The Stranniki

Join UC Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies, and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for The Stranniki, a Russian and Yiddish musical performance with Polina Shepherd and Psoy Korolendo.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 6:00-7:30 pm

In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at magnes@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 643-2526 with as much advance notice as possible.

The Magnes’s programs and exhibitions are supported by our community. Click here to make a suggested donation of $25 per adult.

The Stranniki is a collaborative project of Polina Shepherd and Psoy Korolenko, two multilingual, cross-genre artists and authors, prominent in the Yiddish music scene for over two decades. Soon after their initial mini-tour and presentation at the conference “Mediating a New Cold War in the Digital Age” at Dartmouth College (2016), the duo embarked on a cross-US tour, followed by more international concerts, including JetLAG Festival, featuring the program “Schlepping the Steppes and the Shtetl.” Central to their repertoire is the concept of a “strannik” (wanderer; literally “wandering stranger,” “strange-nik”), roughly translatable into Yiddish as “navenadnik” (vagabond), and the associated archetype of “doroga” (Russian for road, path). The Stranniki draw upon, feature, and fuse elements of poetry and songs from Yiddish and Russian literature, folklore, and popular culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, organically weaving in their own original material. Their first mutual album unveils a distinctive continuity of texts, melodies, paths, and destinies, inspiring and informing in the peculiar 2020s as much as it ever has—if not more so.

Polina Shepherd is a Siberian-born, UK-based composer, singer, choir leader and educator, specializing in Yiddish and Russian music. Her unique style blends East European Jewish, Slavic and Turkic influences. She has collaborated with her husband, klezmer clarinetist and band leader Merlin Shepherd, Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and Psoy Korolenko, among others. She has served as program director for many festivals, including the large pandemic-time online project Step Forverts, featuring over 50 artists from around the world. She also co-produced Undzer Yiddishkayt, a collection of new songs by Eurasian klezmer artists. Polina is the artistic director of the Caravan Orchestra, a German-Israeli/Palestinian youth collaboration. Her work spans choral direction, improvisation and theatre, advancing Jewish music worldwide.

Psoy Korolenko (Pavel Lion) is a multilingual singer-songwriter, translator, journalist and scholar, currently a Visiting Lecturer at Dartmouth College. He is a former scholar/artist-in-residence at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Dickinson College. He has released numerous albums, both solo and in collaboration, as well as several books of essays, lyrics and translations. His style blends Soviet urban folk, guitar poetry, Yiddish theater songs, French chanson, Tropicalia and more. A Recording Academy voting member, Psoy co-organizes the international festival of music and arts JetLAG in NY state and co-created the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory, a project reviving lost WWII-era Yiddish songs from Ukraine in collaboration with the historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto).

Photo by Keith Wolzinger.