Efim Isaakovich Rubin; Matvei Vladimirovich Rubin

Street encounter with an elderly woman and others in Bershad'; local people name streets and the Soviet names of the town's quarters. The woman gives her name, says her father's family were Oystrakh, and mentions a relative who lived in Moscow and one in America. Kerler asks whether she can sing; she says she knows a song from the camp, and mentions that she survived the killings at the pit.

Includes the first hint of her survival of the shooting at the pit.

The woman tells of surviving the killings in the Bershad' ghetto, lying wounded and escaping from the pit, and wandering from town to town. She says she lived in the synagogue building, tells of a sister who fell at the front, and says her mother left the house. She now lives with her husband, a Jewish shoemaker, while her daughter lives nearby; Kerler and others discuss compensation payments from Germany.

Adds the postwar family situation, her husband the shoemaker, and the question of compensation.

Family: a sister who went to the front and an uncle in America who wanted to take her out. The father died in the 1930s, perhaps during the famine, leaving the mother with two children. The informant says her grandparents are no longer alive and recalls that the family lived in the synagogue building where her mother prayed. Her mother was a cook; Kerler wishes her health to enjoy her grandchildren, and the talk touches on Israel.

Adds the uncle who wanted to take her sister to America and the mother's work as a cook.

Gvinter is asked how her mother prepared fish for Jewish weddings and explains the recipe for chopped fish. Kerler suggests a name for the dish; she mentions onion and a little pepper. Another voice thanks her.

Adds Kerler's naming of the dish.

Kerler and others speak in Hebrew and Yiddish with a woman, probably Gvinter's daughter (?), who lives in Israel and works there. There is talk of San Francisco, Jerusalem and health; at the end Gvinter calls for someone to come over and asks about a name.

Gvinter is asked to repeat a sentence in Yiddish about how Jews lived on the streets before the war, and speaks of Jews living close together. She tells of reading books by Sholem Aleichem and Mendele and of giving her books away when she left for Israel. She also says the ghetto was very large and lists places from which Jews were brought, including Chernivtsi, Mohyliv and Sharhorod, and recalls Jews being bound in chains.

Gvinter's husband (Yuzl, per the catalogue) joins in. She says she has two daughters and four grandchildren in Israel. She speaks of living among mixed nationalities there, with Arabs and others, and of an Israeli's remark about preserving Jewish identity.

Gvinter recites a song she learned in the camp or ghetto, about the killing of a family at the pit, a child and the Jewish cemetery. She says she is an orphan who lived through it; Kerler comments on her strength.

Adds the content of the song about the shootings and her words as an orphan.

Closing the interview, Kerler asks permission to use the recording for research. Gvinter identifies photographs, an uncle who owned a factory in America, her husband (Yankel Itzker, per the transcript), and tells of her mother Sura Oystrakh the cook. Kerler hopes to bring her gefilte fish next year and they say goodbye.

Adds the permission request and the family names.

Concluding the Bershad' visit, with wishes of health exchanged. Local people talk about the Jewish community, the Soviet and Jewish schools, and the writer Brodovsky (?), who lived in the town for some years and had no luck there. Part of the passage is town footage with voices in Russian.

Kerler asks how Yiddish speakers say the name of the town; the second speaker says Uman and tells a story about why it is called that: a tavern keeper's Jewish wife Manya, hence a form like Umania, used by Jews in earlier times. Kerler asks whether Jews or non-Jews say it, and begins the interview proper.

Adds the folk etymology of the town's name.

Kerler takes down contact details and names: Matvei Vladimirovich and Efim Isaakovich. Both were born in Uman' and moved with their parents to the town of Buki, fifty kilometres away. Matvei was born in 1928 and Efim a little earlier. He says many Jews were killed in the area and the family fled to a smaller town; in 1940 he was at a military school in Odessa.

A Rubin describes his wartime service: the officer school leaving Odessa for Moldova on the first day of the war, a first fight with a German, being encircled, then Moscow, the Volkhov, Kalinin and Smolensk fronts. At 18 he commanded forty soldiers and burned tanks with bottles. He tells of being shot and wounded on the Smolensk front, with six operations, and is now a disabled veteran, with a pension of 180 hryvnia, who attends prayer with a rabbi.

Rubin says he and the other go to services on Sabbath. Kerler asks about the year of his marriage, and when he went to Odessa and when he was drafted: he says he was in the army before the war, in 1940.

Adds the dating of military school and the Sabbath minyan.

Efim recalls boyhood in Buki, when he studied four years in a Yiddish school before the communists closed it. He then moved to a Ukrainian school and finished ten classes, and was drafted into the army in the year he finished. He says he can still read and write Yiddish and mentions a small book printed in Hebrew and Yiddish.

Kerler asks Efim to write some Yiddish words, such as the word for Sabbath and the word for friend. Efim says his handwriting is poor now. He then recalls that his mother was a pious woman who prayed and read Hebrew, and gives her birth year.

