Zoya Haidai

Ukrainian-Canadian Festival
CBC Broadcast, 1946
Echo, made in Canada

I figured I would get no hits searching on line for the singer Zoya Haidai but to my amazement she had a Wikipedia page dedicated to her. True, it's a small page, but nevertheless. The page also had one link, that to a site specialized in finding grave stones. Zoya Mikhailovna Haidai is buried in Kiev, Ukraine, she died in 1965, 62 years old. The one sentence about her on the 78 rpm 4-disc-set Ukranian-Canadian Festival reveals as much about her as the Wikipedia page does: "Zoya Haidai is a People's Artiste of the U.S.S.R., Laureate of Stalinist Premium, prima donna of the Shevchenko Ukranian State Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine." The four discs are excerpts from a Canadian broadcast aired July 27, 28, 1946. Zoya Haidai is featured on side 8. The song is called Perepilochka. (which, when spelled perepelochka, is also a zither like Russian folk instrument.

Haidai's grave marker in Kiev

After the Canadian broadcast Zoya Haidai, together with basso Igor Patorzhinsky, set out to the U.S. "They would be the first musical representatives to come from the Soviet Union in the postwar era. The two singers had preceded their October 5 Town Hall concert by a five-week tour of Canada, and intended to continue on to several other American cities with their program of Russian and Ukrainian songs. But as soon as they entered the United States, the Department of Justice demanded that they register as foreign agents, under a penalty of a thousand dollars or two years in jail."

            (Eric A. Gordan, The Frances Goldin Literary, Mark the Music: The Life and work of Marc Blitzstein.)