Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Interview in Chernovits (Chernivtsi) on 2012-06-01 with Maks (Meir) Shikler, born 1919 in Ptila (Putila), also indexed with Kotyar, Khaim-Ber. Kerler questions him about his family, his childhood in Putila, the Vyzhnitsa gymnasium, the war, Yiddish and the press, and words and names. A second voice joins in, and a short Russian exchange comes near the end. The session continues in later files.
Opening chat about the languages spoken in the city. The informant says Hungarians lived in the town and that he and the others learned to curse in Hungarian. He then describes the Herren Gasse promenade in Chernovits (Chernivtsi) in the evenings, so crowded that no one could pass.
Personal data: born 14 October 1919, father Shikler, mother from the Linder family. The father came from Putila and the mother from Vyzhnitsa. The informant remembers the Vyzhnitsa rebbe, the Hager family, and tells of a rebbe who cursed a man who travelled on the Sabbath, after which the man was killed. He says the family was observant but the children were not very much so.
Childhood in Putila: two cheders, and the rich Jewish cattle dealers who bought from Hutsul highlanders and drove cattle on foot to the railway. English buyers came every year. He names his mother Leah and his brother Markus/Mordkhe. The home language was German, and he explains how he knows Yiddish. About 80 percent of the town, roughly two thousand people, was Jewish, with two synagogues and two slaughterers, and the Vyzhnitsa rebbe visited twice a year. He recalls the rebbe visiting the cheder and the cheder curriculum.
Childhood games, football and school excursions into the Carpathians. After the war he marked hiking trails there. He names the languages of the Vyzhnitsa gymnasium, German and French, and tells how his mother-in-law did not know he understood French. He describes four years at the Chernovits gymnasium and the Iron Guard beating Jews in the 1930s.
Work and war. He worked at the Hercules knitwear factory, owned by relatives, and when the war began he worked for the Soviets as an interpreter. Evacuated, he was given rubles and food on the road, and tells an anecdote about a kolkhoz with sour cream. He was drafted into a construction battalion and guarded railway stations in Saratov. He describes the Germans deported to Kazakhstan and the Russians' poor living conditions.
Kerler asks about Putila holidays. He recalls Passover matzo baked by the bakery, the Purim masked players and the Purim song or saying, the Hanukkah foods, and food for Shavuot (milk) and Yom Kippur. He cannot recall the Purim songs. He recalls children playing in small booths, the sukkah, at Sukkot.
Family: his brother and sister (Milli) died in Israel. He tells of a month-long visit to Israel under Gorbachev, walking from the Golan to Eilat and into Sinai as part of a Chernovits tourist group he had organised. After the war many Jews came to Chernovits, and he mentions Rabbi Dr. Marcus (Mark) from Hamburg, shot by the Romanians, and a memorial in the woods. He tells of fleeing east, of Jews who would not believe the warnings, and of seeing Jews on guard in Moscow in the war.
The press and writers. He recalls the Yiddish daily Dos Yidishe Vort, four German-language Jewish papers in Chernovits, and postwar Sovetish Heymland. He names the writers Moyshe Altman and Yosef Burg (Burk). He tells how Burg's father drove timber rafts, hutsul rafting, and how the rafting was banned by false scientific claims about fish. He discusses Soviet Yiddish theatre and the closure of Yiddish publishing under Stalin. Kerler asks whether he knows Yiddish poets.
Chernovits street names: Herren Gasse was renamed under the Romanians for the landowner Yankov Lander, then for Kobylianska. He describes the metropolitan's residence and which places he visited before the war, including Vyzhnitsa, Radautz, Storozhynets and Suceava (?), with school trips to Bucharest.
Questions on Yiddish varieties. The Lithuanian Jews speak a little differently, there were Polish Jews from Galicia, and he knows Stanislav, Kolomey and Kosov. He explains an expression about a false witness, a Kosover tsoygn (?), and the cheaper goods in Galicia. Gentiles in the area spoke Yiddish, and Jews were 80 percent of Vyzhnitsa. He lists the other places in Bukovina and Bessarabia, and says that Paul Celan went to the same gymnasium. He knows of Itsik Manger and, with Kerler, discusses the Hutsul word for timber rafts. They discuss Bessarabian Jews, and he says songs were not mixed in language and that he learned Russian from a Russian classmate. The Lipovans are mentioned.
Lipovans, Old Believers who fled from Russia and were friendly to Jews. Then Kerler asks about the Germanised first names of boys such as Max, Moritz, Salomon and Josef, Max and Moritz books, and Yiddish singers and theatre visiting Putila before the war. Kerler and the informant then chat in Russian with the other voices, ending with Kerler noting his address and the symbolic payment for the interview.