Moisei Beregovskii

Moisei Iakovlevich almost never limited himself to work at only one institution. In 1937 he was assigned the position of Head of the Cabinet for Music Ethnography at the Kiev Conservatory and taught a course in musical folklore at the Department of History and Theory. Aside from that, he participated in organizing the Jewish section at the Composers Union of Ukraine and later served as its head.

In the pre-War years, anexation of the Eastern territories of divided Poland to Ukraine and Belarus extended the geographic possibilities for folklorist expeditions, however the beginning of the War disrupted any further work. Eda Beregovskaia said, „My father was recruited to serve in army but in a year he was demobilized. Together with the Academy of Sciences he was evacuted to Ufa. Despite the cold, hunger and absence of the necessary materials he continued his work and believed in its importance even in those times of hardship. There he studied Bashkirian folklore and the folk songs of Ukrainians who had come to Bashkiria during the reign of Catherine II.“ Even during the War, Beregovskii was thinking about his work and the dissertation he had written. In 1942 he wrote, „I contacted the Leningrad Conservatory regarding my Ph.D. thesis defense. I want to introduce the third volume, Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, of the anthology, Jewish Musical Folklore. M.O. Schteinberg responded to me in a very kind manner, but now I am not sure that I can finish this enterprise. The copies of this manuscript were left at the Kiev Conservatory. I actually have here only the introduction and the footnotes. I do not have the sheet music.“ Ideological pressure during the war decreased and this is the probable reason why Beregovskii managed to complete his work. He defended his thesis in Moscow in January, 1944.

Upon his return to Kiev, Moisei Iakovlevich headed the folklore section of the Cabinet of Jewish Culture again and became actively engaged in what he enjoyed most. He made expeditions all over Ukraine (specifically in the Chernovtsy and Vinnitsa Oblasts) and Lithuania. The intuition of a polished scholar, or maybe the situation in post-war shtetls, helped Beregovskii to develop a new direction in his work. On the basis of the collected materials, M. Beregovskii, together with another linguist, R. Lerer, prepared an anthology, Jewish Folklore during the Years of the Great Patriotic War. The anthology included not only war songs but also songs from the Jewish ghettos and even a couple 22