Semen (Shome) Markovich Sherman

Sherman gives his birth date and his parents' names and birth years, and says he lived in Telenești until the war and finished the lyceum in Orhei. His father had a small leather shop. He names his siblings, remembers his maternal grandmother, and tells how she stayed in Telenești and was killed with her son's family.

names the siblings and his grandmother's killing in Telenești

Sherman describes the cheder in Telenești, run by a poor rebbe with one wooden table, which he attended from the age of five. He then went to the Romanian primary school for four years and on to the Orhei lyceum. He answers Kerler's questions about his age at the time and says he finished in 1938 and took the baccalaureate in Chișinău.

Sherman speaks briefly about his grandmother's ironware shop. He then recounts the 1941 flight from Telenești by cart, on foot, across the Dniester with the help of a Christian boatman, and by road to Stalingrad, then by barge on the Caspian to a Kazakh fishing settlement where he worked in a fish plant. Mobilized, he worked on railway-car repair in Almaty, then in a group from Tashkent on bridge-building near Moscow, and later in the Sverdlovsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions before being called back to Telenești.

Sherman tells of his return after the war: his mother and sisters lived in Chernivtsi, where he took bookkeeping courses and worked as an accountant. He married and moved to Chișinău, where he became chief accountant and later an engineer. He also describes his further schooling: courses and a technical college in Moscow, and then an institute.

Kerler asks what games Sherman played as a child; he does not remember. He confirms that the Soviets set the road and the town on fire in 1941 to deny it to the Germans. He then describes the cheder: a poor rebbe, a plain table and the children learning Yiddish, Torah and blessings. He can no longer recall the prayers but says he reads Yiddish and Hebrew.

adds the questions about childhood games

Sherman shows the camera an old prayer book (a machzor, printed in Lemberg, with a date in the 1880s (?)) and explains that the Yiddish text in it was for women. He says he got it from a sister of his wife, and reads a little from it.

Sherman says he reads and writes Yiddish well and loved literature. He recalls the Yiddish library in Telenești, with works by Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem and translations of world literature. Young people read and met to discuss Zionism and communism; there were no formal debate evenings. The library was open to everyone.

Kerler asks whether Sherman knows Unetaneh Tokef; he recalls only part of it. Questions about the library follow: borrowing, whether books were paid for, and whether it held Romanian as well as Yiddish books. He says he read Tolstoy in Russian once he had learned it, and Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish.

Sherman recalls how his eldest sister read Sholem Aleichem aloud at home to the children. Lemster asks about Bessarabian Yiddish writers: he met Moshe Pinchevski and mentions Eliezer Shteynberg, whose memorial inscription he has noted, and Bialik's poems read in Yiddish.

adds Pinchevski, Shteynberg and Bialik

Asked about Yiddish theater, Sherman says local amateurs staged Yiddish plays and that Sidi Tal came to perform. Asked about synagogues, he says there was a large synagogue and separate shuls for shoemakers and tailors. His father's synagogue is not clearly identified, and he recalls the cantors' Yiddish prayers, which he went specially to hear as a gymnasium pupil in Orhei. He has recorded cantors on tape.

adds the synagogues of Telenești and his taped recordings of cantors

Lemster asks whether Jews travelled to visit rebbes or righteous men; Sherman says they did when in trouble, and that his mother went to a rebbe, perhaps in Ștefănești (?), for a blessing on the home. Kerler and Lemster ask about folk healing and the evil eye; Sherman remembers nothing of it.

adds the questions about folk healing and the evil eye

Sherman describes the Jewish holidays before the war: on Yom Kippur eve the shops on his street closed for Kol Nidre. At Passover his father led the seder, reclining on a couch and reading the Haggadah, with the children asking the questions. Sherman does not remember who asked.

Sherman talks about his father's prayer and observance: he knew the Jewish melodies well, prayed at home, and knew the prayers sung after the Torah reading. Kerler checks which prayers he means, and Sherman says the cantor chanted them to a melody.

Sherman describes his mother's Sabbath and holiday food, especially gefilte fish (not peppery), sweet-and-sour meat, and a yellow cake at Purim; at Hanukkah children played with dreidels. He says there was no Purim play in Telenești, only the custom of noisemakers in the synagogue. When pressed he says amateurs staged Yiddish plays at Purim.

Sherman answers questions about non-Jews in the Telenești fire brigade (there was no organized brigade) and about prewar youth movements. Gordonia met in a hall for dances and heard speeches from visiting pioneers (chalutzim) from Palestine, and some friends emigrated. He also tells of clandestine communist literature smuggled in from Bucharest, in Yiddish translations, and of reading Freud.

adds the fire-brigade question and clandestine communist literature

Sherman says his mother did not sing to the children, because life was hard and earning a living the main worry. His parents were born near Telenești, and his grandparents are said to have come from Poland. He met his future wife while studying in Orhei, through friends; they married before the war in a civil ceremony without a chuppah.

adds the grandparents' Polish origin and the civil marriage

Sherman remembers that in Telenești weddings had a chuppah and music from a small klezmer band, with Jewish dances; the musicians were non-Jewish Moldovans who had learned the tunes. Kerler then asks terminology questions: the plural of rov and rebbe, and the meaning of a "good Jew".

