Warsaw(Varshe in the project's index)2018-06-1816 min · 6 stretches · 1 questions about wordsYiddish 97%
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 recording from Warsaw, 2018-06-18, the last of three consecutive files of one session. A woman who grew up in Poland after the war answers Kerler's questions about Jewish and Polish schooling in Bystrzyca (?) and Wrocław, her parents, and the lack of religious observance at home. She then talks about Passover food, Warsaw Jewish youth and clubs, her grandchild, and the Yiddish she speaks. The file ends with a short exchange about Paris and Kiev.
Stretches
00:00–02:14
The woman recalls Jewish school and Polish school after moving from Bystrzyca (?) to Wrocław. A Polish school with religion classes was opened when she was in the fifth grade, and Jewish pupils made up fifteen to sixty percent (?). Teaching was in Polish with some Yiddish and Jewish history, and the school was closed in 1957 (?). She cannot name the teachers and says she spent two or three years in Bystrzyca.
She says there were about a hundred Jews in the town. Her father was head of the Jewish committee and worked as a bookkeeper, and she states the family later went to Israel and France. She gives her father's name as Leyb and her mother's as Feyge, with the mother born in 1913, and says she saw them when she was a year old. Kerler asks whether they were observant, and she says they kept nothing.
She says that nothing was observed in Russia and that other Jews who came with them also kept nothing. She describes Sundays as a bad day because her Polish friends were at church. Passover food comes up: there was no matzo until the Joint distributed it, and she makes dumplings for her children. Kerler asks about latkes and fish, and she says her mother cooked them well and in a truly Jewish way.
Asked about Jewish youth in Wrocław and Warsaw, she says she did not meet Jewish youth. Her sister was in contact with them. She regrets not having joined the clubs and says she later heard about them from young people. She says she left Warsaw in 1957, and that the Jewish school was closed.
She mentions a daughter and a six-month-old grandchild, and jokes about being an old grandmother. Kerler and she discuss the Yiddish kinship term for a grandchild's child.
A mostly garbled passage, with a recogniser loop, follows. The talk is then about her Yiddish, Warsaw Yiddish with some literary influence, and her missing words and French influence. She mentions a recent stay in Paris, and Kerler a trip to Kiev a week earlier, his first visit, which she says she liked.