Baia Mare2013-05-1911 min · 5 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, 10:40, with an elderly man who is not named in the index. It begins mid-conversation with a remark on a Romanian word for money, followed by a joke about communism and Kerler's question about a name. The man then talks about circumcision in Baia Mare after the war, Chabad visitors, and his love of classical music, his student years in Bucharest, and the musicians he met.
Stretches
00:00–02:11
Begins mid-discussion of a Romanian word for money, which Kerler says nobody could explain earlier. The man tells a joke about a Communist and a Jew asking about money under communism. Kerler remarks that capitalism was not good either, and the man mentions what his son says about America. The stretch ends with a remark about Hasidim and taking or giving.
Kerler asks whether he knows the name Yaakov Sternberg. The man knows only a doctor Sternberg in Moldavia (?), and says the name is common. Kerler describes a man known in a small circle, and the man mentions some Jewish items he owns. Kerler then raises circumcision in Baia Mare in the 1950s and 60s, when even Communist families often skipped it. The man says his son's brit was held there about 43 years earlier.
Talks about Chabad young men visiting and laying tefillin. In Israel he met Chabad people, and a nephew lives in a moshav near Kfar Baruch (?), where Chabad youths come on Fridays to make a minyan. He also describes an old synagogue in an old street of Tel Aviv.
Kerler asks about Yiddish songs; the man says he was not a singer but loved symphonic music. He mentions a friend named Mundrl Katz (?), a pianist. As a student in Bucharest he got cheap tickets to symphony concerts at the Athenaeum and went on Thursdays. He tells of a musician who fled Romania in the 1950s (?), his friendship with Constantin Silvestri (?), and a letter from abroad.
Talks about his collection of about 500 records from Moscow, New York and Shanghai (?). He recalls attending a festival in Bucharest in 1958 (?) as an engineer, with the Enescu festival and great Jewish musicians. He names David Oistrakh and a great pianist, perhaps from Krakow, and mentions a Pope. The stretch ends with an incomplete remark about a great pianist and a Russian.