Born to a Bessarabian family in Montreal, Ruth Rubin dedicated her life to preserving Yiddish folk music in the wake of the Holocaust. She carried a bulky tape recorder across North America, on which she would document and sing thousands of Yiddish folk songs in a simple, unaccompanied style.
Her dedication to this project ensured that Yiddish folk music survived, and her work was a cornerstone of the modern Yiddish revival. Ruth Rubin devoted a lifetime to the collection and preservation of Yiddish folklore in poetics and songs. Her writings include books, articles, and music collections. As a popular performer-folklorist, she would describe the background of her selections and then sing them in a simple, unaccompanied style.
Born Rifkele Royzenblatt in Montreal on September 1, , to immigrants from Bessarabia, she grew up in a Canadian multilingual household of books and music. Her father died when she was five years old. The young Rifkele attended afternoon classes at the Jewish secular Peretz Shule, where she sang and where her interest in Yiddish literature was sparked by a visit from Shalom Aleichem in In the early s, she went to New York City, where she worked as a secretary and wrote Yiddish poetry, a collection of which was published by the end of that decade.
In , she married Sam Rubin, and in , their son Michael was born. Meanwhile, she embarked upon Yiddish folklore studies and taught literature and music at several Yiddish schools. During World War II, Rubin translated and had published Yiddish diaries that had been smuggled out of the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe. She participated in programs with other folk song performers at many concerts, including Carnegie Hall performances. In she began to make recordings for Folkways Records and then became a busy lecturer-performer for religious organizations and educational institutions.
In the s, following the death of her husband, Ruth Rubin reemerged and resumed her mission on behalf of Yiddish folk songs. For use in her entertaining lectures and in her many published articles in Yiddish and English periodicals, she shaped sensitive translations into English so as to make those materials more accessible to a wider public.
