00:00–00:26
In Russian and Ukrainian, with a few Yiddish words, coffee is ordered at a café: espresso and one three-in-one. Kerler takes part in the ordering.
Later expeditions, 2012–2018 › 2013 Expedition
AHEYM-2013-133 · Kolomyya
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 Kolomya expedition (index gives no name). It opens with ordering coffee in Russian at a café, then an elderly Romanian-born man talks with Kerler about drinking beer and making home-made wine and spirits in his childhood home. He then recalls his return home on Rosh Hashanah, his father as synagogue warden, and his wartime time in the Soviet Union. He describes the labor army and hunger there, and how he was assigned to a tailoring workshop.
Stretches
00:26–02:45
The informant and Kerler discuss drinking customs among Romanian Jews, including beer. He says wine was not made at home in his area but was made in Bessarabia. His father had a small barrel and made a spirit-based fruit drink, and Kerler suggests it was like vishnyak (visinată). The start is partly confused, with a passage on a number that Romanian Jews say differently (?).
02:45–04:03
The informant recalls coming home from Russia on Rosh Hashanah, when his father was warden of the synagogue. The family was delighted at his return after many years away. He says he survived the war and speaks of how hard it was. Kerler then asks where he was during the war.
04:03–06:36
He describes evacuation to the Soviet interior and the labor army (trudarmiya), which he says was worse than the army. He recalls a daily ration of 700 grams of bread that was gone before the canteen was reached, and people dying of hunger. Prisoners or workers built roads and defensive works, and Kerler follows up on the work.
06:36–10:40
He tells how a tailoring workshop was set up where he was held, and how he was registered as a tailor, which led to a dispute with a fellow worker from Kolomya (?). An official told him he would be given a machine and a press. He recounts a meeting with a Jewish couple, a man in a tailor's suit and a woman, who asked about his parents left behind in Romania, and the woman wept. The file ends mid-conversation.