Cluj-Napoca(Kloyzenburg in the project's index)2013-05-1711 min · 4 stretches · 2 questions about wordsYiddish 94% Hungarian 6%
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
Tenth-minute file of a long session recorded in Cluj (Kloyzenburg) on 17 May 2013; the index gives no name. An elderly man born in 1920 talks with Kerler about his family's roots in a village called Zal (?) and Zalau-area places, German-speaking Jews, his Yiddish and Hebrew names, and Jewish life in nearby villages. The file ends with his present house-bound condition and a Purim custom of going from house to house.
Stretches
00:00–02:45
The man talks about the rich, productive region where his father's family lived, naming villages including Zhibal (?), Iliande (?) and Zal (?). His father married a girl from Zal, and his mother, her mother and he himself were all born there, three generations in one place. Kerler asks whether Germans (Saxons) lived among the non-Jews and how Jews came to know German; the informant's answers are brief.
After an unclear exchange about a village name (Kesene (?)), Kerler gives the date and place of the recording. The informant gives his Yiddish name Yidl and Hebrew name Menachem Yehuda ben David, and discusses the Hungarian forms of his father's name David (Dezső). He then names his birthplace village, which he says he was born in in 1920, and gives the names of his mother and grandmother (Gitl, Miriam Gitl), with some passages in Hungarian.
Kerler asks how many Jews lived in the village; the informant says none are left, and that people used to answer 'twenty tallisim'. He mentions the local notary or mayor (?) who had a tallis and kittel though not observant. They also speak of Krois (?) and Bistritz (?), and Kerler recalls a trip to Bistritz when a gravestone (matseyve) was set up.
Kerler and the informant talk about the pleasure of meeting; he says he has not left the house for a couple of months and is afraid to walk alone. They then talk about Purim customs in his childhood: going to the primar (mayor) and to the householders with the greeting 'a gutn purim', and the humorous rhyme or verse about falling. He recalls dressing up when he went round.