The Unternationale

The Unternationale is Detroit-born Berlin songwriter Daniel Kahn, Moscow song bard Psoy Korolenko and guest Emmy-award winner Michael Alpert. 

As Eastern European borders, ideologies and cultures collided and fluctuated, the workers of the world united, were drafted as cannon fodder by nationalists they despised and turned on by neighbors in the World War conflagrations.

Those who survived tried to forget, but The Unternationale remembered.  Their songs, "Arum Dem Fayer" (Around the Fire), recall nearly lost languages, folkways and their tragic demise.  Riffing on the international worker's anthem, they perform Russian folk tunes, Hasidic melodies repurposed as Soviet anthems and political workers' marches in Yiddish. The poetry is sublime, the propaganda quaint yet reminding us the problems of that era remain.

Daniel Kahn leads the Brechtian cabaret band The Painted Bird, addressing political issues, Jewish social movements and tells stories of outrageous incidents and uncommon people.

Russian poet-singer Psoy Korolenko (Pavel Lion) is a living metaphor of transcultural identity. He hails from Moscow and experiments with song traditions in Russian, Yiddish and French. 

Michael Alpert. a multi-lingual singer, songwriter and pioneering figure in the Klezmer revival is a founding member of seminal act Brave Old World. He won an Emmy Award as musical director of the PBS special In the Fiddler's House with Itzhak Perlman. Alpert was Artistic Director of Montreal’s KlezKanada Institute for the Yiddish/Jewish Cultural Arts, and is currently Director of Jewish Heritage and Arts Programming for the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and Senior Research Fellow at NYC’s Center for Traditional Music and Dance. 

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