Abraham (Avrum-Khayim) Shtaigman

Speakers at the Goldfaden memorial in Iași talk, in garbled transcript, about a Jewish hospital or old-age home and Jewish theater, apparently with reference to Goldfaden and the Romanian theater. The camera is probably recording the memorial.

The transcript suggests talk of an old-age home and early Yiddish theater.

Kerler opens the formal interview, giving the date and asking how Jews say the name Iași. Shtaigman says he was born in Rădăuți in 1937, was deported to Transnistria in 1941 and returned in 1944. He attended cheder briefly, then Romanian school and lyceum, studied in Bucharest and Iași, married in Iași in 1966 and had two daughters. He worked about thirty years as a bookkeeper at a furniture factory and has been the community's bookkeeper for nine months.

Adds Shtaigman's studies in Bucharest and Iași and the lyceum.

Shtaigman describes the Iași Jewish community as well organized, with daily programs and a youth organization headed by his younger daughter. He tells about his wife's family, especially his father-in-law, who ran a kosher restaurant that was nationalized after the war, and about his in-laws' piety and emigration to Israel. His daughters do not speak Yiddish, though they understand it, and Kerler asks the family name (Gelberg?).

Adds the father-in-law's restaurant and the daughters' language.

Asked what he remembers from before the war, Shtaigman says mainly Transnistria. He names his parents, Binyomin Leyb and Miriam (née Shnayder), his father born in Rădăuți and his mother in a nearby village (Frătăuți). Both parents worked making brushes for cleaning shoes. He recalls one grandmother who was in Transnistria with them, and Kerler asks where in Transnistria they were.

Adds the grandmother and the brush-making work of both parents.

Shtaigman describes the night-time expulsion of the Jews of Rădăuți and the march to the Dniester, where a gendarme struck his father over a cap. They were held in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, then briefly in a former kolkhoz and in the town of Dzhurin. There the family lodged with a Jewish tinsmith for over three years, all ill with typhus, and his father's heart was affected. They survived by selling gold teeth for food until the Russians arrived in 1944.

Adds the tinsmith's household and the typhus illness.

Shtaigman says Russian soldiers told them they could go home, and they travelled by train and truck to Chernivtsi, since the front was still at Rădăuți. They stayed about six months before moving to a place whose name is unclear (Mykhalcha?), where his father died in August 1944, at the age of thirty-two. He and his mother then returned to Rădăuți.

Shtaigman recalls returning to Rădăuți and finding their small house and his mother's family dead in Transnistria. They lived there until 1952 and then sold the house instead of emigrating to Israel. His mother remarried a baker, a good stepfather who died in 1965. He attended school and lyceum in Rădăuți, where a few thousand Jews remained after the war, but they dwindled. After studying and working, he moved to Iași in 1966. He says Yiddish in Rădăuți was somewhat more Litvak-like (Polish-Jewish) than in Iași.

Adds the stepfather and the comparison of Yiddish in Rădăuți and Iași.

Shtaigman says he studied Yiddish for four or five years after the war with a lawyer and Yiddishist teacher who had a large library and taught Yiddish literature. His religious education was minimal, with a stepfather who was somewhat communist. He says Rădăuți was multilingual (German, Romanian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian) and describes the prewar population of about eight thousand, mostly Jews. Most Jews left for Israel in the later 1960s, leaving few young people.

Adds the multilingual prewar Rădăuți and the figures on its population.

Shtaigman describes postwar synagogues in Rădăuți: two large ones, a small one, and shoemakers' and tailors' synagogues. He visited Rădăuți often after moving to Iași, and his mother later came to help with the children. He discusses a film by an American about the Jews of Rădăuți and a photo album, mentioning that locals felt they were filmed unflatteringly, and the community bath was demolished. Kerler asks about the word for 'built' as used by old people, then returns to the Litvak speech question.

Adds a film project, the photograph album and a vocabulary question.

Shtaigman explains that 'Litvak' speech in Rădăuți was like that of Polish Jews, with the vowel a pronounced differently, and Kerler gives examples of word forms. Polish Jews came to Rădăuți fleeing the Germans during the Second World War, and earlier Jews came from Austria and Czechoslovakia after the First. Kerler then turns to Transnistria.

