Mikhail Isaakovich Gordin

Gordin begins his interview. He says his mother died in 1947 and that two of his brothers went to Eretz Yisrael. A cousin and an aunt helped him, and he explains how relatives from Bălți (?) and Florești sent Purim gifts. He recalls carrying Purim gifts as a small child with his father and being given money, then Passover customs: kosher dishes, matzo latkes, potato dishes and poppy-seed latkes. Kerler asks about the name of Purim.

Adds the relatives who helped him and the Passover food customs.

Gordin gives his birth year, 1936, and says he was born in Florești and lived there until the war. He describes Simchat Torah lanterns made from pumpkins. His father worked as a loader on the Florești railway and his mother, Leike, did not work. Of five children three survived. Both parents came from Kisnitsa in Yampil raion and moved to Florești around 1919–20, where his mother's sister lived.

Adds Gordin's birth year, his parents' names and origins, and the Simchat Torah lanterns.

Gordin tells of the war years. In 1941 his father was drafted and the family fled to Kisnitsa to his grandparents, then on to Kryzhopil and Zabokrych. There the Germans arrived and Jews were rounded up and killed. They ended up in Myskivka (?), where a ghetto under Romanian administration held them for the rest of the war. His father worked at an oil press and later on forced labor building a bridge. Kerler asks who ran the ghetto.

Adds the flight route, the killings at Zabokrych, the ghetto at Myskivka, and his father's forced labor.

Gordin says his mother died in 1947, in the hunger years, after the family returned to Moldova. He tells of finishing school, failing to enter an institute in Leningrad, serving in the army, and studying chemistry in Vladivostok. He then returned to Chișinău and worked a year in a village before taking factory work. Kerler asks what he studied. The year he finished school is unclear in the transcript.

Adds that Jews were hard to get into the Chișinău institute; the transcript does not confirm 1955 or the furniture factory.

Asked about singing in the ghetto, Gordin recalls a Jewish musician who played for the Romanians, and says Bessarabian Jews were driven from Myskivka to Kryzhopil while his father bought them a place. He recalls ghetto life with its killings, singing and dancing, but no camp song. He names the ghetto elder, Anshl, and his two daughters, whom he married off to men from Mărculești. Kerler asks whether people prayed there.

Gordin says his father prayed only on holidays, with tallit and tefillin, in the synagogue where the women sat upstairs, and that Florești had a shoykhet before and after the war. After the war the family returned to Florești and found their house wrecked. He was married in 1965 and has a son in Ashdod, who knows Hebrew and English and some Yiddish. He travelled to his grandson's bar mitzvah.

Adds his father's prayer habits, the shoykhet, his marriage, and his son and grandson in Israel.

Kerler closes the interview with Gordin and talks about arranging the honorarium paperwork.