00:00–01:53
Opening exchange, partly garbled. Kerler returns to the synagogue and asks about it again. Names, a rabbi/reader and a woman who died a year after an event come up, but the thread is unclear.
Later expeditions, 2012–2018 › 2015 Expedition
AHEYM-2015-050 · Kolodenker, Perl
Tul'chyn (Tulchin in the project's index)
2015-05-24
22 min · 9 stretches · 2 questions about words
Yiddish 84% Russian 16%
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
Second of two consecutive files of an audio-only session with Kolodenker in Tulchin, 24 May 2015. Kerler and the woman talk about a synagogue, the Pechera camp and a refugee family, Purim baking, gefilte and chopped fish, her father's family, her sister's family, and a folk cure and a childhood episode. The transcript is noisy, with Russian asides and interruptions, so many details are uncertain.
Stretches
01:53–03:09
Kerler asks which were the best years of her life. She answers about having sat out sixty-two (?) years, and about her two sons. The context is unclear.
03:09–05:30
She tells of refugees from Moldova who came to a camp. A well-dressed girl begged for bread and soon died. She also tells of Misha Bartik (?) and a mother who lost six children in the Pechera camp and sang a lament about them.
05:26–06:55
Kerler asks whether Tulchin had a ghetto, and she says it did. He asks why people were sent to Pechera. She says those with skills, such as fixing windows and doors, were kept, but the passage is partly garbled.
06:35–09:29
Kerler prompts her about Purim and Queen Esther. She describes Purim baking and gives a recipe for a pastry with dough, butter, margarine, a flavouring, wheat, nuts and raisins, baked in the oven. He then turns to fish for Shabbat.
09:29–12:29
They discuss how chopped fish and stuffed (gefilte) fish are made for Shabbat. She mentions the ingredients, including onions, sugar or sweetness, and the skin. She names a woman, Sarah, who advised on the sweetness. Kerler and she go back and forth on the difference between chopped fish and fish stuffed in the skin.
12:29–15:55
After a Russian aside, she gives her father's name as Shayke (?) Kolodenker. He worked with passenger transport, and her grandfather, a carter, was shot. She talks about travelling to other towns and her mother and sister. Her sister was widowed with three sons and worked in a factory. Her sister helped raise the children.
15:55–18:27
A thin stretch: the sister's thanks, remarks about old age and health, and Kerler mentioning photographs and a recording of names (Sasha). The Russian lines in between do not help.
18:27–21:27
Kerler asks what people did in the shtetl when a child fell ill, whether they had doctors. She describes an old folk cure for pain: milk with some herb or substance bound around the throat or body, and a book laid on the sufferer. She then recalls a childhood episode when she took potatoes her mother had bought and was caught.
Questions about words
- 10:42What was that called, how did one say it? — the name of the dish, chopped fish versus stuffed fish
- 19:19What did one do in the shtetl when a child fell ill, were there doctors? — folk remedy