MusicGorby Sarah
Main achievement
Light and classical music performer from France. She has toured in several countries around the world, including performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY
About
Sarah Gorby, born around 1900 in Chișinău, was a remarkable singer of Jewish origin, specializing in Yiddish music, Russian and Gypsy romances, as well as French and Soviet compositions. At 17, she left Chișinău to study music in Iași, Romania, where she married Joseph Goldstein, a Romanian and Yiddish-speaking publisher. Her career as a contralto spanned from the 1940s to the 1970s, with recordings made in Paris, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and other cities, collaborating with record labels such as Eledisc, which promoted Yiddish artists. She was fluent in nine languages, including her native Bessarabian Yiddish, Russian, French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and English, which allowed her to compose and perform songs in multiple languages. Living a nomadic life, Sarah traveled extensively: from Romania to Rome and Paris in the 1920s, then to South America in the 1930s, emigrating in 1940 to Haiti with her husband, then to the United States. In 1949, she returned to Paris, where her husband passed away in 1950 in Haiti, settling there permanently. She continued touring in Mexico, South America, South Africa, and Israel, preserving the authenticity of the Bessarabian Yiddish dialect in emotional interpretations such as "Undzer shtetl brent," "Oif dem weg," or "Du Solst Nichtgehn." Her music captured Eastern European Jewish traditions, offering solace to the diaspora during the Holocaust and post-war periods, and is available today on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. Although she temporarily worked in the United States in the 1940s, Paris remained the center of her creative work, where she recorded most of her records and participated in Jewish cultural events. Her personal life, marked by the loss of her husband and her Polish-Russian-Jewish family roots (her parents, Zeylik Khaimovich Gorbach and Beyla Kipelman, spoke Yiddish at home), influenced the depth of her artistic sensitivity. Sarah Gorby died in 1980 in Paris, leaving a rich legacy of over 50 recordings celebrating Moldovan and Jewish cultural heritage, inspiring subsequent generations of musicians.
