Sofia Magid

Sofia Magid ( Sofiya Davidovna Magid-Ékmekchi, c. 1892–1954) was a Soviet Jewish ethnographer and folklorist whose career lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s. Among the materials she collected were folksongs of Volhynian and Belarusian Jews and among the only prewar field recordings of European klezmer string ensembles, as well as the music of Russians and other ethnic groups of the USSR. Although she was largely unknown abroad during her lifetime, in recent years she has been seen alongside Moshe Beregovski and other Soviet Jewish ethnographers as an important scholar and collector of Jewish music.

Biography Early life Sofia Magid was born on December 22, 1892 (January 3, 1893 New Style) Her grandfather Hillel Noah Maggid was a genealogist and historian. In 1909, Sofia graduated from secondary school in Saint Petersburg and entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1912 to study piano. After gaining a high profile for her work, she was given a permanent position in 1934 as a senior research assistant in the Folklore section of the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography.

Legacy Many of the materials collected by Magid are now preserved in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, although some are in the collections of the Pushkin House in Saint Petersburg.

Although she was little known outside of the Soviet Union during her lifetime, in recent years Magid has increasingly received attention from scholars of Jewish music. In 2006, scholar Leonid Guralnik used Magid's unpublished work on Yiddish ballads, as well as her audio recordings and transcriptions, to further develop an analysis of Yiddish vocal folklore. Much of her collected material was published as part of a German book in 2008, titled . And in 2020, Michael Lukin used parts of her collected material to once again examine the Yiddish ballad.

Her field work have also been interpreted by klezmer musicians in recent years. Zisl Slepovitch, who is originally from Belarus and now based in New York City, included material collected by Magid in his bands Minsker Kapelye and Litvakus. And in 2019 Joel Rubin and the group Veretski Pass released an album interpreting work Magid collected, called The Magid Chronicles.

The band WAKS from Hamburg, Germany (Inge Mandos, Klemen Kaatz, Hans-Christian Jaenicke) has incorporated original voices from Sofia Magid's wax cylinder recordings into new arrangements. These recordings were sourced from Elvira Grözinger’s book Unser Rebbe unser Stalin . Across all three albums so far, Inge Mandos sings together with the historical voices. The two albums WAKS and OVES (2015, 2019) are based on ten Yiddish songs recorded by Sofia Magid. The third album, "Sofias Reisen – di Rayzes fun Sofia" (2026), contains 13 songs from the Magid collection and is a tribute to Magid’s work.