Zelig Bardichever


Zelig Leib Bardichever was a Yiddish poet and composer from Bessarabia.

Biography

Bardichever was born into a poor family in Bessarabia. His father, Ayzik-Duvid Haskelevich Bardichever, was descended from Mogilyov on the Dniester of Podolsk province. From there his family moved to the Bessarabian Jewish agricultural colony of Aleksandrena of Iasi county no later than 1854. His mother, Haya-Rivka Berkovna Bardichever, was a native of Beltz. As a melamed, he wandered around the towns and villages of Bessarabia and neighboring Moldova in search of a living. In the 1920s, he began to compose and perform songs to his own poems in the tradition of wandering Jewish folk singers and badhenes.
By the 1930s, he had gained extraordinary popularity, despite the lack of publications in Jewish publications. He also wrote melodies to poems of other poets, for example, to the popular elegy "Fun shheinishn Dorf" by Hertz Rivkin. At one time he was a member of the creative organization "Kultur-League", he wrote and staged amateur plays. It was only in the last years of his life that he began to publish in the "Chernovitser Bleter" and "Ufgang".
Bardichever led a vagrant lifestyle and died from acute tuberculosis in Iasi. After his death, the efforts of singer and composer Leib Levin and writer Hersh Segal in Czernowitz was a collection of songs Bardichevera notes "לידער מיט ניגונים", reprinted in Montevideo in 1948 and Rehovot in 1980.
The songs of Zeylik Bardichever were performed by various performers and continue to be performed by Leibu Levin, Chava Alberstein, Arkady Gendler, Mikhail Aleksandrovich and others.

Literature