Later expeditions, 2012–2018 › 2013 Expedition

AHEYM-2013-066 · Baia Mare

Baia Mare 2013-05-19 7 min · 3 stretches Yiddish 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

A short camera file from the 2013 Baia Mare session, with no name in the index. An older man talks with Kerler about Jewish musicians and performers he saw, then about the Jewish writer Victor Rusu(l?) from Baia Mare (?), and about the Yiddish and Romanian Jewish press that now appears in Bucharest. The file starts and ends mid-conversation.

Stretches

00:00–02:43

The man recalls seeing famous musicians in Israel and America, among them Leonard Bernstein (?) and David Oistrakh, whose son Igor is also mentioned, and says Oistrakh died in Amsterdam. He tells a joke about a ship of Jewish immigrants from Poland, with many Bialystok Jews, arriving in a distant country; it turns on the violin and piano and the Jews as great fiddlers. Kerler then asks what he remembers of traditional Jewish musicians and klezmorim.

Songs and musicStories, humor and sayings · Israel, New York, America, Amsterdam, Poland, Bialystok

02:27–04:48

The man recalls a wedding song and says he attended few weddings. He mentions the wedding canopy and music in the street in Baia Mare (Batesh (?)). He then speaks of a Jewish writer, Victor Rusu(l?) (?), who wrote in Romanian and was from Baia Mare, lived nearby, wrote several books including a ballad about Jewish towns, and died in Israel years ago. He mentions that Moses Rosen was later put in charge, as editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper in Bucharest, which now comes out twice a month in Romanian.

05:17–06:39

The man describes the Jewish periodical that appears in Romanian, now twice a month, with a Hebrew-language section and only a little Yiddish; he explains that its title refers to the declaration on the defence of the land of Israel (?). Kerler remarks that people have moved over and must learn Romanian.