Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovsky , was a Soviet-era Jewishfolklorist and ethnomusicologist from Ukraine, who published mainly in Russian and Yiddish. He has been called the "foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry". His research and life's work included the collection, transcription and analysis of the melodies, texts and culture of Yiddish folk song, wordless melodies, East European Jewish instrumental music for both dancing and listening, Purim plays, and exploration of the relationship between East European Jewish and Ukrainian traditional music.
Life
Beregovsky was born into the family of a Jewish parochial primary school teacher in the village of Termakhovka, then in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire. As a child he participated as a boy-chorister in a local synagogue. He studied in the conservatories of Kiev and Petrograd. From roughly 1929 to 1947, Beregovsky made ethnographic trips collecting secular Jewish music in various parts of Soviet Ukraine. His works make up the largest and most carefully notated collection of its kind in pre-WWII and early postwar Europe. Mark Slobin, who arranged and republished much of Beregovsky's collection in the United States, has said in an interview that Beregovsky "was the only person to do this for Yiddish music, and he was an excellent ethnomusicologist." He made roughly 2,000 field recordings on 700 phonograph cylinders. In 1944, Beregovsky received his Ph.D. from the Moscow Conservatory, writing his dissertation on the topic of Jewish instrumental folk music. He worked to meticulously expand the work of previous Eastern European Jewish musicologists and ethnographers such as A.Z. Idelsohn, Yoel Engel, S. An-Sky, and Y.L. Cahan. Beregovsky was the head of the Cabinet for Jewish Musical Folklore in the ethnographic section of the in Kiev. He continued his research during the period of Stalinist repression of the 1930s-50s, under what must have been great ideological pressure, as state-funded musical research in the Soviet Union necessarily followed Marxist-Leninist lines. The institute itself was later closed down and many of its members exiled and disgraced. In 1949, Beregovsky's department was closed and he was arrested in 1950 at the height of Joseph Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign and sent to Tayshet, in the Irkutsk region, where he remained from 1951 to 1955. He was released and 'rehabilitated' in 1956. He returned to Kiev, where he lived the rest of his life. Beregovsky's archive of wax cylinders, many from the pre-WWI Jewish Ethnographic Expeditions directed by Sh. Ansky, was thought by many to have been destroyed during World War II, but was found to be in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv/Kiev in the 1990s. Some of Beregovsky's most significant work and collections have been published in English by American ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, beginning in 1982 with Old Jewish Folk Music, followed by a more expansive volume in 2001 devoted to Beregovsky's study of the klezmer instrumental tradition, Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, translated by Michael Alpert and Slobin, annotated by Alpert, and edited by Slobin, Robert Rothstein and Alpert. The latter has been reissued in a 2015 second edition, extensively revised by Kurt Bjorling with annotations by Bjorling and Alpert, including the restoration of an entire chapter of text missing in the 2001 edition. Beregovsky's collections of melodies have made their way into the repertoire of many current-day klezmer musicians, including recordings by Joel Rubin, Joshua Horowitz, Alicia Svigals, Pete Rushefsky, Brave Old World, and Veretski Pass. Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto and Russian-American scholar/avant-bard Psoy Korolenko worked with Beregovsky's archive of song texts, with Shternshis spearheading the production of the 2018 album Yiddish Glory.
