Baia Mare2013-05-1911 min · 5 stretches · 1 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
A ten-minute camera file from the 2013 Baia Mare session; the index names no interviewee. An elderly man, surname Shalik (?) by Kerler's spelling, talks about illness and surviving, Jewish life after the war, and his wife's family. He also speaks of his own family's origins, a brother in Israel, and holiday and cantor memories from his town. The file ends with an offer of coffee.
Stretches
00:00–03:08
The man tells of leaving a place where he was not allowed to go away and of a doctor's remark about his illness and survival. He says that on his return a Jewish life still existed, but it was no longer the prewar one. The war changed people's outlook and they stopped believing in God. He then speaks of his mother-in-law, whose family was sent to Auschwitz, and of his hopes for his son.
Kerler asks when his wife was born (1946). The man says her father was a doctor whose first family was killed at Auschwitz and who remarried after the war. Her mother is alive in Weimar (?) and is about ninety, but she does not like Yiddish, which she associates with what was done to Jews. Kerler compares this with his own mother's reaction to Polish. He then asks for the family name.
Kerler checks the spelling of the family name Shalik and its meaning. The man says his parents' families came from a place that is unclear in the transcript, then moved to Bucharest and later to Israel. He recalls a brother, Moshe Native (?), who was a child with him and left for Palestine in 1946. The brother spent time in Cyprus, later trained at West Point (?) and became an officer in Israel. The man speaks of visiting him and of the brother's earlier name.
Kerler turns to holidays. The man says the whole town, mostly Jewish, kept them. Cantors were brought from other towns and tried out, and contracts for the High Holidays were made after Shavuot. He mentions a cantor, Yosef Shmid (?), from Chernivtsi (?), who died in 1943 and was refused entry to Switzerland. Kerler asks whether he remembers a great cantor who came for Rosh Hashanah.