Avraham-Yehoshua Makonovetsky

Avraham-Yehoshua Makonovetsky (, , born 1872) was a Russian-Jewish Klezmer violinist who acted as a key informant to the Soviet Ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky in the 1930s. His extensive handwritten manuscripts, which are now in the collection of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, serve as a rare example of nineteenth-century Klezmer violin music.

Biography Makonovetsky was born in Khabne, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire in 1872. (The town was renamed Poliske in 1957 and is now depopulated due to being located in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of Ukraine.) Makonovetsky's father, known as (Israel the fiddler) had lived in Bragin (now Brahin, Belarus) before marrying a woman from Khabne and relocating there, forming a klezmer ensemble there in 1858. In Khabne he worked not only as a klezmer but also as a barber, watchmaker, glazier, and music teacher to local poor children.

Legacy Makonovetsky is known today because he acted as a key informant to Moisei Beregovsky, the Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist and klezmer researcher. He answered Beregovsky's questionnaire about how the klezmer trade worked in the late nineteenth century and shared his extensive manuscripts of klezmer repertoire, some of which Beregovsky used in his published volume of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music. After the closure of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kyiv in 1949, Beregovsky's materials (including Makonovetsky's manuscripts) were kept in storage for several decades before being integrated into the collection of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union. At present, his manuscripts have been digitized and are accessible as part of a digitization project by the Klezmer Institute called the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP).