How Yiddish Came to North Korea: Lin Jaldati, Eberhard Rebling, and the Yiddish Tour Heard Round the World

 Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival
Applebaum-Driker Theater
AUTHOR'S TALK WITH DAVID SHNEER
In the 1960s and 1970s, deep in the heart of the Cold War, an East German husband and wife team toured the Communist world performing European anti-fascist music, including classics of Yiddish song, to Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and even North Korea. Lin Jaldati, a Dutch Jewish, Holocaust-surviving Yiddish cabaret singer, and her non-Jewish, classically trained pianist, husband Eberhard Rebling, had moved to East Germany from Holland in 1952, because of their Communist convictions and hope of a better financial life. Jaldati passed away in 1988 leaving a legacy of Yiddish music that reached the four corners of the globe. In doing this, she became the least known ambassador of Yiddish culture in the world. In this illustrated presentation, showing never-before-exhibited posters, we will learn about Jaldati and Rebling’s mission to spread anti-fascist ideology using Yiddish as their primary medium.

David Shneer is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the academic director of the Steiner Summer Program at the Yiddish Book Center. His most recent book is Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust and today’s talk comes from his newest book project on Lin Jaldati and the dissemination of Yiddish throughout the Communist world in the heart of the Cold War.

Listen to Lin Jaldati sing ‘In Kamf’:

Cost: Free for members; $5/nonmembers; $2/students
Date: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Time: 3:00 PM