Hearing Lviv Out of War, 1939: Sonic Evidence and Its Sung Limitations

This talk draws attention to a three-and-a-half-minute sound recording made December 1939 in Prenzlau, Germany. In detention at the POW barracks for Polish officers, Kazimierz Dziubek shared a song with two linguists who were collecting his voice in order to preserve the urban Polish dialect distinctive to the multiethnic city, Lviv (today’s Ukraine, part of the Polish state before  World War II). Two verses that were classified as speech were in fact a hit song from Polish cinema, “Only in Lviv” (Tylko we Lwowie, 1939) by the prolific composer Henryk Wars and his frequent lyricist-collaborator Emanuel Szlechter. Even though this recording has hardly been heard, it cues my attention to the lives of those invested in its circulation: the song’s Polish Jewish authors, the Polish Catholic dance instructor who sang it, and Jaroslav B. Rudnyckyj, the Ukrainian linguist who pulled it from the archive, listened, and transcribed it in 1942. My analysis insists on a connection between wartime recording and the afterlives of Nazi genocide and German colonial expansion as I explore the recording’s connection to Hollywood and Canada’s state policy of multiculturalism (1971– ). I animate the spatiality—material and metaphorical—of this recording to show this sound’s evidentiary power, despite the transmission failure that undergirds its past. For example, the recording’s usefulness for Jaroslav B. Rudnyckyj’s Ukrainian language advocacy in 1942 Berlin set the tone for his contributions to Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism in the 1960s. By foregrounding Dziubek’s singing at the crossroads of minority language advocacy, the displacement of Polish-Jewish cabaret, and the survival of Lviv during the time of Nazi genocide and German colonial expansion I suggest that practices of translation, transmediality, and recognition are the grease of sonic circulation and its coproduction of difference and sameness.