Samuil (Shmiel) Borisovich Belobrov

Belobrov gives his name and background. He was born in Korsun and called Shmuelik at home. His father was Ber and his mother Reyzl. His parents bought half of a house in the 1930s, a house built in 1897. He says more than half of the prewar town was Jewish. His father came from a town rendered Baslav (probably Boryslav) and his mother from Shpola. He also names his grandparents.

Adds the parents' and grandparents' names, and the town's Jewish majority

Belobrov says he went to a Ukrainian school and finished five classes before the war. He did not attend a Jewish school, and his father was a tailor. He had two brothers. The younger one died in evacuation in Kazakhstan, and his brother Meylekh, two years younger, lives in Vladikavkaz, where Belobrov keeps contact with him. His maternal grandparents and an uncle were killed by the Germans in Shpola. He worked for decades as a lathe operator at a factory.

Belobrov describes the wartime evacuations, three in all: near Rostov, then near Stalingrad, then to Kemerovo. At fourteen he worked in a factory casting aerial bombs there until 1945. The family was kept mobilized afterwards. His father was drafted into the army in 1941.

Adds the father's call-up to the army in 1941

Belobrov tells how his father returned from the army first and sent for the family, so that he and his mother later returned to Korsun. He describes his father's work at the factory, where he was a respected, honest worker. The factory dated from before the Revolution, and many Jews worked there. Kerler then asks him to turn to his childhood.

Adds the factory's prewar origins and its Jewish workers

Belobrov recalls childhood play in the street and says his parents were not strongly religious. They still marked Passover, Hanukkah and Yom Kippur, though they did not go to synagogue. His father, a tailor, worked at home and so was able to keep Sabbath. Friday evening was a festive meal. He describes baking matzo together with neighboring families, and gives a detailed recipe for gefilte fish. He also mentions Jewish song and a choir that travelled to Kyiv, and non-Jews who spoke Yiddish.

Adds the matzo baking with neighbors, the choir trip to Kyiv, and Yiddish-speaking non-Jews

Belobrov takes part in a dialectological questionnaire, translating Russian words and sentences into Yiddish. The items include the word for vodka, thanks, mouse, groats, skin, pleasure, dove, deaf, sun, son, kiss, hand, late, cold, close, faster, breath, stingy, sick, honest, believer, cross, peasant. He also describes a meat dish called rasl (?) and its seasoning. A woman speaks in Russian about a relative who was a party secretary. At the end he discusses the difference between a village and a shtetl, and says Jews also lived in villages before the war.

Adds a Russian-language account by a woman, and the shtetl/village distinction

Kerler and Katz discuss with Belobrov and a second informant whether places such as Smila, Uman and Berdychiv count as a town or a shtetl, apparently by whether they are subordinate to the region; Uman is a big town with a park and a tsadik. The rest is dialectological questionnaire work in Yiddish and Russian. Items asked include flowers, the numbers twenty and the teens, grandmother and midwife, 'tasty', 'to dig', 'well', 'potato', the prepositions 'at the table' and 'on the street', and sentences to translate. There are also a few asides on the dead, the border with Poland and a person's home language.

Adds that the passage is mostly extended questionnaire work with terms for objects, numbers and sentences, plus some talk on the Polish border and the dead.

Kerler and Katz ask the informants for a story or a song from before the war, and one of them is invited to sing a little song. Kerler thanks the two informants for a double interview in one sitting. The tape then ends with a few remarks about garden plants such as dill and parsley, apparently with town footage.