabies, and heder songs; songs describing the condition of women and family life; songs from the period of the first Jewish agricultural colonies in Russia, the period when Jewish youths were conscripted to the army, the period of the first state schools, and so forth)—such songs will slowly but surely give way to new songs composed under the influence of the changing conditions of life in our own times.

By the time a decade has passed, we will have lost living material testifying to and confirming how the people themselves regarded their lived experiences. Our brethren who dwell in Western Europe, who have surpassed us in many respects, have also surpassed us in this matter. In the German-language publications Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volkskunde [Proceedings of the Society of Jewish Folklore] and Am Ur-Quell [At the Original Source], they have devoted themselves to collecting Jewish songs, and the material they have published recently also includes several songs from the Jewish inhabitants of Russia and Poland.

And should we, the Jews of Russia, who are close to the original source, now sit with our arms folded until our brethren who dwell abroad produce a book [ . . . ] offering us our folk songs ready and prepared, just as they have given us other things that we could have done ourselves, if we only had sufficient desire and passion for our history and our literature?

We, the undersigned, are willing to publish a collection of Zhargon [i.e., Yiddish] folk songs and we beg to turn to those who are close to the masses with a request: to write down the songs from the mouths of the folk that are sung in their places, and to send them to one of the two addresses below. We will be delighted and pleased if our request reaches the hearts of our intelligentsia who live in smaller towns remote from big cities, in the small towns within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where the masses of our people still live according to the old ways and still sing the old songs. The collection we intend to publish will acknowledge all those who take part in transcribing the Jewish folk songs and sending them to us.

Sh. Ginsburg [and] P. Marek, St. Petersburg.

And these are the addresses:

Sh. Ginsburg. St. Petersburg, 12 English Ave.

P. Marek, Moscow, house adjacent to Nikolskaya city school or Sheremetyeva, apt. 57