Baia Mare(Baia Mare / Siget in the project's index)2013-05-2011 min · 5 stretches · 3 questions about wordsYiddish 71% Hungarian 29%
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-track file from the 2013 Baia Mare / Siget session; the index gives no name. An elderly woman, a Holocaust survivor who returned home, talks with Kerler about the Jewish community that remained and emigrated, her own childlessness and her family's deportation, then about the languages spoken around her. The last part is a short exchange on the Yiddish names for Russians, Romanians and Hungarians. Parts of her account are in Hungarian.
Stretches
00:00–02:44
The informant and others discuss the Jewish cemetery and those who come from America and Israel to graves. Kerler asks about prewar Jewish life: her street was nearly all Jewish. Many people left after the war, from 1947 until the borders closed, and her nieces and nephews went to Israel, America and Italy. She explains that she stayed in her home town and wanted to be buried there among Jewish friends.
She says that older people who returned after the war have died and that young people married and left. She explains that she had no children and accepts it as fate, with some remarks in Hungarian about accepting one's lot. She says her husband came home, and that nine of them, father, mother and seven children, left the house, and that only she returned.
Mostly in Hungarian, with a little Yiddish. She tells of her sister's daughter and the sister's husband who was in forced labor. She says her future husband came home first, was related to her family, and asked her to marry him. Kerler and others remark that the husband spoke Yiddish.
Kerler asks her to tell in Yiddish because he does not understand Hungarian. She explains that Hungarian is hard to learn and that her husband spoke only Russian where he was born. She says Hungarian, Romanian and Yiddish were spoken at home. Kerler asks what Yiddish speakers call Russians and Romanians.
Kerler asks what is said in Yiddish for a Hungarian non-Jew. She first misunderstands and answers with Jewish terms, then confirms the Yiddish forms. Russian is rusnak, Romanian is volekh, and Hungarian is madyar.