Anna (Khane) Borisovna Tkach

The research team looks for the house on a street in Yampil', speaking Russian about house numbers and directions. They are then greeted at the door and introduce themselves in Yiddish and Russian. The woman asks whether they remember some Yiddish, and the talk about the house and being invited in is only partly clear.

The passage is a mix of Russian and Yiddish, with the team being greeted at the door rather than only driving.

Tkach, born in 1935 in the small town of Chernivtsi ("Kleyn Tshernovits"), talks about her parents, grandparents and the traditional Jewish house with its mezuzah. She recalls her uncle the gabbai, the synagogue with its women's gallery, her aunt reading tkhines, and the killing of another aunt's family. She describes the war years, refugees and the ghetto, the postwar schools and her brother's studies, and her forty years as a journalist in Yampil'. She then covers food customs for Sabbath, Passover, Purim and Hanukkah, children's games, Yiddish-speaking neighbors and friends, and weddings with their dances and musicians. She also talks about non-Jews who spoke Yiddish, the postwar fear of speaking Yiddish and the antisemitism of the Doctors' Plot, and Ukrainian literature. The last part is a dialectological questionnaire: she is asked how various Russian words, phrases and sentences would be said in Yiddish (greetings, house and window words, colors, comparatives).

Questionnaire session with Tkach. She is asked for Yiddish equivalents of Russian and Ukrainian words and sentences: verbs, adjectives, synonyms for 'sick', words for honest and religious people, a convert, a midwife, family terms, house and household words, the dreidel, and sentences to translate. She says she has not spoken Yiddish for some fifty years. Katz and Kerler then ask about earlier songs, pious Jews and a poor 'tsadik' in Kleyn Chernevits (Mala Chernivtsi?), tsadikim's graves, the abandoned houses there and Yiddish writers she has read.

Moves from the questionnaire to pious and poor Jews, tsadikim, and the decline of Yiddish in the region.

Brief passage of camera and crew talk in Tomashpol', with a few Yiddish remarks and Russian speech about where to stop near a house.