Shtetl Berlin Festival | New Yiddish Poetry and Music

From the Middle Ages to the avant-garde of the interwar period, Berlin has been a center of Yiddish art, music, and culture at pivotal moments throughout the centuries—and today, a new generation of writers and musicians is carrying on this tradition.

This concert features two acts that offer a vibrant glimpse into the city’s contemporary Yiddish creativity:

original compositions and poems by Patrick Farrell and Yael Merlini, as well as Di Shkatulkelekh, who will perform new musical settings of poems by Katerina Kuznetsova. Copies of Kuznetsova’s newly published book “Glozperl” will be available for purchase at the concert and signed by the author.

Patrick Farrell & Yael Merlini

In a world premiere commissioned especially for this year’s Shtetl Berlin Festival, accordionist Patrick Farrell and Yiddish poet Yael Merlini will present a joint concert featuring solo accordion music and spoken word, performing works of their own creation and imagination.

Patrick Farrell is an accordionist, composer, and bandleader from the U.S. who lives in Berlin. His projects include newly composed Yiddish song duets with singer Sveta Kundish (album “Nem mayn vort,” 2022) and the acclaimed klezmer ensemble Yiddish Art Trio. He has contributed to dozens of recordings across various genres, including with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and studied accordion in Macedonia, Serbia, Germany, and Romania.

Yael Merlini is a poet, scholar, and teacher whose work explores exile, identity, and language. Originally a researcher in Jerusalem, she now lives in Berlin and writes about diaspora experiences, femininity, and eco-poetry. Her most recent publications include “Di casa in casa” (2023), “La lingua divisa” (2024), and “Manifesto for a Non-Aesthetic of Love” (2024), as well as poems in Yiddish and Italian in literary and political journals.

Di Shkatulkelekh

Poetry is something between prose and song, between prayer and nursery rhyme—the creation of useless beauty as a protest against everyday life. This is how Marina Frenk perceived the poems of Katerina Kuznetsova, a Yiddish poet, teacher, and cultural activist in Berlin, whose work lends new voice and vitality to the contemporary Yiddish literary scene.

Kuznetsova’s Yiddish poems inspired Frenk to compose melodies, which she shared with Lisa Hoppe and Paul Brody—both internationally renowned musicians and established figures in Berlin’s jazz and avant-garde scene. Hoppe, equally inspired, set additional poems to music, and with the addition of clarinetist Christian Dawid to the ensemble, a song cycle emerged that oscillates between ballad and wit, jazz and spoken word, with or without echoes of klezmer, improvised performance, and classical singing. Together, Di Shkatulkelekh bring a rare combination of musical virtuosity and literary depth to this material, with each performer filtering Kuznetsova’s words through their own distinctive artistic voice.

Doors open at 7 p.m.

This is sound salon @gruenersalon.berlin!

sound salon is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.