00:00–00:54
A toast is drunk with vodka; the interviewee drinks to the health of the woman present, and Kerler remarks that the cameraman only operates the equipment. Mostly Russian and Polish with a few Yiddish toasting words.
Later expeditions, 2012–2018 › June 12 copy
AHEYM-2017-014 · Hen, Józef
Warsaw (Varshe in the project's index)
2017-06-12
13 min · 5 stretches
Yiddish 38% Russian 55% Polish 7%
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-track file of a session with Józef Hen (Hen) in Warsaw, 12 June 2017, mixing Yiddish, Russian and Polish. It begins with a toast and talk about favourite poets and translators, then an anecdote about the interviewee's wartime survival in Kraków in 1945 using Russian, and ends with talk of alcohol and alcoholism. The transcript is largely garbled, so the details are uncertain.
Stretches
00:54–05:15
Kerler asks about the interviewee's favourite poets in Polish and Russian. Names mentioned include Tadeusz Różewicz, Blok, Mayakovsky (?) and Svetlov. The interviewee praises Tuvim's translation of Svetlov's "Grenada" (?) as better than the original. They go on to discuss Yiddish poets in translation, Peretz Markish, and his son David in Israel, a midrash (?), Kerler's father as a Yiddish poet, and the Hebrew poet Yaakov Besser (?).
05:10–06:39
Kerler tells a humorous story in Russian and Yiddish about a shtetl mikveh on Friday, where a woman pushes ahead in the queue of women, and he discusses the custom. The interviewee replies in Russian that his knowledge of Russian saved his life.
06:44–08:57
The interviewee tells in Russian and Polish how in Kraków in 1945 a drunk Soviet officer held a pistol to his temple and threatened to kill him. He saved himself by claiming to be Russian despite his narrow eyes and nose, and Kerler laughs about the stereotypical Russian. They discuss how he had nothing to lose and acted by instinct.
08:57–13:22
A conversation in Russian, Polish and some Yiddish about drinking: toasts, the interviewee's work in a factory where he drank cognac daily through a straw from the barrel, and whether alcoholism is genetic. He mentions a Polish novel about a drunkard and Alcoholics Anonymous (?). Kerler and the others joke along.