Efim's mother and her Hebrew learning are introduced here.

Efim gives his mother's name and maiden name (Shtutman) and tells how she travelled to Israel and died there in 1991 (?). His father is buried in Buki, and he has visited his sisters' graves in Israel. He mentions his daughter, a dentist in Kharkiv, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He says he was the eldest of three siblings and that his father was a barber, as was Motl's father, a butcher. His own work as a dental technician comes up, as do the death of Motl's father in Buki and the family names.

Adds a trip to Israel to the family's graves, his daughter in Kharkiv and the fathers' occupations.

Efim and Motl describe Jewish Buki as a large town with many Jews, mostly locally born. It had one large synagogue with separate women's and men's sections, three shochets and a rabbi whose name is partly remembered (Zarnitski?). Kerler asks what the town was called in Yiddish, and the electric station is mentioned.

Adds the shochets, the rabbi and the synagogue layout.

Motl and Efim talk about the first hydroelectric station, built near Buki on the river Hirskyi Tikych and shown at an exhibition in Moscow. It was later merged into a chain and closed. Kerler stops to ask for the Yiddish name of the river. Kerler then turns to cheder.

Efim says he did not attend cheder but a Yiddish school that was soon closed after four years. He learned reading and writing there and recalls the Yiddish textbooks. Kerler asks whether he remembers a poem or song.

The passage is about the Yiddish school and cheder, not the dam.

Efim sings or recites a few Yiddish songs, including one with a Rebbe Nachman refrain about dancing in hard times and a wedding song. He then speaks of the family of klezmer musicians in Buki, especially his uncle Hershl Bonder, who played the cornet. A relative named Nadya played the drum (?). He also mentions that during the famine of the 1930s hungry children were told to dance.

Adds the wedding song, the cornet and the famine children's dancing.

Efim recalls the famine of the early 1930s, when people ate frogs from the river and many died, though he does not remember Jews of Buki dying. He lists the town's Jewish trades, such as tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths and wheelwrights, and explains the terms for those who make wheels and wagon parts. He also tells his father's story of straw roofs being burnt so that tin could be sold.

Adds the trades, the terms for wheelwrights and the roof story.

Efim describes Passover customs: bringing down the Passover dishes from the attic, baking matzo communally and the foods made from matzo. He also describes the seder and the four questions, which the son recited, though he has forgotten them. Kerler asks about Chad Gadya and Hanukkah, and they discuss lighting candles and potato (?) latkes for Hanukkah. Latkes are said to be called blinis in Russian.

Adds latkes and the Russian name for them.

Efim says a memorial was erected after the war at the killing site of the town's Jews and offers to drive there. Kerler asks about words for tombstone and Jewish and non-Jewish cemeteries. Motl says his mother took him to synagogue as a child. The closing of the Yiddish school in Buki is discussed, along with the father's work as shochet until the war and kosher meat.

Adds the memorial at the killing site, the closing of the school and the shochet father.

Motl, with Efim, explains how gefilte fish was made, from skinning and chopping the fish to stuffing the skin and cooking it with sauce, and discusses whether it was sweet or peppery. They also describe fish cooked in layers with beets, and also sweet meat dishes made with jam or sour salt. Kerler asks for Yiddish names for potato latkes, rugelach-like pastries with raisins and nuts, honey cake and kamishl, and for the braided breads kuletsh and challah baked for Sabbath. Some Russian and Ukrainian terms are named.

The passage also covers the gefilte fish recipe in detail, baking and Sabbath breads.

Kerler puts dialectological questionnaire items to Efim and Motl: words for bed, headache, cry, how, please, forgive me, street, and for the cross and for convert. They discuss the Buki word for "cross" and how "he became a Christian" or "became a Jew" is said. Some items are answered in Russian.

Rubin and a second speaker answer Kerler's dialectological questions. The items include words for vodka, cooler, higher, mouse and mice, the house and its rooms, a non-Jew and a non-Jewish woman, thanks, the vineyard, a mug, 'thousand', a rich man, a book, and a few others. They also discuss how people in Buki spoke compared with Lithuanian Yiddish speakers, and who used certain older expressions.

The speakers also comment on Lithuanian Yiddish and on how Buki speech differed.

Rubin talks about the many klezmer families in Buki and nearby towns, who played at weddings. He recalls a wedding entertainer who spoke in rhymes and the klezmer slang for words such as water, bread, money and meat. Kerler then asks about Purim plays, and the speakers recall visiting Yiddish theater troupes from Kharkiv, Kyiv and Moscow, and a play seen in childhood.

Adds the klezmer slang words and the visiting Yiddish theater troupes.

Kerler's brief closing remarks. The transcript for this span is too thin to say more.

Short exchange between Kerler and a second speaker about a possible future visit to places in the area, and fragments about something in Yiddish. The words are mostly unclear, and the transcript does not show any synagogue content.

The transcript shows only unclear conversation, with no synagogue content.