Night Songs from a Neighboring Village. Presentation by Michael Alpert in Lviv

The Second World War, the Holocaust, and post-war assimilations caused a dramatic rupture in the social and everyday practices of multinational communities that used to live, celebrate and work together. One of the community glues was Klezmer — Jewish musical tradition that included traditional dances and virtuosic instrumental improvisations. Yiddish and Klezmer music were taken to the United States with those traveling there searching for work at the end of the 19th century and a safe place to live in the mid-20th century. In the 1970s, Yiddish and klezmer culture was revitalized within the circles of jazz, bluegrass and old-timey musicians, who were drawn to the heritage and started looking for its roots and scattered fragments in old villages and shtetls.

We invite you to the presentation by researcher and musician Michael Alpert, during which he will share his reflections on a fifty-year journey through landscapes, soundscapes, and mindscapes of Jewish Eastern Europe. In particular, he will focus on the explorations of the expressive culture — musical, choreographic, linguistic, and social, both Jewish and non-Jewish, — that are native to Ukraine and have been carried throughout the world as well. Carried especially to North America, which is primarily where his life and work have intersected with these traditions. 

Focusing on field research in Soviet and independent Ukraine, the lecture will be devoted to several songs in Yiddish and Ukrainian that the lecturer learned during his ethnographic fieldwork and which have become an integral part of his life and work as an international performer and teacher of Eastern European Jewish cultural arts.

• June 2, 2026, 18:30
• Conference Room of the Center for Urban History, Bohomoltsia St.,6, Lviv