Alexander (Shure) Ilyich Cherner

Informal chat among community members and the visiting team. A woman and an interviewer discuss languages: Yiddish and German, and Russian film titles. Kerler says he is from America and talks with them about Jews in America speaking English. Lemster asks them to sit down and settle for the interview.

The chat is about language and America.

Brief start of the interview with an elderly woman. Kerler asks her name and she gives her own and her father's. She says her grandmother died young and the granddaughters were named after her. She says she worked at one workplace for thirty years and, as Kerler states, lived somewhere for forty-three years (?).

Gives the speaker's father's name and the naming after the grandmother.

Cherner introduces himself: his first name, Alexander, with Shure in Yiddish, and his birth in 1935. Lemster says he is from Chişinău. Cherner mentions an uncle who was repressed under Stalin as a revolutionary, and his grandfather Khayim Zise, a glazier, who was a klezmer. He says he writes klezmer melodies, more than five hundred, and songs in Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish. He played the violin with his grandfather's band at Jewish weddings in Balta and describes dancing the sher. He recalls no Purim-shpil texts, only melodies.

Adds the repressed uncle, the sher dance and Cherner's own composing.

Cherner talks about Yiddish culture after the war: a Moscow theater troupe was sent and his grandfather was invited to play with it in the late 1940s. He left music, moved to Kharkiv and worked at a factory as a turner and locksmith. He lived in Balta until the early 1950s. He says his grandmother died long before and that his mother hardly remembered her.

Adds the Moscow troupe and the grandmother's early death.

Cherner talks about prewar Balta as a largely Jewish town and about playing with his grandfather and the other klezmers, four or five of them, at Jewish weddings. His grandfather, born in 1800s (the year is unclear), taught his children several instruments. He remembers playing once, around 1948, at a wedding with a canopy held outdoors. He describes the sad and happy melodies played, the guests and the food. He also tells of the synagogue in Balta, which stayed open after the war while the old congregation died out.

Adds the outdoor wedding canopy, the postwar synagogue and the wedding foods.

Cherner says holidays were barely observed at home, there was no matzo baking, and the old men marked them. He describes the shoykhet in a large courtyard after the war, who slaughtered poultry for Jews every day, and the custom of kapores. He answers questions about words for a field and a village, about dialects, and tells of his grandfather Israel Cherner and Khayim Zise, who was with them in the ghetto. A relative died in Moscow. The synagogue stayed open until the early 1950s, and few Jews now speak Yiddish.

Adds the shoykhet, kapores, terminology and the grandfather in the ghetto.

Cherner says that at home they spoke Yiddish and Russian, Russian when children were in Russian school and Yiddish with parents as they grew older. He recalls that the klezmers used a special jargon with a word for money. He describes the order of a Jewish wedding as his grandfather, the bandleader, greeted the guests with music and paid dances were taken. The greeting was spoken in Russian and he cannot recall it in Yiddish.

Cherner answers questions about family, memorial days and holidays; he says there was little Jewish observance in his home. Memorial customs, the cemetery and food are touched upon. He says Soviet policy removed Jewish culture, magazines and theaters, and that one had to join the Party to live. He recalls a Soviet Yiddish editorial office and writing in Yiddish.

Cherner says he moved to Odesa in 1961 and married in 1962 without a wedding. His wife, who comes from Kherson, does not speak Yiddish. He answers a question about Jewish colonies and kolkhozes: there were many rich ones and non-Jewish neighbors praised the Jews' farm work. He says Jews in America mostly do not know Yiddish, that many Jews were in the Party before the war and were shot by Stalin, and that Yiddish writers were shot. Afterward people were afraid and no longer taught or painted their children in Jewish ways.

Adds his wife and the Stalin-era shootings of Yiddish writers.

Cherner says he moved to Odesa in 1961 and married in 1962 without a wedding. His wife, who comes from Kherson, does not speak Yiddish. He answers a question about Jewish colonies and kolkhozes: there were many rich ones and non-Jewish neighbors praised the Jews' farm work. He says Jews in America mostly do not know Yiddish, that many Jews were in the Party before the war and were shot by Stalin, and that Yiddish writers were shot. Afterward people were afraid and no longer taught or painted their children in Jewish ways.

Adds his wife and the Stalin-era shootings of Yiddish writers.

Cherner talks about the Balta ghetto. Many Jews arrived from Bessarabia, Chişinău and Romania, and Romanian, German and Italian soldiers were in town. His family was housed in a room in a neighbor's courtyard, while Romanian and German officers lived in their own house. The family returned in 1945. He describes how the Soviet army's arrival saved the Jews from the Germans, and how an uncle, taken to work at the station, was locked with other Jews in a room and shot or burned; the details are unclear.

Adds the housing arrangements, the soldiers' nationalities and the return in 1945.

Cherner answers questions about the Yiddish dialect in Balta, which he says is like Chişinău, with many Ukrainian and Russian words. He says his mother was born in Balta and his father in Odesa in 1912 (?). He says he goes to his mother's grave in Odesa and does not say a prayer; instead he sings a song he wrote himself in Russian and Yiddish about longing for his mother.

Adds the dialect question, the parents' birthplaces and the visit to the grave.

Cherner talks about the song he sings at his mother's grave, saying he reads the words from a paper. He then tells about the song "Yerushalayim" he wrote, to words by Sara Zinger, whom he knows through Zhenya Fayerman. She is from Odesa and lives in Israel, and he recites a few lines of it.

Adds Zinger and Fayerman and that the words and melody were sent from Israel.

Cherner answers questions about individual words and expressions: dybbuk, golem, a New Year greeting, and a word of Hebrew origin that he says is not his dialect. He then explains a greeting formula used at weddings.

Cherner answers a long run of dialectological questions, with Lemster giving prompts in Yiddish and Russian. Items include words for thanks, groups, leather, hat, pickled and sour cucumbers, sour or vinegar meat, the tongue and the ear, deaf person, late and early, cold, high and higher, near, ill, very beautiful, 'I like him', run away, honest and pious person, apostate or convert (?), Christian and peasant, tree, brandy, potatoes and potato pancakes, street, road, and to live on a street. He often says he has forgotten a word or cannot hear the prompt. Later items include sentence-type prompts such as 'you will come at one', 'came back', 'on the ceiling' and 'on the bridge', and words for enemy, fence and monument.

The transcript shows only word elicitation; it contains no list of Yiddish authors or talk of prewar Yiddish culture.