NEW YORK (AP) Chana Mlotek, a noted archivist of Yiddish folk music and an impassioned collector of Yiddish songs from the shtetls of Europe, has died at age 91.
She died of cancer Monday at her Bronx home, her son Zalmen, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene, said Tuesday.
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once called Mlotek and her husband, Joseph, "the Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs."
In her job as music archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, people would come to Mlotek and say, "I only remember one Yiddish song from my mother, and of that song I only remember one line. And, unfortunately, from that one line I only remember two or three words," according to Itzik Gottesman of The Forward newspaper, who recalled working with Mlotek at YIVO.
Mlotek almost always found a copy of the song the person was looking for, Gottesman wrote in a blog post on the Forward's website.