Henokh Kon. Bat-Sheva [Opera]. Libretto by Moshe Broderzon

(MUSIC)

(Lodz

1924)

On title, pen-and-ink drawing: theatrical design and avant-garde Yiddish lettering. Printed sheet music (bars only) with musical notation and Yiddish lyrics in manuscript

UNPUBLISHED YIDDISH OPERA Moshe Broderzon (1890-1956), was a Yiddish poet, theater director and librettist in Lodz, Poland. He returned to his native Moscow in 1939, and in 1948, at the height of the Stalinist persecution of Yiddish writers, was exiled to a Siberian labor camp. In 1955 he was liberated and repatriated to Warsaw, where he collapsed and died a few weeks later. Broderzon was a consummate master of the Yiddish tongue. Henokh Kon (1890-1972), a composer in Lodz, immigrated to America in 1940. In 1922 Broderzon and Kon opened the first Yiddish marionette theater. Broderzon’s opera “David and Bathsheba” (music by Henokh Kon) was performed in Warsaw’s prestigious Kaminski’s Theater on May 14, 1924. See EJ, Vol. IV, cols. 1391-2; Z. Zylbercwaig ed., Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre I (New York, 1931), p. 215; Leksikon fur di naye yidishe literatur, 8:68