Baia Mare2013-05-1910 min · 4 stretchesYiddish 97%
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 of 9:38 from a longer session in Baia Mare, 19 May 2013. A woman tells Kerler about a relative named Max (Mayk/Mikhael) Isakovich, a musician, professor and theatre director whose collection is held in Cluj, and the two work out how he was related to her father. The end of the file has Kerler arranging a further interview for the next morning and mentioning her painting.
Stretches
00:00–02:52
The woman recalls hearing a melody and tells a story she heard from a relative about a Hasidic village (name unclear, something like Visheu (?)), where a rebbe asked a visitor whether he wore tsitsit. Kerler asks about the relative Max Isakovich, his Yiddish name and his profession. Max became a doctor and professor. After finishing high school he told his father he would live from music, and his father objected.
Kerler and the woman sort out the relation of Max to her father. Her father was orphaned, and the relative's father's half-brother (or in-law brother) took him in. Kerler works out that the grandfather Yankl remarried, to the sister of his first wife, which made the two families related by marriage. They also discuss whether the term for the relation is that of a real brother or a brother-in-law.
Kerler asks where Max's collection is now. The woman says it is in Cluj (Klozenburg), at the academy, where Max was later a professor of the academy. She adds that he was once director of the Hungarian theatre.
Kerler arranges to stay another night and to hold an interview the next morning, and they settle on ten o'clock. He says he heard she became an artist and painted, and that he saw a Romanian TV programme about her. She offers to show him something.