00:00–00:36
S2 and Kerler agree that Yiddish is in a very poor state in Lviv and Ukraine and that there is almost no one left to speak it with. The woman adds remarks, partly in Russian, about people who spoke Yiddish in Soviet times.
Later expeditions, 2012–2018 › 2015 Expedition
AHEYM-2015-078 · Dorfman, Boruch
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
A recording made in Lviv on 28 May 2015 (the index names Dorfman, Boruch). It is a conversation in Kerler's presence with an elderly woman, who speaks mostly Russian and a little Yiddish, and a man (S2) who speaks Yiddish. The woman recalls friends in Israel, her Tulchin childhood, her family, her university studies, antisemitism in the 1950s, and her memoir. Then the man tells about Lviv's Jewish cultural society, his family and grandsons, and the state of Yiddish in Ukraine. The recording ends as he begins to talk about his family roots in Bessarabia.
Stretches
00:36–04:07
Kerler asks whether she knew the Shenker and Klepoysh (?) families. She answers mostly in Russian that she knew them well. She recalls a friendship with a woman whom she met through Rabbi Zilber and with whom she studied English philology at the university, and she visited her family in Israel. She mentions photographs of a rebbe and his family, and says her father's father was a synagogue gabbai. She says the family was sent to Tashkent for ten years after the Soviets came, around 1928, as non-proletarians. Her parents hid their Jewishness, and her husband later taught her Yiddish or Hebrew and Jewish identity. She says they are devoted to Israel.
04:08–07:45
Asked where she is from, she names Tulchin in Vinnytsia oblast, where she was recently, and describes it as a very Jewish town where even non-Jews spoke Yiddish. She was born in 1927. Her father was released in 1938, and the family later went into evacuation and returned to Tulchin after the war. She started school there, and then they left. She says her family name is Rechister (?). She describes starting a memoir and finding relatives through the internet: a cousin in Ulan-Ude and another in Moscow, descended from her father's brothers. She tells of nicknames of the Tulchin families, and Kerler asks for her father's name, given as Shmuel (Shmidl) Rechister.
07:45–09:04
S2 and Kerler talk about the opening of an Israeli consulate in Lviv the day before, with dancing and food. The woman shows photographs of her parents and grandparents. Kerler asks to buy her own book, and she offers it to him, saying it is hard to obtain. She names the book with a Russian title that means 'the ways of the Lord are inscrutable'.
09:07–10:43
The woman says she writes about her experience of antisemitism. In the early 1950s, during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, she graduated with distinction from the university's English course but could not find work. She shows photographs, among them a grandson's Israeli army service in combat conditions. She also says she led a Sunday Jewish school and headed an ulpan for twenty years.
10:43–12:15
Kerler asks whether she remembers Yiddish from home. She says she knows it but lacks practice, unlike her husband, a devoted Yiddish lover. There is a short exchange about her father's patronymic (Smolevich, with a Russian reading) and the book. Then S2 arranges tea in Russian, and she says she will leave them to talk.
12:15–16:39
S2 tells Kerler the news. His wife recently graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Old Soviet-minded people have no feeling for Yiddish. The Hesed gives monthly food packages. He recalls founding the Jewish cultural society with the president Aleksander Lizen and Kharitan Berman. He also describes raising the question of preserving Yiddish in Moscow and being overruled in favour of other languages. He describes the weak Ukrainian state, a visit by the French philosopher Arie Levin (?), and American guests with an English-Yiddish newspaper. He tells of the consulate opening and a concert with deputies from Kyiv. The cultural centre, thirty years old, lacks support, a young president was elected, and the newspaper Shafar (?) has appeared for 25 years.
16:39–19:12
Kerler checks the name of the president, S2's grandson Aleksander (Sasha) Nazar, who is 31, speaks good English and has often been in Israel. S2 mentions a son in New York and a daughter in Lviv. Another grandson went to Israel, served in the army and then worked there. That grandson's girlfriend's parents fled Lugansk and now live in Kyiv. Her mother had helped a rabbi in Lugansk and was taken away to somewhere in the Chernigov region. S2 calls it a family tragedy.
18:43–21:36
S2 describes posting daily about Jewish life on Facebook, mostly in Russian. He says there is no censorship now, but speaking critically of Ukraine or Russia can bring accusations. He regrets that Soviet policy broke up a once-unified Jewish world into national groups. Kerler remarks that the younger generation in Ukraine does not know Yiddish. S2 then recalls being invited to Warsaw to see a Yiddish film about himself, also shown in Krakow, Lodz and New Jersey.
21:36–23:31
S2 comments on the film's subtitles in Ukrainian, Polish and other languages and says the film's producers live in Krakow. Kerler asks what he remembers of Lviv after the war. S2 begins to answer with his roots in Bessarabia: his mother's father, a family said to descend from Spanish Jews, and a shtetl he names as Kilia (?).