Mikhail Iosifovich Skop

Katsman talks about his parents' home: the grandfather, who is named, and Sabbath customs, including his mother's gefilte fish and challah. Kerler stops to ask how to say a term and what the dish tasted like, and Katsman answers. He describes the Passover seder and Shavuot dairy food. He recalls sleeping in the family sukkah and sending Purim gifts of food to ten houses as a child. At the end he starts a story about a sanatorium in Kislovodsk.

includes Kerler's questions about how to say things in Yiddish, Shavuot food and the sukkah

Katsman tells of a Simchat Torah evening after the war, when he was a doctor at a sanatorium in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. A Jew from Leningrad arranged the rental of a restaurant for the Jews of the sanatorium, where they ate together and heard Yiddish songs. He recalls a Jewish artist from Odessa who performed. Kerler asks whether they danced hakafot; Katsman says no.

names the Leningrad Jew and the Odessa artist, and Kerler's question about hakafot

Dialectological questions from the Yiddish questionnaire, with Kerler and Katz asking and Katsman answering. They cover the meaning of 'a good Jew' versus a holy man or tsadik, and of dibbuk, golem and shlimazl. Words are elicited for a book, house, group, skin, mouse, window pane, color terms, illness and sickness, ear, and a ladder. Several items are given in Russian for translation into Yiddish, and some sentences are tried. A second voice repeats the question about the good Jew.

Kerler thanks Katsman and concludes the formal interview. Katsman mentions a Kyiv rabbi and then says in Russian that he served as chief doctor of a partisan brigade and has been photographed for a Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. Kerler asks him to say it in Yiddish.

includes the Kyiv rabbi and the Los Angeles museum

Prompted by Kerler to speak Yiddish, Katsman tells of his war: he was in the Minsk underground for several months, then chief doctor of a partisan brigade in Belarus, treating partisans and villagers. He later served in the army as a doctor and was wounded. He says the partisans blew up railway tracks and took people out of the Minsk ghetto, about twenty-seven of them, young people, some of whom may still be alive. Kerler promises another interview within a year.

Kerler meets the new interviewee, Skop, introduces himself and learns that Skop was born in Korosten' about eighty years earlier. They look for a place to sit while waiting for others to arrive.

Katz sets up the interview, giving the date, 26 May 2003, and place, Korosten'. Skop gives his name as Moyshe (Mikhail Iosifovich) and surname Skop. Katz begins to ask for his address.

Skop talks about his family. His father Yosl, who was born in a small town (Polonne?), was a gravestone maker, and his mother Reyzl came from near Moscow. His parents stayed in town during the war, and the local police killed his mother while the Germans commanded. He names his six brothers. Five of the seven brothers were killed in the war and one died earlier.

Skop recalls early childhood: his parents were very observant and not rich. He talks about paying for kosher meat, Sabbath and the holidays, and strangers coming. He loved going to synagogue with his father and was carried there as a small child. He did not attend cheder but a Jewish school.

Skop describes his eight classes at the Yiddish school and the writers taught there, among them Sholem Aleichem, Itsik Fefer, Abraham Goldenberg and David Bergelson. He recalls Sholem Aleichem plays staged in the local Yiddish theater. The school was closed in 1937 and he moved to a Russian school, finishing ten classes with no Yiddish or Hebrew taught. He says antisemitism began to show then, and that the war began when he was fifteen or sixteen.

Skop talks about being taken in 1940 with other Jewish children to a vocational school to learn a trade, and then, aged seventeen, being sent to Siberia. He was drafted into the army at eighteen. He fought at Stalingrad, in the Donbas, at Kursk and Dnipro, then in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Katz asks Skop about the Sabbath and the town before the war. Skop recalls cooking cholent, baking their own bread and buying milk, and the family trading in meat. He names five synagogues in Korosten', including one for the wealthy, a shoemakers' and a tailors' synagogue and a kloyz near the railway station open day and night. Travelers came from Korosten' and other towns, among them Berdychiv and Kasrilevke.

Skop says that until 1937 everything was as before, then schools were closed and synagogues turned into warehouses. Katz asks about childhood prayer, and Skop recalls Hanukkah money and the dreydl, Purim noisemakers, asking the Four Questions at his father's seder, and the labor of baking matzo. He then speaks of Lubavitch Hasidim, who were beloved in Korosten', and of a well-known rebbe whom people from far away, Jews and non-Jews, visited, with trips to a tsadik's grave and how it was spoken of. Katz asks about the Litvaks, and Skop describes the Yiddish of Vilna and Belarusian Jews as hard to understand and tells of his parents speaking Yiddish with Germans. The passage ends with healing practices and a story of a blind child brought to a rebbe.

Covers Litvak speech, the Germans and healers, and visits to the Lubavitch tsadik's grave, which the catalogue label does not mention.

Skop tells a story of a child who could not speak and was healed through a healer's help; the mother and an older sister are involved and the child finally begins to speak. It is a narrated tale, not about life today.

Katz asks about clever men of the town of Chavne (Polesskoye), and Skop speaks of a respected wise man there and of another man with a nickname. The transcript is garbled, so the names are not reliable.

Katz asks about prewar songs and weddings. Skop remembers weddings and the wedding canopy, and answers questions about the wedding jester (badkhn) and matchmaker (shadkhn), then a question about the dybbuk.

A single song is attempted and the passage moves on to wedding roles and the word dybbuk.

Dialectological questionnaire with Katz and Kerler. Skop explains words such as dybbuk and golem, then gives Yiddish equivalents for vodka, blood, house, skin, cat and mouse, dove, window pane, blue, building, ear, hair colour and illness, along with the cross, ladder and forms of address. Skop notes that Yiddish in Korosten' was like Belarusian Yiddish, and says the Litvak speakers talk differently.

Skop gives the prewar population of Korosten' and says where its Jews came from (figures partly garbled). The questionnaire continues with words for floor/ceiling, fence, face, back, wealthy man, 'another story', one and a half, attic and shopkeeper. Katz then asks him to recall stories of prewar Korosten'.

Gives the prewar population of Korosten' and its Jewish share.

Skop speaks about Nune, the madman of Korosten', killed when the Germans entered the town, and about Meir the blind man, a beggar who recognised people by voice. He then mentions Meyshe the gravedigger at the cemetery, and a search for a grave by visitors from abroad. The talk of the cemetery is partly garbled.