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As the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Hilda Bronstein fell in love with the Yiddish
language at an early age. She learned several yiddish songs as a child, after seeing
them performed at London’s last Yiddish Theatre, the Grand Palais. She trained as a singer at the
Royal College of Music, but other priorities soon took over when she married and had a family.
In the late eighties she decided to retrain, finally taking a doctorate in the field of English
Literature and becoming a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing. However, in 2003,
she discovered that, while she had been otherwise involved, there had been a huge revival of
interest in Yiddish music and language. She therefore decided to return to her long-forgotten first
love. She brushed up her Yiddish by joining the London-based Friends of Yiddish and attending
London’s annual Klezfest, where she encountered the vibrant and exciting sounds of the new
wave of klezmer music and met two of its most talented exponents, Merlin and Polina Shepherd,
who appear on this album. Very soon, she found herself in demand as a singer and teacher of
Yiddish Song. She has now performed at a number of venues, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall
on London’s South Bank, the New Spiro Ark... Read More ... Centre and Yarnton Manor in Oxford. She has also
attracted much interest in the Yiddish language through talks on her return to Yiddish, which she
illustrates in song. She is currently the Director of the Jewish Music Institute’s Song School,
which runs weekly in London from October to March, and here she teaches Yiddish Song to the
students. Her double exposure to Yiddish – firstly to her parents’ Polish dialect, and later, to what
has become the standard ‘Litvish’ or Lithuanian dialect - means that she now uses both
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