Anya Tankhumovna Plotnik

Plotnik gives personal information. She was born in Dumbraveni near Soroca on 25 February 1926 and lived there until the war. Her father Tankhum Vereta had ten hectares of land and an inn, and her mother worked with him. She recalls her grandmother and her sister Yente, who was four years older and died in 1996. She worked as a telephone operator after the war, and her father died when she was seven.

names her sister Yente

Plotnik recalls the village before the war, with about four hundred houses and five prayer houses. She names the tailors' synagogue, the German synagogue, the rabbi's, a klayzl and the one where her father prayed. As the girl, she said kaddish for her father at age seven, since there were no sons. She remembers little of cheder or of religious learning, and her sister studied at the Jewish gymnasium in Soroca.

gives the names of the five prayer houses and the kaddish for her father

Plotnik describes her mother lighting Sabbath candles and her father's languages: Hebrew, Russian, Romanian and Yiddish. She mentions a Jewish library in Dumbraveni run by the community. She says nothing is left from before the war and begins to tell of being driven from her home.

Plotnik tells of the deportation. She and her mother were driven from their house and held in a courtyard, then marched through Rublenita and the Bălți prison to Vertiujeni. Her sister had been evacuated to Uzbekistan with the school. Her mother, who was sick, was thrown into a ravine on the road, and Plotnik crossed the Dniester near Cosauti. She tells of a child killed by a soldier and of being fed by Jews at Zugovka, then continues to Bershad with a family from Dumbraveni. There she lived with a family and begged for food for a year. She worked near a liquor factory dressed as a Christian and tells of the dying child Dudele.

gives many details: the child killed at the Dniester, the deaths in Bershad, the factory work

Plotnik tells of the Bershad ghetto: the deaths of the mother and a child, and of Dudele's father. She also tells of a boy Brie, whom she cared for and who was taken in by a woman, and of how she later reunited him with relatives. She speaks of her husband, who died after three years of marriage, and of her son, who studied at an institute in Rostov, married in Russia and moved to Kishinev. She tells of her grandson, who knows five languages, and says she has endured a great deal.

the case of the child Brie and her son's life

Plotnik says she worked as a telephone operator for forty-five years and as chief operator, without any complaint against her. She talks about her grandmother, who stayed with a son in Lublin and came to visit, and about her prewar Jewish home. Her father led the Passover seder and sang well, though she does not remember the singing.

Plotnik describes the High Holidays before the war. Her mother prayed in the women's section as a prayer-leader, and the family had a field with nut trees. She fasted from age seven and describes the meal before Yom Kippur and the tea afterwards, and the words for these. She says that in the Bershad ghetto she wanted to fast and to eat, and mentions begging.

Plotnik recalls how the holidays were kept in her parents' home before the war. She goes through the period after Yom Kippur, Sukkot (eating in the sukkah, her mother going to the synagogue), Simchat Torah, Hanukkah and Purim. Her mother gave Hanukkah money, and Plotnik recalls the dairy dishes of Shavuot. For Passover she describes the special dishes kept in the attic, koshering them with a hot stone, and the matzo and potato dishes. She notes that the Bulgarian Jews in the camp or ghetto made matzo, and that at the seder as a child of about seven she remembers the hidden afikoman, opening the door for Elijah and her father's singing. Katz and Lemster prompt her on each holiday.

Also covers Purim customs, the Passover household routine and the seder, and her father's singing.

Plotnik says she does not remember songs from her youth. Prompted by Katz and Lemster, she recalls that young people of different political leanings sang together, and then sings two songs. One is about hunger and cold on the street; the other, a cheerful song, is about forgetting troubles and cooking potatoes. She breaks off the second song, saying she cannot remember more. She also answers questions about songs her mother sang and about mixed Yiddish-Russian songs.

Gives the girls' and boys' singing among neighbors and her mother's singing.

Plotnik describes how Shavuot was prepared for, with decorations, and the dairy foods her mother made, such as rice with milk and varenikes. She then says non-Jews in Dumbraveni, shepherds among them, spoke Yiddish, even better than she did, just like the Jews.

Plotnik answers Katz's questions about the meaning of a few Yiddish words, including dybbuk and golem. She describes how she was treated against the evil eye: her mother took her to Jewish and non-Jewish healers, an old Christian woman and a Jewish woman called Malke, who used spoken charms and a knife. She also describes pouring wax for fright. Lemster asks whether she remembers more, and she says she does not bless properly.

Includes explanations of the words dybbuk and golem, and wax-pouring for fright.

Plotnik talks about the town's rabbi, Shternberg, whose children went to Israel, and says he asked her to say Kaddish. She recalls that her father often quarreled with the rabbi over money collected for the community. She tells how her father foresaw his own death, with his late father appearing to him in a dream, and describes his last illness. Katz and Lemster then ask whether she remembers more songs, and she says she does not.

Adds her father's dream and death, and the closing request for songs.

Plotnik answers questions from the dialectological questionnaire, with a second voice giving Russian prompts and Katz asking for explanations. The items include words for sick and sleepy, to run away, honest, a believer and a pious person, to convert or apostasize, headache, and 'from where'. Others are bed, oil, small tree, ten, thousand and twenty, street and road, river, potato, flowers (roses), and the sound of speech.

Plotnik sings a song about the difficulty of collecting papers and documents from lawyers, then the well-known song 'Papirosn' about a child selling cigarettes in the cold. She then sings a children's alphabet song in which the boy names each letter and the rhyme runs through the letters. Lemster and Katz respond in between.

Plotnik sings a short comic song about an ugly, unpleasant girl. Katz then asks about love songs, which she no longer remembers, and puts questionnaire items to her (words for 'to arrange', 'attic', the cantor praying, 'dreidel', 'at that time', 'suddenly', 'back', 'room', and a sentence to translate). S3 prompts her with Russian and Romanian equivalents.

The questionnaire items include some Russian and Romanian prompting by a second person.