Lider fun lebn un kamf | Songs of life and struggle af CKUT 90.3FM

Avi here. Using our blog to post a music show I hosted on March 28, 2022/25 Adar II, 5782 as a guest dj for “World Skip the Beat” which airs every Monday from 12-2pm on CKUT 90.3fm. I dedicate this broadcast to Joni Sadler, may her memory be for a blessing.

The show features klezmer & yiddish music with emphasis on revolution and resistance in a broad sense, though rooted in jewish socialist and anarchist traditions.

I didn’t set out to feature music from Ukraine region specifically, but along with the disasters that have beset our people there over the last centuries, including parts of my family, there are rich treasures of Jewish cultural production that has and continues to come from that region: from particularly melodies developed alongside our neighbours to innovative, skilled, and passionate klezmorim, poets and songwriters of the past and today. There’s reason to be weary of the current moment that names past generations of cultural workers, organizers, etc. as “Ukrainian Jewish artist/activist, so on” because that is so often not how people were identified (by ruling powers or dominant cultures) or how they self-identified. And, even though Putin is full of imperialist shit to claim Ukraine, we know that nationalism covers over the true breadth of life and communities and that goes for contemporary post-soviet nationalisms too.

Check out this Ukraine solidarity kit some rad yids put together.

Git. Listen in good health and if you can, please continue to donate to CKUT’s funding drive and support community radio in Montreal/Tio’tia:ke. Here’s the playlist and audio links:

LISTEN TO HOUR ONE HERE

Fran & Flora – Doina i
Orev Reena Katz – two blaze-clouds of breathw/ Emma Goldman speech “On Nationalism” read by Sandra Oh
Geoff Berner – What Kind of Bear Am I?
Briga – Territoire
Beila – Papir iz Dokh Vays (Papir is But White)
Socalled – Silent Treatment (Poirier remix)
Charming Hostess – Lady Gay
Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht – Mya Z’Fun Ir Arbet Gegangen (Khaveyrim In Kamf) / Mya Left Work (Comrades In Struggle)
The Shondes – I Watched the Temple Fall
David Shneer z”l & Jewlia Eisenberg z”l sing Khavele/Brider, Mir Hobn Geshlosn at the grave of Dovid Edelstadt
Dan Blacksberg – Di Andern (The Others)
Elaine Hoffman Watts & Susan Watts – Eateleh’s Suitele
Konsonans Retro – Freylekhs No.5

LISTEN TO HOUR 2 HERE

Lemon Bucket Orchestra – Freedom
Watcha Clan – On Est Pas Là Pour Rigoler
Dobranotch – Geamparale
Austin Klezmorim – Bayt Zhe Mir Oys A Funf und Tsvansiker (Change For Me this Twenty-Fiver)
The Kharkov Klezmer Band – Dzhankoye/Az men Fort Kayn Sevastopol (When You go to Sevastopol)
Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird – Freedom Is A Verb
Pushkin Klezmer Band – Trisker
Adrienne Cooper & Zalman Mlotek – Yid, du Partizaner
Brivele – Spanish Viglid
Yiddish Glory – Transnistrian Glory]***
Tsibele – Dem Nayntn Yanuar (Ninth of January)
Black Ox Orkestar – Tsvey Tayvbelakh (Two Doves)
Mamaliga – Pearl’s Ascent
Lorin Sklamberg, Sasha Lurje, Craig Judelman – Edelstadt poems excerpt from Yiddish Songs of Resilience concert

***Please check out this video if you’d like an english translation from the yiddish with Yiddish Glory performing Transnistrian Lullaby by Relly Bley (1913– 2000). In 1942, Bley was thirty two years old in the Mogilev-Podolsky ghetto when she sung this lullaby to her 2 year old. It describes, with shattering clarity, the horrific hunger, disease and destruction that she witnessed and experience in Ukraine during the Khurbn.