Musician famed for collaboration with Springsteen to relase Yiddish album

The Yiddish title of the album comes from Dos lid fun a meydl (The Song of a Girl) by Anna Margolin, a 20th-century poet who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania in 1906.

The new project sets classic Yiddish poetry and literary archives to contemporary music, with singles initially released through the indie label Adhyaropa Records. The full album is expected next spring.

Although Goldner did not grow up speaking Yiddish, Jewish identity was a key part of his upbringing in suburban Philadelphia.

He told The Forward, “I had a bar mitzvah. I went to Jewish summer camp. But in retrospect, my memory of my Jewish upbringing was a little like: ‘Here’s Judaism, don't get too close to it’.”

His musical engagement with Yiddish poetry opens up a new gateway to his heritage, using music to reconnect to a literary tradition he had not previously explored.

The album also brings together a few different languages and diasporic experiences. Goldner's musical setting of The Song of a Girl features Temma Schaechter and Ben Abraham on vocals, with the lyrics in Yiddish and English as well as Indonesian.

For Goldner the project is about bringing a very old literary tradition to a new generation of readers, and at the same time about what it is to be part of a culture and a language that weren't really part of his own childhood experience.

“I think that there is a longing for connection that is universal and that manifests itself through the concepts and stories of who we are,” he said.

“That longing often pushes people to ask themselves probing questions of identity like ‘Who are my people?’ or ‘where is my home?’

“I don’t think that there are ever simple answers.”