Aug 26, 2026 · 58 min · 13 segments
Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher in conversation with Kim Rubenstein on their new book Out of the depths. The first collection of Holocaust songs.Available for the first time in English translation, this…
Joseph ToltzGuest
Anna BoucherGuest
Kim RubensteinHost
Shall we talk about them and make tribute to them? And then obviously Olga, well, I say Olga is of course core to this book.
So perhaps if you can share with the audience Joseph about each of them and their memories.
So I'll start by telling you how I came to this book and I came to this book through the family of Olga R who I had known since 2002.
And so they came to me when Olga had passed away, and they were cleaning out the estate, and this tiny little book had fallen out of a bookshelf.
It was sort of pressed in between sheets of other manuscript, thus preserving the book, just naturally conserving it from air, which was really important because it's post-war paper, it was printed on.
And when I first handled it, I could feel it crumbling in my fingers and I was terrified.
And I said, I'll send a copy of the front page to my friend at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
I had a fellowship there in 2010 and 2011, and the resident musicologist there had a look at it and he said, oh, what's that? Where did you get that? It's the first ever collection of Holocaust songs that was made in Bucharest in June 1935.
And some were distributed to institutions where they were preserved, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which was – there was the New York branch that it went to.
There's one copy in the library in Jerusalem, the Jewish National Library, and there's a copy in the Holocaust Museum in DC.
Shall we talk about them and make tribute to them? And then obviously Olga, well, I say Olga is of course core to this book.
So perhaps if you can share with the audience Joseph about each of them and their memories.
So I'll start by telling you how I came to this book and I came to this book through the family of Olga R who I had known since 2002.
And so they came to me when Olga had passed away, and they were cleaning out the estate, and this tiny little book had fallen out of a bookshelf.
It was sort of pressed in between sheets of other manuscript, thus preserving the book, just naturally conserving it from air, which was really important because it's post-war paper, it was printed on.
And when I first handled it, I could feel it crumbling in my fingers and I was terrified.
And I said, I'll send a copy of the front page to my friend at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
I had a fellowship there in 2010 and 2011, and the resident musicologist there had a look at it and he said, oh, what's that? Where did you get that? It's the first ever collection of Holocaust songs that was made in Bucharest in June 1935.
And some were distributed to institutions where they were preserved, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which was – there was the New York branch that it went to.
There's one copy in the library in Jerusalem, the Jewish National Library, and there's a copy in the Holocaust Museum in DC.
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