Anna Moiseevna Marmalevskaia

Marmalevskaia gives personal and family information: her birth in Bila Tserkva in 1923, her father Moyshe, a tailor born in Bila Tserkva, and her mother Khane. She mentions that during the evacuation the family left, while her father and brother were at the front.

Gives her birth date (month) and her mother's name.

Marmalevskaia describes the evacuation to Russia near Astrakhan, with her mother and three siblings, while her father and brother were at the front. At eighteen she supported a family of five by catching fish for four and a half years in a fishing kolkhoz on the Volga. She says many evacuees there starved, and that her ten-year-old sister walked to fetch fish.

The details of the second family from Bila Tserkva and of the mother's malaria are only partly confirmed here.

Marmalevskaia tells of the return to Bila Tserkva in October 1945. Her father came back from the front disabled, and the family's half-house was gone. They bought a ruined kitchen in which six people lived, and her brother Yankl returned in 1949. She names her siblings Yankl and Tanye and says her mother worked at the fish farm and fell ill with malaria.

Names the little sister Tanye and a youngest sister, and says the mother was ill in hospital.

Marmalevskaia recalls the famine of 1932–33: the family ate potato peelings mixed with oats, and two of her mother's sisters with their children died. Kerler then asks about her childhood, her family's one room with kitchen, her siblings' and parents' birth years, and her mother's work. She describes her mother weaving while swollen from hunger, and how her father sold his suit in Moscow and sent bread, which saved the family.

Also gives parents' and siblings' birth years and the mother's weaving work.

Marmalevskaia says the family was poor when she was nine, her father worked in a tailors' cooperative, and she and her brother attended a Yiddish school in Bila Tserkva for ten years, finishing in 1940. She cannot name the school or the subjects, says she can read but has forgotten how to write Yiddish, and still has Yiddish books. She mentions marrying in 1946 and that her husband's family was killed by the Germans.

Adds her ability to read but not write Yiddish and the fate of her husband's family.

Marmalevskaia talks about her husband Marmalevskii, who worked at a factory as a smith, was a lifelong Yiddish speaker, and acted in the Yiddish theater in Bila Tserkva from 1989 until about 2000, playing Tevye the Milkman. She tells of her son in Kyiv, a geophysicist, and her daughter Vera in Petah Tikva, Israel, and grandchildren. Kerler asks about the theater, its director Anatolii Klorfeld (now in America), its repertoire and frequency of performances, and the video cassette she has.

Adds Kerler's request to copy her video cassette and details of the son's work and trips abroad.

Marmalevskaia shows her Yiddish books, including a Sholem Aleichem volume (Tevye the Milkman) and monologues that her husband knew by heart. She says she still reads Yiddish but has forgotten how to write it.

Kerler and Katz ask Marmalevskaia about weddings and food customs. She recalls klezmer music and the huppah but not the badkhn or songs, and she names her husband as the singer. Questions follow on food: gefilte fish, chicken broth with almonds, tsimmes made with dried fruit or carrots, and latkes for Hanukkah made from various flours, as well as the words for vodka.

Kerler asks Marmalevskaia about folk healing and beliefs. She does not remember old-women's remedies but recalls the term for an evil eye and its removal by incantation, and Kerler asks about the dybbuk and the golem.

Marmalevskaia answers questions about Jewish funerals and the cemetery in Bila Tserkva, which has an old and a new Jewish cemetery. Kerler asks for the Yiddish words for the cemetery and for burial, and for the expression used when remembering the dead.

Kerler asks Marmalevskaia about Yiddish after the war: she says she and her husband spoke Russian at home, spoke Yiddish only in the theater, and that her children understand but do not speak it. Kerler then asks, in Russian, for Yiddish equivalents of everyday phrases such as greetings and 'please', and she translates some and cannot recall others.

Marmalevskaia answers a long dialectological questionnaire, prompted by Russian or Ukrainian words and short sentences. The items include animal and body words (mouse, belly, skin), house and building terms, window glass, the colour blue, pigeon and dove, and words for sick and sleepy. Other items are comparatives and adverbs of time, religious terms (icon, cross, convert, peasant, non-Jew, honest, believer), kitchen and household words, numbers, and the word for 'then'. A few Russian-sentence translations are included, and she sometimes says she does not remember a word or that it is not Yiddish.

The catalogue says only that questions continue; the transcript shows the item types, including religious terms and sentence translation, and a few Russian-language remarks by the informant.

Closing exchange: Kerler and Katz thank Marmalevskaia, praise her memory and tease her for not wanting to sing. They ask her to sing a song her mother used to sing and discuss the Yiddish form of her first name. Kerler also remarks on what the Americans ask.