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.
A recording made in Warsaw on 16 June 2018, in a cafe called Babel (as stated in the first minutes). Kerler talks in Yiddish with an elderly woman born in Łódź who is one of the last Yiddish speakers in a Warsaw club for the elderly. She talks about speaking Yiddish, her Yiddish school in Łódź, a sanatorium for Jewish children near Warsaw, a trip to Canada, and a Polish curse. A Polish-speaking woman also takes part. This is the second of six consecutive files.
Opening of the session: Kerler gives the date, 16 June 2018, and the setting, a cafe called Babel. He asks why it is called that, and the woman answers partly in Polish about the Tower of Babel. Kerler points out that Yiddish uses a different form of the word and that the cafe name is a Polish word written in Hebrew letters, which he calls symbolic of Yiddish being forgotten.
The woman says she is the only person in her club for older Jews who still speaks Yiddish. She explains that her parents were simple working people, and she describes the Yiddish lists made in the Łódź ghetto and Yiddish in Łódź, where Hasidim and religious Jews spoke it. She attended a Bundist school until the war, along with the writer Rozenfarb (?) and Mordechai Gebirtig (?). After her father died in 1966 Yiddish stopped being spoken at home, since her sister was born in Russia and her husband was not Jewish.
She explains that she understands Yiddish better than she speaks it, and Kerler says her speech is perfect. He asks her consent to record, and she agrees. They discuss her son, who knows languages. They also make small talk about her birthday and about drinks, with her preferring water.
The woman recalls the Medem school and her classmate Rozenfarb, whose younger sister Henie (?) walked with her. She describes a trip to Canada, where she was invited to Toronto and Montreal and her fare was paid. Rozenfarb's sister taught Yiddish literature at the Bialik school in Toronto.
Kerler asks about the school she entered in 1936. She says it had no building of its own and cost six zloty (?), which was beyond some families. She then recalls staying at the Medem sanatorium for Jewish children, at Miedzeszyn (?) near Warsaw, around 1935. Her companion adds details in Polish about the place and the film Mołodoje (?) by Aleksander Ford. Children from Spain came to the sanatorium, among them poor children for whom her father paid.
She mentions that Rozenfarb's father was a waiter and wrote a little book, and that someone from Siberia visited. She recalls her stay in Toronto and Montreal, where she was well received and her trip was paid for. She says she did not know during the war whether her friends were alive.
She tells how, after the war, she travelled to Łódź and found the two sisters through an address and corresponded with them in Polish. Her companion speaks in Polish about a researcher interested in the sanatorium. The woman then recites or half-sings, with difficulty, a rhyme about the sanatorium and the children being healed there.
She says she is almost 89 and asks her son's age. She asks about the curse "a year for Hanna Kostek" (?), a Polish and Yiddish curse. The woman and her companion note that Hanna Kostek is not a real person. They also discuss the surname Schwarzman, which Czarnota translates, as well as Zilberman.
She speaks of a Russian book of Jewish jokes, bought for her in Moscow, which Kerler had not heard of. Discussion of selling old books.
Kerler asks what the children did at the sanatorium. She says they did gymnastics, and learned about nature and literature, and she first heard of a chameleon there. There was no river or place to swim. The stay lasted three or four weeks.
The woman says she finds Yiddish hard to speak now. She says Yiddish was spoken at home while her father was alive. After 1968 many Jews left, and nobody was left to speak Yiddish with. She tells how her sister, born in Russia, learned Polish words as a child. She also mentions that many people deported from Ukraine lived in her small town.