Cluj-Napoca(Kloyzenburg in the project's index)2013-05-1711 min · 3 stretches · 2 questions about wordsYiddish 99%
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.
Summary
Part of a longer session recorded in Kloyzenburg (Cluj) in May 2013, with no interviewee name in the index. An elderly man who stays mostly at home talks with Kerler. The first half is chat about the team's travel route and where each comes from. The second half is the man's account of his birthplace, a village near Cluj, and its twenty Jewish families.
Stretches
00:00–04:05
The man says he stays indoors and may go out into the courtyard when it gets warmer. Kerler says the team has just come from Nodvarad (?), with Arade (?) mentioned, and that they next go to Bayamare (?). The man discusses the Yiddish and local names of Baniya and Kloyzenburg, and Kerler asks what Arade was called and what it was like. Kerler says they are staying at Hotel Transilvania, that the man is the first person they have spoken to in the city, and that they have also met the president. The man then talks about his poor health, his blood pressure and his rare outings.
Kerler lists the rest of the team's route: Kluzh, then Baniya, Sihet (?), Ukraine, the Carpathians and Ivano-Frankivsk. He explains where Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislav) lies on the road to Bukovina. They compare Bessarabia, Moldova and Podolia, where Kerler's father comes from. Kerler remarks that Moldovans eat a lot of mamaliga (?) and mentions Kishinev as the capital.
InformalYiddish language and dialectFood· Kluzh, Baniya (?), Sihet (?), Ukraine, Carpathians, Ivano-Frankivsk, Stanislav, Bukovina, Kolomea (?), Bessarabia, Moldova, Podolia, Kishinev, Transylvania
06:41–10:40
Asked when he was first in a certain place (Gros-Vardan, as transcribed), the man says he was born about forty or fifty kilometres from Kluzh. He names his birthplace as Zal (?), in Hungarian Mezhe-za (?), a large village near the town of Ludosh (?). Twenty Jewish families lived there. They had a mikveh, a melamed, a shoykhet, a synagogue and a minyan on holidays. A Jewish miller, whose name sounds like Pants (?), ran the village mill. Others were merchants, shopkeepers and timber dealers, plus a shoemaker and a tailor, and the village had no Jewish smith. Kerler asks about the Yiddish word for boards and whether the miller spoke Yiddish. The man says the miller spoke Hungarian.
What was the village called in Yiddish? — the Yiddish name of the man's birthplace
09:39
Kerler supplies the word for boards (ברייטער), after the man says he does not know the Yiddish word; he checks it (הילצערנע ברייטער, האלץ). — the Yiddish word for wooden boards