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.
Audio recording of an interview with Motl Blopstein in Zhitomir (Zhytomyr), 26 May 2015, the second of two consecutive files from the session. Kerler asks about his father's ice-cream making, his family, his work and war experience. He then moves to the evacuation and bombings in 1942, the synagogues and the Jewish community today, Yiddish speakers, games, and a few word questions. The transcript is noisy and some details are uncertain.
Blopstein talks about his father, who made ice cream after the war and who was known to all Zhitomir. Mixed in is the 1942 evacuation, in which people crushed to board trains and the wagons were bombed, followed by a stay near Stalingrad. The talk then returns to the ice cream: how it was made and sold, and where the father learned the craft. The father served at the Belarusian front and was wounded.
Blopstein speaks of his second wife and their seven children, and of working for a house painter. He gives his mother's death in 1978 and his sister's in 1968, both in Zhitomir, and mentions a brother in Moscow. He describes his two sons, in Israel and Germany, his grandchildren, who work with computers, and phone calls from the children. He says his pension is small and talks about medicine and help from the Hesed.
Answers questions about Jewish life in Zhitomir today. Few people remain and the young leave for good, one named Lezer (Leyzer) among those going to Israel. Blopstein recalls going to the synagogue under the Soviets and the rabbi Shlomo who came afterwards (the Yiddish suggests the date was unclear, possibly early 1990s). They arrange to meet a friend, Geler (?), from a shtetl whose name sounds like Pyatka, the next day for the morning service.
Blopstein names his best years as around age thirty, when he had work, a flat and children. He did not attend cheder, as he worked from childhood at sixteen or seventeen. He learned to pray at the synagogue of Barabant (?), and later kept the Sabbath while working as a painter. During the Soviet years he prayed quietly, and he attended on Sunday evenings.
Blopstein describes evacuation to Dubovka and the aircraft raids there. People hid in the wind and many died. The dead were often not buried, and there were three or four bombing raids a day.
Answers Kerler's questions about language. Yiddish was spoken at home before the war, with his wife and father. The grandchildren speak it and study it in school. The son in Israel (Jerusalem) and the one in Germany attend synagogue. Blopstein knows no non-Jews who spoke Yiddish at his workplace, though Kerler says that elsewhere there were some who spoke better than Jews.
Blopstein talks about his sister and mother working in trade under the Soviets and the fear of the authorities and their decrees. People were criminalised for gold or for taking small amounts of goods. He also tells how his father learned ice-cream making from others and paid for patents. After this he speaks of the hard years in Stalingrad (Senegrad?) in 1948 (the year is unclear).
Kerler asks about the words golem and dybbuk. Blopstein does not know golem and has not heard the word. He gives a dybbuk-type explanation, which Kerler elaborates and Blopstein agrees to. After that Kerler asks about children's games in Yiddish, naming hide-and-seek, chess and dominoes. Blopstein confirms hide-and-seek, and says he played chess in the park.
Asked how much Zhitomir has changed, Blopstein says the old city was rebuilt or demolished. He and others travelled to Berdichev for a film. He has never been to Israel and does not want to visit because he must stay with his home, as he lives alone. Kerler asks about Jews speaking other kinds of Yiddish, and Blopstein mentions American Hasidim who visited yesterday and whom he hardly understood.
Blopstein tells of the evacuation journey to the village of Petropavlovka (Dubovka district), a ride with horses that were confiscated and killed for meat, bombings, and the fear of the people. He also speaks of work with horses, a dispute with the authorities over requisitioned horses (partly in Russian), and the family arriving there in 1944(?). His mother kept pigs and hid one from the commission.