Kolomyya(Kolomya in the project's index)2013-05-2211 min · 5 stretches · 5 questions about wordsYiddish 99%
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 (10:40) from the Kolomya session of 22 May 2013, one of twelve consecutive files. An elderly man, whose name the index does not give, recites and sings rhymed folk pieces, including humorous verses about women and boys. Kerler asks him about a Purim play and a Purim song. The man then sings a Purim begging song about the Torah and the nations, and explains the terms for Purim gift money and for masked mummers. He ends with a song his mother sang.
Stretches
00:00–03:01
The man recites or sings humorous rhymed verses about women who bring food in for the Sabbath, about wives, and about boys who go naked. Kerler asks whether he knows the word the verses turn on, which the transcript renders as nadan/naden (?), and what it means. The transcript is garbled in places.
Kerler reminds the man that he once recalled a Purim play, and the man answers that a Jew knew the Purim play. He says something about forty days (?), and Kerler tells the camera operator to stay in frame. The man then sings or recites a song in which God offered the Torah to the nations, who could not take it, while the Jews accepted it. Kerler praises the song. A stretch of Russian-recognised noise at 03:01 is not content.
The man says he used to sing this song on Purim, going from house to house in disguise with a friend named Simkhe (?). He sings the begging verses asking the householder for a drink and a snack, and for a coin called a prankl (?). Kerler asks about the prankl, and the man says it was a sweet or small coin worth about fifty kopecks. Kerler offers a Yiddish word for money from his own area. The man then sings a verse about a child, a mother and the reading of the megillah, and says he is singing it for the first time.
Kerler asks about a Purim kiddush, and the man does not remember one. He explains that Purim disguisers, called farshteler (?), came into houses where people sat. They wore masks that could not be taken off, so that people could not tell who they were. Kerler asks several times what they did, and the man says they walked around and looked.
The man says his mother used to sing songs in the synagogue. He sings one, a song with a refrain (ay-di-gu-lay) about Germans and about people forgetting God's will, the tallis and the tefillin. Kerler repeats the refrain.