Karsten Troyke, one of the first singers to perform at the Days of Yiddish Culture in East Berlin, has a story to tell. During the first edition of the festival, in 1987, a woman from the audience approached him after his concert. It was Sara Bialas-Tenenberg, a Holocaust survivor and a native speaker of Yiddish, born in Czestochowa, Poland. Troyke’s concert of Yiddish songs received a warm reception at the festival, but Sara Bialas-Tenenberg believed that his Yiddish could still be improved. “Sara was sitting in the audience, deeply moved, happy to listen to songs in her beloved language after such a long time,” recollects Troyke. “She wanted to help me make my Yiddish more Yiddish and less German.”. With time, Sara became Karsten’s tutor, but also it friend and a source of inspiration. She was not only one of the few people with whom Troyke could speak Yiddish in an everyday context, but she also knew many Yiddish songs from her childhood in Poland. Troyke started to record her singing and to do research into the songs, some of which had never been documented. Ten years after their first meeting, in 1997, Sara’s Yiddish songs appeared in new arrangements on his CD Forgotten Yiddish Songs (Jiddische Vergessene Lieder).