Shtaigman describes daily life in the Transnistrian ghetto: obtaining food, buying from nearby villages, bread made from flour, potatoes, and aid sent from Bucharest through a woman named Albrecht (?). His father was sent for forced labor to Sharhorod for two years until a Romanian sergeant from Rădăuți sent him back ill. He says Jews and non-Jews in Rădăuți got on very well, and a neighbor who was a police officer warned them two days before the deportation.

Adds the forced labor in Sharhorod and the aid from Bucharest.

Shtaigman recalls going as a child to Jewish youth associations (Dror Habonim), where they sang and danced and spoke Yiddish and Romanian. He remembers Sholem Aleichem works (Tevye, Motl) from his Yiddish teacher but no poetry. He studied Yiddish in school until the lyceum, but few Jewish pupils were left, and in the last year 21 of 26 were Jewish. Kerler asks why the Jewish schools closed, and he adds that at the Iași furniture factory most of the staff were Jews.

Adds the Sholem Aleichem works read with his teacher.

Shtaigman says that almost all the functionaries at the Iași furniture factory were Jews, and that the last Jewish carpenter died a year before his retirement. Kerler asks why the Jews left; he says they went to Israel and Germany, Bukovinian Jews especially to German-speaking places because they came from Austria. Kerler then turns to food and fish.

Shtaigman discusses fish dishes his mother made, boiled and chopped or stuffed (gefilte) fish, the sweeter taste and his wife's views on fish. He then talks about Yiddish theater coming to Rădăuți monthly after the war, including an actress Dina Chernik (?), and amateur performances by children organized by the democratic Jewish committee. He mentions seeing Yiddish theater in Kishinev in 1982 (?).

Adds fish dishes and touring actors.

Shtaigman and S2 describe postwar Purim in Rădăuți: children dressed in masks and went from house to house, with Jewish families living close together. Kerler asks what they said and about costumes such as a chimney sweep, with a figure with a big nose, but they do not remember the greeting. They mention hamantashn that his wife is expert at making.

Kerler asks questions about cultural terminology and Shtaigman answers, with some help from S2: the meanings of dibbuk, golem, a good Jew (pious man or good person, and a hasidic rebbe), a good place (a cemetery), the difference between a rov and a rebbe, and the expression for extinguishing coals (against the evil eye). They also discuss vodka at Purim.

The catalogue's mention of cupping therapy does not appear clearly; the transcript shows the dibbuk, golem and 'good Jew' questions and a coal-extinguishing expression.

Shtaigman talks about his wedding in Iași in 1966, held under a chuppah with a marriage contract and a rabbi who left in the early 1970s, after which only a shoykhet remained. Kosher meat now comes through slaughterers from Ukraine, perhaps Kyiv. He and S2 say klezmer music was played at weddings, often by Gypsies who spoke Yiddish, and mention a woman professor and poet from Rădăuți. Kerler then moves to the language questionnaire.

Adds the Gypsy klezmer musicians who spoke Yiddish and the woman poet.

Shtaigman, helped by S2, answers questions from the dialectological questionnaire: greetings and thank-you forms, animal and body words, colors, adjectives and adverbs of time, speed and distance, kinds of illness, verbs of liking and running away, words for non-Jews, and a sentence to translate, with forms heard in Rădăuți. They compare Yiddish and German forms and note that he speaks more Yiddish since working at the community.

Opens with a brief remark that many Jews came from Poland during the war and that the Russians came. Shtaigman then answers Kerler's dialectological questionnaire, with some prompts from Lemster. Items include kinship words (grandmother, midwife), shop and store, house and room, attic, hell, a rich man, enemy, face, spectacles, and numerals and measures such as one and a half. He also gives words for ceiling and floor, with some discussion of German versus Yiddish forms. He says which words he knows or has heard and which he has not.

The transcript shows the questionnaire running through kinship, household and numeral items, and the opening remark about Poland is brief and hard to follow.

Kerler thanks Shtaigman and ends the interview. He hands over material describing the project and his address, and says something about the project's Romanian connection.