The author, playwright, folklorist, polemicist, and cultural and political activist S. Ansky wrote “Di Shvue” in 1902.  It became the anthem of the Bund shortly thereafter and since then has been a cultural snowball, growing in its psychic weight and momentum with each singing and each generation. 

That is in part because in addition to his poetic skills, Ansky tapped his deep knowledge of Eastern European Jewish folk ritual and theatre to create a song that transcends performance genres into ceremony itself: it’s a musical setting of an oath (שבֿועה shvue in Yiddish) which by singing, the singers make and renew each time the song is invoked – which, given the deep reverence for the power of language and for oaths in particular in Yiddish culture, is significant. It has been sung at official and unofficial meetings of Bundists for over a century, each time connecting the singers with an identity of resistance that transcends generation, time, and place.

I worked on this adaptation for an early pandemic virtual presentation given by Josh Parshall, a historian of Southern American Jewish culture and resistance movements, which I grew up with in Columbia, Missouri. I wanted to honor the living legacy of the Bund in the Southern U.S., an area with even less secular Yiddish language transmission than the coastal urban centers, with a performance that would keep language barriers from obstructing the dynamic participatory experience that this song invokes. In addition to the rhyme scheme and as much as the content as possible, I wanted the English to reflect the way the scope of the ritual has grown since Ansky wrote the original words. Ansky’s original lyrics prophetically describe the family of singers of the Oath, convened in the first lines (Brider un shvester fun arbet un neyt) as tsezeyt un tsehpreyt, scattered like seeds to sprout into resistance, using a word that indicated that they were scattered geographically, but over time could be taken to mean ‘chronologically' scattered, including our generation and those to come, as much as Ansky’s own.

The Bund always promoted the use of the Yiddish language (which is partly why this song has so rarely been translated and sung in English), so we have been singing this when possible as a bilingual adaptation, the English verses alongside the Yiddish original. The first three stanzas are the most stable, and there were many verses that different communities sang in addition to those – the final Yiddish stanza here is one of many variants and options. My intention is for this translation to be an open-source document which different communities may use and improve upon as they see fit, drawing on different aspects of the original. 

*A note on transliteration of Yiddish:

This transliteration reflects Ansky’s Northern Yiddish (Litvish) dialect, a pronunciation necessary to preserve the rhyme scheme: neyt instead of noyt for נויט, reyt instead of royt for רויט). This song has been sung in every Yiddish dialect and pronounced however is comfortable for the singers, so feel free to pronounce in a way that  is natural for you if you have other experience with Yiddish.