All photos by Avia Moore.
Documenting a Yiddish Treasure
This project was created to honour and document a remarkable life, and an outstanding artistic personality. Arkady Gendler z''l (1921-2017) was one of the greatest living treasures of Yiddish song and language, cherished throughout the world for his phenomenal repertoire and memory, his remarkable voice as well as his fine sense of humour, his generous nature, and his gentle manner.
Remembering and performing an astonishing wealth of Yiddish song repertoire, Arkady began to write himself late in life, creating a number of new songs of exceptional musical and poetic quality. Most of these precious original songs had not yet been recorded, some of them had never been performed.
The project, conducted by Christian Dawid, gathered together an international group of artists and scholars to document these songs in musical notation, Yiddish typesetting, Latin and Cyrillic transcriptions of the original Yiddish, and English and Russian translations.
Moving towards recording, the creation of an appropriate musical environment seemed of central importance - the aesthetics of the cultural world that Arkady’s compositions and poetry represent are hardly practiced anymore. Christian Dawid researched the stylistic background, wrote new musical arrangements for all of the songs and eventually recorded with Arkady and a small chamber ensemble in October 2011 in Vienna, Austria.
In Spring 2012, Avia and Christian travelled to Ukraine to visit Arkady in his home, where he shared stories, jokes, songs, and old photographs, and allowed Avia to take the portraits of him that are featured in the project.
The recordings, including comprehensive documentation, photographs, biographical and musicological essays, were published in September 2012 by Golden Horn Records, California. Copies of ARKADY GENDLER - YIDISHE LIDER may be purchased through Golden Horn Records or through Christian Dawid.
