Leibu Levin

Leibo Levine/Leibu Levin (1914-1983) was a Romanian Jewish singer, composer, and narrator of Yiddish literature. He was born in the town of Campulung (Austria-Hungary) and lived in Czernowitz. He studied Yiddish language and literature in the Seminary of the Yiddisher Shul-Farayn and at the same time appeared in recitals of Yiddish prose and poetry, often singing his own melodies. In 1939 in Czernowitz, Hersh Segal published the album “Zeks Shloflider” (“Six lullabies”), with Levin’s melodies to poems by various Yiddish writers. Levin gave innumerable recitals in Czernowitz, becoming a genuine troubadour of Yiddish literature.
During the war, he was called up and subsequently arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Upon his release in 1956, he performed for six more years, then left the stage but continued to set Yiddish poetry to music. He immigrated to Israel and began setting Hebrew poems as well. He also translated from German into Yiddish all of the poems of the Czernowitz poet Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who died in a concentration camp at age 18, and set six of her poems to music.
Levin died in 1983. He left about 80 melodies to the finest lyrics of Yiddish poetry. The songs to texts by Hebrew poets, with Hanan Winternitz’s piano arrangements, were published in 1990 in the Nisimov Music Library in Tel Aviv; an anthology of 49 songs to Yiddish poetry was published in 2006 by I. L. Peretz Publications.