Baia Mare2013-05-1911 min · 5 stretches · 1 questions about wordsYiddish 100%
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
Mid-session file of an interview in Baia Mare (2013-05-19) with a man born in 1935, who is interviewed by Kerler at the Jewish community office. He gives biographical details, recalls his wartime deportation as a child to Transnistria and the camp in a former kolkhoz, then talks about his parents, his father's carpentry and his mother's tailoring. The file ends with his university years and work in a mining town, after Kerler asks about the town's changed name.
Stretches
00:00–01:46
Opening identification of the man: he is named after his grandfather and gives his birth year as 1935. They are at the Baia Mare Jewish community (Comunitatea Evreilor), and he has lived there since 1959. He mentions a university nickname and says he left Bârlad (?) at 18 to study in Bucharest in 1953.
Kerler asks about the town and the synagogues, and a speaker mentions that every street had a shul. The informant recalls Passover 1944 in Transnistria, where he was deported with his mother. His father was in a labour company and did not know of them, and his mother's friends from Sutshave (?) and Bershad invited them for the holidays. He also had typhus as a child, and the route is mentioned through the Kasovets forest to Mogilev.
Talk about Transnistria: Mogilev, Atak and Bessarabia, and Kerler's visits to Sharhorod (Shargorod). Both discuss the large Jewish cemetery there and the camp in a former kolkhoz. They say it was easy to kill a Jew in that period, and mention food made from mushrooms. The informant also says he has been in Russia and Ukraine.
Kerler returns to the informant's childhood. He had a sister, Pese, who died in Shargorod (?), and his mother was Khane Rive. His father was a carpenter who also worked with furniture and had his own workshop with two other workers. His mother was a tailor and homemaker, and did some repairing of clothes in Shargorod.
Kerler asks about the four questions at the Passover seder and a comic extra question about a pot and a shoe, which the informant did not know. They then turn to his studies: he finished the faculty in 1958 and worked from 1959 with Russians in uranium mining at a town named after Petru Groza (?). Kerler asks about the town's name and the politician it was named after.
Do you remember a comic question asked at Passover, about why a pot has a hole and a shoe has a hole? — whether he knows a humorous extra question at the seder