Baia Mare2013-05-1911 min · 3 stretchesYiddish 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
Camera file from the 2013 Baia Mare session, with no interviewee named in the index. It is a conversation between Kerler and an elderly man, with other voices in the room. They discuss Jews in the Russian revolution and Soviet leadership (Trotsky, Yagoda, Lenin), the killing of Jewish writers and doctors under Stalin, and Jewish history as a history of suffering. They then turn to Israel, the Jewish population of Romania, and the interviewer's American connection and project. The file ends with a few lines of family names.
Stretches
00:00–05:20
The informant and others discuss Jews in the Soviet leadership: Trotsky (Bronstein), Yagoda and Lenin's alleged Jewish ancestry. They speak of Lenin's quarrel with Trotsky and of Trotsky's murder in Mexico. They recall the killing of Jewish writers in 1937 and of doctors in 1952, and a writer imprisoned from 1950 for about six years in the Vorkuta coal mines. A man asks for fifteen minutes to go to a synagogue to say kaddish for his father, and is told there are enough men in the room. The stretch ends with the reflection that Jewish history is a history of suffering, and that a state of one's own matters.
Kerler says he is connected to Israel, and the informant mentions visiting Jerusalem and staying with acquaintances in Ramat Dalet(?). They compare Friday-night Sabbath tables in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and Kerler recalls his mother's Friday-night tables. They discuss emigration from Israel and Jewish immigration from the Arab countries, and the growth of Israel's Jewish population to over six million. They note that Romania had 800,000 Jews, of whom 400,000 were killed, and that about three thousand remain. The informant mentions a university town near Indianapolis(?).
Kerler leaves his card with an e-mail address and offers to send a description of the project, which seeks new people to interview. A short passage gives the names of a mother (Khane Rive) and father (Gershon), with a family name Brenem Nakhmen(?). The informant asks where his wife is.