Sherman tells an anecdote about a Moldovan who asked for the "good Jew" in a town, meaning the rebbe, and was told that all the Jews were good. Kerler and Lemster ask about the phrase "a good place" (meaning the cemetery), words for Lithuanian Jews and Galicians, Hasidim and misnagdim, Polish Yiddish and proverbs; Sherman answers only partly.

adds the questions on Lithuanian Jews, Galicians, Hasidim, misnagdim and proverbs

Sherman discusses the Dybbuk, which local amateurs staged in the Telenești theater along with Sholem Aleichem. Questions follow on a dybbuk, the golem, the Baal Shem Tov and Hershele Ostropolyer, which he mostly cannot recall. He mentions receiving a Yiddish children's magazine from Bucharest and Itzik Manger's booklet of poems, and says Manger visited friends in Ploiești.

Sherman quotes a saying he attributes to the poet Rivkin (?), a former colleague of an acquaintance, and describes how that man's wife visited after he was taken away. Lemster and Kerler ask whether he knows songs by Zelik Bardichever and other poets, and ask about a formula said after mentioning the dead.

adds Bardichever and the formula said after mentioning the dead

Sherman talks about collecting Yiddish songs on records and cassettes from America and Israel, and offers to show his collection. He answers Lemster's questions about Jews who converted, then describes his cheder, with a poor teacher who taught only prayer, and how he taught himself to read Yiddish and read many books. Whether Telenești had a talmud torah is unclear.

Includes questions on converts and Hebrew teaching, and the point that he learned Yiddish reading on his own.

Sherman and the interviewers name Yiddish writers and press figures associated with Telenești, with some uncertainty about the names. He mentions a song noted down in Chernivtsi and a Yiddish theater there, with an actor named Sidi Tal (?) who also visited Telenești. He says he lived in Chernivtsi only after the war.

Names several writers; the Chernivtsi residence is after the war.

Asked about life today, Sherman describes working and retiring with his wife, the collapse of savings after the Soviet era, and a pension that rose over time, with support from Hesed and the Jewish cultural center. He gives pension amounts and talks about the hard years of his youth, when he tutored mathematics in Orhei to support himself in school and then went to Chişinău for his baccalaureate with money his mother raised by selling silver spoons.

Gives pension figures and the mother's selling silver to pay for his baccalaureate.

Kerler asks Sherman about his views on God. Sherman answers that it is a delicate question and recalls a university-style lecture on God by a professor, speaking partly in Russian. Kerler then turns to the years of evacuation.

Adds a discussion of God and a remembered lecture, which the catalogue labels only generally.

Sherman recounts being mobilized during the war and moved with a labor unit by way of Central Asia (Almaty) to near Moscow, to Rzhev, and later to Karaganda. They built bridges, railway lines and barracks for workers; Bessarabians were not allowed to join regular units.

Names the places of the labor unit's deployment.

Kerler puts questionnaire items, with Russian prompts, for Sherman to render in Yiddish: greetings and their times of day, requests and thanks, house, skin, mouse, color, pigeon, hill, tired, poor people, and to have a book. Lemster adds Romanian prompts. Sherman distinguishes Yiddish from learned vocabulary, and mentions reading Sholem Aleichem and Ansky as a child.

Sherman speaks about the Yiddish books and translations he read as a child, including translated American writers such as Jack London. Kerler and a second voice put questions on translated authors and on funeral and condolence formulas. Sherman ends with a joke about a man's death.

Includes a joke and formulas said when someone has died.

Sherman tells an anecdote about a man who died and the livelihood of Jews, then talks about his family. As a boy he studied with a teacher and his mother baked bread for the Sabbath; his mother, two brothers and two sisters all moved to Israel after the war and died there. He mentions relatives in Israel, including a niece's husband working for an American firm.

Gives details on the relatives in Israel, including their towns.

Kerler and Lemster continue the dialectological questionnaire: words for being ill, dying, liking and disliking, walking with difficulty, an honest or religious person, cross and Christian, peasant, a headache, bed, threshing and breathing. Sherman translates from Russian and Romanian prompts and says when he does not recall a word from Telenești.

Sherman says Jews in prewar Telenești did not drink; the only drinker was the water carrier. He talks about wine at Passover and memorial days and describes Sabbath food: fish, meat, and cholent kept warm in the oven in a metal box, with a non-Jew called in to light the fire.

Adds Passover and memorial-day drinking and the neighborhood being almost entirely Jewish.

After a question on the word for flowers in Telenești, Sherman describes the hard prewar life of Jewish shopkeepers and traders, who waited a season for peasants to buy. He explains how people went to Chişinău and Iași, with a Christian coachman and horses, to buy goods, and mentions his father traveling this way. Kerler then returns to the questionnaire.

Questionnaire items on grammar and vocabulary: plural forms, such words as such, a ceiling, the floor, window panes, whose, perhaps, a man and woman, and wagons. Sherman also answers on the prewar prayer service, in which the cantor stands at the front, and says people disliked a bad cantor. Lemster asks about the Hanukkah dreidel.

Includes his remarks on the prayer service and cantors.

Sherman says there were few wealthy Jews in prewar Telenești, naming one man with a cash register and cashier. The questionnaire continues with words for tailoring, attic and other household items.

Adds the shift back into the questionnaire.

Lemster asks about Tisha B'Av, and Sherman recalls children's customs of throwing burs. Kerler then puts more questionnaire items: face, appearance, return, suddenly, various, good head and enemy. Kerler thanks Sherman at the end and asks for a song.

Gives the children's burs custom.

Kerler closes the formal interview and a few lines of a Yiddish song are heard. Sherman shows a rare edition of Sholem Aleichem's works and says he reads and writes Yiddish well. He also shows a Russian-language book.

Adds a Russian-language book and a few lines of song.