Ruby, Ruth

Ruth Rubin was born on September 1, 1906 in the county town of Khotyn in the north of Bessarabia under the name Rivke Royzenblat. When she was about two years old, the family crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Montreal , and when she was 5 years old her father died.

In Montreal, Rivka Royzenblat attended The Aberdeen School Protestant School. Seeing the writer Sholom Aleichem in 1915 , she became seriously interested in Jewish literature and began to compose poems in Yiddish . The collection of poems "Leader" ( Poems ) was published under her maiden name Rivke Roisenblatt in New York in 1929 .

Since 1924, Rivke Royzenblat lived in New York , where she married in 1932 and changed her name to Ruth Rubin. Around the same time, she began to study Jewish folklore and, under the influence of one of the main theoreticians of Yiddishism, Khaim Zhitlovsky (1865-1943, Eng. ) And somewhat later, linguist Max Weinreich (1893-1969, Eng. ) Began to collect Jewish songs in Yiddish and related them ethnographic material. As a result, she defended her Ph.D. The ethnographic material collected by Ruth Rubin became the basis of the largest collection of Jewish song folklore ever collected.

Since 1945 , Rubin has released a series of phonograph records at 78 revolutions ( Oriole label ) , and since 1954, and long-playing ones (mainly on the Folksways Records label - founded in 1948 by the son of the Jewish writer Sholom Asha, Moses Ash, and now owned by the Smithsonian Institution ), own performance of the collected songs.

The result of many years of research is the repeatedly published monographs of A Treasury of Jewish Folksong ( Treasury of a Jewish Song , 1950) and Voice of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong ( Voice of the People: History of Jewish Folk Song , 1963). An extensive monograph “Yiddish Folksongs From the Ruth Rubin Archive” ( Jewish Yiddish Folk Songs from the Ruth Rubin Archives ) was published posthumously.

About the life of Ruth Rubin, the documentary A Life of a Song: A Portrait of Ruth Rubin was shot (Song Life: Portrait of Ruth Rubin , Director Cindy Marshall).

• לידער ( Leader - verses, under the name Rivke Royzenblat ). With a preface by Shmuel Niger. New York: YL Magid, 1929.
• A Treasury of Jewish Folksong ( Treasury of Jewish Folk Song ). New York, first edition - New York: Schocken Books, 1950 (Schocken Books - 1967, 1987).
• Voice of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong. First Edition New York and London : Thomas Yoseloff, 1963 (1967 - New York: Schocken Books, 1974 and 1979 - Philadelphia : The Jewish Publishing Society, 2000 - Chicago : University of Illinois Press with a foreword by Mark Slobin).
• Yiddish Folksongs From the Ruth Rubin Archive ( Jewish Yiddish Folk Songs from the Ruth Rubin Archives ). Edited by Hana Mlotek and Mark Slobin. 3rd edition. Detroit : Wayne State University Press , 2007.

• Jewish Children's Songs and Games. Oriole, 1954.
• Jewish Life. Folksways Records, 1955.
• The Old Country. Folksways Records, 1960.
• Jewish Folk Songs ( Jewish Folk Songs ). Oakland, 1965.
• Yiddish Love Songs ( Jewish love songs ). Riverside, 1967.
• Ruth Rubin Sings Yiddish Folksongs ( Ruth Rubin performs Jewish folk songs ). Prestige International , 1972.
• Yiddish Folk Songs Sung by Ruth Rubin ( Jewish folk songs performed by Ruth Rubin ). Smithsonian Folkways Records, 1978.
• Yiddish Songs of Holocaust ( Jewish Holocaust Songs , CD). Global Village, 1995.