Shtetl Berlin Festival | New Yiddish Poetry and Music
Shtetl Berlin’s 2026 Festival kicks off is an evening celebrating the flowering of new Yiddish poetry written right here in Berlin. From the Middle Ages through the interwar avant-garde, Berlin has been a center of Yiddish art, music, and culture at key moments over the centuries — and today a new generation of writers and musicians carries that tradition forward. This concert presents two acts that offer a vivid snapshot of contemporary Yiddish creativity in the city: original compositions and poetry by Patrick Farrell and Yael Merlini, and Di Shkatulkelekh, performing new settings of poems by Katerina Kuznetsova. Copies of Kuznetsova’s newly published book Glozperl will be available for sale and signing by the author at the concert.
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 join together to present a concert of solo accordion music and spoken word, performing original work from their own pens and fantasies.
Patrick Farrell is an accordionist, composer, and bandleader from the USA living in Berlin. His projects include newly composed Yiddish song duets with singer Sveta Kundish (album Nem mayn vort, 2022) and the celebrated klezmer ensemble Yiddish Art Trio. He has appeared on dozens of recordings across many genres, including with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and has 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, writing about diasporic experience, femininity, and eco-poetry. 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 felt about the poems of Katerina Kuznetsova, a Yiddish poet, teacher, and cultural activist in Berlin whose work brings new voice and vitality to the contemporary Yiddish literary scene.
Kuznetsova’s Yiddish poems inspired Frenk to create melodies, which she shared with Lisa Hoppe and Paul Brody — both internationally renowned musicians and fixtures of Berlin’s jazz and avant-garde scene. Hoppe, equally inspired, set more of the poems to music, and with clarinettist Christian Dawid joining the ensemble, a song cycle was born that oscillates between ballad and wit, jazz and spoken word, with or without hints of klezmer, improvised performance and classical song. Together, Di Shkatulkelekh bring a rare combination of musical virtuosity and literary depth to this material, each performer filtering Kuznetsova’s words through their own distinctive artistic voice.
Doors open at 7pm.
Ticket link: https://www.shtetlberlin.com/event-details-registration/a-concert-of-new-yiddish-poetry-and-new-music
This is sound salon @gruenersalon.berlin!
sound salon is financially supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
