Mariam Nirenberg / מרים נירענבערג

Mariam Nirenberg

Mariam Nirenberg was a Jewish, Polish-Canadian Yiddish folksinger. She was born in Czarnawcyce in what was then the Russian Empire in a region known as Polesie. She grew up speaking Yiddish as her first language, and became an amateur folksinger in the Polesie region. She fled growing anti-Semitism, emigrating to Canada in 1932. She was one of the only Polish Yiddish folksingers to survive the Holocaust, which decimated the Yiddish-speaking population.

Nirenberg was a relative of up-and-coming Jewish scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recognized her value as one of the few remaining singers with a deep knowledge of Yiddish folk music in Eastern Europe. Between 1968 and 1975, Nirenberg's Yiddish repertoire was recorded, both auditorily and in writing. Today, her Yiddish voice and song are used to carry on Yiddish folk music, a musical genre which is seriously endangered.