In May 2026, a song composed by a child in a Ukrainian ghetto was performed for the first time — in Shanghai. It had been in the dark for eighty years. It had not been waiting.
In May 2026, the ethnomusicologist Anna Shternshis and the musician Psoy Korolenko took their second album, Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II, on tour across Asia — Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing. Released in April 2026, it draws from an archive of 263 songs collected by Moisei Beregovsky, a Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist who recorded Yiddish music from Jews in Ukraine just after their liberation from Romanian occupation in 1944. Beregovsky was arrested in 1950 on charges of Jewish nationalism, sent to the Gulag, and released in 1956. His archive was confiscated. He died in 1961. The collection was discovered in the basement of the National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv in the 1990s. Among the songs performed in Shanghai was one composed by a child in the ghetto of Bershad about the death of his mother.
In the weeks after the liberation of the Ukrainian ghettos, in the winter of 1944, a man went from town to town with a notebook.
His name was Moisei Beregovsky. He was an ethnomusicologist, which is a word for someone who believes that what people sing is as real as what they build or write or leave behind in stone. He had spent his life collecting Yiddish songs — thousands of them, from markets and courtyards and kitchen tables across Soviet Ukraine. But what he was looking for now was different. He was looking for what had been composed inside — inside the occupation, inside the hunger, inside the particular darkness of Bershad and Tulchyn and the other places where Jews had survived by a margin too thin to measure. He found 263 songs. He wrote them down. One of them had been sung by a child about the death of his mother.
He knew what he had. You can tell, from the care of the transcriptions, that he knew exactly what he had.
In 1950, Stalin had him arrested. The charge was Jewish nationalism, which was the name the regime gave to the act of taking Jewish life seriously. His notebooks were confiscated. He was sent to the Gulag. He came back six years later, but not whole, and he died in 1961 without knowing what had become of what he had gathered. The boxes were placed in a basement of the National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv. They stayed there for forty years, in the dark, unmarked.
There is a teaching that music is the quill of the soul. A quill writes on parchment. But in this teaching, the parchment is the soul itself — and what is written there is written in a different material than ink, which means it survives differently than ink survives. Beregovsky's notebooks could be boxed and buried. What the child of Bershad had sung into the soul of whoever heard him had been written somewhere that boxes cannot reach.
Beregovsky was not a mystic. He was a man with a notebook and an ear trained to hear what others walked past. But he was doing, without the language for it, what the teaching describes: he was finding the inscriptions. The people he recorded in 1944 had survived by singing — not as consolation, not as resistance in the political sense, but because singing is what the soul does when it has no other instrument. A child who watched his mother die and then made a song about it was not composing. He was inscribing. He was writing in the only material he had that no one could take.
Stalin took the notebooks. He did not understand, or did not believe, that the notebook was not the thing. The inscription was elsewhere.
The boxes were found in the 1990s by librarians who did not know what they were opening. Anna Shternshis, an ethnomusicologist, spent years working through what was inside. In 2026, she and the musician Psoy Korolenko released Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II and took it on tour — to Seoul, to Shanghai, to Hong Kong, to Beijing.
In Shanghai, in May 2026, the child's song about his mother was performed for the first time.
Not the first time since the war. The first time anywhere, ever, outside the ghetto of Bershad where a child had sung it sometime between 1941 and 1944, and Beregovsky had written it down.
The song had been in the dark for eighty years. It had not been waiting.
The Rebbe Rayatz burned his own manuscripts to stay alive. His aide read a few pages before feeding them to the flame, and the Rebbe was angry: You don't care about my life?
Stalin released Beregovsky's songs without knowing it. The child of Bershad had already done what could be done — he had sung, and in singing had placed something beyond the reach of what followed. Shanghai, in May 2026, was not a recovery. It was a new surface for something that had never stopped moving. The audience that heard the song heard it for the first time. The song itself had been elsewhere, doing what songs do when no one is listening — rising, returning, present in the only way that things written in that material can be present.
The child did not send something forward. He released something upward.