The Stranniki at The Magnes

The Stranniki is a collaborative project of Polina Shepherd and Psoy Korolenko, two multilingual, cross-genre artists and authors, prominent in the Yiddish music scene for over two decades. Soon after their initial mini-tour and presentation at the conference “Mediating a New Cold War in the Digital Age” at Dartmouth College (2016), the duo embarked on a cross-US tour, followed by more international concerts. Central to their repertoire is the concept of a wanderer, and the associated archetype of “road/path”. The Stranniki draw upon, feature, and fuse elements of poetry and songs from Yiddish and Russian literature, folklore, and popular culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, organically weaving in their own original material.

Their first mutual album unveils a distinctive continuity of texts, melodies, paths, and destinies, inspiring and informing in the peculiar 2020s as much as it ever has—if not more so.