The Forward: How Evgeny Kissin Became a One-Man Yiddish Pride Movement

Writing in The Forward, Allan M. Jalon describes how Evgeny Kissin’s “commitment to sharing Yiddish culture” deepened with Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2014 concert at the Kennedy Center:

Word that he’s a one-man Yiddish Pride Movement has spread more recently, especially since he appeared at the Kennedy Center in 2014 for a program of music by Jewish composers and poems by the classic Yiddish poets Chaim Nachman Bialik and I. L. Peretz. He declaimed them by memory, his speaking voice an instrument both rich and, at times, hauntingly tender…

Kissin has performed Yiddish poetry before, and his website has videos of him reading at the Verbier Festival, in Switzerland, in 2006. But the sold-out Kennedy Center event took it to a new level.

Read the rest to learn about the fascinating origins of Kissin’s love of Yiddish poetry and how it found expression in his collaboration with Pro Musica Hebraica.